THE FIRST TIME I saw the White House was in 1984. I had just graduated fromcollege and was working as a community organizer out of the Harlem campus of theCity College of New York. President Reagan was proposing a round of student aid cutsat the time, and so I worked with a group of student leaders—most of them black,Puerto Rican, or of Eastern European descent, almost all of them the first in theirfamilies to attend college—to round up petitions opposing the cuts and then deliverthem to the New York congressional delegation.

　　It was a brief trip, spent mostly navigating the endless corridors of the RayburnBuilding, getting polite but cursory audiences with Hill staffers not much older than Iwas. But at the end of the day, the students and I took the time to walk down to the Malland the Washington Monument, and then spent a few minutes gazing at the WhiteHouse. Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few feet away from the Marine guardstation at the main entrance, with pedestrians weaving along the sidewalk and trafficwhizzing behind us, I marveled not at the White House’s elegant sweep, but rather atthe fact that it was so exposed to the hustle and bustle of the city; that we were allowedto stand so close to the gate, and could later circle to the other side of the building topeer at the Rose Garden and the residence beyond. The openness of the White Housesaid something about our confidence as a democracy, I thought. It embodied the notionthat our leaders were not so different from us; that they remained subject to laws andour collective consent.

　　Twenty years later, getting close to the White House wasn’t so simple. Checkpoints,armed guards, vans, mirrors, dogs, and retractable barricades now sealed off a two-block perimeter around the White House. Unauthorized cars no longer traveledPennsylvania Avenue. On a cold January afternoon, the day before my swearing in tothe Senate, Lafayette Park was mostly empty, and as my car was waved through theWhite House gates and up the driveway, I felt a glancing sadness at what had been lost.

　　The inside of the White House doesn’t have the luminous quality that you might expectfrom TV or film; it seems well kept but worn, a big old house that one imagines mightbe a bit drafty on cold winter nights. Still, as I stood in the foyer and let my eyes wanderdown the corridors, it was impossible to forget the history that had been made there—John and Bobby Kennedy huddling over the Cuban missile crisis; FDR making last-minute changes to a radio address; Lincoln alone, pacing the halls and shouldering theweight of a nation. (It wasn’t until several months later that I would get to see theLincoln Bedroom, a modest space with antique furniture, a four-poster bed, an originalcopy of the Gettysburg Address discreetly displayed under glass—and a big flat-screenTV set atop one of the desks. Who, I wondered, flipped on SportsCenter while spendingthe night in the Lincoln Bedroom?)I was greeted immediately by a member of the White House’s legislative staff and ledinto the Gold Room, where most of the incoming House and Senate members hadalready gathered. At sixteen hundred hours on the dot, President Bush was announcedand walked to the podium, looking vigorous and fit, with that jaunty, determined walkthat suggests he’s on a schedule and wants to keep detours to a minimum. For ten or sominutes he spoke to the room, making a few jokes, calling for the country to cometogether, before inviting us to the other end of the White House for refreshments and apicture with him and the First Lady.

　　I happened to be starving at that moment, so while most of the other legislators startedlining up for their photographs, I headed for the buffet. As I munched on hors d’oeuvresand engaged in small talk with a handful of House members, I recalled my previous twoencounters with the President, the first a brief congratulatory call after the election, thesecond a small White House breakfast with me and the other incoming senators. Bothtimes I had found the President to be a likable man, shrewd and disciplined but with thesame straightforward manner that had helped him win two elections; you could easilyimagine him owning the local car dealership down the street, coaching Little League,and grilling in his backyard—the kind of guy who would make for good company solong as the conversation revolved around sports and the kids.

　　There had been a moment during the breakfast meeting, though, after the backslappingand the small talk and when all of us were seated, with Vice President Cheney eating hiseggs Benedict impassively and Karl Rove at the far end of the table discreetly checkinghis BlackBerry, that I witnessed a different side of the man. The President had begun todiscuss his second-term agenda, mostly a reiteration of his campaign talking points—the importance of staying the course in Iraq and renewing the Patriot Act, the need toreform Social Security and overhaul the tax system, his determination to get an up-or-down vote on his judicial appointees—when suddenly it felt as if somebody in a backroom had flipped a switch. The President’s eyes became fixed; his voice took on theagitated, rapid tone of someone neither accustomed to nor welcoming interruption; hiseasy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty. As I watched my mostlyRepublican Senate colleagues hang on his every word, I was reminded of the dangerousisolation that power can bring, and appreciated the Founders’ wisdom in designing asystem to keep power in check.

　　“Senator?”

　　I looked up, shaken out of my memory, and saw one of the older black men who madeup most of the White House waitstaff standing next to me.

　　“Want me to take that plate for you?”

　　I nodded, trying to swallow a mouthful of chicken something-or-others, and noticed thatthe line to greet the President had evaporated. Wanting to thank my hosts, I headedtoward the Blue Room. A young Marine at the door politely indicated that thephotograph session was over and that the President needed to get to his nextappointment. But before I could turn around to go, the President himself appeared in thedoorway and waved me in.

