When your job is to hunt for ideas, campaigns are pretty depressing.
In my role as the editor and chief curator of the Aspen Institute Five Best Ideas of the Day, I’ve been closely monitoring the output of editorial pages, think tanks, blogs, newsletters, aggregators, journals and just about everything else for months. I have found profound and inspiring ideas from across the ideological spectrum about entrepreneurship, people’s health, the food we eat, the power of the public commons and how we teach our children. I’ve been knocked out by innovations in the defense sector, spooked by technology’s reach into our lives, troubled by terrorism and tickled by numerous new ways of thinking.
But not a single time through the perilous countdown to Tuesday’s election was I inspired by the ideas of a candidate or campaign.
This shocking bankruptcy of new thinking didn’t dawn on me until the final days before the vote, and it really made a powerful impression in the aftermath of the election. In curating the Five Best Ideas of the Day, I make sure to keep my eye on the leading topics of the day but to follow them down unconventional pathways in search of fresh thinking. While the campaigns provided suffocating background noise for months, no ideas from these unsavory contests bobbed to the surface. Meanwhile, global issues like the fight against Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria, the arrival of Ebola in America and the crisis in Ukraine understandably crowded the headlines and frequently informed some of the items on our daily list. In those final frenzied days before the election, I turned my attention to finding big thoughtful analyses of what the big ideas from the campaigns were and what it all meant. I looked for new faces with new ideas I could feature. Who had done things differently, questioned our assumptions, flouted conventional wisdom?
There was nothing. I’m sure there were smart people running for office with good ideas, but nobody was talking about that now. Nothing mattered — and nothing was discussed — but the money, the ads, the endless emails, the powerful downward drag of whatever made people hate President Obama so much, the powerful upward surge for others of that searing hatred, the meaning of the prospective moves on the political chessboard, the sour taste in the mouths of voters from the whole unsavory ordeal.
A decade ago — as Michael Scherer wrote in Time — we were inspired during another otherwise uninspiring election season by a young Illinois politician and his eye-opening vision of post-partisanship for America. Scherer said that the 2014 midterm elections closed the door on that era, implying I believe that we were back to the same old politics of before, of Bush v. Gore and witch hunt impeachment proceedings and Willie Horton and all that.
The aftermath of the 2008 election seemed to bear that thinking out. Thought leaders and young people took to the airwaves and the Internet to sing a song of a new morning in America. But that moment — one that seemed post-partisan to some and alarming enough to trigger a national backlash movement and some of the most vile political rhetoric in a generation — was short-lived.
It’s here that my experience compels me to disagree with the idea that there was a post-partisan decade or anything like it. Perhaps — through the lens of my work harvesting new ideas with all the limits of my role and venue — I can propose a different view.
I think fans of President Obama, especially those people who really embraced the idea that he represented some new kind of politics, can be forgiven for feeling disappointment. For some, his election seemed to be a permanent sign of that change, a new era dawning. However, others saw his election and the idea that he represented such drastic change frightening beyond measure. So while the notion of change was so uplifting and and potentially transformative for people who felt hungry for it, the atmosphere necessary to really implement that change — to do anything, really — was almost immediately poisonous, because of fear from so many others.
None of this — and in fact none of the surprising successes and spectacular failures in the political realm by the Obama administration — has anything to do with the actual policies governing our nation. This is where the idea bankruptcy really comes into play.
From the audacity of things like the Affordable Care Act and immigration reform to the mundane working of government like not ensuring a working economy and funding roads and paying soldiers, trying anything became impossible in this airless atmosphere, promoted on all sides by people and politicians afraid to lose ground. Campaigns and candidates were idea-free because ideas are inherently risky.
That may be the greatest lesson of President Obama’s two presidential campaigns and his now notorious failures in the midterm elections that followed. Mr. Post-Partisanship could have pushed an idea or two into the big national conversation that sometimes breaks out during presidential contests (despite all the reasons why it shouldn’t). But in the ugly, grinding, hyper-local, culture-war-laden and identity politics-plagued world of midterm congressional, state and local elections, ideas blossom rarely, and die quickly on the vine.
