These are rough times for the “Yes, but” view of life.
Sure, Churchill didn’t save Britain from the Blitz by voting for something before voting against it.
But most people think in shades of gray when bombs aren’t dropping on their heads. The expression “on the other hand” reflects the reality that people have two.
Whoever wins the United States election, nuance has become a no-no this year, bludgeoned by campaign attack ads and each side’s distortion of the other’s positions.
President George Bush’s wish to introduce choices to the social-security system is cast as a dastardly move that will leave old people short of money to buy presents for their grandkids.
Democrat John Kerry’s multifaceted opinion of the Iraq war is feasted upon daily by the Republicans in branding him a United Nations-loving equivocator.
Nuance, a trait most often associated with the Democrat and rarely with Bush, now is taken to mean flip-flop, wishy-washiness or appeasement.
Even his friends say Kerry can see eight sides of an issue, and they mean that as high praise. They say he won’t shut his mind to other possibilities, that all things will be considered. His strategists may wince, but he can construct a scenario that reduces terrorism to a future nuisance.
“He maybe deliberates a little longer than he likes,” says his wife, Teresa, “but deliberation is not a sin in a complex world.”
Whether it’s a desirable leadership attribute or not, nuance is threaded through even the most divisive issues, not to mention through life.
Take abortion. Americans in the main are neither solidly for nor against abortion rights. They are in some nuanced in-between. How they feel about an abortion issue depends very precisely on how they are asked in an opinion poll.
Nuance is what helps keep polls fluid. Polls matter because average people do all the time what politicians do only at their peril — change their minds. Is there a hotter commodity right now than the undecided voter?
Or, take slavery. No nuances there?
Abraham Lincoln, who ended slavery and saved the union, equivocated and evolved on the matter throughout his public life, never liking it but loath to force slave-owning states to change.
“I bite my lip and keep quiet,” he told a slave-owning friend, a confession that could invite charges of hypocrisy in a 30-second attack ad today.
Nuance riddled Lincoln’s first inaugural address, when he told a nation on the brink of civil war that he had no inclination to stop slavery in states that had it — he merely wished to prevent its extension.
He mulled aloud about how two disparate goals could be achieved — discouraging the foreign slave trade yet ensuring slaves who escape to free states are properly returned to their masters.
He was against the forced abolition of slavery before he was for it.
And he pronounced himself confounded about what to do with freed slaves, ruling out their full equality but flip-flopping to say the right to vote should be extended to the smartest blacks and those who were soldiers.
Bush has flip-flopped a number of times in office — and compromised, too — as even the most assured presidents do. But he marches along in self-confidence, unable or unwilling to name a mistake, declaring to the world that you are either for us or against us on terrorism, branding three troublesome countries evil and upending the government of one of them, Iraq.
Kerry, sarcastically if not defensively, credits Bush with his convictions.
“Never in doubt,” Kerry says of Bush, “but frequently in error.”
Polls find that Americans see Bush as a more decisive leader than Kerry by a wide margin. But the election is so close in part because they’ve not decided whether decisiveness trumps everything else.
Many Americans are going back and forth on that, and will continue to do so until they haul their “ifs”, “ands” or “buts” into the voting booth. — Sapa-AP
Bush, Kerry vie to be Mr ‘Regular Guy’