Bill Bradley's The New American Story (2007, Random House)
doesn't look too bad. Bradley ran for president in 2000, losing
the Democratic nomination to Al Gore. He left the Senate. Got a
job as a banker. He seems to be a lot happier, probably because
he feels more productive. But he also wants to remind us that he
wouldn't have been bad as a president. This is basically a policy
compendium. It might be viewed as a campaign book, but coming from
a non-candidate it's just grist for the mill. He contrasts his
"new story" against Bush's "old story," trying to tempt someone
else to take his thinking up. For the most part it's pretty sound,
although it's couched in conventional rhetoric which sometimes
gets in the way. As a born Republican turned Democrat he still
tries to cultivate a bipartisan consensus where none is possible.
Later I read Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, which is
a much better book -- more focused, more coherent -- but still
carries too many platitudes of American political propriety. I
would have found few things more improbable in 2000 that that
I'd wind up reading two books by presidential contenders seven
years hence. Of course, they're not contenders any more. They're
clearly too smart, too principled, too decent to stomach another
run.
I marked a lot of quotes, and wrote more than usual about them --
partly because they needed to be argued with, partly because they
served as convenient launch pads.
The opening to a section on terrorism (p. 32):
Another problem with the story we are told about our role in the
world is that we have declared a war on terrorism but have been given
no clear definition of terrorism. Any repressive regime, from Egypt to
Kazakhstan, is thus free to label its domestic critics as terrorists
and ruthlessly suppress them, all the while justifying internal
persecution by declaring itself America's "ally" in the "war on
terror." Vagueness is often useful in diplomacy; it is disastrous in
defining a national doctrine. We call the opponents of unfriendly
regimes (such as Iran) "freedom fighters." The domestic opponents of
our authoritarian allies (such as Saudi Arabia) are "terrorists." Our
rhetoric is all about democracy, but our actions suggest that we are
quite comfortable with authoritarian regimes. This flagrant
inconsistency damages our credibility around the world and provides
support to those who charge us with hypocrisy.
On Iraq (pp.35-36):
Finally, toppling Saddam Hussein was supposed to give us a friendly
government in control of the second-largest proven oil reserves in the
world, so that when supply was tight we could get it to pump more oil,
thereby moderating prices. In fact the war and the insurgency have
caused oil production to drop below prewar levels, creating the
largest cumulative oil disruption since World War II -- bigger even
than the drop during the Iranian revolution of 1979 or the
nationalization of Iran's oil fields in the 1950s. What will the
widening civil war in Iraq produce for America, other than lost
soldiers, lost wealth, and lost respect in the world?
It seems we've fallen into Al Qaeda's trap. Fouad Hussein, a
Jordanian journalist, described in a 2005 book Al Qaeda's twenty-year
plan to dominate a part of the world stretching from Spain to
Indonesia. An early phase of the plan envisions the United States
abandoning, as an Al Qaeda manual says, "its war against Islam by
proxy" and going to war with a Muslim country in the region
directly. The following phase involves a confrontation between the
United States and Iran. In each phase, Hussein argues, Al Qaeda
believes it will benefit. By doing exactly what they expected us to
do, we've allowed the enemy to predict our actions and plan their
responses before we've even taken them. [ . . . ]
There is no evidence that our war planners ever considered the world
as it might look to our adversaries. The Iraq War is the most serious
foreign policy blunder I have seen in my lifetime.
Politics: Soft Power -- Hard Power (pp. 41-42):
For forty years it has been the policy of this country that the
final status of the West Bank should come out of negotiations between
Israel and the Palestinians without predetermining the boundaries. The
Bush administration abandoned this policy and explicitly promised
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that the borders of Israel and Palestine
established in any eventual peace settlement would not be the same as
those in 1967. The apparent reason for this policy shift was the need
to pander to the Christian right -- an important part of the
Republican Party's base -- which believes that God gave the land to
the Jews and that the Jews' return to the Christian holy land is the
necessary precursor to the conflict that will lead to the second
coming of Christ (which would mean, to these same religionists, the
eternal damnation of those Jews who choose not to accept Jesus as
their Lord and Savior). For loyal allies such as Tony Blair, who
forcefully supported the Iraq War but has sought a more evenhanded
policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, our defection was a stab
in the back.
An interesting aside (p. 42):
In 1992, I sponsored a law creating the largest student exchange
program in history between the United States and the countries of the
former Soviet Union. By 2003, when I attended the tenth anniversary of
that program in Kiev, more than 14,000 high school juniors
[ . . . ] had lived a year with an American
family. [ . . . ] The most striking thing about
the 400 kids who came to Kiev as representatives of the 14,000 was
what they recalled about their stay in America. They were impressed by
our material abundance, our democracy, and our popular culture, but it
was the nonprofit sector that inspired them. It was eye-opening to them
that citizens would raise money and create organizations to help
strangers with no expectation of getting something back for
themselves. After returning home, many of these young people had
raised money and started their own organizations.
Each section ends with a laundry list of recommended policies, like
this one, called "Our Special American Role" (p. 54):
- America must lead by the power of its example, with the
realization that imitation by others will be more successful than
intimidation of others.
- We must recognize that most of the twenty-first century's major
challenges require international cooperation and then build the means
to achieve it.
