New Geography

Category: Politics

  • Obama Family Values

    For a generation, conservatives have held a lock on the so-called “values” issue. But Barack Obama is slowly picking that lock, breaking into one of the GOP’s last remaining electoral treasures.

    The change starts with the powerful imagery of the new First Family. The Obamas seem to have it all: charming children; the supremely competent yet also consistently supportive wife, and the dynamo grandma, Marian Robinson, who serves as matriarch, moral arbiter and babysitter in chief.

    The new president’s focus on family reflects an increasing emphasis among African-American leaders on the importance of parental values. Many prominent black activists initially scorned Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report linking poverty among African-Americans to the decline of intact family units. But today, when roughly half of all black children live with single mothers, it is widely accepted that strong families represent the most effective way to reduce “the racial gap” in incomes.

    When it came to family, the last Democratic White House residents – the highly entertaining but also obviously dysfunctional Clintons – embodied persistent conflicts among baby boomers over sex and social roles. Remember Hillary’s resentful comments about “baking cookies”?

    By contrast, the focused and disciplined Obamas epitomize the aspirations most Americans hold for their own personal lives: caring fathers, strong mothers and an involved extended family.

    These ideals may be particularly appealing for Americans under 40, whose support has been instrumental in the president’s rise to power. Younger Americans are proving to be more family-oriented, in part because close to half come from divorced homes.

    Surveys reveal that people born between 1968 and 1979 place a considerably higher value on family, and a lower value on work, than their baby-boomer counterparts. Women in the former age cohort are actually having more children than their predecessors and, particularly among the college-educated, they appear to be working somewhat less.

    And this family-friendly shift is likely to continue throughout the next wave of child-rearers. As Morley Winograd and Michael Hais suggest in their book, Millennial Makeover, the Millennial generation, born after 1983 and twice as numerous as Generation X, also enthusiastically embraces the notion of a strong family.

    Indeed, three-fourths of 13- to 24-year-olds, according to one 2007 survey, consider time spent with family the most important factor in their own happiness, rating it even higher than time spent with friends or a significant other. More than 80% thought getting married would make them happy. Some 77% said they definitely or probably would want children, while less than 12% said they likely wouldn’t.

    What’s more, the current state of the economy is likely to strengthen ties among family members. One-fourth of Generation X-ers, for example, still receive financial help from their parents, as do nearly one-third of Millennials. As many as 40% of Americans between ages 20 and 34 now live at least part-time with their parents, an option that will only become more commonplace in areas where home prices are particularly high and employment opportunities are sharply limited.

    Yet even if family values are in ascendance, how they are expressed sharply diverges from the norms and attitudes typically associated with the Religious Right. In fact, on a host of issues – including gay rights, interracial dating and stem cell research – millennials trend more toward liberal views than earlier generations, Winograd says.

    “They are more tolerant as well as more conventional,” he notes. “They follow the social rules – they don’t want to be rebellious. They want a basically conventional suburban family life.”

    Attitudes concerning religion – the other critical part of the “values” issue – reveal a similar fusion of conventionality and pragmatism. Like other Americans, Millennials are far more religiously oriented than their counterparts in other advanced countries. Fully one-fourth of Americans in their 20s and 30s, observes Princeton sociologist Robert Wurthnow, consider themselves “very spiritual,” even if they rarely attend church. A 2003 UCLA study found roughly three out of four college students deem their spiritual or religious views important, but most see their (older) professors as largely indifferent to such concerns.

    Yet this spiritual orientation does not imply a shift toward any retrograde “moral majority” conservatism. Upward mobility among evangelicals and fundamentalists, as well as the increased racial integration within churches, has lessened the once-glaring gaps between conservative Protestants, particularly in the South, and the rest of American society. This liberalization is particularly acute when it comes to issues like homosexuality and censorship, but also extends to the role of women and the teaching of religion in public schools.

    I’ve observed this shift firsthand teaching at Pepperdine, a school associated with the conservative Church of Christ, and Chapman University, which has a more liberal Christian orientation. Students embracing fundamentalist or evangelical creeds usually oppose both abortion and gay marriage, but they appear remarkably tolerant and accepting of homosexuals, racial minorities and Jews – attitudes that might shock the more insulated liberal landsmen.

    My more religious students also tend to be ecumenical in their views. Like the Obamas, many are seeking the right mix of spirituality and social activism. Wade Clark Roof, the author of Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion, describes such people as ‘grazers.’ They often meet their spiritual needs through different channels – online Bible study, meditation and even Buddhism.

    Obama seems to be honing his appeal to precisely this demographic. Tapping Orange County evangelical minister Rick Warren for the inaugural invocation opens an important avenue to a new generation of spiritually oriented young people.

    Warren should concern the increasingly marginal hard-right Christian conservatives, who face potent competition for the political loyalties of their younger congregants. With economic issues pushing the middle class to the left, Democratic progress among the so-called “value” voters could leave the already bedraggled Republican ranks even more seriously diminished.

    Also threatened are those on the cultural left, some of whom expressed outrage about Warren’s appointment. Some Democrats see it as part of a conscious strategy to subordinate their social agenda for a more mainstream, family-centered one that holds broader political appeal. “It’s good for him to let the bed-wetters go,” scoffs one well-connected Southern California labor organizer. “They are the ones who have made it difficult to get a majority for the really important things.”

    In reality, though, Obama’s jettisoning of the cultural left is relatively risk-free. No matter how offended they might be, feminist, gay-rights and ultra-secularist activists are not likely to become Republicans. Even if Obama is not as perfect as they imagined, he will be far more amenable to their causes than George W. Bush.

