Nobility and Leadership Of A Free People

A re-reading Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided has proven thought provoking. Jaffa has much to teach about the conflict between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln and even more to teach us about politics in general. 

Take a look at how the Democrats are currently handling the war.  I don't just mean Iraq, although that is paramount, but the entire war on terrorism.  The Wall Street Journal takes them to task for their shameful treatment of Gen. Petraeus as he appeared before Congress last week.  The Journal lists a number of Democrats who questioned the general's intergrity and the almost total silence on the part of Democrats regarding the Moveon.Org ad that essentially called Gen. Petraeus a traitor.  The Journal concludes:

Can this really be the new standard of political rhetoric across the Democratic Party? There was a time when the party's institutional elites, such as the Times, would have pulled it back from reducing politics to all or nothing. They would have blown the whistle on such accusations. Now they are leading the charge.

Under these new terms, public policy is no longer subject to debate, discussion and disagreement over competing views and interpretations. Instead, the opposition is reduced to the status of liar. Now the opposition is not merely wrong, but lacks legitimacy and political standing. The goal here is not to debate, but to destroy.

Richard Cohen, liberal in good standing, has particularly harsh words for Hillary Clinton.  If she desires to rise above political hack, if she aspires to statesmanship, she needs to denounce MoveOn, something she has been slow to do.  Cohen criticizes Clinton for trotting out "politics of personal destruction" only when she wants to claim victim status. 

The MoveOn.org ad was the moment for Clinton to rise above hackdom. It was a moment for her to insist that the business of politics, not to mention governing, is made even uglier and more difficult when people who merely differ with one another resort to insult. It was a moment for her to say that an Army general, under orders and attempting to fulfill a mission, should not be so casually trashed -- especially since she herself has been on the other side of the Iraq war issue and said things she must now regret. And it was a moment for her to trot out her favorite phrase and use it, not in her own defense for once but in defense of someone else. That moment is gone -- maybe because for Hillary Clinton it never arrived in the first place.

Two items from Jaffa are worth considering.  First is this:

Today it is almost inconceivable that we should be involved in a foreign war in which the President would be denounced as the aggressor and the foreign enemy referred to as the victim by leading members of the political opposition. 

Jaffa wrote this in the 1950s, before Vietnam.  I doubt he'd find such a thing "inconceivable" today as he must see it at every turn.  Of course Jaffa's point is that this is very nearly what Lincoln did regarding Lincoln's opposition to James Polk and the Mexican-American War.  And Lincoln paid a heavy political price, his vocal denunciations of Polk being one of a handful of reasons Lincoln's Whig party refused to run him for re-election to Congress.  But we can see some going beyond even this opposition.  I noted the other day that Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has actually traveled to enemy soil (Syria), denounced the American President on state-run (i.e., official government) television, and praised our enemy, a state sponsor of terrorism, as being more dedicated to peace than the American President.   The reaction from his party: silence. True, there has largely been silence from all quarters.  Where are the Republicans on this?  I will wait until the next Democratic debate.  We will see if anyone bothers to challenge Kucinich on this most disgusting of acts. I suppose one could say that Kucinich, as a fringe candidate, is not worth wasting time on.  But one could just as easily say that this makes it so much the easier politically to denounce him, as he represents so few actual votes. 

Another statement from Jaffa:

But a man who makes enemies and aliens of friends and fellow citizens corrupts the soul of the body politic.  To create strife where there was none, or where there need have been none, as a means to one's own fame, is to make honor the reward not of virtue or public benefit but of baseness and mischief-making.  If the order of talents of the man who does this is high, so much the more reprehensible this action.

It is claimed by some that "we oppose the war but support the troops."  An honorable position, to be sure.  Indeed one could say that was Lincoln's position during the Mexican War.  But then what if one questions the loyalty of the leading general?  Is he not a "troop"? What if Lincoln questioned the integrity not only of James Polk, but of, say, Winfield Scott?  Lincoln's political career would have been over.  But in stating that Gen. Petraeus is the willing tool of the Bush administration in spreading falsehoods about Iraq, isn't Hillary Clinton calling Gen. Petraeus a liar?  Isn't her silence in the wake of the MoveOn ad, run in a newspaper in her home state, deafening? Hillary Clinton wishes to be president, to be Gen. Petraeus's boss.  It speaks volumes that in the pursuit of high office she would trash anyone who gets in her way.  Hackdom, indeed. 

One last Jaffa, describing Lincoln's conception of political leadership:

That conception calls for mollifying, never antagonizing, the feelings of those whom he would lead.  So to do was for Lincoln more than an act of prudence, it partook of a moral imperative: for if the cause of free government was noble, then a necessary condition of leadership in such a government could not be ignoble.

A certain amount of demagoguery is inevitable in a democracy.  But throughout the coming campaign, let's look at who appeals to the best in us, mollifying rather than antagonizing our worst instincts.  That, more than what position candidates take on this or that issue, will indicate each one's capacity for high office.  So far things are not looking good for Mrs. Clinton.