By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
Where’s Teddy Roosevelt when you need him? Where are the monopoly-busters and the fire-breathers? Our champions of public morality? The statesmen Roosevelt speaks of? The whole notion of statesmanship seems as outdated as rabbit ears for the television or a land-line telephone. It’s a pity, because some things we simply can’t do without: the cosmic cocktail of character, ethics, wisdom and skill dedicated to the public good, in service to the whole of the nation, is one of them.
Being a statesman is hard to live up to, of course, and some only manage it professionally, but well. When Senator Bobby Byrd died, we lost our congressional orator. When Teddy Kennedy passed, we lost a champion for the working class. Both were American statesmen despite the Achilles heels in their pasts: both offered the larger vision necessary for inspiration and motivation, bringing our faltering narrative back to the higher angels of public service and wellbeing.
But now those voices are silent, and we seem lost in the myopic politics of the moment. Barack Obama has the makings of a statesman, one of the things we love about him. If the nation can give him a working Congress in November we might see a lot more of that, despite the fact that those talents are seldom appreciated in a political arena coarsened by inflammatory language and dulled wit. The one conservative candidate who came close to inhabiting the description of statesman, John Huntsman, dropped out of the presidential campaign because he couldn’t earn more than a half percentage-point of right-wing enthusiasm.