An Optimist to the Bone

New Year's is about optimism, just as July Fourth is about patriotism and Thanksgiving, gratitude. Optimism is sometimes hardest to muster up. It isn't based on experience; indeed, it's how we endure despite everything that happens to us.

Survival skills are learned. The will to survive comes from a deeper place and entails much disregarding of facts. Janus gazes on past and future but the real motto of the day is 'don't look back.'

It's why resolutions are more popular than year-end reviews, including news reviews. I've no stomach for leafing through 'the year in pictures.' I'd rather picture the year ahead. Forced to toast the old year, I'd go on about war, assassins and the venality of politics and wind up sounding like Brando's Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. It's why we toast the new year, not the old.

2007 is a case in point. Benazir Bhutto's murder cast a shadow over the world. It betrays America's narcissism that the questions we asked are what to tell Pakistan to do about it and how it will affect the Iowa caucuses. Five years into Iraq and Afghanistan we still don't get that meddling in other people's politics is both futile and undemocratic or that democracy and non-violence must be modeled, never imposed.

On the election front, John McCain finished the year on an upswing, less for his strengths than others' weaknesses. Former front-runner Rudy Giuliani is tanking like a guy thrown in the East River in cement shoes, to pick a random analogy. You wouldn't believe Mitt Romney if he told you his blood type while lying on an operating table. Fred Thompson has audiences wondering how he made a living as an actor. Ron Paul's a novelty act and even I don't know who Duncan Hunter is.

That leaves McCain and Huckabee. Their appeal is their willingness to say things that don't spring directly from a pollster's forehead. Huckabee lent a rare dollop of humanity to debates when he chided opponents for being unloving. Almost everything he's said since shows less character. McCain says lots of stuff he doesn't believe but with a pained look that says at least he's not lying to himself. It's what passes in these times for integrity.

On the Democratic side Clinton is for 'experience,' Obama is for 'change' and Edwards is for 'standing up to special interests.' More concretely, Dennis Kucinich is for single payer health care but it may not help him much; caucus voters aren't sticklers for specificity.

Pundits say Bhutto's assassination gives Clinton an edge due to her experience. I'm sure it will, unless someone notices that Clinton, Obama and Edwards have about five years of foreign policy experience among them, while Dodd, Biden and Richardson have nearly a century. It may not help them; caucus voters care about experience but only as a theme.

Discouraged? Surveying all this dismal scene I remain optimistic to my bones. I find myself lately thinking back 40 years to 1968 and the horrible assassinations, the horrible, endless war and the horrible wrong turn the nation took. No one guessed when Nixon won we'd fallen down a rabbit hole we'd be 40 years climbing out of. In 2008 I know we can.

America isn't meant to be a backwater. Health care, clean energy and a nation at peace are the unfinished business of a generation that with a little help can still be great. we may not have a Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy, but then again such leaders don't always announce themselves.

In 1932, Walter Lippman belittled FDR as a shallow, gossipy underachiever without a vision. He had him just right, missing only the extraordinary core that made him perhaps the one man who could lead us out of a depression and through a war.

We pray that next year's winner is secretly Franklin Roosevelt but we resolve to do all we can do to create the conditions for change. And we remember the words of the Talmud: 'Look ahead. You are not required to complete the task; neither are you permitted to lay it down."

Read more New Year's posts from HuffPost bloggers

Comments

[YankeeCanuck]

Reasons for optimism? The Big Money candidates discover that the American people are smarter than they thought.
Caucus goers and voters get out and vote for the Seabiscuit in the race-- Joe Biden.People turn their backs on the celebrity and glitz---they vote for substance, integrity, specific plans and the steadfastness to carry out those plans. Biden wins the nomination against all odds.

Watch David Brooks, Mark Shields and Judy Woodruff talk about Biden's "Churchill moment".
Listen to them predict what we'll be saying we should have done.There's your New Year's Prediction.

I'm caucusing for Biden tomorrow--I've got a group who would rather act than depend on sheer optimism.C'mon, join us!

[Qbear]

your 1968 reference may also be forward looking. Like a Democratic Convention with half the angry Democrats outside the Convention being beaten by police, while inside the Convention was being told they needed to accept a candidate annointed from the top down.
Congressional Democrats still have a short time to avert such a Convention...a very short time.

[JakeEasy]

Nice post, Bill.

Like you, I remember the night Nixon was elected. I remember wondering how half a nation could be so gullible. It was very depressing.

Now here we are again. On one side we have several viable progressives of varying degrees. On the other we have only fear, bile, and greed. Nixon won because some idealistic Democrats stayed home. Their pure candidate, McCarthy, didn't get the nomination. He huffed back to Minnesota and didn't support Humphrey. His loyal followers stuck their head in the sand and the result was Nixon.

