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All the more so because of the epoch we've just survived. George Bush is far from the only contemptuous politician in recent history, but he is surely the worst of the lot, and his politics are instructive because of that.
In Bush's world, everyone is two-dimensional, at best. They're either good or evil. Folks is either with us or with the enemy. In Bush's comic book reality, no issue is ever nuanced. There's only right - which, remarkably, always happens to be his way - and there's wrong. Once asked if he could name any mistakes he'd made as president, a flustered Bush was unable to identify even a single one. (I wish I could have been there to assist him. We probably could have made a dent in it after a week or two.) He cannot conceive that anyone he's labeled evil could have legitimate grievances. He cannot imagine that America could ever have committed any crimes, such as using violence to achieve political ends.
Or so he acts when he speaks to us. I doubt he truly believes his own sorry shtick, which of course only makes it far worse.
Nor has the so-called opposition been much better. While their positions on issues might be slightly more thoughtful (and how could they be less so?), one has little sense from a John Kerry or a Hillary Clinton that they can say something just because it is truthful, as opposed to because they've calculated that it's popular. Theirs is different from Republican pandering in scale and destructiveness, but not in kind. It is still pandering for purposes of personal benefit.
And American politics have been deeply impoverished for decades now because of our politicians' contemptuousness. Worse, the effect has been cyclically corrosive. The more of it we get, the more of it we breed.
We live today in a polity characterized by the most unsophisticated public discourse, one where twenty-second scare ads win elections every time. And one where attempts at thinking through basic questions - such as whether our enemy resides in Afghanistan or Iraq - are ridiculed as effete intellectual elitism.
Look what it's produced for us. Whether it is the federal debt, falling economic standards, environmental crisis, or our diminished world standing that we're discussing - or, more likely, not discussing - Americans have dug themselves into failed policy holes of epic proportions. In very large part, this is because it's been mutually convenient for both politicians and voters alike to indulge in a Potemkin politics of fantasy.
But the stunning sub-text of Obama's speech is that we can think of these issues and the people involved in them as more than mere caricatures. In adopting this posture, he telegraphed to Americans more respect, and less contempt, than they've seen from any politician in three decades, ever since Reagan seduced them into assisting in their own looting.
When Obama reminded us that his former pastor had not only bad but also good ideas - like most anyone, black or white,
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