    Overall, Obama is playing an exceedingly smart game of cultural politics. Most Americans, particularly youth, no longer relate to the vintage 1950s sitcom Ozzie and Harriet, an illustration of the lifestyle embraced by conservatives. Too many women now work outside the home and have friends or relatives who practice “alternative lifestyles.” Demonizing “deviants” is increasingly difficult, after all, when many if not most Americans have loved ones who are gay or otherwise outside the historical mainstream.

    Yet at the same time, there is a growing rejection of the highly secularized, self-absorbed lifestyle many boomers embrace. As a result, when it comes to today’s values, the role models seem to be socially hip and strong families like the Huxtables from The Cosby Show. Or perhaps, just maybe, the Obamas.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

    Image courtesy flickr user Vargas2040

  • Don’t Touch That Dial!

    If this were the 1950s, a buzz would be going through the African American community right about now because, come Tuesday, another small milestone would be reached in our progression from involuntary to voluntary servitude. The milestone? A black man is going to appear on television.

    Sightings of black people on the tube back then were rare. Hence, there was always some excitement when it occurred. You had Beulah and Amos and Andy on regularly – singer Hazel Scott once had her own show as did singer Billy Daniels. Nat King Cole had a very popular show for a while but lack of national sponsorship and the fact that they didn’t give him any money to pay his guests forced him to fold it. But you’ll notice these people were all entertainers. Real black people, those who couldn’t sing, dance, play an instrument or tell jokes, were never seen on television.

    Just as importantly, they were never seen in TV commercials. It seemed at the time we had a surfeit of bumbling white husbands and clueless white wives. But somehow sponsors were reluctant to associate their products with similarly deficient blacks.

    Blacks were also seldom seen in television dramas. Whole towns, let alone neighborhoods, were portrayed as devoid of dark-skinned residents. No one had a black friend in those towns. Workmen, sure. Servants, yes. But not friends.

    Simply put, black people were systematically and summarily excluded from the popular culture. And not just from television. It was radio too, where small skirmishes were fought over whose version of “I’m Walkin’” was to be played: Ricky Nelson’s or Fats Domino’s. Naturally, Ricky usually won. It was also true in movies where Super Sidney and Calypso Harry were our only stars. And even they better watch their step lest they offend with too strident a tone or too familiar a manner. And, of course, the newspapers simply did not cover the black community at all unless to report crime statistics.

    To black children of the time, it meant that except for the people in their immediate geographical area, other blacks did not exist. They could turn on the television and enter a world where they saw no one who looked like them. No one they could look up to; no black role models save the Kingfish.

    This situation gradually changed over time. As we moved into the Sixties, the days of “Civil Rights,” blacks emerged out of their real and virtual ghettos. The panoply of blacks expanded to include new types: protesters, militants and eventually, that curious group known as “tokens.” Those were black people used to dress a set like a table or lamp. Nothing was really expected of them but to stand there and be seen – to prove someone knew about them. The “token” was always a “good” black person, meant to represent and asked to speak for all black people. They were not angry like militant H. “Rap” Brown, or civil rights protesters like that troublesome Martin Luther King, Jr.

    Their pop culture numbers ranged from one-twelfth of the Dirty Dozen to a full 30% of the Mod Squad. These were fully-integrated, completely-assimilated, likeable, sympathetic blacks you could work with and invite to your home for dinner. What more could black people want?

    As it turned out, quite a bit more. Black people wanted to be part of things they had helped create. They wanted to be included in a country where inclusion was guaranteed by the Constitution. And, later, as the Eighties dawned in America, they also wanted to be on MTV.

    The pathways to those goals generally excluded politics. Politicians could never be counted on to improve our lot. It became a kind of game to parse the words of the white candidates to see how much they were on our side. There was always just enough there to get the black vote but not enough to turn away the still racially-averse white vote. And after they were elected, all the courtship promises were forgotten. After all, shouldn’t our Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall be enough? Shouldn’t our UN Ambassador Ralph Bunche suffice for a while? Didn’t Adam Clayton Powell prove you couldn’t trust these people with real political power – and power over white people?

    So the preferred pathway lay elsewhere. Sports and entertainment became the ticket. The pop culture route was most efficient because entry couldn’t be denied. A 400-hitter or hundred-yard rusher was a crowd pleaser, white or black, and therefore an economic winner too. Singers, composers and musicians could set a toe tapping before the race of the performer was noticed. Albums of music could be distributed with no photos of the artists to offend the racially biased.

    In time, the economics of black consumerism was enough to move product – considerable product. By the Seventies, the purveyors of what became known as “blaxploitation” movies figured out that filling a movie cast with black faces might lead to filling movie theaters with black faces. And, once it was realized that blacks bought the same products and services that whites did, even television commercials began to feature one or two in the same inane scripts that once were reserved for whites. Later, new generations of whites weren’t as choosy about who made the music they liked. Thus the MTV barrier was broken. What more could black people want?

    And now, politics has been put back on the front burner. The playing field has changed. Not completely, of course. Regardless of what you hear, we are still far from being a post-racial society, not for another couple of generations, at least.

    But now there is a widening array of black images out there. There is something at last for young black people to shoot for and be proud of. There is another way to go besides being running back or gangsta rapper. There is being part of the making of the future – and not only for ourselves. There is being included in the calculation. There is greater belief in the sincerity of the politician. There is more balance in the popular culture.

    Is that the “more” that blacks wanted? Not really. The truth is blacks never wanted “more” in the first place. All we really wanted was the same.

    So when Tuesday rolls around, that buzz will still permeate the black community. Old, young, and in-between we will all gather around our LCDs, some of us wistful, some of us hopeful, to celebrate our past and watch history being made – as a black man appears on television.