　　“Obama!” the President said, shaking my hand. “Come here and meet Laura. Laura, youremember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And thatwife of yours—that’s one impressive lady.”

　　“We both got better than we deserve, Mr. President,” I said, shaking the First Lady’shand and hoping that I’d wiped any crumbs off my face. The President turned to an aidenearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the President’s hand.

　　“Want some?” the President asked. “Good stuff. Keeps you from getting colds.”

　　Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

　　“Come over here for a second,” he said, leading me off to one side of the room. “Youknow,” he said quietly, “I hope you don’t mind me giving you a piece of advice.”

　　“Not at all, Mr. President.”

　　He nodded. “You’ve got a bright future,” he said. “Very bright. But I’ve been in thistown awhile and, let me tell you, it can be tough. When you get a lot of attention likeyou’ve been getting, people start gunnin’ for ya. And it won’t necessarily just becoming from my side, you understand. From yours, too. Everybody’ll be waiting foryou to slip, know what I mean? So watch yourself.”

　　“Thanks for the advice, Mr. President.”

　　“All right. I gotta get going. You know, me and you got something in common.”

　　“What’s that?”

　　“We both had to debate Alan Keyes. That guy’s a piece of work, isn’t he?”

　　I laughed, and as we walked to the door I told him a few stories from the campaign. Itwasn’t until he had left the room that I realized I had briefly put my arm over hisshoulder as we talked—an unconscious habit of mine, but one that I suspected mighthave made many of my friends, not to mention the Secret Service agents in the room,more than a little uneasy.

　　SINCE MY ARRIVAL in the Senate, I’ve been a steady and occasionally fierce criticof Bush Administration policies. I consider the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to be bothfiscally irresponsible and morally troubling. I have criticized the Administration forlacking a meaningful health-care agenda, a serious energy policy, or a strategy formaking America more competitive. Back in 2002, just before announcing my Senatecampaign, I made a speech at one of the first antiwar rallies in Chicago in which Iquestioned the Administration’s evidence of weapons of mass destruction and suggestedthat an invasion of Iraq would prove to be a costly error. Nothing in the recent newscoming out of Baghdad or the rest of the Middle East has dispelled these views.

　　So Democratic audiences are often surprised when I tell them that I don’t considerGeorge Bush a bad man, and that I assume he and members of his Administration aretrying to do what they think is best for the country.

　　I say this not because I am seduced by the proximity to power. I see my invitations tothe White House for what they are—exercises in common political courtesy—and ammindful of how quickly the long knives can come out when the Administration’s agendais threatened in any serious way. Moreover, whenever I write a letter to a family whohas lost a loved one in Iraq, or read an email from a constituent who has dropped out ofcollege because her student aid has been cut, I’m reminded that the actions of those inpower have enormous consequences—a price that they themselves almost never have topay.

　　It is to say that after all the trappings of office—the titles, the staff, the securitydetails—are stripped away, I find the President and those who surround him to be prettymuch like everybody else, possessed of the same mix of virtues and vices, insecuritiesand long-buried injuries, as the rest of us. No matter how wrongheaded I might considertheir policies to be—and no matter how much I might insist that they be heldaccountable for the results of such policies—I still find it possible, in talking to thesemen and women, to understand their motives, and to recognize in them values I share.

　　This is not an easy posture to maintain in Washington. The stakes involved inWashington policy debates are often so high—whether we send our young men andwomen to war; whether we allow stem cell research to go forward—that even smalldifferences in perspective are magnified. The demands of party loyalty, the imperativeof campaigns, and the amplification of conflict by the media all contribute to anatmosphere of suspicion. Moreover, most people who serve in Washington have beentrained either as lawyers or as political operatives—professions that tend to place apremium on winning arguments rather than solving problems. I can see how, after acertain amount of time in the capital, it becomes tempting to assume that those whodisagree with you have fundamentally different values—indeed, that they are motivatedby bad faith, and perhaps are bad people.

　　Outside of Washington, though, America feels less deeply divided. Illinois, forexample, is no longer considered a bellwether state. For more than a decade now, it’sbecome more and more Democratic, partly because of increased urbanization, partlybecause the social conservatism of today’s GOP doesn’t wear well in the Land ofLincoln. But Illinois remains a microcosm of the country, a rough stew of North andSouth, East and West, urban and rural, black, white, and everything in between.

　　Chicago may possess all the big-city sophistication of L.A. or New York, butgeographically and culturally, the southern end of Illinois is closer to Little Rock orLouisville, and large swaths of the state are considered, in modern political parlance, adeep shade of red.

