Barack Obama’s Aug. 15 op-ed in The New York Times is nothing special. It largely consists of the same points and rhetoric as his speeches and official statements and does little in the way of convincing ideological opponents: If you like Obama’s health-care plan, the article reaffirmed your belief, and if you don’t, the article reaffirmed your belief as well, but simply in a different direction. However, one line stood out to me as particularly important:
“In the end, this isn’t about politics. This is about people’s lives and livelihoods. This is about people’s businesses. This is about America’s future, and whether we will be able to look back years from now and say that this was the moment when we made the changes we needed, and gave our children a better life.”
While I have no strong hatred or approval for Obama’s health care plan, or even for Obama as a president overall (I believe it’s far too early to see the long-term impact of his decisions), this is one area in which the president missed the mark. The health-care debate, as well as any other political issue, is indeed about politics; however, it’s also about people’s lives and livelihoods, business and America’s future. The problem lies not just with Obama, but with the way politics is viewed in America: as an ideological battle, where it is all too easy to forget that “mere politics” has real-world impacts that affect our society in a profound way.
A great number of our founding fathers, including George Washington in his famous farewell address, vehemently argued against political parties, believing (in the case of Washington) that they damage the fabric of the political process and that each group would seek to overpower the rest. Washington, however, was not against parties per se—indeed, he accepted that it was natural for individuals to group together with like-minded others—but rather his fear was that the political parties would supplant the political process altogether. Today, we’re not far from that dire prediction.
Several people I’ve talked to about politics have expressed interest in it because it’s “like a game,” concentrating more on the strategem behind gaining influence and control rather than improving people’s lives. However, despite a propensity toward corruption and power, the purpose of government is not merely to act as a center for power, influence and control, but rather to serve the people and improve our nation as well as everyone living within it, and this is true regardless of political orientation. The problem with Obama’s statement is not that he made such a claim, but rather that such a claim has become a reality. We are no longer in an era where politics is used to help people. Instead, we concern ourselves with the latest congressional election results, content with the red tape, earmarking, corruption and outright deception of our elected representatives that leads to inefficient policy, resigned to simply say, “That’s politics.” Despite our complacency, the suffering caused by such political ineptitude persists. We must stop looking at politics as a mere game that provokes intellectual interest, and realize that political issues are interconnected with real world impacts, and that accepting corruption and bureaucracy does not make them go away.