Trust Me - I'm A Politician

Here are some Jeepney pictures I took in the Philippines in 1985. I traveled as much as 8 hours a day in these contraptions, and while they may not be the most comfortable way to get around, they're the most stylish.

The right-wing frame that has defined our politics and political reporting for the past 30 years elevates two sometimes conflicting sets of values. One story is about individual responsibility. If you do it "right" - however defined - you can be Mitt Romney or some other entitled rich person. If you do it wrong, you need to fix yourself and not rely on others to help you, via entitlements and guaranteed medical care. In either case, the libertarian-scented conservative politics of our day focuses on the centrality of each individual person. The community, even the word smacks of socialism to some, is downgraded.

The other conservative thread is a fetishizing of the United States Constitution. To many, the sacredness of this document is frozen in 18th Century Anglo-American values, and many conservatives see themselves as protectors of the core national document as written, however absurd their fundamentalism may appear in 21st Century heterogeneous wired America.

While the media obediently parrots the basic conservative framework, the media also has a need to make lots of money for their owners. Therefore they cast political reporting less in terms of individual responsibility and founding documents, and more as narratives telling stories of interesting people. Politics has bled into reality TV. Story lines are very simple: Mitt is bland, Newt is colorful, Ron is avuncular. People know that about these men, even if they'd be hard-pressed to tell you what they've learned from our boring lazy reporters about what these politicians would do if elected.

We do elect people, not ideas or positions. Who they are matters, although not nearly as much as the Robin Leach-inspired commentators want us to believe. All of our politicians function in a framework of laws, rules and practices. I think progressive people, more likely to function within a framework of community responsibility (no doubt because of our secret satan-derived socialist agendas), sometimes don't pay enough attention to a core truth we could take away from the  chest thumping of the reactionary right: the need to protect our central document. Specifically, I think every liberal should be a conservative when it comes to the Constitution.

The Constitution was in a sense designed to discourage Wolf and Cokie from infecting our political world with endless soap operas about specific people. No matter who gets elected - politicians come and go - we need to be able to count on basic rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution. The Constitution is set up to be very difficult to change for a reason, to keep contemporary fashion or whim from changing the future, because the rights it specifies are bedrock, not to be casually deleted. It takes a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress plus the approval of three-quarters of the states to change the Constitution. Nowadays, that's a heck of a consensus.

Part of what's especially disappointing about President Obama's recent signing of the rider to the Defense Appropriations bill that I wrote about earlier, is his acknowledgement that he's approving a major abridgment of our rights. It will be OK, he tells us, since we can trust him. This guy was sold to us as a Constitutional scholar. He especially should know that the whole idea of a Constitution is to provide us with something that transcends the good or bad will of one person. What would Rick Santorum do with the sweeping powers of spying, arrest and detention that Obama now has? And for that matter - what is Obama doing with those powers? We don't really know.

Elizabeth Drew has been looking at proposals to modify the Constitution as an antidote to the domination of politics by big money. Drew is an experienced political reporter; she's been writing about money in politics for 30 years. In a recent piece in the New York Review of Books, she made a compelling case for not going the Constitutional route to roll back the triumph of money over people in our political system.

Decent people - like my Congresswoman Pingree, who's a co-sponsor of the bill to change the Constitution to address this problem - could be trusted not to use such a change in the Constitution to squash dissent and political opposition. But politicians and political fashions come and go. With my Representative's job up for grabs every two years, and my state's two Senate seats in the hands of Republicans - who are called moderates, even though they're really only opportunists - no, I don't trust them to do the right thing.

Instead I want to leave our Constitution the heck alone, to protect our rights free from the purported good will of people who purchased their political seats. There are a number of ways to change how our political system is funded without giving even more power to the people who are passing through our political system on their way to sinecures as consultants and lobbyists for the rich people and companies that sponsor them.