(I goofed, thinking that the "Save" button did not post my blog and that I'd be able to edit the piece. Here is the remainder of my blog.)

Take for instance ex-GOP operative, Allen Raymond. He thought little of jamming the phone lines on behalf of Steve Forbes so that the opposition couldn't get out the vote. He's a sleaze ball, right? Actually, he's a mixed bag. He felt okay about jamming the phone lines, but when he was asked to lie about it, his conscience kicked in. He explained that he had been trying to teach his kids to be honest and that he just couldn't bring himself to set a bad example for them. So he bit the bullet and was convicted and went to jail.

Okay, so he's not pure case. (He doesn't fit the stereotype. Uhh, nobody does.) What about a guy I know who beat up people on the street "for fun." He liked seeing them suffer. He seems obviously to be a pure case of a sociopath. Not really. For one thing, after he recovered from a life of crime, he started having flashbacks to a time when he completely pulverized a stranger. The victim's bloody face kept haunting him; he was filled with horrific, ghoulish remorse.

When I told this story to a man who helped many parolees, he said, "That guy is just, well, evil; he's beyond anything I've ever seen." I argued, "But he was brutalized." This experienced man argued back, "I don't believe he could've been that tortured."

I related the sociopath's story. From age 7 through 15, his older brother would periodically hogtie (tie his arms to his ankles behind his back) him, pick him up like a package, and throw him against the wall. So it makes sense to say that he was not inherently evil. He was doing what was done to him. Or, put in more precise empathic terms, he was "acting out" rage at his brother, at anyone who had the slightest resemblence to his brother. He was an out of control person, not a determined purveyor of destruction. He didn't choose to be bad. He was in the grip of torment that he nothing about and, therefore, could not possibly have control over.

I know that it's more difficiult to imagine that a well-heeled, educated person like Karl Rove, the King of Sleaze, can be empathically understood. For one thing, the degree of damage he's done is beyond anything that we can imagine, just as the damage done by other bald-faced liars and mongers of sleaze, Bush, Cheney, et al was immense. What possibly in their backgrounds could account for the destruction they've done?

We know something of Bush's background. In Bush On the Couch, a psychiatrist helps us begin to glimpse how Bush is more like the violent bully captured above than different than him. To begin with, his grandfather, Prescott, used to unmercifully beat Bush's father. The effects of that devastating abuse were never addressed and so remained in force during our current president's childhood.

When Bush was a toddler, the most beloved person in his life was his older sister. She contracted a terminal illness, but his parents didn't tell him. When she died in a distant city, Barbara and her husband spent the rest of the day playing golf. They didn't tell Bush for a while. This gross inhumanity had to help make Bush into a deeply troubled person who could only act out his pain and suffering on others. You can reasonably extrapolate from this incident to a climate of inhumanity throughout his formative years. His well-documented alcoholism, lying and manipulativeness are widely recognized signs of gross abuse. Moreover, in his adult years, the unholy pressure on him in his family of origin and in their wing of the Republican party was immense. Imagine a deeply troubled, confused man being pressured on threat of total humiliation to do the things that Bush has done in office.

Why create empathic pictures of people we can't stand? The point is that we're locked in a culture war with some radical folks who are amazingly destructive. It seems that the degradating ways we characterize them must at the very least only add to their destructiveness. On a much less intense note, think about how the degradation heaped on the Right by the Left helps account for the fury and depth of commitment with which the Right has attacked and tried to marginalize the Left. The point is that if we really want to affect these people, we have to understand them accurately. There's no solving our culture war if we don't.

Obama's all about bringing people together to solve our problems. He wants to solve our most influential conflicts. So far, his most profoundly empathic statement came in his speech on race in Philadelphia. He allowed that blue collar folks who have been marginalized and put down during the rise of race consciousness are understandable. Their anger (their prejudicial statements) are only human reactions to difficult circumstances. He can go much further down this empathic road as he assumes the Presidency and tries to create broader coalitions.

He can help us to reach for deeper, more profound understanding and constructive dealings with the people who threaten to undermine us. His temptation is to pursue legal action, which may be the only means to get them to face what they are doing long enough to tap into their caring and remorse, as the Republican operative, the phone jammer, did. But he should use his world-wide pulpit to ply the power of empathy.  

He can say things like, "For understandable reasons, some campaginers have made desperate choices. Their desperation is understandable. I feel it too. There's just so much pressure we all feel to take responsibility for the terrible, threatening problems that confront us. We each think that we know the way, and we're afraid that, if we don't go the right way, all hell will break loose. We believe so strongly in our methods that we do desperate things, things we later regret. The least we can do is to try to understand this predicament that all of us are in rather than put each other down for doing desperate things that hurt people. Experience shows that understanding and compassion are more powerful than any threats."