To Argue or Not to Argue

Growing up the son of a senator, Evan Bayh attended Washington's elite, Gothic-spired prep school for boys. Even so (or maybe because of that) he treasured summer trips back home to Indiana. His father, Birch, whose own father was a hog farmer, was a fiery liberal, an expert on the Constitution revered in capital salons. To survive in Republican Indiana, he hit every dusty crossroads and church supper. An Army marksman, Birch always stopped by the "Black Powder Shoot" in rural Friendship, where contestants fired rifles filled with cartridges of old-fashioned black gunpowder. Birch wowed the crowd—and his son—with his accuracy. Today, Evan Bayh does not own a gun. He is not a hunter. He doesn't usually vote with the NRA. Still, he knows what those Powder Shoot voters believe: that a rifle is a symbol of their identity as Americans. "You don't have to be of those voters," Bayh told me, "but you need to know where they are coming from well enough to understand their side of the argument."

And there always is an argument about something. We are, after all, the Arguing Country. We are born to debate, free of top-down rulers and their absolutes; no other place has such a provenance and responsibility. We are—and must remain, if we are to thrive—a never-ending series of arguments: about the meaning of personhood and citizenship; about the structure of government, credit and the law; about our relationship to the rest of the world and even to the demands of our own history. The "gun issue," for example, is an element of a larger dispute over the limits of individualism in a country created for the "general welfare." Facts change, but the underlying creative tensions do not. The trick is to tap the heat of the friction in the service of progress as we struggle toward the Founders' "more perfect union." We've been doing it since 1607.

Forgetting this history, purveyors of conventional wisdom worry that we argue too much. The reality is that we do not argue enough—about what matters. (Think about the ferocious debate we did not really have in 2002 before the decision to go to war in Iraq.) Voters yearn for less "partisanship" in Washington, but what they really want to do is halt the fake wrestling match there and ask their putative "leaders" to listen beyond the Beltway. Voters see a government unresponsive to their economic distress; big corporations and K Street insiders throttling the government's ability to act, and the news media lost in the rush for "Idol"-like ratings. They see elites doing well and turning inward, while everyone else slips to the downside. In the permanent argument about the need for reform, today's answer is a resounding yes. The last time the national "wrong track" polling figures were this dismal was during Watergate.

Can Barack Obama, leading an Internet-generated reform movement, reverse those numbers? If there is a rhyme in recent history, it's in the aftermath of Watergate. A beleaguered country, facing rising oil prices and the constitutional wreckage of a rogue presidency, chose a Democrat with an exotic background. Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer from rural Georgia, promised moral and political renewal based more on his own personal qualities than any specific policy proposal. He clinched the sale, his handlers later said, with the publication of what became an iconic photograph: Carter in farm duds on bended knee in a field, reflectively fondling his family's soil.

Now Obama hopes to ride to the White House on a similar wave of revulsion with Washington. He is pacing methodically toward the Democratic nomination: in the past month, Hillary Clinton hit him with her best shot—and Obama had to distance himself from his acid-tongued, Porsche-driving spiritual mentor and his "mangled" comments about small-town voters who "cling to" their guns and faith. At least among Democrats, no blood, no foul: Obama actually lengthened his lead over Clinton, from 45-44 percent a month ago to 54-35 percent now, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll. While his favorable ratings have dropped some, Hillary's are now sulfurously bad. So far, it seems, Obama can defend himself from her attacks merely by accusing Hillary of practicing "the tired, old politics of the past," and Democrats agree. She is, in effect, making his case for him.

But will that be enough to carry him in a battle with John McCain, who possesses tarnished but still genuine credentials as a reformer himself? Obama must demonstrate—more convincingly than he has so far—that he understands where the full array of American voters are "coming from." As he prepares to do battle with Clinton in Indiana in early May, he is still struggling to make the sale to the Powder Shoot voters and their families. The new NEWSWEEK poll measures how far he must travel to do that. Obama leads Clinton, 52-35, among upper- and middle-income white Democrats, but he trails her by an even larger margin—54-35 percent—among the bottom half.