Misunderestimating the American people

I finally saw An Inconvenient Truth yesterday -- in the red state of North Carolina mind you. Afterwards, my wife and I went to a cafe next to the theater. Two couples in their 40's talked about the movie and their lives, with us eavesdropping from the next table. The men were smoking cigars. One wore a shirt bearing the insignia of his country club. They were talking also about church. One was telling the story of an episode in which his pastor brought a politicized speaker in around election time. This man recounted how he stood up and gave a counter argument against the speaker, and suffered a little bit of friction with his pastor as a result.

Those are the people who will turn the country around once the Democrats give them something to work with. I'm not talking about triangulating, pseudo-Southern, faith-euphemizing, focus-group-synthesized candidates. I'm talking about real leaders with real vision for turning the country around. (I wrote more on this last week.)

Eventually, we struck up a conversation with that table.
¬
"What if Al Gore ran for president?" I asked.

They were unenthusiastic. It really surprised me, considering how deeply the movie had moved them.

"OK," I said, "what if Al Gore ran by laying out a plan to get the U.S. to zero emissions and actually stop global warming -- you know, instead of asking individual Americans to buy Priuses, asking all of America to support a plan that would really do it all?"

The man wearing the country club shirt raised he fist like a Black Panther: "Yes! I'm in!" The whole table agreed. "We're in!" one of the women shouted. "Heck, we'd vote for you if you ran with a plan like that," another said.

It's stating the obvious to say that Democrats have been triangulating themselves to death. However, I guarantee you that we will wind up doing it one more time if our candidates don't make a quantum leap this cycle and present America with a big, credible, challenging way to save itself -- on the environment, as well as other issues.

Of all recent presidential hopefuls, McCain does the best with that kind of rhetoric. "People want to work for something greater than themselves." However, his free market dogma guarantees that he and all other Republicans of this era will always come up empty on specifics. And empty rhetoric doesn't work in this area. People do yearn for something greater than themselves, but they are very good at sniffing out the difference between something worth real sacrifice and nice-sounding lines written by a Senate staffer.

Al Gore made it perfectly clear: the planet is actually going to become totally unlivable in the next 50 years if we don't have another industrial revolution RIGHT NOW. So why, then, did he end his film saying the only way he knows how to approach this problem is by performing his slide show, "city by city, person by person, family by family." Isn't there another way? Like, um, asking the American people if they're willing to take on this challenge using a national presidential campaign as his pulpit?

A lot of liberal American politicians have a low opinion of the American people. They think the American people are "brainwashed by TV" and dumbed down by poor schooling.

I implore those politicians to give the American people the benefit of the doubt. For a long time, the only big thing our leaders have asked of us has been war. Each time they've made a compelling case, America accepts the challenge. (Remember this: "Saddam will be able to hit us with nuclear bombs this month!")

Al Gore is the last person in the world who should give up on the American people: they gave him the benefit of the doubt and elected him president even after he ran a campaign that consistently underestimated their intelligence and courage. Come back at us, Al, with something that challenges us, and see what we can do -- you'll get a lot more than a 1% lead.

Whichever politician winds up with that nomination, his or her challenge will be to break with decades of policy fidgeting and challenge America with a revolutionary plan for renewal. As I said in my last post, you won't be getting much if any support from academia or liberal think tanks. But isn't the job you're going for called "leader of the free world"? Lead!

If that guy I met last night can stand up in front of his entire church and take on a national conservative onslaught, then surely you can show as much courage in our next presidential primary and general election.

(PS: If you're already excited about 2008 politics, then check out RootsPrimary.org, where you can vote for your favorite potential candidate and get involved.)