"We believe in a politics as 'Common Good,' folks, dominated by evidence and argument. There is a big difference between a philosophy and an ideology, on the right or the left.

If you have a philosophy, it generally pushes you in a certain direction or another; but, like all philosophers, you want to engage in discussion, and argument. You are open to evidence, to new learning. And, you are certainly open to debate the practical applications of your philosophy. Therefore, you might wind up making a principled agreement with someone with a different philosophy.

If you look at the welfare reform legislation which passed, for example, when I was president I vetoed the first two bills because they took away the guarantee of food and medicine for poor people. When those things were put back in, I signed it. Some people who shared my philosophy did disagree with my decision because they said that we shouldn't have a hard and fast requirement for people on welfare who are able bodied to work. I disagreed. I thought work was the best social program, and I thought it would help to overcome a lot of the pathologies in the families of poor people. And, I also think you should never patronize the poor, they're basically as smart as the rest of us without the same breaks.

So, I thought that…so, we had a conservative idea in welfare reform. If you can work, you gotta go to work. But, in addition to that, we had - one of the reasons that it worked - is that there was a huge increase in support for people to go to work: a huge increase in child care, a huge increase in transportation assistance - a lot of these people didn't have cars, a huge increase in worker training and support, and other things that were essential.

In other words, because we had a philosophical debate, with plenty of politics and two vetoes, we had a creative tension which led us to a dynamic center — not a mushy center — a dynamic center that worked.

The problem with ideology is, if you got an ideology, you already got your mind made up; you know all the answers. And, that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time.

So, you tend to govern by assertion and attack.

The problem with that is that discourages thinking and gives you bad results. This new Bob Woodward book, ‘State of Denial' is interes… well-named, but I think it's important to point out that if you are an ideologue, denial is an essential part of your political being. Whichever side. Listen to me. You got to - 'cause, if you are an ideologue, you got your mind made up. So when an inconvenient fact crops up, you have to be in denial. It has to be a less significant fact."

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006 at 9:07 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.