"Hey, you were there. You had Kennedy. I didn't. I've never heard a president use words like 'destiny' and 'sacrifice' without it being bullshit. And, okay, maybe it was bullshit with Kennedy too, but ... but, people believed it. And, I guess, that's what I want. I want to believe it." - Primary Colors
I just finished Primary Colors, only 8 years after it was published, pretty good for me. The line above is the perfect expression of what I've felt for the last few years as my eye and mind has wandered to politics. I think that I did, just a little, believe it that is. Wes Clark brought a little of that out, and the Deniacs exuded it from their pours, until the harsh light of politics finally shone on their candidate.
I'm lucky, I live in Iowa and here you can feel like you're making a difference in national politics every four years. It's only for a few weeks, maybe a month, and then the stark reality of appealing to the lowest common denominator rears it's ugly head. You're left like a one-night-stand hoping that the candidates will call you, but knowing that you've had your fling and there was never any real emotion in that moment of callous caucus coitus.
I think, looking back through the lens of Joe Kline's fictionalization of the Clintons and those few months in 1992, that more than anything I feel cheated. Cheated that I didn't appreciate what it was like to have someone in office as good as Clinton. Didn't appreciate how good the world is. I suppose it's always like that looking back on things. We never realize how good we have it in the moment, we're always run down with work, or other daily tasks and can't realize how good things are.
These past four years have stood in stark contrast to the warm glow of Clinton's presidency, remembered warmly, if not lived that way. Things are bad if you're a liberal, bad if you're a democrat, bad if you're a part of the middle class, now pressured as you were under Regan and Bush the elder. It looks hopeless, you want to believe in something, I want to believe in something in this country other than tax cuts that provide no stimulus and an over arching feeling of dread and fear. I need an FDR telling me that all I have to fear is fear itself, I need a JFK telling me to ask not what my country can do for me, and the field of candidates to fill in that role is looking rather barren.
John Kerry doesn't engender hope. He engenders change, but not hope really. Kerry represents the idea that, if elected, things won't get worse. The possibility that they will get better seems a distant dream, not a present proponent of hope. He's not a candidate to support, he's an alternative, he's THE alternative to the source of my pain and disappointment these last four years.
He's the reason that reading Primary Colors in 2004 stings more than other years. Jack Stanton, fictionalized though he may be, seen through the eyes of a jaded reporter, still can inspire, can bring that touch of hope, as you remember how well Clinton could connect with people through that fiction. It's easy to romanticize our leaders who have gone by the wayside, hell it was all the press could seem to do recently with Regan. There has to be a kernel of something to romanticize though, some nugget of truth that speaks to a part of our hearts that yearns to believe in something, yearns to believe that someone up there wants to make a difference for the 'plain folks' that slog through day and weeks and months.
By the end of the story we see Stanton, much as we have come to see Clinton, as a flawed man, but still a good man, someone who wanted to make a difference. Looking back now perhaps is a bit late, and a bit premature, long enough ago for the warm fuzz of memory to smooth over the rough patches, but not enough time for history to arrive at any judgments.
I do know this, I wish Jack Stanton was on the ticket today, knowing that he was a flawed man and a politician of the highest order. I wish that he were here to tell us that the future would not be easy, but that he would be there to help us. To quote Fox Mulder, as well as Henry Burton, I want to believe. Unfortunately for me I seem to take after Mulder's partner.