    Bob Carr is a free-lance writer, editor and webmaster living in Los Angeles. He has been an Associate Editor and Senior Staff Writer for Playboy magazine and was born in Charleston, South Carolina shortly after VJ Day.

  • Not Even Gerrymandering Will Save Some Candidates from Ethnic Shifts

    California’s 32nd congressional district, stretching from East Los Angeles to the eastern San Gabriel Valley, would seem like friendly territory for a Hispanic candidate. Labor Secretary-designate Hilda Solis’s district is more than 60 percent Latino, and there is no shortage of Hispanic local and state lawmakers eager to replace her in Congress.

    But rapidly shifting demographics suggest an Asian-American candidate – State Board of Equalization Chairwoman Judy Chu – has a shot at winning the urban-suburban district. Asians make up nearly 20 percent of the district, whom statistics suggest are better-organized politically, wealthier and have generally attained a higher level of citizenship (voting power) than Latino residents.

    The 32nd is one of several congressional districts that could soon trigger new leadership in ways that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. The city where Chu long served as mayor, Monterey Park, is one of the only majority Asian-American municipalities in the nation.

    The increasingly mobile nature of American society means that no district – no matter how carefully gerrymandered – can be considered permanently safe. So while Solis’s district could slip away, Latinos can look west down the I-10 freeway to a swath of potential pick-up opportunities among seats held by African-American lawmakers.

    Consider the South Los Angeles-based 35th Congressional District, long represented by firebrand liberal Maxine Waters. The area won national attention – and infamy – as the epicenter of L.A.’s two postwar riots: in Watts in 1965 and at the corner of Florence and Normandie in 1992.

    But the district is no longer majority black. Inglewood – once all white, later mostly black – is now about 46 percent Hispanic, though city statistics suggest African Americans still vote in higher numbers. Hawthorne now has more Hispanics than blacks. And South Los Angeles, an almost entirely black neighborhood at the time of the Watts riots, now is home to more Hispanics. A small shift in district boundaries in the post-2010 Census redistricting process could provide a Hispanic lawmaker a decent shot at beating Waters in a Democratic primary.

    Rep. Diane Watson faces a similar political predicament in the neighboring 33rd District. Watson was a pioneering African-American lawmaker in her long state Senate career before serving as ambassador to Micronesia in the Clinton administration. She won a 2001 special election to Congress in the demographically diverse district, which begins about one mile inland from Venice Beach, runs through Culver City and ends up in South Los Angeles. The district also includes Koreatown, the Miracle Mile district, and Hollywood – all areas with both an influx of immigrants from various countries and a growing cadre of young professionals.

    Though once solidly African-American, the district is now 35 percent Hispanic, 30 percent black and 12 percent Asian. Lower citizenship rates among Latinos have deflated their political clout. But small shifts in new redistricting could have a considerable impact on Watson, altering the district’s racial and ethnic balance of power and possibly generating serious primary competition from a Latino challenger.

    This drama was already played out in the Long Beach area 37th Congressional District during a 2007 special election. The seat takes in Compton and Carson, which went from predominately black through the 1980s to heavily Latino. When Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald passed away in early 2007 the open seat special election quickly came down to another African-American Assemblywoman – Laura Richardson – and Hispanic state senator Jenny Oropeza. Richardson edged out Oropeza in the special election primary, a temporary setback for Hispanic political ambitions. But the district could change considerably in redistricting within two years, providing another Hispanic pickup opportunity.

    The story is similar in other demographically shifting districts around the nation. In 2008 once-Republican Virginia, Democrats took over three U.S. House seats. The suburban district of long-time Republican Rep. Tom Davis fell to Democrat Gerry Connolly in an area filled with professional transplants from across the Potomac in Washington, D.C. Though technically part of the South, Northern Virginia votes more like affluent parts of New Jersey.

    Michigan, Pennsylvania and other large states with relatively static populations are projected to lose seats in the post-2010 redistricting process. Meanwhile rapidly growing Sunbelt states like Arizona, Florida and Texas will make big gains. All these states are seeing rapid demographic shifts, particularly from Latinos.

    Members of Congress have grown expert in tailoring district lines to their own political advantage. But given the rapidly shifting demography of the nation, the redistricting process of 2011 could result in even the craftiest lawmakers and political consultants losing control of their electorate.

    David Mark is a senior editor at Politico.com and author of Going Dirty: The Art of Negative Campaigning.

  • Does Growing Inequality Mean the End of Upward Mobility?

    Barack Obama’s ascension to the presidency won’t end racism, but it does mean race is no longer the dominant issue in American politics. Instead, over the coming decades, class will likely constitute the major dividing line in our society—and the greatest threat to America’s historic aspirations. This is a fundamental shift from the last century. Writing in the early 1900s, W.E.B. DuBois observed, “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Developments in the ensuing years bore out this assertion. Indeed, before the 1960s, the decade of Barack Obama’s birth, even the most talented people of color faced often insurmountable barriers to reaching their full potential. Today in a multiracial America, the path to success has opened up to an extent unimaginable in DuBois’s time.

    Obama’s ascent reflects in particular the rise of the black bourgeoisie from tokens to a force at the heart of the meritocracy. Since the late 1960s, the proportion of African-American households living in poverty has shrunk from 70 percent to 46 percent, while the black middle class has grown from 27 percent to 37 percent. Perhaps more remarkable, the percentage who are considered prosperous—earning more than $107,000 a year in 2007 dollars—expanded from 3 percent to 17 percent.

    Yet as racial equity has improved, class disparities between rich and poor, between the ultra-affluent and the middle class, have widened. This gap transcends race. African-Americans and Latinos may tend, on average, to be poorer than whites or Asians, but stagnant or even diminishing incomes affect all ethnic groups. (Most housecleaners are white, for instance—and the same goes for other low-wage professions.) Divisions may not be as visible as during the Gilded Age.

