This is not a paid political ad for George W. Bush, but my next sentence may sound as if it were:
Bush reminds me of Abraham Lincoln.
Because I am not, nor have I ever been, in the employ of the Texas governor who has already lapped the field in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, allow me to clarify:
Hillary Rodham Clinton also reminds me of Lincoln. Bill Bradley, too. And maybe Lamar Alexander. Better throw in President Clinton while you’re at it.
There. That should dispel any suspicions of partisanship, for you could hardly make a stew out of more motley elements. What all of those present or aspiring public servants share, however, is a vulnerability to the charge that they don’t state clear, unequivocal positions on the critical issues of the day, that they are trying to appeal to everybody.
To which I reply: So what?
The seeming reluctance to sink one’s ideological pole in concrete is a strategy that was employed with nation-saving grace and efficiency by Lincoln, surely our most beloved and, some would argue, greatest president. His experience proved that waffling does not always equal intellectual cowardice, that constantly refining one’s stance is not synonymous with a slimy desire to please all. Vagueness can be a virtue.
All of the aforementioned individuals, but especially Bush, have been tagged as political tofu, accused of absorbing the passions of whatever crowd they happen to be whipping up at the moment. Commentators have criticized Bush for having his finger a bit too often in the wind, for tailoring his words to the world’s whims. “There’s little doubt,” wrote an editorialist in this week’s New Republic, “that much of George W. Bush’s current popularity stems from the fact that, so far at least, he’s managed to be all things to all people.” The writer goes on to tweak Bush for his mushy, opaque remarks about California’s anti-affirmative action push.
Likewise, Rodham Clinton’s “listening tour” of New York, as she prepares to seek the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, has been ridiculed for its seemingly squishy, spineless capitulation to her audiences. Democratic presidential contender Bradley was vilified in the current issue of Harper’s for being more raconteur than firebrand, more Mr. Rogers than Nathan Hale.
Where, the pundits thunder, are the rock-hard principles, where the immutable ideals?
The same charge of slippery evasiveness once was lobbed at a skinny, sad-eyed candidate named Lincoln, according to Garry Wills, author of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.” Yet, as Wills traces, Lincoln’s unwillingness to take firm stands was based not on timidity, but calculation.
Had Lincoln stated his positions right from the start, he would have alienated at least half of his audience, and maybe more. Quite likely, he would never have been elected to anything, and the United States would have endured a vastly different destiny indeed.
When Lincoln ran for the U.S. Senate from Illinois in 1858, Wills records, he was accused of engaging in “polite silences” on the most contentious issue of the day: slavery. Consequently, anti-Lincoln observers such as rock-ribbed abolitionist Theodore Parker found him “more clever than principled.” Parker, disgusted by what he interpreted as Lincoln’s mushy-mouthed meekness in a debate on slavery, wrote: “They were the vital questions pertinent to the issue, and Lincoln dodged them. That is not the way to fight the battle of freedom.”
Perhaps not, but Lincoln was fighting that battle in his own way, Wills comments: “Lincoln knew the racial geography of his own state well, and calibrated what he had to say about slavery according to his audience. . . . Lincoln knew it was useless to promote the abolitionist stand in Illinois.”
Here is Wills’ most salient sentiment: Lincoln, he believes, “knew how to sneak around the frontal defenses of prejudice and find a back way into agreement with bigots.”
Those bigots, of course, had the same voting rights as did the morally superior, right-thinking abolitionists. By sweeping enough of them into his tent–i.e., getting himself elected–Lincoln put himself in a position to bring about key changes when they really mattered. Had he declared a position early in his public service career and refused to budge, he likely would have wound up his days as a bored country lawyer in Illinois, an underachiever whose only challenge came when he moved the spitoon each day a bit farther away from his battered armchair.
Instead he was cagey and canny–and effective. Lincoln left himself enough wiggle room in his positions so when it mattered, he could wiggle his way right into statesmanship.
As Wills recounts, the same people who were pro-slavery were also enthusiasts of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln demonstrated how the two positions could not coexist. He outsmarted the pro-slave faction. He did not try to bully his way past them with a flurry of confrontational rhetoric. Rather, he eased his way past them with a series of logical arguments.
Lincoln was, in his own masterful phrase, “preparing the public mind” for an intellectual evolution that had to occur, if there were to be a nation worth saving: a movement toward freedom and dignity for all.
Realistically, of course, it is extremely unlikely that Bush or his wobbly brethren possess anything close to Lincoln’s grandeur of thought or moral conviction. Yet even if their allegedly wishy-washy public remarks thus far are based on actual ambivalence, on a genuine inability to make a final policy choice, I still think that’s preferable to the kind of stubborn ideological immobility that blights the campaigns of presidential contenders Patrick Buchanan, Steve Forbes and Gary Bauer.
Don’t you get the idea that those three haven’t changed their minds about anything since 1967?
The problem with a campaign that hardens too quickly into a single position on difficult issues is that it divides rather than brings together. And politics is all about finding a way to solve intractable problems through discussion, not domination. You give a little; I give a little.
California political activist Ron Utz, profiled in a recent New Republic, believes that the politics of the future will be based on just this sort of negotiation, the kind that enables people to indulge their natural inclination toward unity. “The key thing that makes it work,” he told the magazine, “is most people don’t think in terms of those rigid boundaries.”
Most people, Utz believes, are looking for an excuse to move beyond self-interest. Lincoln had that faith too. And so, perhaps, do Bush, Rodham Clinton, Clinton, Bradley and the other ditherers.
At long last, of course, policy decisions must be made. Indeed, the root of the word “decide” means the killing of other options (just as words such as “regicide” and “suicide” mean the killing of king and self). Like literal death, though, a decision is best when it doesn’t come too soon.
