What Might Have Been

Imagine, if you will, a January 2001 in which President-elect George W. Bush reaches out to his political adversaries in an attempt to heal the nation's political divide. In the week prior to inauguration day, he attends a dinner with numerous left-wing newspaper columnists and commentators; on the night before his inauguration, he holds a ceremony to fete Al Gore, his just-barely-defeated electoral adversary.

What Barack Obama has done in the weeks since his election to the Presidency is nothing less than extraordinary. Be they altruistically bipartisan, cynically political, or somewhere in between, his actions are nonetheless a radical departure from those of his predecessors. They are the actions that I would hope for from a President-elect.

George W. Bush had two opportunities to make himself the President of all of the United States -- his first, upon his inauguration; his second, upon the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Instead, he chose to employ Karl Rove's "50% plus one" strategy. In the first instance, he chose to ignore his adversaries entirely and to enact the policies favored by his far-right base. In the second, he chose not to ask sacrifice and introspection from the American people, but to ask us to shop obliviously at the mall while he committed war crimes in our names.

I say these things not as an accusation of George W. Bush, but as a lamentation. What could have been, had Bush been a bigger man, a man better-equipped for the times in which he found himself? What could have been, were he only the man that I so desperately wanted him to be... were he the man that we, as a nation, needed him to be?

What might have been?