    As Irving Kristol once noted, “Who doesn’t wear blue jeans these days?” You can walk into a film studio or software firm and have trouble distinguishing upper management from midlevel employees.

    But from the 1940s to the 1970s, the American middle class enjoyed steadily increasing incomes that stayed on a par with those in the upper classes. Since then, wages for most workers have lagged behind. As a result, the relatively small number of Americans with incomes seven times or more above the poverty level have achieved almost all the recent gains in wealth. Most disturbingly, the rate of upward mobility has stagnated overall, which means it is no easier for the poor to move up today than it was in the 1970s.

    This disparity is strikingly evident in income data compiled by Citigroup, which shows that the top 1 percent of U.S. households now account for as much of the nation’s total wealth—7 percent—as they did in 1913, when monopolistic business practices were the order of the day. Their net worth is now greater than that of the bottom 90 percent of the nation’s households combined. The top 20 percent of taxpayers realized nearly three quarters of all income gains from 1979 to 2000.

    Even getting a college degree no longer guarantees upward mobility. The implicit American contract has always been that with education and hard work, anyone can get ahead. But since 2000, young people with college educations—except those who go to elite colleges and graduate schools—have seen their wages decline. The deepening recession will make this worse. According to a 2008 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, half of all companies plan to cut the number of new graduates they hire this year, compared with last. But the problem goes well beyond the current crisis. For one thing, the growing number of graduates has flooded the job market at a time when many financially pressed boomers are postponing retirement. And college-educated workers today face unprecedented competition from skilled labor in other countries, particularly in the developing world.

    The greatest challenge for Obama will be to change this trajectory for Americans under 30, who supported him by two to one. The promise that “anyone” can reach the highest levels of society is the basis of both our historic optimism and the stability of our political system. Yet even before the recession, growing inequality was undermining Americans’ optimism about the future. In a 2006 Zogby poll, for example, nearly two thirds of adults did not think life would be better for their children. However inspirational the story of his ascent, Barack Obama will be judged largely by whether he can rebuild a ladder of upward mobility for the rest of America, too.

    This article also appears at Newsweek.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • President Obama, Bring Us Together

    The election of Barack Obama signaled the beginning of a “civic” realignment, produced by the political emergence of America’s most recent civic generation, Millennials (born 1982-2003). Civic generations, like the Millennials, react against the efforts of divided idealist generations, like the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) to advance their own moral causes. Civic generations instead are unified and focused on reenergizing social, political, and governmental institutions and using those institutions to confront and solve pressing national issues left unattended and unresolved during the previous idealist era. The goal of a transition during such realignments has to be to lessen the ideological splits that have divided America during the preceding idealist era and take steps to unify the country so that the new Administration can more effectively deal with the major issues it faces.

    Reducing ideological divisions and unifying Americans to achieve important common goals has been a focus of Barack Obama since even before he announced his presidency. It is one of the key reasons his campaign had strong appeal to the emerging civic Millennial Generation, which he carried by a margin of more than 2:1. When CBS’s Steve Croft asked the then-candidate in a pre-election interview what qualified him, a junior senator with limited governmental experience, to be president of the United States, Obama led off his reply by citing his desire and ability to bridge differences and bring people together.

    Through Your Actions
    One way a civic era president-elect can demonstrate the importance he places on the need for national unity is to name members of the opposition party to his cabinet. The actions of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the only two other Presidents to preside over transitions to civic eras, demonstrate how this game should be played.

    For all the media commentary on Lincoln’s first cabinet, deemed a “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, it should be noted that it contained no one from the discredited Democratic Party, even though it did have representatives that spanned the breadth of opinion within the relatively new GOP. However, Lincoln did add a Democrat, Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, to his cabinet less than a year after taking office. Stanton, a strongly pro-Union Northern Democrat, had opposed Lincoln’s election and had served as Attorney General in the final months of the Buchanan administration. However, Lincoln’s selection of pro-Union Democrat, Andrew Johnson, as his vice-presidential running mate in his 1864 re-election campaign demonstrates that it’s sometimes possible to take even a good idea too far. FDR appointed two Republicans to his initial cabinet–industrialist William H. Woodin, who as Treasury Secretary helped FDR implement his economic and fiscal program at the outset of the New Deal, and Harold L. Ickes, who served as Interior Secretary throughout the entirety of the Roosevelt administration. Both Woodin and Ickes were progressives who had supported FDR in the 1932 election. While neither was a member of the Republican Old Guard, together they demonstrated Roosevelt’s willingness to reach beyond his own party to enlist what today would be called “moderate Republicans” in a unified effort to overcome major national problems.

    Reflecting America’s changing demographics and social mores, Barack Obama has chosen the most diverse cabinet and set of top advisors of any president in U.S. history. Two members of Obama’s larger number of appointees — Robert Gates and Ray Lahood — are not Democrats, the same number for which FDR found room. This represents a greater number of members of the a different or opposing party than were present in the Cabinets of any of Obama’s idealist era predecessors.

    President-elect Obama’s attempt to include a wide range of political opinion and backgrounds in his Cabinet and White House team has generated criticism from the most ideological members of his party, just as FDR and Lincoln faced such criticism from the extreme partisans of their day. Obama’s appointment of many “centrist” cabinet-level officers who previously served in Congress, the Clinton Administration, or as governors suggests to his critics that he is abandoning his pledge to bring about significant change in economic, foreign, and social policy. But as political scientist Ross Baker points out, “In uncertain times, Americans find it much more comforting that the people who are going to be advising the president are steeped in experience. A Cabinet of outsiders would have been very disquieting.” And civic realignments like the present one have come at the most uncertain and stressful times in America’s history.

