The job of the politician, to address what people are feeling, not necessarily what they are saying, from speechwriter David Frum in an interview with the CBC’s Ideas program. I don’t agree with everything in there, but there is plenty of good and educational stuff.
Q: … were they simply anti-Obama, anti-government, anti-somthing or other? Do you think the rise of the Tea Party was because of rational analyses like that?
A: I think people are always very smart about what’s bothering them. People are experts on their problems. And even if they can’t always articulate well what they’re feeling, the feelings are true. Politics begins by finding ways to meet the feelings of distress and anxiety and concern that people have.
One of the things that makes politics a challenge is you often have to listen past what people are saying to what people are feeling.
[He goes on to narrate a famous point in 1992 when during a debate between Clinton, Bush and Perot a woman asks about the deficit, when she means recession. Bill Clinton manages to figure out what she’s talking about.]
That’s a lot of what happens in politics. People say something and you have to press them a little bit. What do you mean when you say that? Because the language of public policy is not the language in people’s hearts. They have a different language.
And so when something like the Tea Party comes along, even if you find a lot of the expressions of the feeling irrational, even if you don’t like the symbolism they use, and even if you see a lot of anger and paranoia, and those things are all present, you need to get past it to what is true.
And what is true, is not just in this crisis but for a decade the typical American has seen institutions fail and fail and fail again. The military did not win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 9/11 which should have been prevented was not prevented. The housing bubble which should have been stopped early, was not stopped early. The average person… was not getting better off through these years of economic expansion. The financial elite to whom people were invited to entrust their savings in the form of 401Ks… that failed. Elite group after elite group failed.
Any time someone said, “You should listen to me because I’m smart,” the upshot of listening to them was total disaster. A decade of that tends to erode the foundations of institutional trust in a society.
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2011/11/16/david-frum-conservatism-for-liberals/
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2011/11/16/david-frum-conservatism-for-liberals/