- We must use talk before action, diplomacy before war.
- We must maintain our military through investment in high-tech
weapons, intelligence resources, and training of military
personnel.
- We must continue the war on terrorism together with our allies but
end the war in Iraq. Given the history of Iraq and the nature of the
conflict, leaving has fewer long-term downsides than staying.
Actually, the one I marked was #4, which reflexively clung to
armed forces that wouldn't be necessary if the first three points
were followed, and would ultimately be dangerously subversive of
them. The last point is also flawed, both in its notion that Iraq's
big problem is its past (as opposed, e.g., to us) and in its naive
notion that war is an answer to terrorism.
On consumption vs. savings (p. 58):
Consumption now represents 71 percent of the U.S. gross domestic
product, and savings 1 percent. The Chinese, by contrast, have a
consumption rate of only 38 percent of GDP, a personal savings rate of
35 percent, and a fixed-investment rate of 48 percent, compared with
America's fixed-investment rate of 17 percent. We fill our homes with
flat-panel TV screens, MP3 players, and computerized refrigerators;
they fill their bank accounts with U.S. Treasure bonds. In essence,
the Chinese manufacture our products and do our savings. They save
more of their salaries. We borrow, to consume more of their goods. It
is a virtuous circle -- for them. They get jobs. We get debt.
I'm always suspicious of preaching about how we need to drive the
savings rate up -- usually this cloaks a scheme to concentrate capital.
If savings is deferred consumption, one would expect them to balance
out in the end, or even to start drawing down on excess savings --
there's not much point saving more than you can possibly use. While
the savings ratios look bad in the US, there actually doesn't seem
to be all that much of a problem getting capital to invest. The fact
that stocks and whole companies are commonly sold at inflated prices
even suggests that there's more capital chasing assets than is actually
needed to satisfy current consumption levels.
Clinton and Bush on taxes and deficits (pp. 59-60):
Clinton's 1993 budget was unusual in that not one Republican voted
for it. They claimed that the tax package would stop investment and
short-circuit the incipient recovery from the 1990-91 economic
downturn that had claimed Bush I's presidency. Instead, the economy
entered a period of sustained growth, with business investment leading
the way. By 1997, the deficit had shrunk from $290 billion, which is
where it was when Clinton took office, to $22 billion. By 2000, there
was a $236 billion surplus. With no need to finance a budget deficit,
the surplus made more capital available to the private sector, and net
national investment rose to a level it hadn't reached since the
1970s. The result was robust economic growth, and because of the
expansion of the earned income credit, which aids low-income working
families, the growth was more fairly shared. For the first time in
twenty-five years, weekly wages rose. Poverty decreased. In many ways,
this budget was Bill Clinton's finest hour.
In 2001, George W. Bush assumed the presidency and immediately
proceeded to squander the surplus. After 9/11, people wanted money
spent on the war on terror -- but they wanted money spent on education
and health care, too. Bush obliged, but he also insisted on three big
tax cuts. By 2004, the deficit was $412 billion, the largest share of
our national income sine 1993. The Congressional Budget Office
reported that during Bush's first term, from January 2001 to January
2005, the budget went from a ten-year projected surplus of $5.6
trillion to a projected deficit of $2.6 trillion. The tax cuts
accounted for half the swing. (The March 2006 ten-year projection,
from 2007 through 2016, was for a $3.4 trillion deficit.)
A footnote (p. 63):
To ensure that globalization and technological change produce the
maximum level of fairly shared economic growth, the government must
create what I called in a 1993 speech "an economic security platform,"
providing health care for all; pension security; and a flexible
education system with dramatic improvement in K-12 school performance,
more high school graduates going on to college (especially in math and
science), and innovative programs to offer retraining and education to
people displaced by globalization or technological change.
A paean to economic growth (p.70 ):
Economic growth can indeed generate arising standard of living for
most Americans. A rising standard of living fosters tolerance. If
middle-class Americans are doing well, government efforts to help the
poor don't bother them. If economic growth enables upward mobility,
all Americans become optimists. Economic growth gives us the resources
to educate our children, guarantee a secure retirement for our
elderly, provide health care for everyone. With growth, we can afford
most public goals; without it, those goals compete with one another
for limited resources, and the country becomes a meaner place. In long
economic downturns, racists and xenophobes have a field day.
Bradley buys into the Star Wars myth (p. 71):
One reason the Soviet Union fell was that its economy, with prices
controlled by bureaucrats and corruption rife, couldn't produce the
growth to support the large increases in military expenditures
necessary to match U.S. technological advances. In this sense,
President Reagan's Star Wars project and military buildup helped to
bankrupt the Soviet state. Some on the left say that our own economy
is propped up by what President Eisenhower termed the
military-industrial complex. The truth is the opposite. The military
economy sits atop the basic-research economy, the
technological-development economy, and the adequate-capital-investment
economy of our country.
This is nonsense several times over. Star Wars didn't bankrupt the
Soviets, partly because they didn't take the bait and develop the MIRV
systems, which they had on the drawing board, that would have overwhelmed
any possible missile defense -- and arguably pushed the US to spend even
more. The idea that the US could bankrupt the Soviet Union by pursuing
an arms race goes back to the '50s -- Nelson Rockefeller was a pusher.
