Image: Abraham Williams

One can live a long time without water, but only long enough to say goodbye.

Tulsi Gabbard’s genetic odyssey began near the sea. She is a child of water, born of a people who have a reverence for the ocean as a source of sustenance and heritage, of ritual and obligation. Water is her élan vital and so too, the people she represents in Congress. It’s why the furor over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock touched her. Water is life, no matter where you live or where you argue or where you read to your children. Without water, there are no forests, there are no crops, there are no rivers, snowfalls, or joy. Without water, people die.

Tulsi’s observations about water are plentiful and born of her heritage as a Pacific Islander. Her connection to the surf defines her candidacy like no other. To refer to this Member of Congress by her first name seems appropriate, if somewhat disrespectful. In professional journalism, the Ms. Gabbard or Congressperson Gabbard designations might apply, but this candidate is authentically Tulsi. It’s her caché.

Image: Tulsi 2020

Writing about Tulsi brings the good fortune to reread Joan Didion’s Essay, Holy Water, in which she says, “In the part of California where I now live aridity is the single most prominent feature of the climate, and I am not pleased to see, this year, cactus spreading wild to the sea.” Ms. Didion has always been prescient, and though she was not considering climate change when writing that sentence, she well could have been.

What would it mean to the United States to have a leader whose stock reveres water the way her adversaries revere endorsements and polls? What would it mean to have a president who is not only a soldier, but an outsider of sorts, one who would inject the gravitas of conservation into the national lexicon?

Gravitas surrounds her, yet Tulsi Gabbard projects warmth and spiritual patience. She likes to laugh but takes her job and zeal for service seriously. Perhaps it is her ethos or her duty to strive for dharma; perhaps it was seeing the dead and dying in her deployments to Iraq; perhaps one feeds the other. Whatever the catalyst, her ingenerate connection to water connects her to us by its urgency and necessity. We understand this in a primal way. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy, once you meet her, to like her.

Her adherence to principles is refreshing and, like water, she is strong enough to wear down stone. It’s evident in her poise when she is interviewed by her antagonists in the mainstream. It is her slow-moving train of personal ethics that presents such a challenge to those who enrich themselves at the public troughs or parrot the dictates of corporate media underbosses. She’s a smiling locomotive that isn’t dissuaded by power or cultural influence, the party leaders and the DC press corps.

Hawai’i

To most Americans, Hawai’i is a vacation destination; it doesn’t factor into our discussions about war, economics, taxes, or election polls. Hawai’i is a postcard. It’s picture perfect as far as we can tell from the brochures and surely anything worth discussing would have been included in the time-share pitch, no?

Hawai’i is a state in which 70% of the population is some combination of native Hawaiian, Asian, Caucasian and Pacific Islander. They feel as distant from the heartland as the rest of us do from American Samoa. It’s a state that voted overwhelmingly democratic in 2016, and overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders in the primary. Cue, Tulsi Gabbard, a woman not obliged to dislodge from her memory the way her constituents voted, so she could participate in a coronation. She didn’t.

Ninety-million people sat on the couch in 2016 rather than vote for either candidate. Hawai’i won the dubious award for poor turnout, at just 43%. Of all the voters who didn’t care, Hawaiians cared the least. Was it only apathy or lingering isolation from the rest of the country, never really feeling a part of the family who fostered them?

It wasn’t so long ago the US government simply took Hawai’i for the Dole family. Surely this affects the way some Hawaiians feel about being US citizens. Perhaps there is something about being an American from Hawai’i that is not just geographically but culturally so different from what we’ve grown accustomed to in Superbowl ads that strengthens Tulsi’s resolve. The Clydesdales never pull the beer wagon down Route 93 in Kapolei. Despite the disconnect, something stirred in Tulsi Gabbard to drive her to enlist in the Army. To most of us, Hawai’i is luaus and Five-0 and spam and pineapples, but it’s also the place that gave us the only candidate who wants to end the cycle of interventionism and perpetual war.

Oh Yes, War

In an address before the Canadian Club in Ottawa in January of 1946, General Eisenhower said, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

Do we even know how many trillions of dollars and how many lives have been taken by war since then? Tulsi may not know exactly, but she knows this. She knows that the people who die in wars aren’t the ones who declare it. The survivors never see a share of the profits reaped by the companies who build the weapons; that money is reserved for the politicians and their friends in the media who sound the call for action and support for the troops and democracy. Death may indeed be the ultimate freedom from a life of tyranny in a foreign land, but no one has ever come back to thank us for it. As for our own troops, Tulsi has often said that these regime-change wars dishonor their great service and sacrifice. “We raised our right hand to serve this country and the American people, not to be sent off to fight another country’s battles somewhere else in the world.”

The call to war is always actuated by avarice and hegemony. To deny that the Military Industrial Complex exists is to take a willful flight from evidence. Tulsi is ready to take up the good fight, to expose and dismantle this corrupt system over the life of her presidency. In stepping up, she must step forward, beyond the imperialist proscenium of her predecessors and into the light of peace.

Image: Tulsi 2020

To stop and think, as Carl Sagan suggested, about the speck of dust this planet is in this vast universe, is something we rarely do. “Think of the rivers of blood, spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and triumph, they can become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”

We don’t think about these things often enough, but Tulsi bears the weight of loss and suffering with her, every day, in every interaction with a colleague, in every committee meeting, in every difficult consideration about the best way forward for this nation.

