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Capitol Hill - Source: ONE News -
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My favourite spot in Washington is sitting high up on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It's best at night, enjoying the Reflecting Pool and a grand view down the Mall to the towering Washington Monument, then further onwards to the Capitol Building.
It's always felt like a second home to me, for lots of reasons, one of which is that chiseled on the walls of Lincoln's memorial are two exquisite and timeless thoughts: "With malice towards none, with charity towards all" (and) "to do which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations."
These ideas are guiding this Kiwi through the labyrinthine politics of a city spiraling around a rancorous vortex of partisanship over healthcare.
But I'm a flawed individual, so living up to Lincoln's dream is more a pilgrim's journey than a final destination, as the following story will attest.
A few Fridays ago I was sitting in the Sculpture Garden down on the Mall, enjoying a couple of drinks and some live jazz. Life was about as pleasant as one could wish. At the table next to me were two archetypal liberals - a pretty safe assumption on my part - not least because in the District, voters favoured Obama by 93-7 last November. Another couple, looking for a seat, asked if they could join them. They were in town for the anti-government, anti-Obama, anti-everything-except-guns 'Tea Party' protest the next day. Nevertheless typical American politeness saw courtesy extended and it also guided their initial conversation.
But inevitably things turned sour.
Healthcare was the trigger and before long one liberal was shouting, "If 'Fox' is your lodestar don't you feel soiled in your ignorance." The second couple stuck to the Palin/Hannity line that Obama was socialising healthcare, it was a government takeover, and death panels were on the way.
And so it went on, except it got louder.
In the end I couldn't stop myself blurting out, "I come from a country whose health system your Rush Limbaugh would describe as "Stalinist" yet it is about half the drain on our economy as yours. And we live longer!"
The second couple got up from the table - they'd heard enough. Two liberals were intolerable enough but a third, especially a foreigner, constituted a nightmare. To them we were what was wrong.
The liberals came up, shook my hand, and asked me where I was from. "New Zealand" I said. Gary, a travel writer who looked a bit like a fried remnant from the sixties, and Kurt (a political scientist as it turned out) embraced me like a brother. Gary told me he'd never met a Kiwi who didn't look happy. I immediately thought he'd never met Garth McVicar, but took it as a compliment and we parted as friends.
The next day I sailed down the Potomac to Mt. Vernon, home of George Washington. It was so tranquil. The Potomac is hypnotic and I could imagine in my mind's eye the virgin river journeys the pioneers made all those centuries ago. After soaking up the serenity of the General's retreat I returned to the Mall to catch the Tea Party protest in full flight.
The contrast was stark.
Incendiary banners and an ugly smugness infected the Mall. Travelling home on the metro I overheard a conversation between two twenty-somethings. One was carrying a snake banner with the slogan 'Don't Tread on Me' - an old anti-British banner during the revolution but with a new, implicit double meaning that Obama is the snake's head needing to be cut off. The one with the banner turned to her friend, "What does this snake thing mean?" Her friend replied, "I don't know, something about tax, maybe?"
As a local I took comfort in Washington's economy doing well out of the protesters, but man-oh-man, the blind ideology of the Tea Party mob was overpowering. They seem a weird mutation of the Republican base, wanting a restoration of a fallen faith, but their energy is stoking a wholly negative Republican Party with no leader, nor vision. Republican moderates are losing the battle , and surface punditry is suggesting that Obama will be routed at the mid-term elections next year, predicting as much as a 30 seat loss for the House Democrats, and crucial Senate loses.
These experts may prove correct, but the underlying logic suggests to me that people lost in the trees are the least capable of seeing the contours of the forest. Group think is pervasive in Washington but I think the irreducible logic is that the Democrats cannot afford to see their president fail.
Obama has also learnt the lessons from Hillary's healthcare debacle .
He has many of the big healthcare players on his side, isolating the insurance industry, not least because they see the economic benefits and necessity of reform. And when Obama does get a healthcare bill through Congress he will be the first president in eight who has succeeded in delivering reform. That will be huge, a game changer.
Over the course of the next few months I intend exploring
Lincoln's words as I observe American politics, for both good and
ill. But my final thought is this: after my trip to Mt. Vernon and
seeing the Tea Party protests I came away with the feeling that
while the consequences of failure were so much more extreme for the
General and his fellow Founding Fathers - a matter of life and
death in point of fact - Washington's leadership choices were in
many respects far simpler ones than those facing Barack Obama in
21st century, fractured America.