It might have had more effect back then, as the Soviets under Kruschev
were in a more competitive frame of mind. But for the most part, the
Soviets were satisfied simply to be able to deter a US first strike.
From the 1970s on the arms race was mostly a matter of the US psyching
itself out, which became all the more obvious once the Soviet Union
gave up the ghost. The only country the US is bankrupting with arms
races these days is itself.
I suppose one might argue whether US arms spending, which currently
matches or exceeds the rest of the world combined, is a matter of
Keynesian force-feeding or simply a case of political graft. But
it's hard to see it as a side-effect of basic research, technology
development, or private investment. Up through the 1970s one might
argue the opposite -- that military spending promoted those things,
with the Internet a particularly successful example -- but after
Star Wars took over military technology spending went into a stupid
phase where it seems to be permanently stuck.
Here's Bradley's economic plan (pp. 85-86):
- Continue to invest in science and technology -- basic research and
development -- in the public and private sectors alike.
- Provide free tuition up to $12,000 (the average tuition cost for a
four-year public college) for any high school student int he top third
of his or her graduating class, and more generous incentives for math,
science, engineering, and foreign-language students in both
undergraduate and graduate studies.
- Reduce the federal budget deficit.
- Reform the income tax code to provide lower rates, fewer
loopholes, and more revenue.
- Impose a $1 per gallon gasoline tax or the equivalent in energy or
pollution taxes and then offset either one by a reduction in
employment taxes such as those for Social Security, Medicare, or
unemployment insurance.
- Raise the age threshold for receiving Social Security and the
income threshold for paying into it, bring new state and local
employees into the system, and change the way the annual
cost-of-living adjustment is calculated.
- Make Medicare changes as a part of overall health care reform by
offering choices to the elderly and creating competition on outcomes
and prices among the providers, recognizing that, absent reform, the
only alternatives would be some combination of increased premiums on
Medicare recipients, higher taxes on working Americans, and reduction
of benefits for recipients.
- Reduce defense spending by 10 percent.
- Reduce farm subsidies for the wealthiest 3 percent of farmers.
- Control budget earmarks, or cut them outright.
- Cut corporate subsidies by 30 percent.
- Help working families.
- Increase the earned income tax credit.
- Increase the minimum wage.
- Regulate hedge funds.
- Require all hedge funds that manage pension fund money to come
under federal ERISA regulation.
- Force hedge-fund managers to register with the Securities and
Exchange Commission so that authorities would at least know who they
are in the event of a financial crisis.
- Make changes in tax administration and budget rules.
- Have the IRS fill out tax returns for those with only wage and/or
1099 income and no itemized deductions, thereby saving taxpayers the
cost of tax preparation.
- Cut tax fraud in half by beefing up the IRS to go after the big
abusers.
- Return to the pay-as-you-go budget rules that existed in the
1990s.
- Put the entire federal budget on the Internet, with keyword
accessibility.
There are some good ideas in that list. The one that I red-flagged
was the 10% military budget cut: can't you do better than that? The
US military budget has grown from ridiculous up more than 40% since
Bush took office. The corporate subsidies, agriculture supports, and
earmarks may be as wasteful but are far less dangerous. I also have
to wonder about Bradley's skinflint approach to Social Security. The
trend in Europe, for instance, has been toward lower retirement age,
not higher. That seems like a preferable direction, one that should
not be dismissed out of hand because it's easier to balance the books
on the backs of the elderly.
On debt risk (pp. 86-87):
If we fail to take steps to increase our national savings, reduce
systematic financial risk, and generate broad-based economic growth,
there is a collision waiting to happen between us and the Chinese. As
noted, we send them dollars by buying their exports, and they buy
U.S. government debt with that money. Right now, they own more than
$300 billion of very-low-interest U.S. government debt and nearly
another $700 billion in corporate and quasi-government debt. At some
point they will seek a higher return, at first by diversifying, not
out of dollar assets but among dollar assets: They will buy fewer
bonds and more stocks. They won't be satisfied with only portfolio
investment. They will want to buy companies -- as they tried to do in
2005 with the oil company Unocal. Congress will huff and puff and
threaten. This time, the Chinese, tired of all the saber rattling over
Taiwan and trade deficits, will say, "Fine. You don't want our
money. We'll sell more of your bonds, even at a poor rate of return,
and put that money in euro- or yen-denominated assets, or even buy
gold, platinum, and diamonds." To argue that they would never do this
because selling off our Treasury bonds would reduce the return on
their investment is to ignore their fierce nationalism. What are a few
dollars, compared with national pride? Dubai and other Middle Eastern
countries, who are fed up with U.S. bullying over port deals,
accusations of shielding terrorists, and intractability on the
Israeli-Palestinian problem, will intensify the precariousness of our
position by selling some of their U.S. bonds, too. When these
countries begin selling U.S. government debt, the dollar will drop and
the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates to attract
non-Chinese, non-Middle Eastern capital. When interest rates go up,
many people will liquidate their real estate at low prices. With less
money, they will cut consumer spending, and nothing will replace
it. The recession will deepen. Bankruptcies and foreclosures will
rise, and we'll have a major economic crisis on our hands.