　　I first traveled through southern Illinois in 1997. It was the summer after my first termin the Illinois legislature, and Michelle and I were not yet parents. With sessionadjourned, no law school classes to teach, and Michelle busy with work of her own, Iconvinced my legislative aide, Dan Shomon, to toss a map and some golf clubs in thecar and tool around the state for a week. Dan had been both a UPI reporter and a fieldcoordinator for several downstate campaigns, so he knew the territory pretty well. Butas the date of our departure approached, it became apparent that he wasn’t quite surehow I would be received in the counties we were planning to visit. Four times hereminded me how to pack—just khakis and polo shirts, he said; no fancy linen trousersor silk shirts. I assured him that I didn’t own any linens or silks. On the drive down, westopped at a TGI Friday’s and I ordered a cheeseburger. When the waitress brought thefood I asked her if she had any Dijon mustard. Dan shook his head.

　　“He doesn’t want Dijon,” he insisted, waving the waitress off. “Here”—he shoved ayellow bottle of French’s mustard in my direction—“here’s some mustard right here.”

　　The waitress looked confused. “We got Dijon if you want it,” she said to me.

　　I smiled. “That would be great, thanks.” As the waitress walked away, I leaned over toDan and whispered that I didn’t think there were any photographers around.

　　And so we traveled, stopping once a day to play a round of golf in the sweltering heat,driving past miles of cornfields and thick forests of ash trees and oak trees andshimmering lakes lined with stumps and reeds, through big towns like Carbondale andMount Vernon, replete with strip malls and Wal-Marts, and tiny towns like Sparta andPinckneyville, many of them with brick courthouses at the center of town, their mainstreets barely hanging on with every other store closed, the occasional roadside vendorsselling fresh peaches or corn, or in the case of one couple I saw, “Good Deals on Gunsand Swords.”

　　We stopped in a coffee shop to eat pie and swap jokes with the mayor of Chester. Weposed in front of the fifteen-foot-tall statue of Superman at the center of Metropolis. Weheard about all the young people who were moving to the big cities becausemanufacturing and coal-mining jobs were disappearing. We learned about the local highschool football teams’ prospects for the coming season, and the vast distances veteranshad to drive in order to reach the closest VA facility. We met women who had beenmissionaries in Kenya and greeted me in Swahili, and farmers who tracked the financialpages of the Wall Street Journal before setting out on their tractors. Several times a day,I pointed out to Dan the number of men we met sporting white linen slacks or silkHawaiian shirts. In the small dining room of a Democratic party official in Du Quoin, Iasked the local state’s attorney about crime trends in his largely rural, almost uniformlywhite county, expecting him to mention joy-riding sprees or folks hunting out of season.

　　“The Gangster Disciples,” he said, munching on a carrot. “We’ve got an all-whitebranch down here—kids without jobs, selling dope and speed.”

　　By the end of the week, I was sorry to leave. Not simply because I had made so manynew friends, but because in the faces of all the men and women I’d met I had recognizedpieces of myself. In them I saw my grandfather’s openness, my grandmother’s matter-of-factness, my mother’s kindness. The fried chicken, the potato salad, the grape halvesin the Jell-O mold—all of it felt familiar.

　　It’s that sense of familiarity that strikes me wherever I travel across Illinois. I feel itwhen I’m sitting down at a diner on Chicago’s West Side. I feel it as I watch Latinomen play soccer while their families cheer them on in a park in Pilsen. I feel it when I’mattending an Indian wedding in one of Chicago’s northern suburbs.

　　Not so far beneath the surface, I think, we are becoming more, not less, alike.

　　I don’t mean to exaggerate here, to suggest that the pollsters are wrong and that ourdifferences—racial, religious, regional, or economic—are somehow trivial. In Illinois,as is true everywhere, abortion vexes. In certain parts of the state, the mention of guncontrol constitutes sacrilege. Attitudes about everything from the income tax to sex onTV diverge wildly from place to place.

　　It is to insist that across Illinois, and across America, a constant cross-pollination isoccurring, a not entirely orderly but generally peaceful collision among people andcultures. Identities are scrambling, and then cohering in new ways. Beliefs keep slippingthrough the noose of predictability. Facile expectations and simple explanations arebeing constantly upended. Spend time actually talking to Americans, and you discoverthat most evangelicals are more tolerant than the media would have us believe, mostsecularists more spiritual. Most rich people want the poor to succeed, and most of thepoor are both more self-critical and hold higher aspirations than the popular cultureallows. Most Republican strongholds are 40 percent Democrat, and vice versa. Thepolitical labels of liberal and conservative rarely track people’s personal attributes.

　　All of which raises the question: What are the core values that we, as Americans, holdin common? That’s not how we usually frame the issue, of course; our political culturefixates on where our values clash. In the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, forexample, a major national exit poll was published in which voters ranked “moralvalues” as having determined how they cast their ballot. Commentators fastened on thedata to argue that the most controversial social issues in the election—particularly gaymarriage—had swung a number of states. Conservatives heralded the numbers,convinced that they proved the Christian right’s growing power.

