There Can Be No Mandate Without the Public’s Trust

As water faced reflects back a face, so is one person’s heart to another.
— Proverbs 27:19

Barack Obama won his 2008 campaign on the fuzziest of platforms: “Hope and Change.” Nothing specific, except the fact that he was black and that his election should have marked a great landmark in our national story, the victory of hope and the power to change and so to overcome at last the historical national failings of slavery and racism. 

Obama was noticeably short on detail. He famously described himself as being a screen onto which people project themselves. Perfectly fine — as long as you are not manipulating their hopes to do what they never would have voted for had you been up front with them. 

But it suited his style to be short on detail. And what he did say, he would parse to himself so differently than the effect he planned it to have, that he had to chide people for being so obtuse to forestall justly deserved criticism for duplicity. As far as voters understood in 2008, he was against gay marriage, he was pro-Israel, and he intended no major change in America’s confrontation with the terrorist Iranian regime. 

Certainly, Obama did not allow the voters to know his thoughts on revamping the American medical system by having the government largely take it over, eliminating options and raising costs for most. And when his Obamacare plan came to light, with all its specifics, it was the issue of the congressional midterm elections of 2010.  And in those elections, Obama’s representatives in Congress were, as he said, “shellacked.”

Having clearly heard the vox populi, he chose not to take it as vox dei. Deep into Congress’ lame duck session, he made a deal sweet enough to coax a member of the second-oldest profession to act like a member of the oldest, and forced through a law that Americans had just made perfectly clear they did not want. By a one-vote margin, under Obama’s leadership, a group of expiring and/or disingenuous politicians thumbed their noses at the citizen sovereigns of this nation simply because they had the power to do so.

Here was political arrogance, something which Obama excelled at. It is all too often the bane of intelligent people in politics.

It is astonishing how many people felt betrayed by Obama. Among them, Alan Dershowitz, a life-long liberal Democrat, had been an admirer of his. He was troubled, though, by clear signs of weakening of America’s opposition to Iran. He made a personal visit during the 2012 campaign to meet the president in which Obama assured him that he would remain constant on this point. On that specific assurance, Dershowitz endorsed Obama one more time. Dershowitz was shaken when this specific assurance was blatantly violated and even more when it became clear that Obama had intended not to honor it when he gave it.

Many other less famous Americans felt the same way. So many had bought into Hope and Change, and the beautiful picture Obama eloquently projected of Americans at last reconciled with each other across the racial divide. They felt betrayed when the racial divide was reactivated for political advantage in a 2012 campaign that featured Joe Biden talking like an actor in a minstrel show, telling black voters that the Republicans would put them back in chains. Obama lost voters in 2012, though his successful playing of the race card did mobilize the black vote enough to secure him victory nonetheless. But his fracturing of the trust of millions of Americans has not yet mended.

Breaking trust isn’t the way to win in America. Much like the great COVID lockdown, more was lost in the victory than was gained. 

For the power that politicians seek amplifies the range of their intelligence much more quickly than their moral sense can keep up, absent a deliberate choice to forestall it. To master the temptations associated with pursuit of power, one needs much sounder moral guidance than Obama imbibed during twenty years of listening to Jeremiah Wright. 

When we have a case, when we truly believe we have truth on our side, our goal as Americans under the Constitution is to share that truth with our fellow citizen sovereigns. That is how we get lasting change. We respect the citizens who have solemnly covenanted power to a constitutional government.

Respect for the process is a sine qua non, far more important than the particulars of changeable policies. Like it or not, FDR had a massive mandate for his New Deal. He controlled Congress by supermajorities in both houses. The social changes he implemented, however much we may not like them, had massive popular assent.

The Brown decision to integrate public schools was not rammed through the Supreme Court by a bare majority. The justices realized that the major social change it represented needed to have everyone on board — it was a unanimous decision. It was a major turning point for the good.

We have not yet got such a mandate from the people. It is premature to try to force through the kind of budget bill we would like to get a mandate for. But at present, the people have entrusted us only with control by a thin majority in one-half of the two branches of our government that legitimately engage in the law-making process. Working for a significant compromise was the best thing to do, and the most we should have done. We have not yet won our case with the voters so that we should expect to fully implement our views. To insist on winning by parliamentary strategizing  would be contemptuous of the people’s sacred say. And who is to say they are wrong until we have done a deep examination of our own motives and intentions? We must show faith in the people to earn their faith in us.

This is not a call to naïveté or passivity. We cannot be politically naïve when we are dealing with people struggling to get power, and we cannot expect others to do our own work for us. In the case of the budget, the damage of the fiscal irresponsibility is real and lasting, and we must fight it. But neither can we betray our own belief in the freedom of the people to govern themselves and our faith in their ability to do so. Acting recklessly with the faith of the American people hurts us even more than the considerable hurt of seemingly endless profligacy. 

No one had more faith in the people than the first Republican president and no one has dealt with difficult realities with more realism and sobriety than he did. We will be true to our own heritage if we emulate his enduring model. Lincoln’s piety was as practical as it was biblical, and as ageless. Our fellow citizens need us being living examples of such faith in our own political lives.

If we look as honestly into our reflection as did Old Abe, we might just find the hearts of our fellow citizens beating together with our own.

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