I've been watching Obama closely for about six months, and having listened carefully, what strikes me is that he quite obviously doesn't seem to be a typical politician. It seems to me that Obama is a politician who cares, in a way that is unusual, about the good of the country above his own political well being. I'm not arguing that he is good, and the others are bad. I'm arguing that his whole approach is morally or qualitatively different than the typical politician, and that this should matter to us. In particular, I've noticed that he avoids using fear or negative emotions as a way to gain votes. This can't be a coincidence, and has to be a result of his having made this decision consciously. All the data says that negative attack campaigns win votes. The fact that he is not "going negative" to gain votes has become all the more clear during the week of the Wright press conferences. This is in sharp contrast to both Clinton as well as what we have heard referred to as "the Republican attack machine". The fact is, it is remarkable that Obama has so far resisted, to the extent he has, pursuing this "tried and tested" strategy. If we say we care about having a good society - if we care about goodness - then it seems that we should want someone who appeals to the best, and not the worst, qualities in us. The flip side of this argument is that we ought reject any public voice that raises a negative ante. The best example of this was in the 2004 election when Republicans motivated people to vote against the Democrat by invoking fear of gay marriage. The issue is not who is right or wrong. The issue is the use of anger, fear and resentment to motivate the voter. What I've been thinking about concerning Obama in regard to the contrasts he keeps drawing is the seeming fact that too many presidential candidates try to gain voters not by getting the voter to vote for their ideas or policies, but by getting them to reject the other. This seems to be a primary focus of a lot of talk-show radio as well as some TV news outlets. I would wish that more Americans would be suspicious of any public speaker or media outlet which uses fear, resentment or negative emotion in general. Obama is subtly yet clearly trying to move the country away from a destructive negativity our political culture seems to be stuck in. If part of being patriotic means shoring up our good qualities and the things we have in common, then what passes for a great deal of politics and radio talk show in our recent past is often unpatriotic. These voices are forces of disunity, not unity. They do not make society better, but make us angry.

The fact that Wright spoke in public in the odd way he did shows, for one, that he's not a politician. While we would expect Clinton and McCain to try to gain from this, our media and we ourselves should be careful to not act as if we are not in on a joke. The joke is that Wright takes himself a bit too seriously and embarrassed himself by holding press conferences. Clearly he likes the limelight and likes to hear himself talk. Perhaps he was resentful at Obama's distancing himself from him a month earlier. But in any case, the actions he took were a serious public faux pas, if you will, and not much more. It seems that in the heat of a campaign, concrete individual Americans who have a position internalize what is merely political posturing, treating it as if the posturing or event reveals some deep truth! In other words, I've heard not a few voices talk AS IF the fact that Wright came out and said what he did means something substantial about Obama. This feels a bit like a kind of reverse Emperor's New Clothes. "If enough people say he's tainted, he will be tainted" kind of spin-il-logic. We should be highly suspicious of the motives behind this kind of claim. We know the motives of this "spin" on the part of the Clinton campaign, and in what will come later in the McCain campaign. But this issue gets more serious when we look at individual citizens. My argument is that when we as private citizens let all the public rhetoric influence us, we are at risk of being moved by appeals to our own "dark side"; our fear, resentment or other negative emotions. Clearly this is the kind of psychology that a lot of talk radio as well as negative campaigning plays on. A good litmus test for us as individuals - as opposed to members of this or that "party" - to see if we are allowing ourselves to be pulled in by this dynamic is to see if we often find ourselves listening to and focusing on a negative claim made by a candidate about another candidate. In contrast, I would argue that we need to listen to what the candidate themselves says about their ideas and proposals. The fact that in reality this issue shows up as a matter of degree and is not black and white makes this even more interesting. For the contrast between Clinton and Obama is very strong on this count. It's so strong that it can teach us something about ourselves, if we let it. The implication of a candidate, or a Party for that matter, that focuses on making negative claims about the other candidate is that they do not have enough within or in their own platform to stand on their own two feet. It belies a kind of Machiavellianism and/or desperateness to win at all costs. And of course, it can imply the conscious manipulation of negative psychology on the part of financial and other narrow-interest groups. This latter motive, however, is not my primary focus. It is something else altogether. The implication of appealing to negative emotions in the voter is that the candidate cannot win unless they try to get the voter to strongly dislike the other. In listening to Obama, I want to suggest that appeals to negative emotions inversely correlate with moral, spiritual and/or intellectual integrity, whether we are talking about a Party as a whole, a particular candidate, or talk radio or news.