Oil and the environment (p. 106):
The new story points out that global warming is fundamentally an
air-pollution problem, and we have solved air-pollution problems
before, at less cost than anyone thought possible. Technological
advance has always given us pleasant surprises, once we decide as a
nation that we want to reduce a particular pollutant and set tough
regulations to achieve that reduction. In the 1960s, urban smog was a
major health threat. "Either we stop poisoning our air," President
Johnson warned when he signed the Air Quality Act of 1967, "or we
become a nation in gas masks groping our way through the dying
cities." Then the catalytic converter was invented, and smog dropped
by nearly 50 percent. The same was true for chlorofluorocarbons in the
1980s. Since we banned them, some studies show that the hole in the
ozone layer over Antarctica has begun to close. Acid rain has
decreased, too, because the credit-trading system of the 1990 Clean
Air Act Amendments gave companies profit inentives for pollution
reduction. Up to the tipping point, the environment is incredibly
resilient. There is no reason why we could not at least prevent global
warming from worsening. Author and lecturer Gregg Easterbrook, writing
in the September 2006 Atlantic, lamented that Democrats
minimize how solvable the problem of global warming is, while
Republicans exaggerate the cost of solving it and ignore the efficacy
of regulation.
Actually, I can think of several reasons why carbon dioxide levels
are different from other air pollution problems, starting with the
scale of use and how directly it is tied to fossil fuel energy use.
Just blithely saying new technology will solve the problem may be
baseless as well: technology operates within physical constraints
aren't necessarily amenable to our desires.
On health care (pp. 144):
Health care should be a right. But rights come with
responsibilities attached. Individuals must take responsibility for
their own health by how they behave. Two-thirds of adults in America
are overweight, in large part because they consume too much sugar and
too many trans fats and don't exercise. In the new story, your
employer tries to keep you healthy, because your health affects the
firm's productivity. Employers discourage unhealthy lifestyles and
reward people who exercise, get annual checkups, and lose excess
weight. Schools do away with vending machines that sell junk food,
require physical conditioning classes, and develop detailed health
education courses, including anti-drug education from the sixth grade
on. Learning the food groups is the beginning, but not the end, of
health instruction. If you still insist on unhealthy behavior, then
you'll be charged more for health insurance. Otherwise, the rest of us
pay more because of your bad habits.
I'll quote more, but I have to break here. It's not intuitively
obvious to me that the sorts of "bad behaviors" Bradley wants to
charge more for actually cost more in the long run to treat -- i.e.,
is there really a cost basis for such charges, or is it just part of
the American habit of punishing people who are out of fashion? I'm
not arguing that these behaviors have no effect on longevity, let
alone quality of life. But, to be blunt about it, if they kill you
sooner, doesn't that save all the expense of treating you later?
It seems more likely than not that those numbers wash out, unless
the cost of treatment keeps going up like it has been, in which
case it would be all the harder to argue that those who will die
sooner should pay more.
As for employers' interests in keeping employees healthy, there
is very little evidence that they care much about the long-term health
costs of their employees. One could try to tax them accordingly, but
that would be a pain, the data could take much too long to accumulate
to affect behavior, and it may very well wash out in the end, for the
same reasons mentioned above.
None of which argues that a good health care system shouldn't try
to focus more on preventive measure, on improving quality of life
and longevity. It's just that the reason for those things isn't cost
reduction; it's quality of service. It also positively reinforces
the integrity of the system: the idea, after all, is to provide good
quality health care, and everyone should be properly motivated to do
just that.
Continuing (p. 144):
The biggest driver of costs in American health care is advances in
medical technology. Pharmaceutical companies create markets for
expensive drugs, some of which are breakthrough drugs but many of
which are not. The same goes for medical devices, such as heart stents
or artificial knees. The marketing of devices, drugs, advanced
treatments, and even hospitals directly to the consumer often confuses
people. You used to leave it to your doctor to sort through these
claims, but now, because of the increase in malpractice suits, doctors
are often hesitant to respond to patients' inquiries. What is needed
is a quasi-federal agency, perhaps the National Academy of Sciences'
Institute of Medicine, that will determine which drugs, medical
devices, and new treatments are cost-effective. These items would have
to be covered in a minimum policy, but insurance companies could
always augment that coverage.
This starts off semi-true, but doesn't ask why advances in medical
technology drive costs upwards. After all, in areas like consumer
electronics the same sort of advances drive costs down. Medical
technology is different because of the nature of the market, and that
difference is powerfully amplified by government grants of patent
monopolies, especially for drugs. Eliminating patents would introduce
competition, which would reverse the cost spiral. The objection that
patents are required in order to get private enterprise to invest in
new breakthroughs can easily be overcome by public funding of research
and development. The latter has the advantage that it can be directed
at goals rather than profits; also that it allows competitive research
based on common knowledge, and subject to common scrutiny. The huge
marketing costs under the current system can be offset by underwriting
independent groups to transparently evaluate technologies and treatments
and inform professionals and the public of their unbiased findings.
The resulting system would be something the current system is not:
scam proof. The results should not only be much more cost-effective;
they should be qualitatively better.
