| Is the Unexamined Life Worth Voting For? The Memoirs of Clinton, Edwards, and Obama |
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| Essays and Memoirs | |||
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"Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. It was not merely that [President Bush] did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take the care to understand himself. The sense of reality that might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing. But then, it is doubtful that warning bells had ever sounded in him before. He had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives warning bells do not sound." —"Getting Iraq Wrong" Michael Ignatieff The New York Times Magazine August 5, 2007
1. In 2000, while preparing for her New York Senate debate with Rick Lazio, Hillary Clinton said that she had "steeled" herself "for the possibility of personal attacks and was determined to stay focused on the issues—not on Lazio as a person." Steeling oneself is a familiar political canard. Politicians imagine that if they stay on the issues—gun control, health care, the Iraq war—and stay off the person—themselves, their spouses, and others—they’ll be more electable. This chin-up stand tells voters, I’m above the fray; evaluate me only on my persuasive abilities. But we don’t evaluate them that way. Nor does our TV-mediated politics. We want the debate heated. We want sparks. We’re looking for tics of emotion, the temper of resolve. Candidates differ far more in self-expression than they do in their positions—a fact everyone knows. Thus, abnegating the self becomes a stance no different from a fine haircut (think Edwards) or a patented smile (think Giuliani). Watching and listening to, even reading, politicians is the art of gleaning the personal from the political when the two conditions seem inseparable. Which is another way of saying that in politics, character and its many expressions remain king. For proof we need look no further than the putative depth of self in Reagan and the indisputable lack of it in Bush. The rest of the story at Amazon.com.
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