    Through Your Words
    Lincoln and FDR are also renowned for their ability to use their words to rally Americans to a common cause. Both did so at the very outset of their terms. Both of these great civic presidents’ first inaugural addresses addressed the fears of a nation in crisis with rhetoric that has continued to ring through the ages.

    Lincoln, in another last-ditch effort to forestall secession, told the South that neither he nor the Republican Party would make any attempt to undo slavery in states where it already existed. But he also reminded the South that, while only its actions could ultimately provoke civil war, his “solemn oath to preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution would require him to prosecute that war if it came.

    Lincoln concluded his address with an appeal to the secessionists to rejoin the Union:

    We are not enemies, but friends…Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

    Roosevelt used his inaugural speech to rally the country to the task ahead by telling it, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He reminded his listeners that at previous dark moments in our national history vigorous leadership joined with a supportive public to win ultimate victory in the nation’s trials. Perhaps most important, FDR gave clear recognition that the United States and its people had moved from what we have called an “idealist” era of unrestrained individualism to a “civic” era of unity and common purpose:

    If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.

    Even before President-elect Obama had a chance to utter similarly comforting and inspiring rhetoric, his inaugural plans came under fire for inviting Pastor Rick Warren, a fundamentalist minister and activist in the passage of California’s Proposition 8 outlawing gay marriage, to give the invocation at his inauguration. But the selection of Warren should not have been surprising to careful observers. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Obama signaled his desire to find common ground on divisive social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and gun control.

    By bookending his inaugural with a benediction from Joseph Lowrey, a minister who favors legalizing gay marriage among other liberal causes, Obama has signaled his determination to put an end to the debates over social issues from an idealist era that is ending and enlist all those willing to join his cause to rebuild America’s civic institutions.

    For in the end, it is the American people that Barack Obama must rally to his side. It is they who will ultimately decide the effectiveness of his transition as a springboard to a civic era Administration. So far their judgment is overwhelmingly positive. A late December 2008 CNN national survey describes “a love affair between Barack Obama and the American people.” That survey indicated that more than eight in 10 Americans (82%) approved of the way Obama was handling his transition, a figure that was up by three percentage points since the beginning of the month. Obama’s approval is well above that of either Bill Clinton (67%) or George W. Bush (65%) at that point in their transitions.

    More specifically, the poll suggests that the public approves of Obama’s Cabinet nominees, with 56 percent saying his appointments have been outstanding or above average. That number is 18 percentage points higher than that given to Bush’s appointments and 26 points above that of Clinton’s nominees. To quote CNN polling director Keating Holland: “Barack Obama is having a better honeymoon with the American public than any incoming president in the past three decades. He’s putting up better numbers, usually by double digits, than Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, or either George Bush on every item traditionally measured in transition polls.”

    Of course, the final judgment of the Obama presidency by the American people and history will be based on his performance in office starting on January 20. Still, these polling results clearly suggest that Barack Obama has internalized and put into operation the historical transition lessons provided by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the presidents who led America’s two previous civic realignments. If his inaugural address comes close to matching their first inaugural speeches, President-elect Obama will begin one of the most important administrations in the nation’s history with an enormous reservoir of political and public support that will serve him well in the crucial early days of his Administration.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute and co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008).

  • A Bailout For Yuppies

    The recent call by the porn industry – a big employer where I live, in the San Fernando Valley – for a $5 billion bailout elicited outrage in other places. Around here, it sparked something more akin to nervous laughter. Yet lending a helping hand to Pornopolis is far from the most absurd approach being discussed to stimulate the economy.

    Some influentials close to the administration may even find the porn industry a bit too tangible for their tastes. After all, the pornsters make a product that sells internationally, appeals to the masses and employs a lot of people whose skills are, well, more practical than ideational.

    As such, they may not even qualify for what is best described as a yuppie bailout, poised to extend the welfare state to the highly educated professional set. After all, George Bush’s bailout of Wall Street has already set a precedent, using public money to secure the bonuses and nest eggs of some of the nation’s most elite professionals. Call it the Paulson principle: In bad times, steer help to those least in need.

    A yuppie stimulus differs from the more traditional approach, which aims to get the front-line, blue-collar types back to work. Instead, it would channel public funds away from those grouchy construction workers – some 30% of whom may soon be out of work – to better heeled, and, in their minds, more deserving “creative” professionals. After all, what stake do the netroots have in making things better for Joe the Plumber?

    In contrast, the yuppie bailout focuses on a sure-fire Democratic constituency, the well-educated urban professional. One advocate of such an approach, pundit Richard Florida, has urged President-elect Barack Obama to eschew crude investments in traditional production and a renewed housing market in favor of goodies directed to what he calls “the creative industry.”

    Florida sees any focus on restoring manufacturing and housing as a misguided rescue of the “old industrial economy,” in which Americans actually made things and other Americans consumed them. Instead, he suggests, “the first step must be to reduce demand for the core products and lifestyle of the old order.”

    So let’s stop worrying about what happens to Detroit, or the crisis in the housing market. In Florida’s view, cars, of course, are demonized as woefully bad for environmental reasons and not particularly friendly to the preferred dense urbanity so attractive to advocates of “hip cool” cities.

    Florida even recommends shifting away from the single-family home, which is also, all too often, in the ‘burbs. Instead, we should develop what he calls “flexible rental housing,” so people can move every time they get new jobs. I think that is what they used to do in Chairman Mao’s China, too, albeit without the granite countertops and a Starbucks around the corner.