　　When these polls were later analyzed, it turned out that the pundits and prognosticatorshad overstated their case a bit. In fact, voters had considered national security as theelection’s most important issue, and although large numbers of voters did consider“moral values” an important factor in the way they voted, the meaning of the term wasso vague as to include everything from abortion to corporate malfeasance. Immediately,some Democrats could be heard breathing a sigh of relief, as if a diminution in the“values factor” served the liberal cause; as if a discussion of values was a dangerous,unnecessary distraction from those material concerns that characterized the DemocraticParty platform.

　　I think Democrats are wrong to run away from a debate about values, as wrong as thoseconservatives who see values only as a wedge to pry loose working-class voters fromthe Democratic base. It is the language of values that people use to map their world. It iswhat can inspire them to take action, and move them beyond their isolation. Thepostelection polls may have been poorly composed, but the broader question of sharedvalues—the standards and principles that the majority of Americans deem important intheir lives, and in the life of the country—should be the heart of our politics, thecornerstone of any meaningful debate about budgets and projects, regulations andpolicies.

　　“WE HOLD THESE truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that theyare endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

　　Those simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only thefoundation of our government but the substance of our common creed. Not everyAmerican may be able to recite them; few, if asked, could trace the genesis of theDeclaration of Independence to its roots in eighteenth-century liberal and republicanthought. But the essential idea behind the Declaration—that we are born into this worldfree, all of us; that each of us arrives with a bundle of rights that can’t be taken away byany person or any state without just cause; that through our own agency we can, andmust, make of our lives what we will—is one that every American understands. Itorients us, sets our course, each and every day.

　　Indeed, the value of individual freedom is so deeply ingrained in us that we tend to takeit for granted. It is easy to forget that at the time of our nation’s founding this idea wasentirely radical in its implications, as radical as Martin Luther’s posting on the churchdoor. It is an idea that some portion of the world still rejects—and for which an evenlarger portion of humanity finds scant evidence in their daily lives.

　　In fact, much of my appreciation of our Bill of Rights comes from having spent part ofmy childhood in Indonesia and from still having family in Kenya, countries whereindividual rights are almost entirely subject to the self-restraint of army generals or thewhims of corrupt bureaucrats. I remember the first time I took Michelle to Kenya,shortly before we were married. As an African American, Michelle was bursting withexcitement about the idea of visiting the continent of her ancestors, and we had awonderful time, visiting my grandmother up-country, wandering through the streets ofNairobi, camping in the Serengeti, fishing off the island of Lamu.

　　But during our travels Michelle also heard—as I had heard during my first trip toAfrica—the terrible sense on the part of most Kenyans that their fates were not theirown. My cousins told her how difficult it was to find a job or start their own businesseswithout paying bribes. Activists told us about being jailed for expressing theiropposition to government policies. Even within my own family, Michelle saw howsuffocating the demands of family ties and tribal loyalties could be, with distant cousinsconstantly asking for favors, uncles and aunts showing up unannounced. On the flightback to Chicago, Michelle admitted she was looking forward to getting home. “I neverrealized just how American I was,” she said. She hadn’t realized just how free shewas—or how much she cherished that freedom.

　　At its most elemental level, we understand our liberty in a negative sense. As a generalrule we believe in the right to be left alone, and are suspicious of those—whether BigBrother or nosy neighbors—who want to meddle in our business. But we understandour liberty in a more positive sense as well, in the idea of opportunity and the subsidiaryvalues that help realize opportunity—all those homespun virtues that Benjamin Franklinfirst popularized in Poor Richard’s Almanack and that have continued to inspire ourallegiance through successive generations. The values of self-reliance and self-improvement and risk-taking. The values of drive, discipline, temperance, and hardwork. The values of thrift and personal responsibility.

　　These values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will—aconfidence that through pluck and sweat and smarts, each of us can rise above thecircumstances of our birth. But these values also express a broader confidence that solong as individual men and women are free to pursue their own interests, society as awhole will prosper. Our system of self-government and our free-market economydepend on the majority of individual Americans adhering to these values. Thelegitimacy of our government and our economy depend on the degree to which thesevalues are rewarded, which is why the values of equal opportunity andnondiscrimination complement rather than impinge on our liberty.

　　If we Americans are individualistic at heart, if we instinctively chafe against a past oftribal allegiances, traditions, customs, and castes, it would be a mistake to assume thatthis is all we are. Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communalvalues, the glue upon which every healthy society depends. We value the imperatives offamily and the cross-generational obligations that family implies. We value community,the neighborliness that expresses itself through raising the barn or coaching the soccerteam. We value patriotism and the obligations of citizenship, a sense of duty andsacrifice on behalf of our nation. We value a faith in something bigger than ourselves,whether that something expresses itself in formal religion or ethical precepts. And wevalue the constellation of behaviors that express our mutual regard for one another:

　　honesty, fairness, humility, kindness, courtesy, and compassion.