Continuing (pp. 144-145):
To make our new story a reality requires acceptance of several
simple principles. First, the focus of the system should be on quality
of care for the patient. Second, it must be mandatory for all
Americans to have health insurance; low income cannot be an acceptable
barrier. Third, individuals must do their part to stay well and not
overutilize the system. Fourth, individuals, should retain some choice
over the kind of coverage they receive. Fifth, recurring costs should
be reduced, not shifted. Sixth, specific national goals should be set
that improve health outcomes, such as slashing the number of medical
errors in hospitals, reducing infant mortality, lowering the number of
sick days at work, combatting obesity and diabetes, filing fewer
lawsuits, and providing better information to prospective patients
about which doctors and hospitals do what well and where they are.
Bradley's biggest problem here is that he's trying to keep some role
for private insurance carriers when they are little more than parasites
that are directly responsible for most of the system's problems, starting
with spiraling costs and spreading to denial of treatment, inequitable
treatment, and mistreatment. Actually, the problem is deeper than that:
it derives from the notion that health care should be a profit-driven
industry. The insurance companies are merely the worst offenders here,
because they -- unlike doctors, hospitals, even the big pharmaceutical
companies -- bring nothing worthwhile to the table. (Their strongest
claim is to act as a brake against "overutilization," but quite frankly
treatment itself is a pretty effective disincentive against unnecessary
system use.)
Bradley then goes into commonsense things like electronic medical
records, then goes on to errors (pp. 145-146):
The most important initial step we should tke to improve the
quality of our health care is to adopt a goal of zero medical
errors. Medical errors annually cost all of us billions of dollar in
corrective health costs, higher insurance premiums, and unnecessary
human suffering. The number of people dying in American hospitals from
medical errors is the equivalent of a 747 airplane crashing every day
of the year. The system catches only 1 percent of medication errors,
and the hospital infection rate has been growing for decades, to the
point where it now affects one out of twelve people admitted to
U.S. hospitals. As a nation, we should regard such a situation as
intolerable. To ameliorate it, we should start by holding hospital CEOs
and heads of medicine responsible for developing data collection that
will reveal the patterns of mistakes in their hospitals; only then can
a system be developed that will prevent such errors from
recurring.
It's not that Bradley doesn't understand the advantages of a
single-payer system; he offers it as one of two options (pp. 150-151):
The simplest would be Medicare for All. It could be phased in by
first establishing Medicare for children, followed by Medicare for
people with incomes under $50,000, and then Medicare for everyone else
who remained uncovered. Once everyone was in this single-payer
system,t he aforementioned cost shifts would end. All citizens would
have the same benefits and payment schedule. Advertising and marketing
costs, which now amount to about 5 percent of health care costs, could
be eliminated. Duplicate hospital facilities could be
eliminated. Administrative costs would be slashed. The 15 percent
administrative costs of the current private system, resulting from the
bureaucratic tug-of-war between hospitals and doctors on one side and
insurance companies on the other, would come to match the 1.5 percent
administrative costs of Medicare. Doctors would spend less time
battling insurance companies and more time treating patients. The
coverage would be easy for people to understand. Businesses would no
longer be burdened with paying open-ended health care costs for their
workers; they could then hire more workers at better pay and become
more competitive internationally. People would no longer have to stay
in jobs they didn't like just to keep health coverage for their
families. Government would have leverage in bargaining for lower costs
with doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies. The crazy quilt
of government tax subsidies, aimed at getting the private sector to
serve the public interest through employer-paid health care, could be
redirected to paying the health care bills for those who need
help. Medicare for All would complete what everyone from Harry Truman
to Bill Clinton has tried to do.
The other path is touted as "conservative means (vouchers) to
achieve liberal ends (universal coverage)." Bradley concludes
(p. 152):
The single-payer system, in which the government pays for everyone
to have a basic health care plan, seems simplest and most effective to
me, but a hybrid approach that uses conservative means to achieve
liberal goals and embraces value-based medicine has the best change to
become law and assures the most innovation.
On education (p. 171):
In the new story, the federal Department of Education becomes an
action-oriented organization that deploys SWAT teams of experts to
districts that request help on a wide range of issues: the
introduction of innovative curricula, the creation of a self-motivated
school culture, response to the unique challenges faced by a majority
of non-English-speaking students. The employees of this reconstituted
Department of Education are less like bureaucrats and more like
Marines. To buttress efforts at the federal level, regional
consortiums of schools will be established, so that schools can share
their experience and best practices with one another. If we can put
men on the moon, surely by the seventh grade our students ought to be
technologically savvy, sound in math, reading, and science, proficient
in at least one foreign language, aware of our history, and motivated
to broaden their knowledge and skills in high school.
Else what? The Marines will introduce them to waterboarding?
Sometimes the human brain is a truly scary thing. Next paragraph
the fantasy flowers even further (p. 171):
In the new story, teaching will become one of the nation's most
popular professions. With more freedom to do what they really want to
do, teachers will thrive. College graduates will see elementary and
secondary school teaching as a rewarding career, with sufficient pay
-- one in which they can have a profound impact on other people's
lives. Teaching will become a prestigious profession of meaning once
again.
On the previous page, he at least started with more manageable
goals, like "In the new story, teachers will know the names of all
their students." Even that may be pushing it. The problem isn't that
we shouldn't dream; the problem is that the actual trend is getting
worse. Given that, what's needed first of all is an effort to stop
the decline. This has to start with putting a credible positive
value on better education, and that has to start in the real world.
