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Iowa - Hooray for Hicks
By John Graham The caucus-goers of Iowa have fundamentally altered the political landscape for the election of the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Good for them. Watching the cover-to-cover CNN coverage I couldn't help wondering how thoroughly weird all this must have looked to viewers abroad-that we Americans would trust a tiny portion of our population with this much power, and to do it not only peacefully but with at least grudging acceptance that the results might portend significant national preferences and trends. I must admit, I rankled a bit myself, sitting out here in Seattle, watching a couple hundred thousand Iowans shift the balance of electoral power for the entire country. But there was something very attractive about it too, something that I felt proud about, even though I've been in Iowa just once in my life, and only then because my Dad made a wrong turn off US 86 on a family vacation. I'm proud of such a quintessentially American process that, whatever its complexities and confusions, does seem to eventually and with some justice sift the field of candidates for the highest office in the land. There they were, these Iowans. Guys getting off their tractors and driving into Grange halls, and city-dwellers going to school gymnasiums and private homes to hold up signs and argue with their neighbors. I'm re-reading Churchill's history of the Second World War right now, something I try to do once a decade. By now I've gotten under the great man's skin a bit, and I can sense from his careful prose his quiet put-downs of FDR as a fine but flawed ally, occasionally overwhelmed by that sense of American idealism that never quite meshed with Churchill's' rock-hard assessment of the world. And Churchill can barely restrain his frustrations with Harry Truman whom he clearly regarded as a naïve and uninformed Midwestern hick. Yet it was Churchill who was bounced from power in 1945 and it was idealistic Americans like Truman, Marshall and Vandenberg who did so much to shape the postwar world with the Marshall Plan and the United Nations. Between you an me, I trust our unquenchable American idealism and our faith in the basic goodness of people at least as much as the realpolitics of a Churchill-or a Kissinger for that matter. If that makes us hicks, then hooray for hicks. But there is no reason to choose. Like post-WWII American leaders, we can face a dangerous world as it is but also restore a vibrant vision of what our country is and can do at its best. Leadership is only part of the answer. As important as the 2008 elections are, we can never depend on a Man or Woman on a White Horse to solve problems of the magnitude that face us now. The basic nature of the American enterprise has always relied on individual responsibility-citizens with courage and caring standing up to press for change, starting in Grange halls and community centers and church basements and radiating out from there to demand women's suffrage and civil rights and clean air and water and all the rest.
Iowa was important Thursday night to me because-forgive my unbridled American idealism-I saw in that quirky, clumsy, chaotic, honest, thoroughly democratic process a microcosm of what Americans can do. Take the essence of what happened in Bob and Madge's living room in Ames, write it larger, give it Internet and media megaphones and hey, we right our own ship, and from there we change the world. Like those Americans who wrote the Marshall Plan and helped launched the United Nations because they knew it was right and they refused to believe they couldn't. Copyright 2008 John Graham John Graham is the President of the Giraffe Heroes Project, and Unwilling Member of the Federal Government's No Fly/Watch List. jgraham@whidbey.com
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