That is what separates Clinton's welfare speeches form those of Dan Quayle when he slammed of Murphy Brown's single-parentdom. Unlike Clinton, Quayle was not justifying a policy so much as he was using morality to exclude people and to batter them into certain types of behavior. He was using words to cut off certain groups of people from the "mainstream" of our society. His words did not change anyone's moral decisions, but served only to increase people's disdain for politics.
Similar demagoguery also plagues the irresolvable and divisive issue of abortion. Here socially conservative rhetoric trips even harder over the distinction between what is morally right and what is political sensible.
No one would deny that an abortion is a difficult moral decision. No one believes that choosing an abortion is an unambiguously correct or morally flippant decision. Abortion-rights advocates who have had abortions themselves acknowledge the difficulty of choosing to terminate a pregnancy.
It's because abortion is such a morally complex decision that liberals believe that it best be left in the hands of the individual, not of a distant Washington bureaucracy. Our thoughts on abortion are sometimes so personally conflicting that individuals should have the freedom to resolve the issue themselves.
Abortion-rights proponents are not amoral people, but they do have a richer understanding of the necessary ambiguities of public life. Their political sensibility informs them that some questions are not easily hammered out, and so they do not believe it is reasonable to try to sweep aside moral complexities for the sake of public consensus and resolution.
Injecting these unresolvable issues into our public life serves only to feed our growing frustration toward politics. People cease to view government as a set of institutions responsive to our individual opinions and energy. And demagogues rush in to exploit this political resentment.
Unfair and unmet expectations for our politics have led to the creation of a cynicism industry, led by talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, whose book, See, I Told You So, continues to top the bestseller lists. Limbaugh feeds off this growing disillusionment with government to promote himself. His tactics are not unlike those of Ross Perot. (Expect him to share a ticket with Perot in 1996.)
Limbaugh's listeners do not always agree with his often offensive rhetoric, but the radio pundit remains popular because he has tapped the growing public sense that something is seriously wrong with our political culture. It has become conventional wisdom that our special-interests-beholden political parties are barely distinguishable from each other.
As much as they scare us with their reactionary, knee-jerk rhetoric, Perot and Limbaugh scare Washington even more, Politicians tremble when they sense that public opinion, which they thought was theirs to manipulate, is escaping their control. Even though Limbaugh and Perot exploit our cynicism to promote themselves, they unwittingly create an opportunity for the public to engage itself more constructively in political life.
It is easy to be critical, to flatten politicians who are not perfect, but our real challenge is to convert cynicism into action, and action into progress. It's easier to snicker at higher-ups than it is to critically probe our own foibles; it's easier to blame others when we have not yet faced up to our own responsibility for improving the state of our political affairs.
I do believe that there is a place for morality in our politics. And if I knew what Hillary Clinton means by a "politics of meaning," I'd probably be for it. But the kind of political morality that we need in our politics has nothing to do with sexual propriety; it consists essentially of accepting one's responsibility to participate in the direction of everyone's affairs. As Czech President Vaclav Havel has written, "If you are modest and do not lust after power, not only are you suited for politics, you absolutely belong there."
This kind of politics has to start from the bottom, percolating up from the electorate to the officeholders. When we stop blaming government for not doing the impossible and we look at the morality of our own actions, we will start getting the political leaders we deserve.
Even more importantly, we will have taken a long step toward living fuller, more interesting lives, in which we are not easily swayed by what we hear and see, but trudge through the dilemmas of politics and morality ourselves, becoming more active citizens and the authors of our own lives.