As my trip is drawing to a close, I've been reminded what a great privilege it's been to be Fulbright's Visiting Scholar to Georgetown University.
And being a Kiwi I bring a youthful naivety to my observations about US politics (well, as much as a 48-year-old political junkie can be accused of either). We are young, and our political system is hugely uncomplicated when compared to the constitutional and institutional architecture over here (for both good and ill).
Yet we originated from similar stock to America's own settler population (Puritans excepted, thank the cosmos), our democratic values are the same, and our blood has mingled with theirs across far too many battlefields these past 100 years. We therefore have much in common but I also, and frequently, have cause to repeat over here David Lange's core insight that we are also separated by a common language.
In America, in 2009, so seem they. The US Constitution provided a framework for robustly arguing political differences, but while reasonable people can agree to disagree, during the debate over health care unreasonable people have only agreed to be unreasonable.
I had been here less than 24 hours when I heard Russ Limbaugh describe "Obamacare" as Stalinist. We Kiwis must have long been in the grip of it, Stalinism that is (some right-wing bloggers back in New Zealand would no doubt agree), despite our false consciousness as a vibrant western democracy, because our heretical single-payer system is anathema over here even though it sees us living longer then Americans for approaching half the fiscal drag on our economy.
I admire America's founding fathers with a passion, and I've made pilgrimages to Gettysburg, Monticello, Montpellier, and the incomparable Mt Vernon to breathe in some of the rarified air of their pantheon. My favourite place in Washington, as I've said before, is the Lincoln Memorial, and sitting high on the steps fills me with profound respect for America's better angels as well as produce a serenity born out of any commited effort, anywhere, anytime, to loose tolerance from cynicism.
What the founding generation and Abraham Lincoln tell this Kiwi is that in times of crisis America's greatest leaders took (calculated) risks and courted catastrophic failure rather than resile from principle.
America's founders also believed their constitution would evolve over time. Thomas Jefferson explicitly argued that further constitutional change should be embraced by each new generation. I tend to the view that the high threshold set for constitutional change in the original document can be sourced to the founder's desire and imperative to solidify the union during the period when it was at its most fluid and vulnerable, yet no sooner was the ink dry on the document than the Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments) was being drafted.
The founding generation were great constitutional innovators; their heir's less so, their distant heir's stubbornly less so, because during my time here what has struck me most is how change-resistant and entropic the American political system has become. Perhaps all large, complex and sophisticated systems tend in this direction.
I heard Republican Senator Orrin Hatch absurdly claim last week in senate debate that the Democratic majority was trying to ram through health care. This is only true to the extent that one might confuse a wild torrent for the movements of a glacier.
The senate, above all of America's enduring institutions, has become hopelessly anachronistic to the modern need for any legislature to make adaptive responses to its changing conditions and the public will. It is a procedural abomination that a recently defeated minority can thwart the majority's will, on everything of policy substance, for no better reason than its own perceived partisan gain and the protection of its vested interests. This last remark applies to Independent(ly compromised) Senator Joe Lieberman, too.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that the old and practically wise could serve as his statesmen. The US Senate - a body whose average age is 63, with a quarter of its membership aged over 70 - is an interesting and uncomfortable test of Aristotelian thought.
And although the senate was formed out of compromise, as my last column discussed , the potential existed for senators to serve as practically wise statesmen and women in the wider national interest. On civil rights, in 1964 and 1965, the senate fulfilled this potential under LBJ's brilliant presidential leadership that forced change inside the well, and Dr King's inspirational moral leadership outside of it. The dam of inertia was consciously busted and one consequence of that effort is sitting in the Oval Office today.
Americans should see that health care has assumed the mantle of moral imperative - as well as representing America's greatest unresolved policy dilemma (with a dishonorable mention to the national debt) - and if the current health care bill does not build a path-breaking new model, it's at least a serious reconditioning effort; one that can provide a floor of security for tens of millions of Americans who already feel chronically insecure in the current economic conditions.
Health care is thus both an urgent moral and economic imperative, but you wouldn't know this from the senate's minority's stubborn and willful obstruction.
I'm departing the District next week, to take a leisurely drive across the great expanse of the continent, before returning home to sea and sun in early January.
I will miss the US, the District even more, but I know I'll be back, which softens the blow. I just hope that by the time I do leave health care is passed and that the senate has demonstrated to itself that it can act for all its citizens, not just a few of them, and thereby achieve, however momentarily, a state of grace.