Even the lip service there reduces to "get an education so you can
make more money," which reduces to credentialism -- especially when
you see putatively successful morons with degrees like GW Bush.
In a section called "Media and Spin" (pp. 213-214):
Public relations techniques have come to dominate the nexus of
public policy and politics. As a lobbyist I know once said, "My job is
not to tell the truth, it's to tell my client's story. It's the
press's job to determine if it's true." To the masters of spin, it
doesn't make a difference what the truth is; they can create their own
truth. If something is unpleasant, just deny it or muddy the
waters. If you get pushed to the wall, just lie. The press will report
the lie anyways, because they need opposing views on every issue. For
example, as Paul Krugman pointed out in his July 28, 2006, New York
Times column, Edward Lazear, the chairman of the Council of
Economic Advisers, said the following about the Bush tax cuts: "The
tax cuts have made the tax code more progressive and reduced income
inequality." The opposite is true. By simply reporting a lie often
enough, you create an impression of truth, especially in the absence
of a countervailing story. But many point-counterpoint television
shows simply result in shouting matches. Fairness and truth go out the
window. Often it is two on one -- the moderator and the conservative
against the liberal, or vice versa, depending on the cable
channel. Given the twenty-four-hour news cycle and cable television's
need for ever more material, having two politicians yelling at each
other is a cheap way to fill airtime.
Political spin has gotten so bad that many people can't tell what
the truth is. They eventually decide that both sides are lying, and
they begin to think of the media simply as the pipe through which the
lies flow.
On the Republicans (chapter title: "Why Republicans Can't")
(pp. 223-224):
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Republicans became the
party of William McKinley and his political guru, Mark Hanna, a man
deeply admired by George W. Bush's chief political strategist, Karl
Rove. Rove was fond of saying that the model for the 2000 presidential
election was 1896, the year McKinley defeated the populist Democrat
William Jennings Bryan. McKinley and Hanna won in 1896 by agreeing to
turn the party over to business. Economic power became more and more
concentrated. Lip service was paid to those who worked in the mines
and factories, but little was done to balance the clout of private
capital. In the American West during that era, these business
interests violated vast areas of land, cutting down forests,
extracting minerals, and draining rivers for irrigation. In the East,
industrial and financial powers exploited their workers with impunity:
Child labor, thirteen-hour days, dangerous workplaces, and meager pay
were the rule.
Actually, those things were worse before McKinley, but in retrospect
McKinley -- rather than Democrat Grover Cleveland -- has become the
gold standard for Republicans wishing to dismantle the New Deal. What
McKinley can be credited with is introducing an active, interventionist,
imperialist foreign policy, of which the 1898 Spanish-American War is
the prime, but by no means the only, example. That's no doubt something
else Rove digs about him.
On the Republicans' crony politics (p. 240):
With this mind-set, it's understandable why, when [the Republicans]
control government, they appoint cronies instead of competent
professionals to head government agencies -- one prominent example
being FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in charge of
responding to natural disasters such as hurricanes. To Republicans,
who have very little respect for government, these jobs connote
patronage, not responsibility. Unable to abolish government agencies,
they turn them over to advocates of the very industries they are
supposed to regulate. The current administration is loaded with
lobbyists who now "regulate" the industries for which they formerly
lobbied and for which they will lobby once again, after they're out of
government. One imagines that, when they return to their old jobs,
bonuses will await them for their loyal work on the inside.
On Clinton's adjustments to the Republican coalition, previously
broken down into the categories listed below (p. 246):
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton, in an act of political genius, defanged
nearly the whole Republican coalition by co-opting issues they had
used against the Democrats. He trumped the Main Streeters by running a
budget surplus, the racemongers by instituting welfare reform, the
crime busters by increasing aid to local police and supporting the
death penalty, the realists by holding defense spending steady, the
messianists by going into Kosovo, the libertarians by opposing
government interference with abortion rights, the subsidists by
leaving their sweetheart deals intact, the liberals by asking them to
join him in a streamlined government constituted to solve problems,
and the corporatists by pushing free trade and allowing an
unprecedented consolidation of corporate power through massive mergers
and acquisitions. Republicans -- with the exception of the now
ascendant fundamentalists and supply-siders -- had little to
criticize, because Clinton was doing what they had long advocated, but
in his own way.
But the Republicans did nothing but criticize, pushing Clinton
further and pounding him for not going far enough -- indeed, not
giving him credit for doing their own dirty work. And while his
personal popularity remained strong enough, he did nothing to rebuild
his party, because he wound up standing not for the people who voted
for him but for their opponents. In the end he proved that it is
possible to run a more competent Republican administration, especially
compared to his successor. To call this "genius" is very strange.
