Change We Are Not Asked For

Not too long ago, one of the safest icebreakers used to be a complaint about the apathy of the American voter. “More votes were cast for the American Idol winner than for the presidential candidate,” one would say after 2004, to instinctive nods of shared outrage.

Fast-forward to 2008, and Barack Obama has transformed the political landscape. His call to unite the nation not only attracted the young, but it also hooked some members of the most improbable constituency—the Republican Party. But, while Obama brought fewer prejudices to the presidency than his predecessor, did he also succeed in breaking down our biases and clinging to comfort? No, he did not.

It is hard to avoid the impression that we simply cherry-picked Obama’s (admittedly phenomenal) 2004 speech. While it was remarkably effective at bringing fame to the Illinois senator, it failed to change us in any meaningful way. Our notions about those who are ideologically distant remain inert, in spite of Obama’s early pleas.

At our school and elsewhere, for instance, many still speak of the “red states” as if they were inhabited by spiders or other equally unpleasant creatures. Or, to take an example from the other side of the political spectrum, consider the strange mutation of the campaign in September 2008, when it suddenly started to matter where one came from. It’s still easy to recall how a candidate repeatedly insisted that the size of one’s birthplace is (somehow) a reliable predictor of character.

Of course, uniting a diverse nation is probably an infeasible task. No president, at least in a democracy, has the ability to tell citizens what to believe. What is in the president’s power, however, is to challenge those who listen to him—but Obama is still too hesitant to do so. During a recent press conference, for example, he essentially dismissed a question from NBC correspondent Chuck Todd. Todd asked why, if past presidents had had the power to call for some form of sacrifice, Obama did not ask for something specific now, especially since he purports to seek a “new era of responsibility.”

The president’s politically safe response was that “folks are sacrificing left and right.” This expression of sympathy may be commendable, but it is not enough. The crisis does not justify not confronting our life styles. Due to subsidies to agribusinesses, we don’t bear the true costs of food; due to an irrational fear of nuclear power, we are dependent on foreign sources of energy. Ideally, these and other indefensible policies and approaches should be relegated to the trash piles we are so good at generating. If changing these policies is too difficult—a testimony to our elected representatives’ true motives—we could at least be asked to pay for the damage we cause.

The most obvious example is driving. Americans drive too much, and they have good reason to do so. In the United States, gas tends to be two to three times cheaper than in Western Europe, since federal and state gas taxes in the U.S. are inefficiently low. Now that oil prices around the world have fallen, it would be the best time to gradually start raising gasoline taxes, which would limit gas consumption, pollution, and congestion as well as motivate people to move closer to work or to demand more public transportation. Unlike regulations or rations, higher taxes would not take away personal freedoms, but they would bring in revenues that could be used to pay down debt and alleviate far-reaching concerns over the U.S. economy.

But we are not asked to pay more when we pollute, as if the crisis has made us incapable of hearing or accepting that some of our habits need an immediate change. Instances like this open a space for those in positions of authority to make reasonable requests of the American people. Perhaps the president knows that he cannot ask us for this much. I would still welcome it if he boldly tried.


Jan Zilinsky ’09, a Crimson editorial writer, is an economics concentrator in Mather House.