or, maybe there's a less cynical explanationNew Covenant Address at Georgetown University
October 18, 2006
Washington, DC
{snip}
When I gave these Georgetown speeches, they allowed me to set out this construct of equal opportunities, shared responsibilities, inclusive community, and an aggressive approach to engagement with the rest of the world. I thought that they were consistent with the traditional American values of work and family, freedom and responsibility, faith and tolerance; that as a Democrat I was being faithful to Andrew Jackson’s credo of opportunity for all and special privileges for none, to President Kennedy’s call for mutual responsibly and citizen service, and to Franklin Roosevelt’s commitment to continuous innovation – to bold, persistent experimentation.
I also asked there and throughout the ’92 campaign for a political debate that engaged these things, that moved away from what I then thought was an unacceptable level of partisanship and rancor and a tendency to let elections turn on issues that had nothing to do with the decisions that leaders would make after the election was over, or the consequences on ordinary people’s lives – the politics of division and personal destruction.
I frequently cited in that year a book that was written that I think has special relevance today, even though for all of you 15 years is a lifetime ago. And I swear this was in my notes before I saw him in the audience, but E. J. Dionne, this distinguished columnist for The Washington Post, wrote a book called Why Americans Hate Politics, and the central thesis was that Americans hate politics because it seems irrelevant to them, and they feel like they’re being manipulated because they’re always being asked to make false choices: you’re either pro-labor or pro-business, you’re pro-growth or pro-environment, you’re for a strong national defense or for trying to make an agreement with everybody no matter how crazy they are – that there’s always an either/or choice. And the truth is, most of us don’t think that way, most of us don’t live our lives that way, and most of us long for a politics where we have genuine arguments, vigorous disagreements, but we don’t claim to have the whole truth, and we don’t demonize our opponents, and we’re really trying to work on what works best for the American people.
Everybody knows this kind of down deep in their gut. That’s why – I think that’s why I’ve gotten such a strong response to the work I’ve done with former President Bush since I left office on the tsunami and on Katrina, and with former Senator Dole, who was my opponent in ’96. We raised $100 million to guarantee a college education to the spouses and children of all the people killed or disabled on 9/11.
It’s not that we want a bland, mushy, meaningless politics. We like our debates. The country has been well-served by its progressive and by its conservative traditions. We understand that campaigns will be heated and only one side can win, but we want it to be connected somehow to the real lives of real people, to the aspirations of ordinary Americans, to the future of our children and grandchildren.
Now, this sort of politics – striving for the common good – for me stands in stark contrast to both the political and governing philosophy of the leadership in Washington today and for the last six years. The more ideological, right-wing element of the Republican Party has been building strength, partly in reaction to things that happened 40 years ago: to Barry Goldwater’s defeat, to what they saw as the excesses of the ‘60s. It got a lot of legs when President Reagan was elected, but this is the first time when, on a consistent basis, the most conservative, most ideological wing of the Republican Party has had both the executive and the legislative branch, with a very distinct governing philosophy and a very distinct political philosophy.
Where us common-good folks favor equal opportunity and empowerment, they believe the country is best served by the maximum concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the right people – right in both senses. (Laughter.) We believe in mutual responsibility. They believe that in large measure people make or break their own lives, and you’re on your own. We believe in striving at least to cooperate with others, because we think that there are very few problems in the world we can solve on our own. They favor unilateralism whenever possible and cooperation when it’s unavoidable.
And you may think that’s laughable, but even today in the press, there’s a story about the Administration’s new policy on national security in space, which points out that 160 nations were asked to vote to begin negotiations – not to prejudge the outcome, just to begin negotiations – on making outer space weapons-free, and the vote was 159 to 1 to do it. We were the only country that didn’t do it.
I’ll give you another example which has caused us a lot of problems, which I almost never read about it in the press. There is legitimate concern about the North Korean nuclear test, about what Iran’s nuclear ambitions are, and neither of these problems have easy solutions now. But our position has been weakened because for at least half – I’m sorry I don’t know how many – but at least half of the last six years, the Administration has asked for funds to research the development of two new nuclear weapons. One, a nuclear bunker buster, even though we have a conventional nuclear bunker buster that’s quite powerful; and two, a so-called tactical battlefield nuclear weapon, which the administration admits that, had it been deployed – they say it’s small – but had it been deployed in the Iraq conflict, it would have taken out 25 percent of Baghdad.
So there is this sense that the world is divided between the good guys and the bad guys, and the good guys should have their nuclear weapons, and the bad guys shouldn’t. We might all feel that way, but it’s a very hard argument to make.
