A couple of old Democrats sitting around talking

Last month I was back at the old Mannion family homestead for a clan reunion of sorts where I got to talking politics with Pop Mannion and my Uncle Bill.  Uncle Bill is Pop Mannion's brother-in-law and they've been friends going back fifty years or more, to before Uncle Bill started dating my aunt, even though Pop's a Dodger fan and Uncle Bill lives and dies with the Yankees.  Pop and Uncle Bill were in the position they so often are at these family events, sitting side by side on folding chairs, good-naturedly removed from the general throng, talking about their two favorite subjects, sports and politics.

Both Pop Mannion and Uncle Bill are politicians.  They have run for and been elected to local office.  They have been leaders in their local party organizations.  Over the decades, they have worked hard for many and various candidates up and down the ticket, and some day I'll tell you the story about how Pop Mannion didn't get to be a McGovern delegate to the 1972 convention and what George McGovern himself had to say about that.

They are Democrats.  Among the last of the New Deal kids.  Theirs is the generation Hawkeye Pierce was describing when he said, "It was easy to be a kid back then.  You knew where you stood.  Franklin Roosevelt was always the President, Joe Louis was always the champ, and Paul Muni played everybody."

I suspect that in their hearts, Roosevelt is still the President.

They are Democrats.

Which means they're bound to disagree with each other often.  Like this year.

Pop's for Obama.

Uncle Bill's for Clinton.

That day they were going around and around on the question of which one was truly electable.  Uncle Bill had been in Florida all winter, so this was the first chance they'd had to talk about the campaign since it heated up.

Uncle Bill was worried because all his Jewish neighbors down on the Gulf Coast were saying how there was no way they were going to vote for Obama.  Pop Mannion was worried that the Independents just won't vote for Hillary over McCain.

Neither one said anything I hadn't read a thousand times in the blogosphere.  The difference between their way of arguing and what has become the bloggers' way of arguing is that they were having fun. They were enjoying the discussion.  They were both glad to have a candidate this year they liked and cared about.  There was no chance that either one wasn't going to vote for whoever gets the nomination.  They disagreed strongly and nobody's mind got changed.  But they weren't really trying to change each other's minds.

They knew better.

Because they know each other.

Each one knows the other one is not stupid.  Each one knows the other has good reasons for supporting his chosen favorite.  Each one knows the other has been right about a lot of things in the past.  Each one knows the other may very well be right now.

Each one knows the other is a Democrat.  Which means that they know this about each other, their reasons for supporting their favorites are based on what they believe President Clinton or President Obama can do as Democratic Presidents.

They both want the same things in the end.

Concerned readers sometimes write in to ask, "Lance, how can you be a Democrat!  Don't they break your heart every single day of the week?"

Some of them.

But this is something I learned growing up listening to Pop Mannion and Uncle Bill.  You're a Democrat because you want to see certain things get done and unfortunately you need politicians to get them done and politicians are just people, often significantly flawed people. Saints become nurses and doctors and teachers and missionaries.  They don't go into politics.  This is what I've learned on the blogosphere.  The difference between Democrats and a lot of self-styled Progressives is Democrats want certain things to get done; Progressives want a lot of the same things to get done but they want a certain type of person to be the one to get them done.

I'll tell you, that kind of person doesn't usually go into politics, and when they do they don't often get very far.

I'm not bragging when I tell you this, though.  Pop Mannion is that kind of person, as close as you can get anyway, and I'll tell you this too.  If you'd voted for him for town supervisor, the odds are he'd have broken your heart at least a half dozen times during both of this long tenures in the job.  You know why?  Because he's still just a human being.  He couldn't do everything he wanted to.  He couldn't please everybody he needed to please.  He couldn't be everything to everybody and whenever he had to choose what he could be to whom he broke a lot of people's hearts.

In the end, what there was was what he'd gotten done, which was considerable, considering.  And that's what he'd tell you to look at.  The point wasn't who was supervisor.  The point was what got done.

The point isn't Obama.  The point isn't Clinton.  The point is what is the next Democratic President going to get done, and neither one is going to get everything they want done.  Either one is going to have to make choices that are going to break hearts.  And don't try telling me that your candidate will get more done or better things done because you don't know that.  What you do know is that no matter how wonderful your candidate is when he or she is President he or she is going to fail to do a lot of what you hope they will do.

At the end of four or eight years it will be the same no matter which one is President.  The Democratic President will have gotten done some of the things that we want done and need to get done.

It's anybody's guess what those things will be.