On the political superiority of Republicans (p. 259):
I have a friend who knows one of the Republican Party's most
prodigious fund-raisers. In a candid moment one night over dinner, the
fund-raiser confided to my friend that Republicans didn't have the
issues to reach the majority of Americans and get their votes. To win,
he said, they ran smarter campaigns than the Democrats: They raised
more money, exerted more discipline on their candidates, conveyed a
clearer message. They used the most advanced private-sector
data-mining skills to target their messages at the precinct level and
built grassroots organizations that pulled those voters to the
polls. He cited the example of the fundamentalist Christians in
southern Ohio, who dramatically increased their turnout between 2000
and 2004. Republicans also use state referenda in election years to
get out their vote. In November 2004, eleven states (including Ohio)
put state constitutional amendments opposing gay marriage on the
ballot. The action served two purposes: It was a skillful diversionary
tactic -- let's talk about gays, not about jobs or health care -- and
a way to get out the vote, since those who trooped to the polls to
vote against gay marriage would doubtless also vote
Republican. Republicans have become masters at using culture as a
wedge, by raising emotional but peripheral issues such as the death
penalty, gun control, gay marriage, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ten
Commandments -- all in an attempt to draw a contrast between
themselves and Democrats that favors them with targeted
populations. All of these techniques explain why Republicans,
according to political analyst Michael Barone, have dominated 97 of
the 100 fastest growing counties in the country, and they are also why
many of the party's big fund-raisers believe the debacle of 2006 was
just an anomaly.
This isn't really news. What might be news would be to detail the
issues the Republicans don't talk about because they know they're
losing issues.
Last chapter is "Why Democrats Don't", which lists "The Eight
Democratic Curses" (pp. 285-304, just the heads):
The first curse on the Democratic Party is its fear of
thinking big. When Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve, he
was thinking bit. When FDR established Social Security, he was
thinking big. When LBJ set up Medicare, he was thinking big. We seem
to live in a time when the smaller the idea, the bigger the
hype. [ . . . ]
The second curse is our capitulation in the face of the
Republican charge that we are soft on
defense. [ . . . ]
The third curse is our inability to counter the persistent
accusation that we waste people's hard-earned tax
dollars. [ . . . ]
The fourth Democratic curse is the impression we have created
of a closed-minded devotion to the
secular. [ . . . ]
The fifth curse is wealth
bashing. [ . . . ]
The sixth curse is the curse of our special friends. It
relates to certain members of the Democratic coalition itself:
teachers, trial lawyers, and
autoworkers. [ . . . ]
The seventh curse is that Democrats have ceased to take a
strong stand on principle. The abolitionists, the progressives,
the civil rights activists, and even some of the early
environmentalists were willing to take a public policy stand that was
rooted in a moral view of the world and based on individual
conviction. [ . . . ]
The Democrats' final curse is that we are hypnotized by
charisma. Ever since JFK's Camelot, Democrats have been looking
for a leader whose very presence would ensure the nation's
primacy. [ . . . ]
Actually, Bradley has a better explanation for what's wrong the the
Democrats, although he doesn't clearly identify it as wrong. Backing
up a bit (pp. 275-276):
The modern Democratic Party has, in effect, a second father. He was
a Republican -- Ronald Reagan. Reagan cast a broad shadow, and many
Democrats ran from it. His political journey was a long one: In the
1940s he was an FDR Democrat; i the 1960s he became a Goldwater
conservative and advocated a smaller federal government. Still, Reagan
often alluded to FDR in his speeches and, in a unique bit of political
jujitsu, claimed the Roosevelt mantle even as he tried to destroy the
New Deal's achievements.
After Reagan won in 1980 and nine Democratic senators were defeated,
giving control of the Senate to the Republicans, Democrats lost not
just their confidence but some of their convictions as well. Indeed,
their pro-government stance of the previous forty-eight years was said
to be the cause of the party's defeat. Ronald Reagan had tapped into
the anxiety that many taxpayers felt about the nature of the federal
bureaucracy, portraying it as too big, too intrusive, and too
wasteful. A kind of Democratic panic ensued. It was as if "government"
had become a bad word. Republicans had successfully defined the
political moment, and we Democrats increasingly sought to be
Republican lite. At the time, few of us seemed to understand the depth
of our party's problem. "In politics," the late political scientist
David Green wrote in The Language of Politics in America: Shaping
Political Consciousness from McKinley to Reagan, "real
intellectual victory is achieved not by transmitting one's language to
supporters but by transmitting it to critics." When you adopt your
opponents' definition of the situation, including their premises and
even some of their substantive analysis, effective opposition becomes
difficult. By 1984, when former vice president Walter Mondale ran,
Democrats were no longer in control of the dialogue.
The Democratic Party's reaction to Ronald Reagan shaped a
generation of Democratic politicians, as we sought to differentiate
ourselves from both Reagan and FDR -- Reagan because he was a
Republican and FDR because he was a "big spender." Instead of creating
something new that was true to our origins, we tried to split the
difference between the legacy of FDR and the political potency of
Reagan.
This split, of course, was surrender, both as a matter of tactics
and principle. What Bradley doesn't say is that Reagan's Revolution was
the biggest crock in American history. The only thing that Reagan changed
in America was our perception of reality, which became hopelessly (or
was it haplessly?) distorted and perverted -- decline presented as New
Morning. The 1984 presidential debates were revelatory: Reagan and Mondale
might has well have come from different planets. When the voters chose
Reagan, they abandoned Earth. Ever since then the central theme of US
politics has been flattering the public and promising them favors. Some
Democrats enjoyed some success doing that, but when the unattended or
actively denied decline finally caught up with us they were clueless.
And in the end, clueless realists were unpersuasive against rhapsodic
fantasists -- at least as far as 2004 went.
