Deep in the bowels of Washington, hidden from public scrutiny and prying cameras, there is an illicit underworld where people are subtle, reasonable and interesting. I have occasionally been admitted to this place, the land of RIP (Reasonable in Private).
I have been in the Senate dining room and heard senators, in whispers and with furtive glances, acknowledge the weaknesses in their own arguments and admit the justice of some of the other side’s points. I have seen politicians fess up to their own evasions and acknowledge the trade-offs inevitable in tough decisions.
I have always felt honored when politicians admit me into the realm of RIP, because if it ever got out that these pols were sensible and independent, it would ruin their careers. If it ever got out that they could think for themselves or often had subversive and honest thoughts, they would be branded traitors to their party and uncertain champions for their cause.
For politicians are not permitted to ply their trade in the land of RIP. In our democracy, all public business must be done in the land of SIPB (Self-Important Pathetic Blowhards).
In our democracy, everybody has to line up in party formation for each week’s mighty clash, no matter how stupid they think the exercise may be.
In our democracy, lawmakers are compelled to spend their days maneuvering for trivial advantages that nobody will remember by dinnertime.
In our democracy, presidential aspirants spend a few months fighting a general election but two years positioning themselves for the primaries. That means they spend the bulk of their time in transcontinental cattle calls, competing to most assiduously flatter the prejudices of their most febrile supporters. They traffic in pre-approved bromides while searching with their hyperattenuated antennas for their party’s maximum sweet spot of approval, love and applause.
In our democracy, top officials lead frantic, overscheduled lives, with almost no time alone and with major decisions made by instinct during rushed limo rides from one forgettable event to another. They spend their days talking, and pretty soon they become human jukeboxes — their snippets of conversation are just chunks of oft-repeated material they have retrieved from the stump speech audio collection in their heads.
In short, our democracy, at least as it has evolved, takes individuals who are reasonable in private and it churns them through a public process that is almost tailor-made to undermine their virtues. The process of perpetually kissing up to the voters destroys the leadership qualities the voters are looking for in the first place: tranquillity of spirit, independence of mind and a sensitivity to the contours and complexity of reality.
The best politicians try to build a fortress around their private lives to protect themselves from the ravages of the process all around them. They try to separate their real belief from their public spin. They stage little rebellions against members of their political base, who would otherwise be their slavemasters. They try not to let the bloated public persona smother the little voice within.
But this week it has become clear what an uphill struggle that is. This week, everyone senses that we have reached a crucial juncture in the Iraq war debate. This week, in private, everyone acknowledges how complex the choices are. Everyone senses that the policy being promoted possibly won’t work and could have ruinous consequences. This week, the mood — in private — is sober and anxious.
And yet the politicians have completely failed to institutionalize that sense of sobriety in the public sphere. Instead of having a serious debate, the Senate disgraced itself with mind-bendingly petty partisanship. Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential candidates engaged in an unholy bidding war to get out of Iraq soonest, which had nothing to do with realities in Iraq and everything to do with applause lines in Iowa.
In a week when the private mood was grave, the public action was partisan and shortsighted. Instead of trying to educate public opinion by stressing the realities described in the National Intelligence Estimate, the political class, by and large, publicly ignored those findings. The Republicans maintained near lock-step solidarity even though privately, Republican opinions are all over the place. The Democrats ignored the intelligence community’s warning about withdrawal after spending three years blasting the Bush administration for ignoring intelligence.
In private, we have a decent leadership class. In public, it’s rotten.
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