That may seem trivial, but it illustrates how the political process gradually bends candidates away from their natural center of gravity to suit the electorate. It was as if their respective handlers read the same fashion reports and groomed their candidate to fit the “powerful presidential look.”

Similarly, after the polling feedback from two previous debates, both candidates gravitated towards similar personalities – optimistic, engaging, commanding. Bush had clearly been chastised for his rabid moments. He smiled in a constant but often insincere fashion. Kerry had clearly been coached about his seriousness and his lack of overt displays of religiosity. And so he quoted the Bible and talked about his altar boy days and parodied his seriousness when discussing the women in his life.

If you weren’t someone who has been working vigorously on the issues and reading the deeper analyses and exposing yourself to Internet fact checkers, you’d think these were two collegial guys who have slightly different ideas about how to run the country. It all seemed rather polite and chummy.

I find this disappointing.

It’s not that I don’t think there are radical differences between the two candidates. There are, perhaps more differences than we’ve faced in a century. It wasn’t a relatively benign conservative President who dragged me from my political slumbers to get engaged this year. It was a man who is driving our democracy and our planet into the ground. Bush’s administration has been a slap in the face of those who cherish the planet we live on: the lies, the gutting of our liberties, the backroom secrecy, the military braggadocio, the entitled indifference, the brazen transfer of wealth, the razing of the environment. It’s been enough to force many of us who were not engaged into committed and powerful action.

And yet watching the debate tonight, Bush seemed rather harmless – not particularly well educated perhaps, but congenial enough. Gone was the scowl and the pout, scrubbed clean after the polling feedback. Similarly, Kerry also positioned himself cautiously, hitting the same points as before. The man who moved me to tears in the documentary Going Upriver stirred little in me during this debate. I do recognize a warrior for the truth in him. It surfaced in moments, such as when he related his mother’s closing words to him about “integrity, integrity, integrity.” But it tends to get lacquered over by the varnish of the political process, the careful sculpting of every word to stay on point, to prevent any missteps, to send keywords to each base. The future of our country and even the world is reduced to a sort of chess match of statistics, plans, posturing, and sound bites.

It’s maddening when it’s clear that we need something deeper, much more fundamental: a major evolution, a shaking of the national character to allow something more generous, visionary, and bold to emerge. The first debate had some of that fire in it – an opening for Kerry to carry the torch of truth and transformation.

Tonight, we had a sort of bland sparring match, with neither providing much in the way of powerful moments. Sure, Kerry won on points and had a greater command of statistics and policy and was more “presidential.” But I hungered for more moments such as when he said that “being lectured by the President about fiscal responsibility is a little bit like Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order.” Now THAT had oomph in it – the force of genuine, powerful truth, playfully delivered.

I hope that Kerry doesn’t hold back in these last 20 days. This country urgently needs to wake up again, to be shaken from our indolent slumbers and realize that we are simply not acting in integrity anymore. The world is seeing it clearly. We need to remember our greatness rather than dwell in our fears and non-stop offensive wars. We need to be reminded of our true calling to live with integrity, wisdom, and compassion.

This cannot happen without the truth. We must tell it like it is. We need the unvarnished truth about 911 rather than the shellacked report produced by the 911 Commission. We need the unedited truth about the disaster of the Iraq War and our drive to secure adequate oil to feed a gluttonous empire. We need the truth about efforts to control the media. We need to expose illegitimate CIA covert operations. We need to remove the corporate claws from the halls of Congress.

We need major change and what we get is identical ties.

It’s a maddening part of politics, this race to a careful center. Our only choice is to look deeper, to really examine the records beneath the rhetoric, the true history rather than the narrative tale of these two men. And on that score, Kerry wins powerfully.

The truth is that if we want positive change, the messenger we have to send to the White House this year is John Kerry. However, it seems that the constraints of politics may not allow him to unleash the soul force that he had as spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. It’s up to us to live and breathe that fire while he positions himself to deal with a political reality that is hemmed in to a very narrow bandwidth of acceptability.

Deep down, Kerry has the potential for greatness. He showed it clearly during the Vietnam War. What we simply must believe is that the man who spoke the conscience of America about Vietnam will carry the torch of truth, integrity, and reform once he is President. To change the rules of the game, it first takes someone who can play by the rules and still win. Kerry’s methodical march in the last debate may be what it takes to win the American people – a steady reliability that soothes the fears of a skitterish populace. Then, once he’s elected, the winds of real change can blow freely.

Let’s hope that enough Americans see past the identical ties to the deeper truth.

Stephen Dinan stephen@radicalspirit.org is author of Radical Spirit (New World Library, 2002), and founder of TCN, Inc. Stephen directed and helped to create the Esalen Institute's Center for Theory & Research, a think tank for leading scholars, researchers, and teachers to explore human potential frontiers. Currently, he is a marketing consultant for a number of startups, political action groups, and non-profits and runs workshops through the Radical Spirit Community. For a full archive of his articles, visit www.stephendinan.com Permanent link: http://www.stephendinan.com/2004/10/of-ties-and-truth.html

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