　　In every society (and in every individual), these twin strands—the individualistic andthe communal, autonomy and solidarity—are in tension, and it has been one of theblessings of America that the circumstances of our nation’s birth allowed us to negotiatethese tensions better than most. We did not have to go through any of the violentupheavals that Europe was forced to endure as it shed its feudal past. Our passage froman agricultural to an industrial society was eased by the sheer size of the continent, vasttracts of land and abundant resources that allowed new immigrants to continuallyremake themselves.

　　But we cannot avoid these tensions entirely. At times our values collide because in thehands of men each one is subject to distortion and excess. Self-reliance andindependence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and afrantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we’ve seenpatriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we’ve seen faithcalcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even theimpulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness toacknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves.

　　When this happens—when liberty is cited in the defense of a company’s decision todump toxins in our rivers, or when our collective interest in building an upscale newmall is used to justify the destruction of somebody’s home—we depend on the strengthof countervailing values to temper our judgment and hold such excesses in check.

　　Sometimes finding the right balance is relatively easy. We all agree, for instance, thatsociety has a right to constrain individual freedom when it threatens to do harm toothers. The First Amendment doesn’t give you the right to yell “fire” in a crowdedtheater; your right to practice your religion does not encompass human sacrifice.

　　Likewise, we all agree that there must be limits to the state’s power to control ourbehavior, even if it’s for our own good. Not many Americans would feel comfortablewith the government monitoring what we eat, no matter how many deaths and howmuch of our medical spending may be due to rising rates of obesity.

　　More often, though, finding the right balance between our competing values is difficult.

　　Tensions arise not because we have steered a wrong course, but simply because we livein a complex and contradictory world. I firmly believe, for example, that since 9/11, wehave played fast and loose with constitutional principles in the fight against terrorism.

　　But I acknowledge that even the wisest president and most prudent Congress wouldstruggle to balance the critical demands of our collective security against the equallycompelling need to uphold civil liberties. I believe our economic policies pay too littleattention to the displacement of manufacturing workers and the destruction ofmanufacturing towns. But I cannot wish away the sometimes competing demands ofeconomic security and competitiveness.

　　Unfortunately, too often in our national debates we don’t even get to the point where weweigh these difficult choices. Instead, we either exaggerate the degree to which policieswe don’t like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferredpolicies conflict with important countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tendto bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right tobear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when itcomes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to controlpeople’s sexual practices. Conversely, it’s easy to get most liberals riled up aboutgovernment encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman’s reproductivefreedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potentialcosts of regulation to a small-business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.

　　In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how wedraw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works.

　　But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess valuesthat are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunterfeels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and ifconservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right toreproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

　　The results of such an exercise can sometimes be surprising. The year that Democratsregained the majority in the Illinois state senate, I sponsored a bill to require thevideotaping of interrogations and confessions in capital cases. While the evidence tellsme that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes—mass murder, the rape and murder of a child—so heinous, so beyond the pale, that thecommunity is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out theultimate punishment. On the other hand, the way capital cases were tried in Illinois atthe time was so rife with error, questionable police tactics, racial bias, and shoddylawyering that thirteen death row inmates had been exonerated and a Republicangovernor had decided to institute a moratorium on all executions.

　　Despite what appeared to be a death penalty system ripe for reform, few people gave mybill much chance of passing. The state prosecutors and police organizations wereadamantly opposed, believing that videotaping would be expensive and cumbersome,and would hamstring their ability to close cases. Some who favored abolishing the deathpenalty feared that any efforts at reform would detract from their larger cause. Myfellow legislators were skittish about appearing in any way to be soft on crime. And thenewly elected Democratic governor had announced his opposition to videotaping ofinterrogations during the course of his campaign.

　　It would have been typical of today’s politics for each side to draw a line in the sand:

　　for death penalty opponents to harp on racism and police misconduct and for lawenforcement to suggest that my bill coddled criminals. Instead, over the course ofseveral weeks, we convened sometimes daily meetings between prosecutors, publicdefenders, police organizations, and death penalty opponents, keeping our negotiationsas much as possible out of the press.

　　Instead of focusing on the serious disagreements around the table, I talked about thecommon value that I believed everyone shared, regardless of how each of us might feelabout the death penalty: that is, the basic principle that no innocent person should endup on death row, and that no person guilty of a capital offense should go free. Whenpolice representatives presented concrete problems with the bill’s design that wouldhave impeded their investigations, we modified the bill. When police representativesoffered to videotape only confessions, we held firm, pointing out that the whole purposeof the bill was to give the public confidence that confessions were obtained free ofcoercion. At the end of the process, the bill had the support of all the parties involved. Itpassed unanimously in the Illinois Senate and was signed into law.

　　Of course, this approach to policy making doesn’t always work. Sometimes, politiciansand interest groups welcome conflict in pursuit of a broader ideological goal. Mostantiabortion activists, for example, have openly discouraged legislative allies from evenpursuing those compromise measures that would have significantly reduced theincidence of the procedure popularly known as partial-birth abortion, because the imagethe procedure evokes in the mind of the public has helped them win converts to theirposition.