“War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men. Though you follow the trade of the warrior, you do so in the spirit of Washington, not of Genghis Khan. For Americans, only threat to our way of life justifies resort to conflict.” -Eisenhower, to the graduating West Point cadets in the spring of 1947

The Machiavelli Factor

Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince five-hundred years ago. It is the seminal work of political intrigue and treachery. If she hasn’t already, Tulsi Gabbard needs to read it, if for no other reason than to better understand the people she will need to deal with on this run. Though Tulsi has put herself in the arena and must therefore, take up the mantle of the gladiator, Nietzsche warned in Beyond Good and Evil, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he also become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

The devil is in the balance. Tulsi can wax idealistic when paddling out to a wave, relaxing in the surf, far from the madding crush of politics, but once in DC, she is best advised to heed Machiavelli’s realistic view that we live so far from what ought to be, that care must be taken not to dismiss what is, in hope of what ought to be. If she falls into this trap, she will not prevail.

To be successful without being ruthless, Tulsi needs to increase her capacity to recognize Machiavellian personas and maneuvers. Call it the Machiavelli Quotient or MQ. It’s a derivative of EQ, the aptitude to recognize emotions, to be connected. But MQ is detached; it’s the ability to sense the Machiavellian antecedents of colleagues and unfriendly journalists, to observe clinically. Tulsi’s MQ must be honed like an assassin’s blade to survive in the Borgian District of Columbia.

More than a mere bullshit meter, MQ is a deep understanding of the ways of the people who possess the antigen of MQ, the M-Factor. This M-Factor is the princely impetus for power, control and self-aggrandizement, using whatever cunning and deceptive tactics one dares to acquire sovereignty or, more pathologically, using whomever is necessary to do the dirty work and then have that person take the fall for it. Trump / Cohen sound familiar? MQ flourishes in the light — MF, in the dark, in both the shadows of corrupt institutions and the midnight souls of the covetous.

In seeking to understand her competitors and those who wish to smear her, Tulsi must be careful not to become enamored of the power she needs to accomplish her mission. Honorable leadership requires a judicious exercise of the minimal power required to fulfill the duty to serve. MQ works best when the leader accepts its utility and nothing more.

While Tulsi remains grounded to principles, she must upregulate her MQ to navigate the waters populated by those with high MF — those most enchanted with their own propensities for duplicity, vengefulness and guile. In the vernacular of microbiology, a high MQ would give her an intrinsic resistance to the pathogen of M-Factor. If it isn’t yet in her veins, then it can be injected, by studying Machiavelli and developing an acquired resistance.

There are some who would say that being Machiavellian is to shun the delusion of idealism, and a cynical view of Washington politics might confirm that view, but this time in history demands pragmatic idealism, one in which a soldier understands that sometimes you must fight, but that war should always be a last resort, one who believes that the voice of the commoner must not be muted by the DC syndicate.

A presidential contest grants the winner unimaginable power, and much of that power will be necessary to move the levers of reason to effect change, but it should remain in all efforts, loyal to the Constitution, and in the parapets guarding its original doctrines. Madison warned of the “silent and gradual encroachments” on freedom by those in power. The quiet stripping away of our liberty is best prevented by a snarling wolf, or at least one who stands as fearless.

Tulsi has been in the military for sixteen years and in Congress for six. She’s had ample time to learn the ways of government. We have the opportunity to elect a president who places service over self, and sacrifice over adulation. She can show us how the government is supposed to serve the people and not abuse the flaws in the system for personal gain. Wouldn’t it be a strange feeling to be proud of our government? One hopes Tulsi appreciates another of Nietzsche’s hopes. “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful.”

Two Hands

What do we really want from our candidates? Do we want more platitudes, analgesic handouts, salves on our wounded psyches, or do we want honesty? Do we want a dictum that tells us it’s going to be hard before it gets better?

It’s the right time in our history to listen to Tulsi Gabbard. She will bring a perspective never before experienced in the Oval Office. Apart from the obvious fact of her gender, she will view the country and the presidency through the lenses of both an outsider, a Pacific Islander, as well as one who has operated long enough among the military and political elite to know how the cards are shuffled. Too many politicians have a penchant for ignoring the DC rackets. They distract us with an imaginary future while pledging that this time, a change is gonna come. It never does.

We can’t all go to Washington. We must rely on proxies like Tulsi, an insider who can tell us the game is rigged but is still willing to flip a few tables. What strikes her audience most when she speaks is her tone: sincere, resonant, and smart. She’s a measured orator. She doesn’t yell punchlines to get applause.

“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.” -Arthur Ashe

To rule with two hands, strength and compassion, one pressing against the other, is how we are lifted up. Tulsi is the leader with two hands: the soldier and the surfer; the individual and the spouse; the islander and the American; teammate and commander.

This is the reason America needs to listen to Tulsi Gabbard. From the time she was young, she has served her community, served her country and now wants to serve the people of the United States in her desire to “bend the arc of history away from war,” to redirect the camber of American destiny toward peace and honor.

There is something captivating about her unique combination of serenity and strength. I saw Tulsi in New York City on June 08. When she spoke of losing friends in Iraq in 2005, there was a slight but audible choke in her voice, as though she hasn’t quite become accustomed to speaking publicly about dead friends. Fourteen years after they were killed in a pointless war, they still have names. They are not statistics. Tulsi won’t become a proponent of unprovoked war just to ingratiate herself with the profiteers.

“You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.” — James Baldwin

Tulsi has absorbed malice from multiple fronts, including from her own party, but she’s not afraid to stand alone and take responsibility for her actions. This is just the kind of individualism Americans used to champion, the kind that made us proud to be one country, one people with many faces. It’s time to set a new course, in waters that may not always be calm, but with a commander in chief that knows the sea, we can be as proud of the voyage as we will be of our journey’s end.