This is the third in a series. Part 1 discussed the failure of John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000 to tackle the issue of values. Part 2 showed how Bill Clinton's approach was different.
He has described himself as "a skinny kid with a funny name." Others have described him as "a rising star in the Democratic party." This summer, many Americans got their first introduction to Barack Obama:
My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack or "blessed," believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren't rich, because in a generous America you don't have to be rich to achieve your potential.
Barack Obama's parents saw this nation as a land of opportunity. As I showed yesterday, opportunity was one of the three values Bill Clinton touted in his successful 1992 bid for the presidency. What about the other two values, responsibility and community?
On responsibility, Barack Obama says:
Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach our kids to learn; they know that parents have to teach, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.
And on community:
For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we're all connected as one people. If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.
Opportunity, responsibility, and community. Those are the values of the Democratic party. Bill Clinton tapped into them in his 1992 bid for the presidency, and now Barack Obama has ridden them into the Senate.
Politically, Clinton and Obama are very different. Clinton is a southern moderate and Obama is a blue state liberal. What connects them is an intuitive understanding of the values that have made the Democratic party strong, the values that have made America strong.
The other thing Clinton and Obama share is a hope that America can be strong again -- that our nation's best days are not in the past.
Here's Barack Obama again:
It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes the American dream has a place for him, too.
Hope -- Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.
While Democrats around the nation were losing badly, Barack Obama was winning more than 70 percent of the vote in one of the nation's largest states. There is a lesson here.
Embracing values does not mean moving to the right -- or the left. It doesn't mean letting the Republicans frame the debate with their phony family values. It means reaching within ourselves and finding the core of who we are. It means letting those core values drive our policies.
Universal health care, a living wage, the Kyoto protocol, civil unions... whatever policies Democrats want to promote, we need to articulate them in terms of our shared values. Any policy that cannot be defended in terms of these values is a distraction. If we ever want to retake control again, we need to focus on what has made our nation strong and explain how we are going to build on that to make it even stronger.
That's what it means to talk about values.
