We Can All Do Better (22 page)

Our leaders should paint the picture of what we can become and how, once we tighten our belts for a while, our economy will improve. They should explain how we can revive the manufacturing sector, encourage innovation across the board, and invest for the long term. They should make the case for taxing work less and things more. They should describe the benefit to businesses of one national healthcare system. They should invest in education at all levels. They should show us how infrastructure investment can produce economic growth and jobs. They should talk about what it means to be American and what our historical values are. They should charge us to think anew, remind us of the goodness that lies within each of us, and inspire us with the courage they demonstrate by telling us the truth.

But energy flows not only from leaders to citizens but the other way as well. Above all, we need citizens who recognize their role in the American democracy. Our country has progressed because citizens wanted to change a national direction and decided to do something about it. From the abolitionists to the suffragettes to the civil-rights activists to the environmentalists, people have started movements that have shaped our larger politics. Their organized passions have changed our future.

In 2008, on that election night in Chicago, we made the mistake of believing that a leader can renew the country all by himself. But even someone who touched our hearts as deeply as Barack Obama cannot do it alone. A president can inspire and help to mobilize us, but then you need the lieutenants and sergeants who make the dream operational. Clarity from leaders is necessary but not sufficient.
Only when it is joined with commitment from citizens can great things happen. Democracy is not a vicarious experience.

In our current circumstances, with the power of the Washington club never greater, only the people can free our government from its clutches and put our country on the path to renewal. In the internet age, apathy should not be an option. Citizens have to vote; for many, the vote is their most effective voice. But in order to vote wisely, citizens must take the time to become informed; otherwise the future will be hijacked by a combination of greed, self-indulgence, and excuse-making. The government will no longer belong to the people, and the people will suffer.

The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street offer contrasting examples of citizen involvement. The Tea Party promulgated a very specific objective—Roll back government—and immediately converted its energy into electoral politics. The result was that in 2010 forty-three Tea Party Republicans won election to the Congress, and through their leverage in the Republican caucus they almost forced the country into bankruptcy during the debate on the debt limit in the summer of 2011. That's how quickly things can change. That's how easily the status quo can crumble. Occupy, on the other hand, while full of passion and solidarity, and even armed with a catchy slogan—“We're the 99 percent”—failed to have much of an impact on policy, because it had no specific objective. Some people argued that it was enough simply to point out inequality; a detailed program would have divided the movement. I say, better than an emotional movement that hesitates to develop a specific program would be a specific program—such as getting money out of politics—that attracts emotion to it. Whether we like it or not, passion only goes part way. Remember Martin Luther King Jr. and LBJ. It took both of them, working together as they did, to transform America in the 1960s.

So how do these thoughts reflect on 2012? To begin, citizens should insist on a presidential campaign about the future, not a blamefest about the past. The candidates should tell us specifically what they would do to raise our standard of living, reset our foreign policy, and reform our politics. Their narratives can have a historical dimension about how we got to where we are, but the bulk of their story must be about the future. If what you hear is only blame or bromides, change the channel. Haven't we had enough of those two things over the last twelve years?

Now is the time for citizens to insist on answers to real questions and for the media to serve the public more diligently than they serve their advertisers. Now is the time for follow-up questions and enough airtime for candidates to lay out their programs. What specifically will they do about jobs, the deficit, political corruption? How do they see America's role in the world? Now is the time for politicians to show us that they are more interested in doing something than in being somebody. There is a great difference between a genuine leader and a celebrity. The nation has had enough of politicians fascinated with celebrity. What we need are courageous leaders who serve the public and not themselves, who devise a plan to save the country and fight for it because they know that the well-being of millions of Americans is at stake.

My grandfather was an immigrant from Germany. On hot summer evenings, he would sit on his front porch in our small town with a bottle of Budweiser in hand, a Zane Grey novel on the table next to him, and the radio tuned to his first love, the St. Louis Cardinals, and tell his only grandson, me, what America meant to him. He said that America was great because it was free and because people seemed to care about each other. At our very best, throughout our history, that has been true. It's time to reclaim the legacy that reflects our best selves. It's time to elevate “What can we do
for each other?” to the pedestal that for too long has been occupied by “What can I do for myself?”

The time for cooperation has arrived. No one person can fix the economy alone, much less the global financial system. No one alone can secure our national safety at home and abroad. No one person can protect our natural heritage or reduce global warming. No one person or group of self-made men can “raise all boats.” Each of us has our individual part, but it will take all of us acting together to make America better.

In our current crisis, we must look for solutions from all directions. The richest man may not be the wisest. Wisdom is where you find it. On the individual and local level, solutions can come from a union hall or a community meeting or a parish church. They can come from a cab driver, a garbage collector, a shoeshine man in Pittsburgh, a welcome lady in Phoenix, a Walgreens executive in South Carolina, a public-health nurse in the Aleutian Islands, a professor at the University of Oklahoma. But solutions must also come from all of us working together at the national level to promote the general welfare.

Wisdom acts for the long term. It recognizes our human frailties, even as it celebrates our achievement. It knows that good and evil live in the same heart. It reminds us that we are our brother's keepers. It tells us that our great country needs to be revived and that its citizenry deep down wants to reclaim American democracy from the stranglehold of money and ideology. And it has faith in those citizens to succeed in that difficult task. Wisdom tells us that love is our truest impulse, that love translated into policy is justice, that we're all on this planet together, connected by our common humanity and hope for the future. Today what we need, above all, is that wisdom.

In writing this book, I owe much to others.