As much as they like and care about their candidates, to Uncle Bill and Pop Mannion Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are tools.  I don't mean that in a snide or dismissive or insulting way.  Because of the way the country is set up, we need a certain type of people to go to work every day on our behalf and get things done.  Pop Mannion and Uncle Bill want certain things to get done.  Their argument is over which one has the better chance of getting into the position of getting those things done and which one seems more likely to be able to get those things done.  But it's the things that need to be done that are what's important.  Not the person doing them.  To them it's an argument over process not over personality and since they are in fundamental agreement about principles, they don't worry about the personal and they can take a kind of mechanic's delight in the process.  Half the fun of any repair job is arguing over the best way to go about it before you settle down to work.

Pop Mannion and Uncle Bill went around and around, but neither one lost his temper.  Neither gave an inch and the conversation only ended because at one point they turned to me and asked for my opinion and when I said I didn't think it mattered which one got the nomination because the Republicans are broke, demoralized, and disgruntled with their candidates up and down the ticket.  The Right doesn't come out just to vote against things.  They vote for things too.  They won't come out to vote for John McCain.  The only people who are going to vote for him are the Republican equivalents of Uncle Bill and Pop Mannion, practical-minded party loyalists, and there just aren't enough of those left in the Republican party.  This is why the polls that are supposedly showing McCain "doing well" against either Obama or Hillary (although lately he's not doing as "well" against her) are really all showing the same thing---he can't get above 45 per cent of the vote.  This is at a time when the Democrats are supposedly tearing themselves apart while he's getting a free ride from the National Press Corps.

I said this and Pop Mannion and Uncle Bill exchanged sidelong looks as if to say, What are you going to do with somebody this naive?

Then the subject changed to baseball.
______________________________________

This has been a very long introduction.  Here's where I'm going.  Neither Pop Mannion nor Uncle Bill would understand what the hell's going on in Jim Wolcott's article in Vanity Fair this month.

Comments

[Tom W.]

Wonderful post! Can we get Pop Mannion and Uncle Bill to blog?

It bothers me that must Democrats - bloggers or not - can't see or accept or support or even consider what's staring them in the face: a unity ticket is easily our best chance this year. And it's literally crazy not to go that way if at all possible...

[Karen]

"Pop's a Dodger fan and Uncle Bill lives and dies with the Yankees."

"Pop's for Obama.
Uncle Bill's for Clinton."

I feel that there's a correlation, here. Obama and the Dodgers have both had to deal with being essentially uprooted, and in search of an identity. The Yankees and Hillary both feel that winning is their birthright and their entitlement.

I'm thinking that that's just scratching the surface....

[MikeT]

A dearly departed friend used to constantly complain about the left's 'purity fetish' when it came to politicians. He thought they were doomed because everything in politics was the result of compromise, but to the purity fetishists, once you'd compromised, you had to be kicked out of office. So the only politicians they could stand were the ones who never accomplished anything.

[burritoboy]

"But it's the things that need to be done that are what's important. Not the person doing them. To them it's an argument over process not over personality and since they are in fundamental agreement about principles, they don't worry about the personal and they can take a kind of mechanic's delight in the process. Half the fun of any repair job is arguing over the best way to go about it before you settle down to work."

Unfortunately, that's precisely the naive viewpoint - it's a version of the functionalist schools of political thought that were predominant during your father's and uncle's youths. Only one problematic aspect of this view is it's too easily made assumption of general rationality - that people are rational in the ways assumed or asserted by the economics, political science and social sciences of the immediate post-war period (and gradually absorbed by politicians of that period). Not only has this assumption been disproven - most concretely by the behavorial economists such as Thaler or Kahneman/Twersky - but it also can be extremely debilating to actual politicians and statesman.

In Platonic terms, this is described by the phrase: "the unwise cannot recognize the wise". That means that the unwise cannot identify the wise based upon the wise's expertise or knowledge because the unwise (lacking both knowledge and temperament) cannot distinguish between those who pretend to wisdom and those actually wise. Thus, the wise or savvy politician must signal to the unwise through commonly recognized signs or wonders or violence or signifiers that the said politician has the favor of the gods, or History (Hegel), or Fortuna (Machiavelli), or Leadership (TM), etc.

[actor212]

Lance, this is one reason I chose Clinton over Obama. I see where the Obombers get all righteous and elitist about what "they" will do, conveniently forgetting a few salient facts:

1) Most important, Obama has been Senator less than one term. In that time, he has not exactly distinguished himself as a legislative whiz kid, to the point where a glaring omission on his resume of "inclusiveness" is the fact that he wasn't one of the Gang of Fourteen who saved the filibuster. You'd think a guy who talks about "No Red States, No BLue States" would have been first on that coalition.

