One of our core beliefs as Democrats is that the government is a vehicle for achieving
The Common Good, as Representative Jim McDermott ably reminded me:
ARMANDO: I'm selfish just like everybody else. I'm lucky. I have my job, I have my health care and haven't thought about it but your description of it just now really got to me and it makes me wonder if Dems are using it properly.
McDERMOTT: But you are absolutely right and, you see, I mean, by the way if there's anything that's lost, that we've lost for awhile, it's the sense of the common good. You are honest enough to tell me that that's exactly how you thought. You are thinking about yourself. I've got a job, I've got health care, I've got, you know, I'm doing OK, so it's not a problem.
Well Reagan started us down the road, not that he was the first, but he was the one that articulated best when he said: "are you better off this year than you were last year or four years ago?" The question should be are we better off than we were four years ago and the fact is that as a country and as a people and as a middle-class, we are not . . . and that's why I think the biggest thing that's missing in the Democratic Party is that we have lost the idea of the common good.
Katrina and its aftermath reminds us that although we Democrats believe our government is supposed to function for the Common Good, it has not -- and we have not fought hard enough for this ideal. E.J. Dionne hits this as well in his column tomorrow:
One can hope that our individual generosity will pour forth to our fellow citizens suffering on the Gulf Coast. We can take some solace in the fact that for every looter, there is a sport fisherman who brought a boat up to New Orleans to help in rescue efforts. There is a Red Cross nurse caring for an injured person, a Coast Guard member conducting a daring rescue, a volunteer in a church basement comforting a homeless child.
Yet this is a moment in which individual acts of charity and courage, though laudable and absolutely necessary, cannot be enough. It is a time when government is morally obligated to be competent, prepared, innovative, flexible, well-financed -- in short, smart enough and, yes, big enough to undertake an enormous task. Not only personal lives but also public things must be put back together.
You wonder if this summer, with deteriorating conditions in Iraq and now this terrifying act of God, might make us more serious. This is said not to be a time for politics, and we can surely do without the petty sort. But how we pull our country together, make our government work at a time of great need, and share the sacrifices that war and natural catastrophe have imposed on us -- these are inescapably political questions.
He's right. I had forgotten for a while.