    In a yuppie bailout, what spending takes priority? More jobs for academics and educators. Florida suggests we invest in “individually tailored learning.” We assume this means neither home-schooling nor basic skills training but something more like painting and acting classes for tots and advanced “creative” navel-gazing for tweens and adolescents. And, of course, lots and lots of new jobs for well-paid, unionized teachers.

    These ideas should not be dismissed out of hand as the impractical meanderings of a lone scholar. In fact, Florida’s views are taken very seriously among influential Obama supporters at companies like Google as well as by politicos such as Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who is widely identified as a key Obama counselor on economic issues.

    Nor is Florida alone in his views. Bigger feet among the purveyors of conventional wisdom, like The New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman, also think the stimulus should steer more resources into the public pedagogy. Friedman even recently suggested teachers be exempted from paying federal taxes.

    And it’s not just teachers who would benefit from a yuppie bailout. The economic stimulus, Friedman says, should also focus more on high-tech companies like Google, Apple, Intel and Microsoft, all of which enjoy extraordinary valuations. This reaffirms the Paulson principle with a politically correct spin.

    Politically, a yuppie bailout would certainly appeal to powerful Democratic constituencies, not just the teachers’ unions. Select high-tech companies and venture capitalists can count on new subsidies and tax breaks. Greens and “smart growth” advocates will celebrate if money is diverted from hard infrastructure – such as improved roads, bridges, ports and transmission lines – which they insist would create enough carbon to heat the planet like a toaster.

    This “yuppie first” approach certainly would appeal to many mayors, some of whom are already adherents to the Floridian ideology. They may be further encouraged by a new report by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve called “City Beautiful,” which suggests cities should not promote growth through traditional infrastructure but instead invest in frilly amenities. As a Boston Globe article on the report summarized cheerfully: “Make it fun.”

    Here’s another hint of what might be coming in a yuppie bailout. Providence, R.I., located in the state with the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate, wants to sink money into a polar bear exhibit at its zoo – perhaps so we can see them before they become extinct or go on Al Gore’s payroll – as well as make improvements to a soccer field. Miami envisions spending on a giant water slide, new BMX and dirt bike trails at a local park and, of great national import, a new Miami Rowing Club building.

    Even the once-booming but now-hurting ultimate “fun city,” Las Vegas, wants in on the act. Mayor Oscar Goodman is asking the feds to kick in big time for its new Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. That’s right, taxpayers can participate in building a monument to Bugsy Segal. And with Nevada’s own Harry Reid running the Senate, the project seems well-positioned to get the “respect” it deserves.

    If Goodman, who used to defend mobsters as a criminal defense lawyer, has his way, it could spark a feeding frenzy for every under-funded tourist trap from Cleveland to Cucamonga. Pork used to mean roads, bridges and ports that, at least in theory, made the economy more productive while providing well-paid work for blue-collar workers. Soon these dollars may instead go toward yacht clubs, art galleries, museums and “creativity” training for toddlers.

    A yuppie bailout is likely to hold more money for Boston, San Francisco and other havens of the perennially hip – all of them Democratic bastions. There’s also likely to be less funding for the grotty suburban towns, industrial backwaters and Appalachian hamlets, all of which don’t usually appeal to the artistic set.

    To an old-fashioned Democrat, this all seems to miss the point. Shouldn’t we be stimulating the places already suffering the most from high unemployment, foreclosures and spreading impoverishment? Where do Toledo, Cleveland or Modesto fit in to the yuppie bailout? As Pittsburgh-based blogger Jim Russell says: “Most of the population will continue to live in ‘Forgottenville.’ Should we just forget about them?”

    In spite of all this, the mounting pressure for a yuppie bailout sadly reveals how the supposed party of the people is being transformed into just a second party of privilege. We should desperately try to create new productive capacity and better-paying jobs, especially for the denizens of Forgottenville. It certainly makes more sense than pouring taxpayer funds into new clubhouses, water slides or even better-financed pornographic movies – however much the latter may help property values in my neighborhood.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Daschle And State-by-State Healthcare Mistakes

    Tom Daschle appears before the Senate this week for confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services. While Daschle knows his stuff on health care (see his book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis), the discussion is likely to be sidetracked by those who champion a reliance on insurance companies, or on piecemeal reform starting with children. Or, as I’ll discuss here, on a wrong-headed impulse to depend on the states to create new health care models.

    Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

    Brandeis’ elegant language has been distilled to the phrase, “laboratories of democracy,” and used as if that’s a good thing. However, the converse also holds: bad ideas can be legislated at the state level and spread nationwide. One idea that continues to threaten to boil over the boundaries of a single state is “universal health insurance” achieved one state at a time. Oregon, Tennessee, California, and most famously Massachusetts have all experimented with versions, and other states have tried variations, particularly with children.

    I’ll get to the more general notion of why I think states can’t go it alone. But for now, I’ll give a quick rundown on how states have tried and failed.

    Critical Mass: Despite recent claims of a 97-percent coverage rate, Commonwealth Care, the Massachusetts plan, is struggling. You remember the Massachusetts plan: Mitt Romney was for it as governor before he was against it as a presidential candidate.

    The plan is a patchwork of good intentions, political and practical exceptions, and as-yet deferred but heavy-handed enforcement. There’s an appeals system, waivers, and “creditability” (this has to do with the comprehensiveness of the policy and the out-of-network charges).

    The crux of the Massachusetts law is a model of administrative clarity. The goal of insuring the uninsured was to be achieved in a couple of ways. One was that if health insurance was “offered by” an employer, the employee had to take it.

    The problem is that “offered by” the employer isn’t a clean standard. Employers might have an insurance plan that’s technically available to employees, but it might be too expensive for them, or for their families. To square this circle, Massachusetts subsidized employment-based coverage if it cost more than a certain percent of the person’s income, and raised the eligibility limits for public insurance. Those without employers were required to buy private insurance, and insurers were regulated to make the policies “affordable.”