That's how we could get a McCain/Leiberman administration. I want to have the hope you write about - that we can get past pettiness and not repeat the past.

[poopdeck]

"Caucus voters aren't sticklers for specificity". A more damning statement about the Iowa charade cannot be found.

[Kungfublood]

Well now I seam to remember a real journalist during the foul Nixon campaign calling his people thugs and goons or wait- I guess in your alternate world those thugs worked for carter?

[Yukon Jack]

This post is meant as a reply to the post of adang621.

Still crying about Nixon?

He resigned honorably, unlike Clinton. He never bad-mouthed any of his successors, unlike Clinton. He never went abroad and bad-mouth his country, like Clinton. He is dead, again, unlike Clinton.

Besides, anything the Republican Presidents might have done, (such as Nixon opening the path to China and Reagan destroying the Soviet Union) should have been fixed by the "greatest President ever", William Jefferson Clinton.

Don't worry! There WILL be a Democratic President elected in 2008. He/she will be nothing more and nothing less than another Jimmy Carter. Strictly one-term, an incompetant nobody, "supported" by a Democratic Congress as Bush has been opposed by same.

Republicans will be OK as long as Pelosi and Reid lead their respective houses, regardless who the Democratic President might be.

[daddyG56]

Bill,
I don't know how old you were in 1968, but I was 12, and I knew we'd fucked things up very badly as a nation when I watched the kids getting beaten by the Chicago cops at the Dem convention! But, at the same time, I also felt a great sense of hope and wonder at the prospect of these kids making such a profound political statement.
The kids may save us yet again, if they see anything worth saving.

[adang621]

You glossed over the one really important thing: the most lying, creepy, divisive and low-life politico since Nixon, Rudy the Myth Man.........is tanking just as all of us who came to know him during his eight years of terror in New York City knew he would.
Even Republicans know a creep when they see one.
Good Riddance.

[ljsfolly]

The one thing I have learned at an advanced age old hippee is that we don't ever get the best person for the president's job. We get the person most deemed to be electable. I hear that little message under all the hype and blow and it confounds me. To think we get the top tier person then they are vetted and whammo here's the guy on our side! I would have liked some of the guys who don't ever catch on for whatever reason, like say Biden who has great qualifications for the job, to even be considered as most electable. Instead we get big, huge out of the ballpark money shoving into our faces who we have to select from.

[Rocku]

In the end, the problem is as much about how we pick our candidates as it is the people who excell at this process. It might be better to think about going to free media time for all the "qualified" candidates like it used to be(though who decides who is qualified could be a joke too...), and also only allow public funding with a very strict limit to contributions by checking off a few bucks on our taxes. Sort of like now, but with no private money allowed at all. Unless we make these candidates beholden to us (Us meaning the public at large), and not to some very limited interest groups with deep pockets we will keep getting the type of candidates we have been getting who then have to keep campaigning year around in order to make enough money to keep getting elected. If you have to do that, you keep going to the people who have all the money, and that ain't us! And they dictate the policy and we, the people, don't have much of a voice... But hey, who am I. Just one of nearly 300 million nobody's.

[kirotahoe]

i used to be a pretty good golfer. and one thing golf teaches you quite quickly is not to overcorrect after making a mistake.

[January]

I, too, share the hope that enough of the American electorate has had more than it can stomach of waiting for the privileged to feel charitable. The real world makes demands. Unhealthy accumulation of wealth in too few pockets makes us all sick.

I am trying to think of when it was I last remember a good law being written. Not under the GOP congresses. Maybe a couple under Bush, Sr. and fewer still under Reagan. Consumer protection laws under Carter were good. The anti-watergate reaction gave us some good ones. Nixon's domestic policy sucked. So, yeah, since 1968 we have had a nation where our leadership was out to lunch. So it wouldn't be real hard to do a whole lot better real quick.

[maddogbitesback]

It seems more like stepping through a looking glass than falling down a rabbit hole. You have to run as gfast as you can just to stay in one place.

[BrickSykes]

I like your style, Curry, as I too believe that 2008 can start something that has been long past due. The forces that have brought us to this place, though, will not relinquish control so easily. They will require forcible eviction.

Personally I feel that John Edwards is the best hope for dealing with the Corporatocracy; he's been on the inside and knows his way around. He's also vain enough to protect his legacy, thus assuring a real commitment.

But, you're right...The new Youth I see in America is ripe for inclusion and won't be denied. They are the "Help" America needs, and, they're ON THE WAY!

Brick

[Mariel]

Huckabee, Biden, and Dodd have that idealistic optimism you are looking for. Huck would bring it the most, and hire excellent people to fill him in in areas which are new to him, such as foreign affairs. He made a fool of himself this morning when he canceled his ad attacking Romney, but then, idealists often do make fools of themselves. My New Year's wish is that he at least makes it to the nomination.