I had an 8th grade science teacher who was one of the most physically unattractive people I ever met in my life. (Laughter.) He had thick Coke-bottle glasses, and he smoked cheap cigars in a cigar holder that caused his mouth to pinch. And he had been a football coach before he became a science teacher, and he gained a little weight after he turned to science, and he still wore the same clothes.
Let me tell you why I said this. One day in class he said to us – I was 13 at that time; 47 years ago – he said, “You won’t remember anything about science in a few years, so if you don’t remember anything else in class that I teach you, remember this: every day, I get up and I go to my bathroom, and I wash my face, throw water in my eyes, and I shave. I wipe the shaving cream off. I look in the mirror and say: Vernon, you’re beautiful.” And by the end of the year he was beautiful to me. I say that to remind you it is very hard to succeed in politics when you’re telling people they’re ugly all the time. You have to oppose people who do things that are wrong, but it’s very hard to say there’s going to be one set of rules for me and another set for everyone else.
I think the common-good approach on national security worked. It was a combination of carrots and sticks. We did have military encounters. We didn’t succeed at everything we tried to do, but I think on balance the world was safer when we stopped than when we started.
Now, the same thing works in politics. I think the central challenge to American politics today is that what I would call the uncommon-good approach has been so successful. It may not be in three weeks, but it has been. We believe in a politics – us common-good folks – dominated by evidence and argument. There is a big difference between a philosophy and an ideology, on the right or the left. If you have a philosophy, it generally pushes you in a certain direction or another, but like all philosophers, you want to engage in discussion and argument. You are open to evidence, to new learning, and you are certainly open to debate the practical applications of your philosophy. Therefore, you might wind up making a principled agreement with someone with a different philosophy.
If you look at the welfare reform legislation which passed, for example, when I was President, I vetoed the first two bills because they took away the guarantee of food and medicine for poor people. When those things were put back in, I signed it. Some people who shared my philosophy did disagree with my decision, because they said that we shouldn’t have a hard and fast requirement for people on welfare who were able-bodied to work. I disagreed. I thought work was the best social program, and I thought it would help to overcome a lot of the pathologies in the families of poor people. And I also think you should never patronize the poor. They’re basically as smart as the rest of us, but without the same breaks. So I thought that.
{snip}
The problem with ideology is, if you’ve got an ideology, you’ve already got your mind made up. You know all the answers, and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, so you tend to govern by assertion and attack. The problem with that is: that discourages thinking and gives you bad results.
This new Bob Woodward book, State of Denial, is well named, but I think it’s important to point out that if you’re an ideologue, denial is an essential part of your political being – whichever side. If you’re an ideologue, you’ve got your mind made up, so when an inconvenient fact pops up, you have to be in denial. It has to be a less significant fact.
Ron Suskind wrote a related book called The One Percent Doctrine. I don’t know if any of you read that. He also co-wrote former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s memoirs. But the most interesting thing to me in this One Percent Doctrine is not the part that people have talked about, about 9/11. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but Mr. Suskind says in The One Percent Doctrine that the ideologues within the current government refer to people not just like me, although I’m included, but even moderate Republicans like Colin Powell and Admiral Scowcroft as somehow lesser political mortals, because we are trapped in, quote, “the reality-based world.” And what they mean by that – in fairness to them, what they mean by that is that we are an empire, we’re the world’s only military superpower, and you can use power to change reality. And if you don’t see that, then you will always be condemning your country to a lesser status.
When I was a kid, I grew up in an alcoholic home. I spent half my childhood trying to get into the reality-based world, and I like it here. People ask me all the time, “What great new idea did you and Bob Rubin bring to economic policymaking in Washington?” I say, “You know, Rubin came down, and he put all that fancy Goldman Sachs-type spin on what we were doing, but the truth is all we brought to Washington was arithmetic.” I had this dumb idea that if two and two equaled four in Little Rock, it probably did in Washington. And sure enough, I turned out to be right.
Now, we’re all laughing here, but I want you to laugh so I can make a point. This is not about conservative or liberal philosophies. You can argue whether on problem X or Y or Z you need more or less government. You can argue whether you get more growth from stimulating the business side of things or training workers better. You can have an argument about trade, about whether you should be more protectionist or more free trade, or whether you need what I think: trade, plus labor and environmental standards to lift everybody around the world.
You can have these arguments, but in every case the evidence is relevant. In every case, the act of entering into a conversation with someone else and listening to what they have to say means that you know you might not be right about everything. You might have something to learn. There might be an ongoing process in which, when you put all these perspectives together, you come out with something that will actually move the ball forward toward a more perfect union, something that will actually make lives better for ordinary Americans.
more:
http://www.clintonfoundation.org/101806-ts-cf-gn-ts-new-covenant-address-at-georgetown-university.htm
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