　　And sometimes our ideological predispositions are just so fixed that we have troubleseeing the obvious. Once, while still in the Illinois Senate, I listened to a Republicancolleague work himself into a lather over a proposed plan to provide school breakfaststo preschoolers. Such a plan, he insisted, would crush their spirit of self-reliance. I hadto point out that not too many five-year-olds I knew were self-reliant, but children whospent their formative years too hungry to learn could very well end up being charges ofthe state.

　　Despite my best efforts, the bill still went down in defeat; Illinois preschoolers weretemporarily saved from the debilitating effects of cereal and milk (a version of the billwould later pass). But my fellow legislator’s speech helps underscore one of thedifferences between ideology and values: Values are faithfully applied to the factsbefore us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

　　MUCH OF THE confusion surrounding the values debate arises out of a misperceptionon the part of both politicians and the public that politics and government areequivalent. To say that a value is important is not to say that it should be subject toregulation or that it merits a new agency. Conversely, just because a value should not orcannot be legislated doesn’t mean it isn’t a proper topic for public discussion.

　　I value good manners, for example. Every time I meet a kid who speaks clearly andlooks me in the eye, who says “yes, sir” and “thank you” and “please” and “excuse me,”

　　I feel more hopeful about the country. I don’t think I am alone in this. I can’t legislategood manners. But I can encourage good manners whenever I’m addressing a group ofyoung people.

　　The same goes for competence. Nothing brightens my day more than dealing withsomebody, anybody, who takes pride in their work or goes the extra mile—anaccountant, a plumber, a three-star general, the person on the other end of the phonewho actually seems to want to solve your problem. My encounters with suchcompetence seem more sporadic lately; I seem to spend more time looking forsomebody in the store to help me or waiting for the deliveryman to show. Other peoplemust notice this; it makes us all cranky, and those of us in government, no less than inbusiness, ignore such perceptions at their own peril. (I am convinced—although I haveno statistical evidence to back it up—that antitax, antigovernment, antiunion sentimentsgrow anytime people find themselves standing in line at a government office with onlyone window open and three or four workers chatting among themselves in full view.)Progressives in particular seem confused on this point, which is why we so often get ourclocks cleaned in elections. I recently gave a speech at the Kaiser Family Foundationafter they released a study showing that the amount of sex on television has doubled inrecent years. Now I enjoy HBO as much as the next guy, and I generally don’t carewhat adults watch in the privacy of their homes. In the case of children, I think it’sprimarily the duty of parents to monitor what they are watching on television, and in myspeech I even suggested that everyone would benefit if parents—heaven forbid—simplyturned off the TV and tried to strike up a conversation with their kids.

　　Having said all that, I indicated that I wasn’t too happy with ads for erectile-dysfunctiondrugs popping up every fifteen minutes whenever I watched a football game with mydaughters in the room. I offered the further observation that a popular show targeted atteens, in which young people with no visible means of support spend several monthsgetting drunk and jumping naked into hot tubs with strangers, was not “the real world.”

　　I ended by suggesting that the broadcast and cable industries should adopt betterstandards and technology to help parents control what streamed into their homes.

　　You would have thought I was Cotton Mather. In response to my speech, onenewspaper editorial intoned that the government had no business regulating protectedspeech, despite the fact that I hadn’t called for regulation. Reporters suggested that Iwas cynically tacking to the center in preparation for a national race. More than a fewsupporters wrote our office, complaining that they had voted for me to beat back theBush agenda, not to act as the town scold.

　　And yet every parent I know, liberal or conservative, complains about the coarsening ofthe culture, the promotion of easy materialism and instant gratification, the severing ofsexuality from intimacy. They may not want government censorship, but they wantthose concerns recognized, their experiences validated. When, for fear of appearingcensorious, progressive political leaders can’t even acknowledge the problem, thoseparents start listening to those leaders who will—leaders who may be less sensitive toconstitutional constraints.

　　Of course, conservatives have their own blind spots when it comes to addressingproblems in the culture. Take executive pay. In 1980, the average CEO made forty-twotimes what an average hourly worker took home. By 2005, the ratio was 262 to 1.

　　Conservative outlets like the Wall Street Journal editorial page try to justify outlandishsalaries and stock options as necessary to attract top talent, and suggest that theeconomy actually performs better when America’s corporate leaders are fat and happy.

　　But the explosion in CEO pay has had little to do with improved performance. In fact,some of the country’s most highly compensated CEOs over the past decade havepresided over huge drops in earnings, losses in shareholder value, massive layoffs, andthe underfunding of their workers’ pension funds.