    And then there are the penalties: “To enforce the mandate, [Massachusetts will] establish state income tax penalties for adults who do not purchase affordable health insurance….”

    These stipulations raise obvious questions. What is “affordable”? Will residents be penalized for buying a policy too expensive for their family budget? Will insurance companies be punished for selling them such policies (do I hear the words “sub-prime mortgage”?). Will premium arrearages be counted as medical debt in bankruptcy court?

    Alan Sager and Deborah Socolar, directors of the Health Reform Program at the Boston University School of Public Health, damned the Massachusetts legislation with faint praise in the Boston Globe last July: “the best law that could be passed.”

    Calling it “a blessing to 350,000 newly insured people,” they pointed out that a similar number remained uninsured, and that the law often “can’t work” largely for reasons of cost. The mandates, they said, required huge subsidies, boosted payments to providers without controls, and redistributed funds committed to the most vulnerable.

    Not surprisingly, by summer 2008, the lousy economy had begun to take its toll. To shore up the “coverage” rate, Massachusetts has reduced funding to safety-net hospitals, and has even cut millions of dollars from subsidized immunization programs. Patients wait six months for a physical.

    With no plan for reducing medical costs, the state is effectively obligated to bankrupt itself.

    The Oregon Lucky Number:

    Oregon in March – for the first time in more than three years – will begin accepting new beneficiaries in its Oregon Health Plan […] The state will use a lottery system to enroll 2,000 eligible applicants per month for 11 months. Kaisernetwork.org, Jan. 10, 2008

    The Oregon plan had lost two-thirds of its participants since freezing enrollment in 2004 and a lottery was deemed to be the fairest way to apportion openings.

    Government lotteries have been used for everything from real estate in tax foreclosure to placement in magnet schools or, showing my age, the chance to serve in Vietnam.

    Still, why should anyone have to depend on a lucky number to be treated for diabetes or cancer without going broke? If the plan is funded for 32,000 participants out of a total of 100,000 eligible residents, why didn’t they keep topping up as the numbers diminished? Or was there a theoretical break-even point somewhere?

    California Pipe Dream: In early 2007, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a $14 billion program that supposedly mirrored the Massachusetts plan. The plan would have extended Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, to adults earning up to twice the federal poverty line, and to children, regardless of immigration status, who lived in homes with family incomes up to 300 percent above – about $60,000 a year for a family of four.

    One controversial element called for employers without health plans to contribute to a fund to help cover the working uninsured. Doctors were to pay two percent and hospitals four percent of their revenues to help cover higher reimbursements for those who treat patients enrolled in Medi-Cal.

    The ambitious program died in committee a year later, with legislators from both parties agreeing that it was unaffordable.

    Florida No Frills: A 2008 Florida package would allow insurers to offer “no-frills coverage to the state’s 3.8 million uninsured” residents. Residents ages 19 to 64 could purchase limited health coverage for as little as $150 per month; the policies would cover preventive care and office visits, but not care from specialists or long-term hospitalizations.

    “No frills” works better in airline travel than in health care. You can do without hot meals and pay extra for a headset or a Bloody Mary, but what Floridians will ultimately get for their $1800 a year and up are office visits and preventive care. It would probably be cheaper served à la carte and paid for in cash.

    Hawaii’s Keiki Care In October, 2008, Hawaii dissolved the only state universal child health care program in the nation after only seven months. Dr. Kenny Fink, the administrator at the Department of Human Services, told a reporter, “People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for free. I don’t believe that was the intent of the program.”

    I should say not, but this disconnect between the intent of the program and its result makes perfect sense. Consumer behavior is supposed to be based on rational choices, and those parents who switched seem pretty rational. Hawaii’s solution seems simple and elegant, until you apply some basic laws of economics and behavior. Aloha, Keiki Care.

    Why States Can’t Do It Alone

    Why haven’t any of these state “universal health care” plans succeeded? Probably for the same reason that states can’t be self-sufficient in fossil fuels, or in banking. Most don’t produce their own fuels, and those that do can’t require their use within the state. They don’t print their own currencies. They have to compete with the rest of the world, public sector and private, for energy and capital.

    These are not minor issues with localized consequences. The decision-making alone requires resources that might not be available at the state level. We need national bodies to determine standards, to evaluate technology, and – remembering that Medicaid, Medicare, the VA, and the government employee system amount to around half of health care spending – to decide on the appropriate use of federal dollars.

    A final thought: Each additional set of rules, level of supervision, and geographic boundary may make sense initially. But when the lines drawn become indelible, and the bureaucracies created to enforce them calcify, we move further from the goal of providing health care. Jobs, and their budgets, become ends in themselves. We have to return to our original purpose and ask, “How can we get there?” One thing you can be sure of: it won’t be one state at a time. When it comes to health care, we need more unum and less e pluribus.

    Georganne Chapin is President and CEO of Hudson Health Plan, a not-for-profit Medicaid managed care organization, and the Hudson Center for Health Equity & Quality, an independent not-for-profit that promotes universal access and quality in health care through streamlining. Both organizations are based in Tarrytown, New York.

    Tom Daschle photo by: aaronmentele

  • Bush: A Disaster to Those He Held Most Dear

    You always hurt the one you love
    The one you shouldn’t hurt at all
    You always take the sweetest rose
    And crush it till the petals fall
    You always break the kindest heart
    With a hasty word you can’t recall

    — Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher

    Like the 1944 pop standard says, President George W. Bush has hurt the most all those he professed to love the most — from the conservative ideologues and born-again Christians to the free-market enthusiasts, energy producers and red state political class. Perhaps no politician in recent memory has done more damage to his political base.

