The Audacity of Hope

viewing preferences, global climate change is or is not dangerously accelerating; the
budget deficit is going down or going up.
Nor is the phenomenon restricted to reporting on complicated issues. In early 2005,
Newsweek published allegations that U.S. guards and interrogators at the Guantanamo
Bay detention center had goaded and abused prisoners by, among other things, flushing
a Koran down the toilet. The White House insisted there was absolutely no truth to the
story. Without hard documentation and in the wake of violent protests in Pakistan
regarding the article, Newsweek was forced to publish a self-immolating retraction.
Several months later, the Pentagon released a report indicating that some U.S. personnel
at Guantanamo had in fact engaged in multiple instances of inappropriate activity—
including instances in which U.S. female personnel pretended to smear menstrual blood
on detainees during questioning, and at least one instance of a guard splashing a Koran
and a prisoner with urine. The Fox News crawl that afternoon: “Pentagon finds no
evidence of Koran being flushed down the toilet.”
I understand that facts alone can’t always settle our political disputes. Our views on
abortion aren’t determined by the science of fetal development, and our judgment on
whether and when to pull troops out of Iraq must necessarily be based on probabilities.
But sometimes there are more accurate and less accurate answers; sometimes there are
facts that cannot be spun, just as an argument about whether it’s raining can usually be
settled by stepping outside. The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts
every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful
compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those—like the White House press
office—who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately,
and with the best backdrop.
Today’s politician understands this. He may not lie, but he understands that there is no
great reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly when the truth may be
complicated. The truth may cause consternation; the truth will be attacked; the media
won’t have the patience to sort out all the facts and so the public may not know the
difference between truth and falsehood. What comes to matter then is positioning—the
statement on an issue that will avoid controversy or generate needed publicity, the
stance that will fit both the image his press folks have constructed for him and one of
the narrative boxes the media has created for politics in general. The politician may still,
as a matter of personal integrity, insist on telling the truth as he sees it. But he does so
knowing that whether he believes in his positions matters less than whether he looks
like he believes; that straight talk counts less than whether it sounds straight on TV.
From what I’ve observed, there are countless politicians who have crossed these hurdles
and kept their integrity intact, men and women who raise campaign contributions
without being corrupted, garner support without being held captive by special interests,
and manage the media without losing their sense of self. But there is one final hurdle
that, once you’ve settled in Washington, you cannot entirely avoid, one that is certain to
make at least a sizable portion of your constituency think ill of you—and that is the
thoroughly unsatisfactory nature of the legislative process.
I don’t know a single legislator who doesn’t anguish on a regular basis over the votes he
or she has to take. There are times when one feels a piece of legislation to be so
obviously right that it merits little internal debate (John McCain’s amendment