The Audacity of Hope

those who sent them to Washington—all those people who have said to them at one
time or another: “We have great hopes for you. Please don’t disappoint us.”
Of course, there are technical fixes to our democracy that might relieve some of this
pressure on politicians, structural changes that would strengthen the link between voters
and their representatives. Nonpartisan districting, same-day registration, and weekend
elections would all increase the competitiveness of races and might spur more
participation from the electorate—and the more the electorate is paying attention, the
more integrity is rewarded. Public financing of campaigns or free television and radio
time could drastically reduce the constant scrounging for money and the influence of
special interests. Changes in the rules in the House and the Senate might empower
legislators in the minority, increase transparency in the process, and encourage more
probing reporting.
But none of these changes can happen of their own accord. Each would require a change
in attitude among those in power. Each would demand that individual politicians
challenge the existing order; loosen their hold on incumbency; fight with their friends as
well as their enemies on behalf of abstract ideas in which the public appears to have
little interest. Each would require from men and women a willingness to risk what they
already have.
In the end, then, it still comes back to that quality that JFK sought to define early in his
career as he lay convalescing from surgery, mindful of his heroism in war but perhaps
pondering the more ambiguous challenges ahead—the quality of courage. In some
ways, the longer you are in politics, the easier it should be to muster such courage, for
there is a certain liberation that comes from realizing that no matter what you do,
someone will be angry at you, that political attacks will come no matter how cautiously
you vote, that judgment may be taken as cowardice and courage itself may be seen as
calculation. I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less nourishing
popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a
poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own
conscience.
And my constituents. After one town hall meeting in Godfrey, an older gentleman came
up and expressed outrage that despite my having opposed the Iraq War, I had not yet
called for a full withdrawal of troops. We had a brief and pleasant argument, in which I
explained my concern that too precipitous a withdrawal would lead to all-out civil war
in the country and the potential for widening conflict throughout the Middle East. At the
end of our conversation he shook my hand.
“I still think you’re wrong,” he said, “but at least it seems like you’ve thought about it.
Hell, you’d probably disappoint me if you agreed with me all the time.”
“Thanks,” I said. As he walked away, I was reminded of something Justice Louis
Brandeis once said: that in a democracy, the most important office is the office of
citizen.