　　What accounts for the change in CEO pay is not any market imperative. It’s cultural. Ata time when average workers are experiencing little or no income growth, many ofAmerica’s CEOs have lost any sense of shame about grabbing whatever their pliant,handpicked corporate boards will allow. Americans understand the damage such anethic of greed has on our collective lives; in a recent survey, they ranked corruption ingovernment and business, and greed and materialism, as two of the three most importantmoral challenges facing the nation (“raising kids with the right values” ranked first).

　　Conservatives may be right when they argue that the government should not try todetermine executive pay packages. But conservatives should at least be willing to speakout against unseemly behavior in corporate boardrooms with the same moral force, thesame sense of outrage, that they direct against dirty rap lyrics.

　　Of course, there are limits to the power of the bully pulpit. Sometimes only the law canfully vindicate our values, particularly when the rights and opportunities of thepowerless in our society are at stake. Certainly this has been true in our efforts to endracial discrimination; as important as moral exhortation was in changing hearts andminds of white Americans during the civil rights era, what ultimately broke the back ofJim Crow and ushered in a new era of race relations were the Supreme Court casesculminating in Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and theVoting Rights Act of 1965. As these laws were being debated, there were those whoargued that government should not interject itself into civil society, that no law couldforce white people to associate with blacks. Upon hearing these arguments, Dr. Kingreplied, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep himfrom lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.”

　　Sometimes we need both cultural transformation and government action—a change invalues and a change in policy—to promote the kind of society we want. The state of ourinner-city schools is a case in point. All the money in the world won’t boost studentachievement if parents make no effort to instill in their children the values of hard workand delayed gratification. But when we as a society pretend that poor children willfulfill their potential in dilapidated, unsafe schools with outdated equipment andteachers who aren’t trained in the subjects they teach, we are perpetrating a lie on thesechildren, and on ourselves. We are betraying our values.

　　That is one of the things that makes me a Democrat, I suppose—this idea that ourcommunal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity, shouldexpress themselves not just in the church or the mosque or the synagogue; not just onthe blocks where we live, in the places where we work, or within our own families; butalso through our government. Like many conservatives, I believe in the power of cultureto determine both individual success and social cohesion, and I believe we ignorecultural factors at our peril. But I also believe that our government can play a role inshaping that culture for the better—or for the worse.

　　I OFTEN WONDER what makes it so difficult for politicians to talk about values inways that don’t appear calculated or phony. Partly, I think, it’s because those of us inpublic life have become so scripted, and the gestures that candidates use to signify theirvalues have become so standardized (a stop at a black church, the hunting trip, the visitto a NASCAR track, the reading in the kindergarten classroom) that it becomes harderand harder for the public to distinguish between honest sentiment and politicalstagecraft.

　　Then there’s the fact that the practice of modern politics itself seems to be value-free.

　　Politics (and political commentary) not only allows but often rewards behavior that wewould normally think of as scandalous: fabricating stories, distorting the obviousmeaning of what other people say, insulting or generally questioning their motives,poking through their personal affairs in search of damaging information.

　　During my general election campaign for the U.S. Senate, for example, my Republicanopponent assigned a young man to track all my public appearances with a handheldcamera. This has become fairly routine operating procedure in many campaigns, butwhether because the young man was overzealous or whether he had been instructed totry to provoke me, his tracking came to resemble stalking. From morning to night, hefollowed me everywhere, usually from a distance of no more than five or ten feet. Hewould film me riding down elevators. He would film me coming out of the restroom.

　　He would film me on my cell phone, talking to my wife and children.

　　At first, I tried reasoning with him. I stopped to ask him his name, told him that Iunderstood he had a job to do, and suggested that he keep enough of a distance to allowme to have a conversation without him listening in. In the face of my entreaties, heremained largely mute, other than to say his name was Justin. I suggested that he callhis boss and find out whether this was in fact what the campaign intended for him to do.

　　He told me that I was free to call myself and gave me the number. After two or threedays of this, I decided I’d had enough. With Justin fast on my heels, I strolled into thepress office of the state capitol building and asked some of the reporters who werehaving lunch to gather round.

　　“Hey, guys,” I said, “I want to introduce you to Justin. Justin here’s been assigned bythe Ryan campaign to stalk me wherever I go.”

　　As I explained the situation, Justin stood there, continuing to film. The reporters turnedto him and started peppering him with questions.

　　“You follow him into the bathroom?”

　　“Are you this close to him all the time?”

　　Soon several news crews arrived with their cameras to film Justin filming me. Like aprisoner of war, Justin kept repeating his name, his rank, and the telephone number ofhis candidate’s campaign headquarters. By six o’clock, the story of Justin was on mostlocal broadcasts. The story ended up blanketing the state for a week—cartoons,editorials, and sports radio chatter. After several days of defiance, my opponentsuccumbed to the pressure, asked Justin to back up a few feet, and issued an apology.

　　Still, the damage to his campaign was done. People might not have understood ourcontrasting views on Medicare or Middle East diplomacy. But they knew that myopponent’s campaign had violated a value—civil behavior—that they consideredimportant.

