Getting ready to be ready on Day One: Working on the division problem, NOW
October 18, 2008
by Robert A. Letcher, PhD
When the “ready on Day One” debate broke out among Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama, they all (defensively: the conventional approach) boasted their experience and strutted their accomplishments. But, somehow, they never got around to debating what they actually had to be ready for, on Day One. Nor did they ever get around to debating proper criteria according to which readiness for that should be assessed. They also didn’t get around to debating specifically what they could or should or would undertake beginning That Very Day to make themselves readier for Day One. Beyond lost opportunities to use the debates to sort out their positions on “readiness”, they also wasted a terrific opportunity to begin to dialog with the public, to help them learn the practical particulars of “being ready” as an issue.
As such, the candidates missed a major opportunity to respond seriously to the admonition voiced by Sam Nunn, from whose stature I have sought to derive “oomph” for my recent series of essays. For readers who haven’t already memorized Nunn’s admonition, here’s part of what he said in a joint appearance with former Secretary of Defense William Cohen appearance on Charlie Rose (2/13/2008):
“…We’re talking about how we can cooperate in the world and how we can get people together across party lines and across all sorts of lines. There is a real opportunity in the campaign for the kind of dialog that can lay the foundation for whomever is the next President to really be able to successfully govern. […] If we don’t discuss some of these fundamental issues in enough depth to get some understanding out there among the American public, it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to govern, no matter how popular, no matter how much charisma, no matter the vote margin their vote is; unless they have some platform that really leads people to be able to say, “Yeah, that’s the direction we ought to go in as a nation; that’s the kind of nation we want to be.” And those are the fundamental problems we’ve got to deal with, including perhaps some sacrifice in the short run in order to have a better future for our children and grandchildren.” [emphasis added; transcribed from broadcast by RAL]
Not only did they lose the opportunity to discuss this matter “in enough depth” to develop their own understanding of “readiness”. They didn’t have dialog “in enough depth to get some understanding out there among the American public”. If this non-attention continues, “it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to govern”, as Nunn said, [my emphasis added] … Obama included – and that’s important to me, because he’s my candidate to be the country’s next President, and because the country needs its next President to govern successfully.
That brings me [back] to the “division problem”. That’s the problem that the next President must be ready for on Day One. It’s the problem that complicates all other problems, and confounds efforts to remedy them. Of necessity, Presidents rely on advisors, whose judgment and capacity for being informed they have learned to trust. If the White House phone were to ring at 3 AM on a military matter, only a cowboy President would act without first consulting the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who on the next President’s Day One would presumably be holdovers from the current President’s Last Day. And if the phone call described another Katrina about to hit, or the “Big One” earthquake having hit, it’s difficult to imagine any President not doing a better job than W and his “good job” Brownie.
But only a President – and in my view, only a President Obama – could be ready on Day One to answer Sam Nunn’s challenge: “[to] get people together across party lines and across all sorts of lines”. Indeed, I very much doubt that either of the other two then-candidates could ever be ready for answering this call: Senator Clinton, due primarily to residual animosities around her husband’s policies and philandering, but also to her “do what it takes” approach to campaigning; and Senator McClain due to a combination of his own and the current President’s out-of-touchness.
Obama’s readiness for Day One derives from his well- and oft-demonstrated capacity to inspire an ever widening circle of everyday people to dare to hope for less division, to risk envisioning a much more “together” America (to reintroduce a term from my younger days).
But we would all make a horrible mistake if we were to cast Obama as some sort of savior for our division problem. He’ll have to learn how to help us help him, and we’ll have to learn how to help him do that. Two-way learning isn’t a strong suit of most American institutions, perhaps because it entails mutually respectful dialog, entered into for the purpose of mutual exploration.
No! I’m not pollyannish enough to suggest that Obama even might lead us – with appropriate apologies – to completely end division as we know it. But I do think he will be able to help us learn our collective way beyond suffficient division to allow him and his advisors to work with a newly “un-divided” public enough to make his Presidency the success that so many of us yearn for and te Country so desperately needs.
A challenge this big won’t be easy to meet. Learning can never be reduced to following instructions. It can never come about through one-way conversations. Learning means asking questions, even challenging conventions and commonly accepted “truths”. It necessarily entails risk-taking. All things that conventional politics loathes.
But, we all need to change over to a learning oriented way of doing politics. And that is something that Obama and the rest of us could start doing now to make ourselves more ready for Day One.
This past weekend, I got an indication of how difficult meeting this challenge would be. I attended an Obama “Unity Party”. I did so in hope of persuading Obama’s local organizer to put at least some of the group’s effort toward working on the division issue. The organizer first claimed to agree that overcoming divisions was important, but then he went on to cite efforts to register the many new voters whom Obama had excited into getting involved. This sounded like more conventional politics to me: important, but not getting at the “division thing”. I just don’t see how we can hope to help Obama become a successful President just by telling other people the arguments that had persuaded us – perhaps adding only volume.
Obama needs to help us learn how to listen appreciatively. For example, people doing voter registration can learn how to listen between the relatively mechanical steps of registering a new voter. Is there anything in particular that Obama would like his volunteer’s to listen for? If an Obama volunteer were to notice a pattern among responses, would there be way to feed the information to someone closer to Obama who might actually be able to bring it to Obama’s attention? Should volunteers cast themselves as sources of substantive information, or as empaths? Is there a way to organize the experience of thousands of volunteers in ways that they could help each other?
There just has to be something Obama can call on us to do other than join the infantry and follow orders. And I’m going to keep writing until I find it.
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