The Audacity of Hope

behavior, even if it’s for our own good. Not many Americans would feel comfortable
with the government monitoring what we eat, no matter how many deaths and how
much of our medical spending may be due to rising rates of obesity.
More often, though, finding the right balance between our competing values is difficult.
Tensions arise not because we have steered a wrong course, but simply because we live
in a complex and contradictory world. I firmly believe, for example, that since 9/11, we
have played fast and loose with constitutional principles in the fight against terrorism.
But I acknowledge that even the wisest president and most prudent Congress would
struggle to balance the critical demands of our collective security against the equally
compelling need to uphold civil liberties. I believe our economic policies pay too little
attention to the displacement of manufacturing workers and the destruction of
manufacturing towns. But I cannot wish away the sometimes competing demands of
economic security and competitiveness.
Unfortunately, too often in our national debates we don’t even get to the point where we
weigh these difficult choices. Instead, we either exaggerate the degree to which policies
we don’t like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferred
policies conflict with important countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tend
to bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to
bear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it
comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to control
people’s sexual practices. Conversely, it’s easy to get most liberals riled up about
government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman’s reproductive
freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential
costs of regulation to a small-business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.
In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we
draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works.
But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values
that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter
feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if
conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to
reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.
The results of such an exercise can sometimes be surprising. The year that Democrats
regained the majority in the Illinois state senate, I sponsored a bill to require the
videotaping of interrogations and confessions in capital cases. While the evidence tells
me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes—
mass murder, the rape and murder of a child—so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the
community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the
ultimate punishment. On the other hand, the way capital cases were tried in Illinois at
the time was so rife with error, questionable police tactics, racial bias, and shoddy
lawyering that thirteen death row inmates had been exonerated and a Republican
governor had decided to institute a moratorium on all executions.
Despite what appeared to be a death penalty system ripe for reform, few people gave my
bill much chance of passing. The state prosecutors and police organizations were
adamantly opposed, believing that videotaping would be expensive and cumbersome,
and would hamstring their ability to close cases. Some who favored abolishing the death