Allow me to make a few more remarks on the logic of the argument that Wright's behavior tells us something bad about Obama. To make this logical jump - 1) Wright said x,y, or z and 2) This tells us something significant about Obama, is, simply, illogical. As noted above, it is to confuse politics with valid reasoning. And the United States is supposed to be an Enlightenment nation, in which its citizens reason. I take it that what we have heard from Obama, and in particular his careful attempt to avoid using negative psychology, is where we should look to get the knowledge we need to make a rational choice about whom to vote for. To repeat a theme: We carefully resist letting ourselves as individuals confuse ourselves with the strong and at times overwhelming tendency in our public culture, e.g. our media driven culture, to confuse our political or public "selves" with our true selves. Stated in terms of a contrast central to this web site, we keep in mind the core distinction between what it takes to be a 'good citizen' and a 'good man'. I believe Obama is seeking to appeal to our true and moral nature. In this sense he might be - though it's much too early to say - a real statesman. On the above standard, he's clearly more patriotic than most politicians. What is striking is the contrast offered by other political groups and actors. I see the Republican Party in general as well as Clinton appealing to our emotions and in particular fear and resentment. Hopefully we can find that we are not mostly motivated by our own negativity, but by the best quality in us collectively: our strong moral sense. In applying our moral sense, we are to balance a need to be in the real world while demanding to be talked to like adults. One way we enact these values is by not voting for candidates who seek to manipulate us. While we can assume that all candidates will be manipulative to a degree, if and when candidates of substantially different character show up on the stage, we should be prepared and able to apply standards of judgement that make it possible for us to see who cares about the common good for its own sake, and who is telling us they care about the common good in order to gain their own narrow interests. I am arguing here that a factor that should lead us to disqualify a candidate is the kind of negative appeals used by the Republican Party in the last few election cycles. For as soon as they seek to manipulate us with fear and negativity in general, this is an indication that they are not so much motivated by a desire to make the nation better, but by their own narrow ends, whatever these are. As a corollary, we do not allow profit driven media, which itself has discovered that keeping people angry makes them more profit, to manipulate us. (Rush Limbaugh, an unrepentant drug addict who continues to publically say that drug addicts are immoral, is the best example of one who keeps people angry and resentful.) We refuse to listen to any talk radio or TV that has the effect of making us angry or continually agitated. We simply turn it off or change the channel. If we notice this effect on us - and we may need to develop sensitivity to become aware that we are indeed being repeatedly agitated - we need to conclude that the claims made by these politicians or media outlets does not teach us anything about the other politician or the world, but rather simply that we are being manipulated.

The final thing I'll say regards the issue of elitism. The use of this term in public discourse is the vehicle of double-speak on the right. And if one understood the meaning of the conscious use of this charge they'd quickly have nothing to do with those who make the charge, lest they find themselves embarrassed. The charge of 'elitism' is blatantly phony and creepy at the same time. Every time I hear this charge made, I am brought to think of the fairy-tale "The Emperor's New Clothes". In this case, someone says this or that politician is an "elitist", and then we are supposed to assume that this means something bad about this politician. Again, repeatedly making the charge of 'elitism' reveals a deliberate attempt to cultivate the emotions of anger, fear and resentment in the listener.  The real purpose of the charge of 'elitism' is to try to bring up some reason that the listener has in his own life to feel the emotion of resentment, simply. It is part of the method of seeking to get someone to vote not for a party or candidate for a positive reason, but against the other. Elitism, when it actually means something robust, is always linked to wealth and one's place in society. It is not linked to the imagined concoction of qualities that Republicans and the likes of Rush Limbaugh attribute to those who contradict their political views. The qualities that talk radio and certain Republican politicians call 'elitist' are so vague as to be meaningless. Elitism in the history of philosophy and religion never has to do with a way a person speaks. A particular purpose of the charge of 'elitism' is to tar highly educated people as 'not like us'. Evoking the emotions of anger, fear and resentment is the gasoline used to make this 'tar' stick. The problem with this is that being very educated or simply sounding educated is never said to be a bad thing by any serious thinker or prophet. But this is what the charge that Obama is an elitist can be reduced to. On the other hand, enacting policies that consistently harm the common good and benefit a narrow few at the expense of most of us is always said to be bad by any robust moral standard. Finally, I note that the creepy use of the charge of elitism as undertaken consistenly on the American "right" is reminiscent of the fact that the Soviet Union as well as Nazi Germany made killing of their highly educated citizens - their intellectual class - a top priority. In this country, those intellectuals who threaten to make it harder for the most selfish among us to pursue their own narrow agenda are not killed, but those with narrow agendas can desparately do whatever they can to tar them as unpatriotic, or again, "not like us". Given the need to explain how this nation elected someone who might easily have been predicted to become the worst president in our history, what happened in 2000 and 2004 was that the Democratic candidate was voted against. Bush was not voted for. And this occurred because of the effective application of the charge of 'elitism' by the Republican Party to the Democratic candidate. And these candidates were naive enough to think that this charge would not 'stick'.  We gain more insight into the bottomless pit of this large-scale collective, very public immorality when we allow ourselves to reflect honestly on our own motives and feelings: who did we side with in the last two elections, and why? And did we respect the Democratic candidate less because he assumed the charge of elitism would not stick?  If so, what does this say about us as individuals? The fact that this charge did stick for quite a significant percentage of our population means that we and our children must pay for a kind of collective shallowness.  If the charge of 'elitism' gets many to not vote for the more educated and independent political leader, then so much the easier to continue the kinds of policies we've seen in the last decade or so, policies which have demonstrably harmed the common good in this nation more than any other set of policies in American history.