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PagesPersonnalité publiqueJournalisteDan Rather
A favorite saying I heard long ago and have often repeated is "No president is bigger than the country."
This thought returned this morning as I took stock of two sets of headlines: those coming from the Mueller testimony and those coming from Puerto Rico.
In the first, we have a struggle to make sense of what took place yesterday on Capitol Hill. Was it a dud or did it lay out a striking case of criminality? Was it the death knell for the Russia investigation or will it spa…rk hearings, oversight, and even a possible march towards impeachment? We must keep in mind that hot takes are often wrong, especially in a nanosecond news cycle like the one we live in where where we're tossed and spun more than a ragdoll in a washing machine. And the major reason why hot takes turn out wrong is because the future matters and it has yet to be written.
That brings me to Puerto Rico, where the headlines aren't ambiguous at all. An unprecedented surge of popular protest, at a scope and scale that is almost unfathomable, chased a government from office. We saw, very literally, the power of the people. Their voices were so loud, so clear, so impossible to ignore, dismiss, or belittle, that they collectively bent the future to their will.
And therein lies a lesson for what happened in Washington. We may have heard from the pundits about what yesterday meant, but we haven't heard from the people. Will there be an outpouring of energy and outrage, in phone calls to elected officials, at town halls, at public demonstrations and in campaign fundraising? Or will there be a general shrugging of shoulders? Will the Democratic leadership in the House see action or apathy?
Despite how historically unpopular this president is we have seen very little mass demonstrations since the immediate aftermath of his election. And I suspect that's because a lot of energy (and money) has gone into a political response as demonstrated in the 2018 elections. Will that strategy largely continue looking into 2020? Or will the aftermath of what we heard yesterday foment a new direction? Those headlines have yet to be written. They're impossible to write at this point because we haven't heard yet from the people that really matter, the broad and diverse electorate that is bigger than any president.
We will have a battle of headlines, hot takes and hot air. We will have polls and politics. We will have the schisms plaguing American democracy plunge deeper. I fear little said today will, at least in the short term, provide any balm to our national struggles.
But this was historic. It confirmed what we already should have known. America was attacked by a hostile foreign power. That attack was welcomed and benefited a candidate for president. And that president lied about …that attack and minimized it. His enablers and confederates have played along. Many of his aides have pled guilty to lying about their foreign contacts. This is un-American at its core.
That should be enough for bipartisan outrage. Whether we move towards impeachment will be the calculation of House leadership. But we saw in the questioning this afternoon a lot of tap dancing from Republicans eager to not infuriate their president but also not wishing to seem to countenance this type of foreign attack.
In all the smoke, in all the outrage, in all the posturing, we cannot forget the core truth. In between the lines of Mueller’s testimony we see his determination that the risk to our democratic ideals and function is deep and remains very present today. He has performed his service. How he performed that will be for others to judge. But the action now lies with Congress. How they respond, how we respond, will determine the verdict of history.
