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Let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, six frogs sat on a log, on a hot July day. Four of the frogs felt just too warm, and decided to jump off the log.
Here’s a question: how many frogs are on the log.
The right answer, my friends, is six. Because deciding is different from doing. It is safe to expect this is what we’ll see the Republican party learn over the next few months as they take leadership of the Senate. The people have decided; now it’s time to get to work, to do something to prove your leadership to us.
Whether or not you’re thrilled by this change in Washington, there are vital lessons to be learned here. While our televisions can now be free of caustic political ads, and we can go back to keeping out of politics for a while, let’s not let last night’s Republican victory slip by without learning a few vital lessons.
First, it is true that criticism can take you far. The Republican Party at the Senate level ran on a platform of “anything Obama does we hate.” By running campaigns that told the voters they would do anything to make the President’s job harder, people flocked to the polls. When it comes to creating change, it’s easy to do if you launch no-holds-barred attacks on your enemy. In short, criticism is a mighty tool.
Yet, and this is the second thing we can take away, criticism has limited uses. Dana Milbank wrote a tremendous piece for The Washington Post that says it all: “For Republicans, the hard part is about to begin.” Indeed, this is true. Milbank writes, “But now comes the hard part. Because Republicans didn’t run on an agenda other than antipathy toward all things Obama, they created a policy vacuum – and it’s about to be filled by a swirl of competing, and contradictory, proposals.”
What Milbank helps us see clearly is our third take away: criticism is not leadership. That’s the problem with campaign ads that go negative. We start to think that the best person for the job is the one with the least hidden in their closet and the greatest ability to criticize the other candidate. More importantly, we have to remember that criticism is an act of tearing down; leadership, on the other hand, is an act of building up.
Put simply, you don’t call in the demolitions expert when what you need is an architect.
Thus, the question before the Republican Congress, and really the Party, as we move toward 2016 is this: can you build something better than what you spent billions on tearing down?
The kind of leader our country needs, and the kind of leader we need in our region, is someone who builds up instead of tears down. In light of that, my hope is that our recently elected officials around our community would be architects who create a space for progress, instead of demolitions experts, who destroy anything that gets in their way.