(Mis)Represented

With the election over, my political ego (small and retiring to begin with) has withdrawn into a corner to lick his wounds. Suffice it to say, my candidates did not do very well. I only picked one winner, a challenger for a Congressional seat. It's a good thing we don't bet on everything in this country the way they do in the U.K., or the kids would be going without their gruel this month. But in the course of getting clobbered in the election, I started to wonder about representation. All my adult life, I had taken it as a given that once an election is decided in a constitutional democracy, those elected do their best (as pathetic as that best may sometimes be) to represent all their constituents. And that means people of all political stripes. (This model, by the way, does not work very well in Singapore, where election districts which oppose the President can't seem to get roads fixed or storm drains cleared). But the last eight years have been marked in the United States by extreme partisanship; you could be the idiot child of married first cousins, but if you swore fealty to the ideology of the ruling party, you could accede to positions legally held to be above politics (e.g. U.S. Attorneys, most memorably). For eight years, there was no "loyal opposition", only those who wanted the best for the country (and infallibly knew what "best" was), and those who treacherously sought to do harm by slowing the ideological forward progress of the Bushies. An oversimplification? Perhaps. But it was the outgoing President's biggest flaw that he did not attempt to open his mind to the arguments of those who did not agree with him. The defensive walls were drawn so close to the President's inner circle that even his erstwhile Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was outside the "circle of trust". Having a sense of manifest destiny and an unshakable faith in your own convictions are admirable traits in some; for a President, who is bound to accept the "advise and consent" structure of our democracy, it is a terrible failing. The job is too big, the problems too complex for one, or two, or even a dozen people to be correct 100% of the time. President Bush came to that realization far too late to save the legacy of his presidency. Presidential scholars will surely find much legislative good that was done during the past eight years at Mr. Bush's urging. The general public, however, is left with the hangover aftertaste of wasted opportunity. If President-elect Obama does nothing more than restore some level of public faith in government, he will have done well. We need to know that the government is of all the people, and for all the people.