Nevertheless, after some shrewd marketing by the President and his allies, 70 percent of the country now opposes the “death tax.” Farm groups come to visit my office, insisting that the estate tax will mean the end of the family farm, despite the Farm Bureau’s inability to point to a single farm in the country lost as a result of the “death tax.” Meanwhile, I’ve had corporate CEOs explain to me that it’s easy for Warren Buffett to favor an estate tax — even if his estate is taxed at 90 percent, he could still have a few billion to pass on to his kids — but that the tax is grossly unfair to those with estates worth “only” $10 or $15 million.
So let’s be clear. The rich in America have little to complain about. Between 1971 and 2001, while the median wage and salary income of the average worker showed literally no gain, the income of the top hundredth of a percent went up almost 500 percent. The distribution of wealth is even more skewed, and levels of inequality are now higher than at any time since the Gilded Age. These trends were already at work throughout the nineties. Clinton’s tax policies simply slowed them down a bit. Bush’s tax cuts made them worse.
I point out these facts not — as Republican talking points would have it — to stir up class envy. I admire many Americans of great wealth and don’t begrudge their success in the least. I know that many if not most have earned it through hard work, building businesses and creating jobs and providing value to their customers. I simply believe that those of us who have benefited most from this new economy can best afford to shoulder the obligation of ensuring every American child has a chance for that same success. And perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffett seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that’s hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American’s yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.
More than anything, it is that sense — that despite great differences in wealth, we rise and fall together — that we can’t afford to lose. As the pace of change accelerates, with some rising and many falling, that sense of common kinship becomes harder to maintain. Jefferson was not entirely wrong to fear Hamilton’s vision for the country, for we have always been in a constant balancing act between self-interest and community, markets and democracy, the concentration of wealth and power and the opening up of opportunity. We’ve lost that balance in Washington, I think. With all of us scrambling to raise money for campaigns, with unions weakened and the press distracted and lobbyists for the powerful pressing their full advantage, there are few countervailing voices to remind us of who we are and where we’ve come from, and to affirm our bonds with one another.
That was the subtext of a debate in early 2006, when a bribery scandal triggered new efforts to curb the influence of lobbyists in Washington. One of the proposals would have ended the practice of letting senators fly on private jets at the cheaper first-class commercial rate. The provision had little chance of passage. Still, my staff suggested that as the designated Democratic spokesperson on ethics reform, I should initiate a self-imposed ban on the practice.
It was the right thing to do, but I won’t lie; the first time I was scheduled for a four-city swing in two days flying commercial, I felt some pangs of regret. The traffic to O’Hare was terrible. When I got there, the flight to Memphis had been delayed. A kid spilled orange juice on my shoe.
Then, while waiting in line, a man came up to me, maybe in his mid-thirties, dressed in chinos and a golf shirt, and told me that he hoped Congress would do something about stem cell research this year. I have early-stage Parkinson’s disease, he said, and a son who’s three years old. I probably won’t ever get to play catch with him. I know it may be too late for me, but there’s no reason somebody else has to go through what I’m going through.
These are the stories you miss, I thought to myself, when you fly on a private jet.
Chapter Six
Faith
T WO DAYS AFTER I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, I received an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School.
“Congratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win,” the doctor wrote. “I was happy to vote for you, and I will tell you that I am seriously considering voting for you in the general election. I write to express my concerns that may, in the end, prevent me from supporting you.”
The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to be comprehensive and “totalizing.” His faith led him to strongly oppose abortion and gay marriage, but he said his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free market and the quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of President Bush’s foreign policy.
The reason the doctor was considering voting for my opponent was not my position on abortion as such. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign had posted on my website, suggesting that I would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.” He went on to write:
I sense that you have a strong sense of justice and of the precarious position of justice in any polity, and I know that you have championed the plight of the voiceless. I also sense that you are a fair-minded person with a high regard for reason…. Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded…. You know that weenter times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve others…. I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.
I checked my website and found the offending words. They were not my own; my staff had posted them to summarize my prochoice position during the Democratic primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v. Wade. Within the bubble of Democratic Party politics, this was standard boilerplate, designed to fire up the base. The notion of engaging the other side on the issue was pointless, the argument went; any ambiguity on the issue implied weakness, and faced with the single-minded, give-no-quarter approach of antiabortion forces, we simply could not afford weakness.
Rereading the doctor’s letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. Yes, I thought, there were those in the antiabortion movement for whom I had no sympathy, those who jostled or blocked women who were entering clinics, shoving photographs of mangled fetuses in the women’s faces and screaming at the top of their lungs; those who bullied and intimidated and occasionally resorted to violence.
But those antiabortion protesters weren’t the ones who occasionally appeared at my campaign rallies. The ones I encountered usually showed up in the smaller, downstate communities that we visited, their expressions weary but determined as they stood in silent vigil outside whatever building in which the rally was taking place, their handmade signs or banners held before them like shields. They didn’t yell or try to disrupt our events, although they still made my staff jumpy. The first time a group of protesters showed up, my advance team went on red alert; five minutes before my arrival at the meeting hall, they called the car I was in and suggested that I slip in through the rear entrance to avoid a confrontation.