I want to thank my editors: Sara Lippincott, whose attention to both large themes and small details raised the quality of the book by several levels, and whose good humor made working together a pleasure; Betty Sue Flowers, whose counsel and wise observations challenged me at every step of the writing process, and whose steadfast support I treasure.

I thank my former wife, Ernestine Bradley, for her careful reading, knowledgeable insights, and helpful candor; and I thank our wonderful daughter, Theresa Anne Bradley, whose comprehensive comments and editorial suggestions are reflected throughout the book.

I thank my friends who read all or part of the book and made helpful suggestions: Herbert Allen III, Marcia Aronoff, Zoe Baird, David Booth, Terry Bracy, John Gearen, Scott Greenstein, Matt Henshon, Mellody Hobson, Devorah Klahr, Sandy Levinson, Jim
Manzi, Jessica Mathews, Daniel Okimoto, Don Roth, Barry Schuler, Shirley Tilghman, John Thornton, and Rick Wright.

I thank my assistant, Claire Falkner, who turned my scribble into clean text again and again and again, and whose considerable research skills improved the project. I also thank my longtime personal assistant, Beth Montgomery.

I thank my fact-checkers, Boris Fishman and Rob Liguori, whose thoroughness gave me great comfort.

I thank my agent, Art Klebanoff, who encouraged me and stood by me every step of the way.

Finally, I thank Allen & Co. for giving me the time to write the book.

Chapter 2

1
. Susan Page, “Surveys Show an America That's Bruised, But Still Optimistic,” USAToday online, Feb. 16, 2010, accessed at
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-02-16-optimistic-decade-americans_N.htm
.

Chapter 3

1
. Jill Schlesinger, “November Unemployment: Why the Big Drop?” Marketplace Economy, Dec, 2, 2011, accessed at
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/november-unemployment-why-big-drop
.

2
. “Dollars & Sense,”
The Mark
, November 2011, volume 23, no. 11, 2–3.

3
. “Public Priorities: Deficit Rising, Terrorism Slipping,” Pew Research Center online, January 23, 2012, accessed at
http://www.people-press.org/2012/01/23/public-priorities-deficit-rising-terrorism-slipping
.

4
. Census Bureau, March 17, 2011, accessed at
http://www.census.gov/construction/nrc/historical_data
.

5
. Shaila Dewan and Louise Story, “U.S. May Back Refinance Plan for Mortgages,”
New York Times
, August 24, 2011.

6
. Bill Bradley, Tom Ridge, and David Walker,
Road to Recovery: Transforming America's Transportation
(Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2011), accessed at
http://carnegieendowment.org/2011/07/11/road-to-recovery-transforming-america-s-transportation/3e1h
.

7
. I co-chaired the committee, along with former Pennsylvania Governor and Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge and former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker.

8
. Bradley, Ridge, and Walker,
Road to Recovery
.

9
. Michael Korda,
Ike: An American Hero
(New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 693; and David A. Nichols,
Eisenhower 1956
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 251, 264, 272–274.

10
. Thilo Hanemann and Daniel H. Rosen,
An American Open Door? Maximizing the Benefits of Chinese Foreign Direct Investment
, Asia Society, May 2011, 9.

11
. “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2011 to 2021,” Congressional Budget Office, accessed at
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/120xx/doc12039/01-26_FY2011Outlook.pdf
, p. 166, Appendix B.

12
. Ibid.: Total budget for 2015 is in Table 1-2, under Outlays. Total Outlays is 3.26T, with another 728BN off-budget. Total is 3.988T; Debt service is under “net interest” in Table 1-2: 336BN; Entitlements are in Table 1-4. Social Security is 897BN, Medicare is 662BN, and Medicaid 364BN; Defense is in Table 1-5: 756BN; The math: Outlays of 3.015T. That's 92.5% of 3.26T, and 75.6% of 3.988T.

13
. “2010 Annual Report of the Boards of Trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance and Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Funds,” accessed at
http://www.cms.gov/ReportsTrustFunds/downloads/tr2010.pdf
.

14
. “Letter to Ryan,” accessed at
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/92xx/doc9216/05-19-LongtermBudget_Letter-to-Ryan.pdf
.

15
. “The Feeblest Branch,”
The Economist
, October 1, 2011.

16
.
Nightly Business Report
, PBS, July 14, 2011.

17
. See, for example, Professor J. Rufus Fears's lectures for the Teaching Company,
Famous Romans; The World was Never the Same: Events that Changed History; American Voices, interview with Bill Bradley
, February 26, 2012.

Chapter 4

1
. “U.S. Election Will Cost $5.3 Billion, Center for Responsive Politics Predicts,” OpenSecrets blog, Oct. 22, 2008, accessed at
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/10/us-election-will-cost-53-billi.html
.

2
. “Most Members of Congress Enjoy Robust Financial Status, Despite Nation's Sluggish Economic Recovery,” OpenSecrets blog, Nov. 15, 2011, accessed at
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2011/11/congress-enjoys-robust-financial-status.html
.

3
. “Chart of the Day: 9% of Americans Are Millionaires in 2011,”
The
Atlantic online, May 5, 2011, accessed at
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/chart-of-the-day-9-of-americans-are-millionaires-in-2011/238458/#
.

4
. “Lobbying Database,” OpenSecrets blog, accessed at
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby
.

5
. Mancur Olson,
The Rise and Decline of Nations
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).

6
. “Lobbying Database,” OpenSecrets blog.

7
. “Interest Groups,” OpenSecrets blog, accessed at
http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/index.php
.

8
. Gretchen Morgenson,
Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon
(New York: Times Books, 2011), p. 19.