“a conversation - rather than a shouting match over a canyon”
I just watched about an hour of President Obama taking questions from House Republicans. Not watched, really. Mostly, I listened while I cleaned up the kitchen. Not everyone will have a kitchen to clean or an hour to spare. So let me just tell you why I think this Q&A mattered and why the president and congressional Republicans should literally be in the same room more often. This event amounted to a reality check. We now know either that A) Obama is not the Hitler / Trotsky / Lenin / commie / nazi / whatever caricature that some on the right have doodled up to scare Americans; or B) that congressional Republicans inexplicably face down a Hitler / Trotsky / Lenin /commie/ nazi / whatever by asking him pointed but cordial questions.
It’s probably most obvious why Obama benefits from a televised moment that deflates the notion that he’s some doctrinaire monster out to destroy America. What’s just as true, though, is that any Republicans who are actually interested in legislating and governing stand to gain from a mellowing in the rhetoric. The president pointed this out using less stark language that I’m about to use. But the basic dynamic goes like this: If you go around painting a guy as the devil, then you can’t afford to do any deals with him — no matter how sensible.
I originally saw the video for this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Here’s a bit of Sullivan’s take on why this event was heartening:
… it finally brought us a conversation - rather than a shouting match over a canyon. So much of American politics is debate conducted at a distance, through ads or soundbites or various talking points that never actually engage one another in debate. Reared in the British debate tradition - I debated through high-school and college, becoming President of the Oxford Union in 1983 - this has always felt to me like the biggest drawback of the American system. The point of debate is to clarify things, to find where the real points of disagreement are, and to assess them in that context of actual alternatives.
Here’s the video.