　　The gap between what we deem appropriate behavior in everyday life and what it takesto win a campaign is just one of the ways in which a politician’s values are tested. Infew other professions are you required, each and every day, to weigh so manycompeting claims—between different sets of constituents, between the interests of yourstate and the interests of the nation, between party loyalty and your own sense ofindependence, between the value of service and obligations to your family. There is aconstant danger, in the cacophony of voices, that a politician loses his moral bearingsand finds himself entirely steered by the winds of public opinion.

　　Perhaps this explains why we long for that most elusive quality in our leaders—thequality of authenticity, of being who you say you are, of possessing a truthfulness thatgoes beyond words. My friend the late U.S. senator Paul Simon had that quality. Formost of his career, he baffled the pundits by garnering support from people whodisagreed, sometimes vigorously, with his liberal politics. It helped that he looked sotrustworthy, like a small-town doctor, with his glasses and bow tie and basset-houndface. But people also sensed that he lived out his values: that he was honest, and that hestood up for what he believed in, and perhaps most of all that he cared about them andwhat they were going through.

　　That last aspect of Paul’s character—a sense of empathy—is one that I find myselfappreciating more and more as I get older. It is at the heart of my moral code, and it ishow I understand the Golden Rule—not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but assomething more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see throughtheir eyes.

　　Like most of my values, I learned about empathy from my mother. She disdained anykind of cruelty or thoughtlessness or abuse of power, whether it expressed itself in theform of racial prejudice or bullying in the schoolyard or workers being underpaid.

　　Whenever she saw even a hint of such behavior in me she would look me square in theeyes and ask, “How do you think that would make you feel?”

　　But it was in my relationship with my grandfather that I think I first internalized the fullmeaning of empathy. Because my mother’s work took her overseas, I often lived withmy grandparents during my high school years, and without a father present in the house,my grandfather bore the brunt of much of my adolescent rebellion. He himself was notalways easy to get along with; he was at once warmhearted and quick to anger, and inpart because his career had not been particularly successful, his feelings could also beeasily bruised. By the time I was sixteen we were arguing all the time, usually about mefailing to abide by what I considered to be an endless series of petty and arbitraryrules—filling up the gas tank whenever I borrowed his car, say, or making sure that Irinsed out the milk carton before I put it in the garbage.

　　With a certain talent for rhetoric, as well as an absolute certainty about the merits of myown views, I found that I could generally win these arguments, in the narrow sense ofleaving my grandfather flustered, angry, and sounding unreasonable. But at some point,perhaps in my senior year, such victories started to feel less satisfying. I started thinkingabout the struggles and disappointments he had seen in his life. I started to appreciatehis need to feel respected in his own home. I realized that abiding by his rules wouldcost me little, but to him it would mean a lot. I recognized that sometimes he really didhave a point, and that in insisting on getting my own way all the time, without regard tohis feelings or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself.

　　There’s nothing extraordinary about such an awakening, of course; in one form oranother it is what we all must go through if we are to grow up. And yet I find myselfreturning again and again to my mother’s simple principle—“How would that make youfeel?”—as a guidepost for my politics.

　　It’s not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to besuffering from an empathy deficit. We wouldn’t tolerate schools that don’t teach, thatare chronically underfunded and understaffed and underinspired, if we thought that thechildren in them were like our children. It’s hard to imagine the CEO of a companygiving himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while cutting health-care coverage for hisworkers if he thought they were in some sense his equals. And it’s safe to assume thatthose in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisionedtheir own sons and daughters in harm’s way.

　　I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics infavor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us,then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.

　　But that does not mean that those who are struggling—or those of us who claim tospeak for those who are struggling—are thereby freed from trying to understand theperspectives of those who are better off. Black leaders need to appreciate the legitimatefears that may cause some whites to resist affirmative action. Union representativescan’t afford not to understand the competitive pressures their employers may be under. Iam obligated to try to see the world through George Bush’s eyes, no matter how much Imay disagree with him. That’s what empathy does—it calls us all to task, theconservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and theoppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond ourlimited vision.

　　No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.

　　Of course, in the end a sense of mutual understanding isn’t enough. After all, talk ischeap; like any value, empathy must be acted upon. When I was a community organizerback in the eighties, I would often challenge neighborhood leaders by asking themwhere they put their time, energy, and money. Those are the true tests of what we value,I’d tell them, regardless of what we like to tell ourselves. If we aren’t willing to pay aprice for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realizethem, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.

　　By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing somuch as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. We say we value thelegacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains ofdebt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions ofAmerican children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but thenstructure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get lessand less of our time.

　　And yet a part of us knows better. We hang on to our values, even if they seem at timestarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed themmore often than we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values areour inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize thatthey are subject to challenge, can be poked and prodded and debunked and turned insideout by intellectuals and cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durableand surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We canmake claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be testedagainst fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not justwords.

　　To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.