Bradley's lecture against "wealth bashing" (pp. 297-298):
Many of the wealthy are as angry as populists are with those
Americans who get rich not because of their genius or hard work but
because of their political connections or bloodlines. They feel such
unearned advantage demeans the efforts of the self-made person who has
built a career from scratch. Inherited wealth is not intrinsically
evil; it depends on what you do with it. Some build on the previous
generation's success and deserve our praise. More than a few good
companies became great companies because a son or daughter took the
parental vision to a new level. You should have the right to pass
along what you've earned to your children and those you love, up to a
point. Democrats should propose reform of the estate tax but
not its repeal.
Reform is a pretty vague word; we should greatly increase the
estate tax. The occasional poster boy for nepotism, like Thomas
Watson Jr. (IBM), hardly justifies letting a hereditary oligarchy
establish itself, diminishing the opportunities of others and
disconnecting wealth from accomplishment. Indeed, the basic idea
of unbounded personal wealth is something we should be suspicious
of. As we move closer to exhausting the earth's limited resources,
we would be better off if people accepted the notion that there
is some level at which one is well off enough.
Bradley's appreciation of estates may have been something he
inherited along with the proverbial silver spoon, but rather
than follow in his father's footsteps, he set a pretty good
example of someone who created his success on his own merits.
It would be impossible to take all of the advantages away from
the children of the rich, but a stiff estate tax starts to make
the point that people should rise or fall on their own merits.
If that's good enough for the poor, it's the least we can expect
from the rich.
On campaign tactics (p. 306):
As a party, we need a much greater investment in the technical
aspects of campaigning: database management, branding exercises, and
other business practices that Republicans long ago mastered. We need
to develop our own wedge issues to split the Republican camp, just as
they used race, gay marriage, and abortion to split ours. Budgets for
marketing must be as robust in off years as in election years. We need
to respond to people's beliefs about themselves and their communities,
not simply enter debates with the idea of showing that our candidate
is the brightest kid in the classroom. We need to contest Republicans
on the twinned issues of patriotism and personal freedom. We need to
castigate them for what they've done to the deficit, to the
environment, to our standing in the world.
A promising wedge issue could be something as ubiquitous as the
weather. We should go into the Republican congressional districts that
have been hard-hit by hurricanes, floods, or droughts. We should
assert that climate change has contributed to these natural
disasters. We should then dredge up all the Republican congressmen's
statements denying the existence of climate change, reveal the
campaign contributions they got from interests that benefit from our
continued addiction to fossil fuels, and then ask them to explain how
refusing to act on climate change serves the national interest. We
should bring the global to the local.
A more promising wedge issue would be war and empire: at least
some Republicans are latent isolationists, but try to find a Democrat
who could appeal to them. Personal liberties is another, but try to
find a Democrat who's willing to tackle drug prohibition. If you
want to break the "big government" habit, start with where it is
biggest: the police state and the military-industrial complex. All
the things that Democrats nominally believe in are compromised by
supporting those things, but still Democrats fall into rhetorical
traps which work against their interests. Bradley's insistence on
showing his patriotism is one of them.
But perhaps more important than yearning to play offense like
the Republicans, the Democrats should learn to play defense. Why
does anyone believe the crap Republicans put out? Partly because
the Democrats respond to it respectfully instead of dismissing it
as part of the usual outrageous Republican con. It may or more
likely may not be possible to fight Republican crap with counter
crap, but it would be more effective just to immunize against it.
I read a book once which detailed twenty-some sales closes, pretty
much everything salesfolk use to sell everything. It ended with
one paragraph on how to get out of all of them: just compliment
the salesman on his close, identifying by name two or three of
the close techniques. The greatest sales pros in the world are
powerless if you're wise to them. Wising up the voters would
save the Democrats from having to fight off a lot of flack.
On Republicans at church (pp. 308-309):
Republicans go to places such as mega-churches where real human
contact takes place. Mega-churches have ongoing discussion groups on
issues that affect people's lives: work, children, finances, child
care, aging. In addition, some have book groups, sports teams, fitness
classes, day-care centers, and even schools. What happens in the
smaller groups bonds the members to the church as much as the pastor's
sermon does on Sunday morning. Republicans often use these gatherings
as focus groups. More important, Republicans plug into the politically
active elements of the congregation, who become the local foot
soldiers of the party's voter contact. Their role comes out of their
involvement with the church and the meaning they derive from that
association. Many of these same individuals also participate in
community projects through their churches. Democrats ignore the
potential of mega-churches for Democratic organizing, rarely talk
about issues in a collegial way at a structured place, almost never
(beyond the candidate's campaign) engage real people outside a focus
group, and never provide ways for volunteers directly to help another
human being.
A conclusion, of sorts (p. 338):
In recent years, we have headed down a dangerous path toward
empire, environmental destruction, and a general blindness to the
conditions of life for millions of Americans and billions of fellow
human beings around the globe. But the future, with all its wondrous
technology, increasing interdependence, and responsive democracy, can
bring all of us a better life while reestablishing America's position
of respect and power in the world. For that to happen, we must be bold
enough in our leadership, generous enough with our neighbors, truthful
enough with our citizens, and farsighted enough toward the world.
Then, of course, he wobbles off, finally quoting Abraham Lincoln
about how we're "'the last best hope' of humankind." Poor us. Poor
species.