2) Senators hate the new kids on the block. That's why rookie senators get the shit jobs and the shit offices. Obama's got some powerful superdelegates, but at the end of the day, when he's President, he'll be paying back chits, not passing legislation. He'll be signing yes to bills he doesn't agree with, or face an uprising the likes of which he can't even imagine.

3) Hillary in the Senate will be the most powerful Senator. Period. Should she lose the nomination, she will be all but a shadow government to Obama (and McCain, but that went without saying, I felt). And don't think for one minute she's not got a list of senators that she's going to fuck over the second she can. That will effectively kill any proposals Obama puts forth.

4) Given all this, all these fresh new faces who pop up, clean shaven and idealistic, are going to shrug their shoulders in two years and say "Fuck, man, he turned out to be no better than Bush."

[scottreads]

Great post. Somehow, I irrationally persist in my belief that actual humans like your dad and uncle can model this kind of behavior (vice Thaler or Twersky) and that both politicians and voters can profit from it, despite their otherwise regrettable Platonic deficiencies.

[burritoboy]

"But it's the things that need to be done that are what's important. Not the person doing them. "

Here, too, I would say your relatives are somewhat naive or again, perhaps too idealistic. Such an attitude can really be seriously maintained only if the persons going into political affairs are not self-interested, not wanting honors or rewards or fame or glory for serving the state. Traditionally, this circle was squared in American politics by one of two devices: either by politics being the province of an already wealthy and honored WASP aristocracy well-trained in selflessly serving others (essentially, the model of the early Twentieth century Progressives) or by politics being the province of academic experts (the model of the New Deal and post-WWII period), also portrayed as a engineering or science analogy. Neither model really described how politics actually worked, but these were the models that were aspired to.

The reality is that both models decisively failed: the WASP aristocracy in the wreckage of the Depression and the need to unify the nation in WWII, and the academic experts discredited when the post-WWII economic consensus collapsed during the economic disasters of the 1970s. Rather than attempting to return to already-discredited failures - and even the possibility of returning to the WASP aristocracy no longer exists - your relatives need to face much more fundamental questions. The question of glories and honours (or political ambition, or the spirited soul in Plato's terminology) in the social contract state is a central one.

[burritoboy]

"Somehow, I irrationally persist in my belief that actual humans like your dad and uncle can model this kind of behavior (vice Thaler or Twersky)"

Incoherent. Our current American state is founded exclusively on rational self-interest. If we cannot plausibly argue that the population actually IS rational - and we cannot plausibly do that any longer - then we must either propagandize the population into behaving as if they were rational (even though the population at bottom is not rational) or simply abandon the current regime. Hoping that completely selfless politicians emerge who somehow - the mechanism is entirely obscure here - selflessly and virtuously make the populance rational is itself a piece of irrational nostalgia, and a nonsensical claim by our current regime's own understanding of plausible political arguments. There's no difference between hoping for such politicians and wanting an aristocracy (not necessarily a hereditary aristocracy, but an aristocracy nonetheless). Or dreaming of some mystical time when King Arthur ruled the land or some such.

[Susie from Philly]

Anyone who doesn't understand that McCain has a very, very good chance of pulling it off is, yes, naive. Sorry, Lance. This time, listen to your elders.

[kateNC]

This is a wonderful piece of writing. I've sent the link to lots of people.

[lambert strether]

Wouldn't a farcical aquatic ceremony be simpler than all this pesky "voting"?

[4jkb4ia]

Thank you for reminding us that people can disagree about this election without hating each other.

Ted Kennedy did not magically become the most powerful senator after the 1980 primary. Hillary may be able to block Obama's specific health care plan, but the two candidates have been talking about the same priorities because they are Democratic priorities. If Hillary is such a real Democrat as her partisans say she is, she will help to make sure that Democratic issues can succeed.

[4jkb4ia]

We have representative democracy and minority rights because people are not always rational, and have religious passions etc. The process is supposed to bring forward public-spiritedness in everyone so that they can choose the person who can be rational and disinterested. But two things have happened.
1) We expect a Presidential candidate to be our savior. Any president does not have unlimited power. At least we should hope.
2) The media speaks to irrationality instead of rationality. The media is charged with describing the personal character of candidates we do not know well and easily goes over into gossipmongering.