As told to Ellis Dean, 12 December 2010
Two years ago, we offered something the other folks didn’t. We offered hope. And the American people responded. They placed their faith in us to overturn the mistakes of our Republican predecessors. We have honored their support since then, and have demonstrated the worthiness of our promise. We have shown the American people that what “hope” really means is placing all your chips on a promising, newly-elected president, arming him with a mandate that amounted to a royal straight flush — in Spades — and then standing by him when he folds to a pair of deuces.
Because the American people don’t expect their President to win every hand. They don’t even expect their President to try to win every hand. Or to win any hand. Most Americans — and by that I mean the 90% – 99% of Americans who have suffered under our national taxation, regulatory, and fiscal policies over the past decade or three — are too busy worrying about day to day survival that to pay too much attention to what we folks in Washington do.
They expect their President to talk about how important it is that they not be forgotten by the people inside the Washington beltway. They elected me to remember them, and they know that I remember them every day.
The American people also know that this nation was founded on the spirit of compromise. They know that had our founding fathers not been willing to compromise with the British government, we might have been forced to issue some kind of edict, or pronouncement, or declaration of our independence from Great Britain. And that had we been forced to issue such a declaration, we might have been forced to back it up with armed conflict. That we would in fact have been forced to fight a war to secure our independence. Instead, history tells us that through compromise that we achieved our freedom from British rule.
Four score and five or six years later, Abraham Lincoln followed this same approach when faced with one of the deepest crises in our nation’s history. Had President Lincoln not insisted on engaging the southern states through compromise, he might have been forced to engage in armed conflict against those states that had voted to secede. He might have been forced to send brother into battle against brother in a bloody and extended war that would have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, fought on American soil, and leaving scars that lingered through all subsequent generations.
Were he not willing to compromise, President Lincoln might have been forced to issue some kind of edict, declaration, or proclamation ending slavery in the United States. That he did not take such a firm stand against slavery — which some people erroneously insist would have been the cause of a Civil War had he not allowed the southern states to secede — stands as a testament to President Lincoln’s willingness to compromise.
Instead, thanks to compromise, slavery exists to this day in the Confederate States of America. Slavery remains, as the state of Mississippi noted in its secession ordinances, “the greatest material interest of the world.” It must no longer fear that abolition or Civil War might threaten the right of its citizens to own other human beings, and thereby threaten its “commerce and civilization.”
Compromise spares us the potential agony confrontation. Look, nobody likes confrontation. Confrontation makes people uncomfortable. No one wants to be uncomfortable. Compromise helps us avoid confrontation in our relations with others. It is one of the great products of civilization. The American people understand this.
The American people understand that compromise works this way. Let’s say I state a position. The Republican opposition makes it clear that my position is in conflict with their holy grail. Let’s say that any position I state would theoretically stand in conflict to Republican’s holy grail. Fair enough. By virtue of my unilateral commitment to compromise, my response is to concede whatever the Republicans want. It takes two to tangle. Only takes one to compromise.
The discomfort of conflict has thus been short-circuited. Sure, I could have scored some political points by engaging in a protracted battle with Republicans over the wisdom of sacrificing deficit reduction in order to ensure that the wealthiest one percent of Americans had a little extra money to tuck into trust funds for their children.
The American people support this position. Polls make it clear most Americans supported allowing the welfare-for-millionaire tax breaks to expire. We’d already won the point. There was nothing further to be gained by rubbing Republican noses in the fact that their position was politically unpopular. They are now on alert that when the welfare-for-millionaire tax cut comes up again in two years, they will, in the words of a certain TV sitcom husband, “Have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.” I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.
And besides, the Republicans made it clear they would accept no other outcome. They clearly have the 41 votes in the Senate to back up their intentions. The U.S. Senate is like any other democratic institution. Majority rules. Basic math — anyone who can count can understand how this works. Out of 100 senators, 60 is a majority. If you only have 59 votes, that’s only 59%. That’s not enough; a majority is half the total, plus one. In other words, 60 out of 100. And we just didn’t have the votes.
The American people understand it’s better to compromise on this that to engage in confrontation. Compromise now buys us two critical years. Who knows? Within those two years, the laws of economic physics may remanifest themselves in such a way that it is possible to live beyond our means, so that there is such a thing as a free lunch, and that we can have our cake and eat it too.
Maybe it’s time we learned something from our Republican compatriots. Maybe it’s time we conceded that it is possible to make our own reality. If we truly commit ourselves to the notion that we can remain solvent by spending more than we take in, that we can cut taxes and start wars at the same time and not fall fatally behind in our debt payment to our competitors, then maybe we can. In fact, we can. Si, se puede!
In closing, I’d like to quote Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a man whom I admire greatly — a man of courage, who paid the last full measure of his devotion to the this great nation for the conviction of his beliefs. In the words of that great American hero, “Some people see things as they are and ask, ‘Why not?’ I see things as they might be and ask, ‘If it isn’t fixed, why not keep breaking it?’”
Good night, and God bless the United States of America.