    The most obvious recent equivalent, Richard Nixon, did cause harm to the conservative cause, but that damage was short-lived. It reflected his deviousness more than his policies. Similarly, Bill Clinton’s many personality flaws weakened the Democrats’ hold on the White House, but inflicted no permanent harm to liberalism.

    In contrast, the Katrina-scale disaster that has been the Bush presidency may leave his ideological backers in the wilderness for years to come. Over the past eight years, Bush has done more to undermine conservatism than all of the country’s college faculties, elite media and Hollywood studios put together.

    The late Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater — whose memory remains far more cherished than that of either President Bush — nurtured the modern brand of conservatism. Nixon employed some of these tenets, but they flourished most fully under Ronald Reagan.

    Conservatism’s core values rested on notions of a strong national defense and free market economics. Bush has punctured these ideas in a way that transcends the effects of historically anomalous scandals such as Watergate or Clinton’s extramarital affairs. Bush has not only dinged the conservative car, he has totaled it.

    Start with the great core issue of national defense. Arguably, Bush’s one success lies in his reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks and the ensuing lack of follow-up terrorist attacks on the homeland. Yet a series of other blunders, notably the war in Iraq, has blemished this enviable record.

    Despite the great efforts of the military, particularly in recent years, to calm that rich but cantankerous country, it is hard to see how it has been worth the cost in life, treasure and international reputation.

    The shoes thrown in Iraq and celebrated around the world epitomize not only ill manners but also the fact that even our supposed friends there don’t like us very much. If history is any guide, Iraq will end up as an authoritarian state with strong anti-American (as well as anti-Israel) leanings. The farther our sons and daughters get away from those ever-scowling people, the better most Americans will feel.

    One unintended part of the Bush legacy will likely be a weaker, highly stressed military. The influential Democratic Netroots will be able to hound the military establishment — whatever President-elect Barack Obama’s intentions. Congress may be reluctant to commit troops to almost anything short of a Chinese invasion of San Francisco, which many Americans — and perhaps some progressive natives — might consider a blessing anyway. Support for new weapons systems, needed or not, will dissipate.

    Bush’s legacy for the cause of free market capitalism may be even worse. Our first MBA-holding president has turned out to be the worst economic manager since Herbert Hoover.

    The bailouts of Detroit and — much worse — the vile Wall Street profiteers now open the door to an unprecedented expansion of invasive welfarism throughout the economy. It’s hard to call proposals that build tennis courts in yuppie towns or subsidize performance artists in Flint, Mich., wasteful after the billions Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has lavished on his compadres in Richistan.

    In the coming years, the only legitimate opposition to the bipartisan pro-Wall Street policy will come from the scruffy populists of both parties, many based in the heartland regions of the country. Bush may even make quasi-Marxism respectable again. Hearing about $20 billion in new bonuses for government-subsidized Wall Streeters this year should be enough to bring out the hidden Bolshevik in even rational people.

    Ironically, the only people who should be thanking Bush — the environmentalists, the urban gentry, the welfare staters — are the very ones who have despised him the most. Now that he has helped put them in power, perhaps they could host a celebrity fundraiser for the new Bush library in Dallas. Serenaded by Barbra, scolded by St. Al, with a short film by Michael Moore, the program — hosted by Whoopi Goldberg — could help consecrate a lavish new sarcophagus that Bush has prepared for the conservative movement.

    This article originally appeared at Politico. White House Photo by Paul Morse

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • How Detroit Lost the Millennials, and Maybe the Rest of Us, Too

    The current debate over whether to save our domestic auto industry has revealed some starkly different views about the future of manufacturing in America among economists, elected officials, and corporate executives. There are many disagreements about solutions to the Big Three’s current financial difficulties, but the more fundamental debate lies in whether the industry should be bent to the will of the government’s environmental priorities or if it should serve only the needs of the companies’ customers and their shareholders.

    But there’s something more at stake: the long-term credibility of Detroit among the rising generation of Millennials. These young people, after all, are the future consumers for the auto industry and winning them – or at least a significant portion of them – over is critical to the industry’s long-term prospects in the marketplace and in the halls of Congress.

    The enormous investments the federal government has been making in private enterprises, including the auto industry, will test the ability of private sector executives to meet the expectations of this very civically minded generation. Sadly, so far, it’s a test many business leaders seem likely to fail.

    In the case of the American auto industry, this failure has deep roots. Over the past few decades the leaders of the Big Three repeatedly have failed to move their industry in new directions, even when the opportunity to do so has plainly been put before them.

    Attempts to nudge Detroit into producing more fuel-efficient vehicles have been going on since the 1973-4 Arab Oil embargo, which led Congress to establish Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFÉ) standards for cars and light trucks. The target was for cars to meet an average of 27.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 1985. On Earth Day, 1992, Bill Clinton proposed to raise that standard even further to 45 mpg after he was elected President.

    When Al Gore was asked to join the ticket, auto industry executives, terrified at the prospect that the man who had called for the abolition of the internal combustion engine might become Vice President, implored the leadership of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) to meet with the candidates and bring them to their senses. The lobbying effort worked. Under pressure from Owen Beiber, then UAW president, and Steve Yokich, who was his designated successor, and the powerful Democratic Congressman from Dearborn, Michigan, John Dingell, Clinton agreed to delay the adoption of higher CAFÉ standards until it could be proven that such goals were attainable.

    This formulation opened the door for what came to be known as the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles or PNGV. Reluctantly supported by the Big Three, PNGV provided approximately a quarter of a billion dollars in government research funds to demonstrate the feasibility of producing a midsize sedan that could get 80 mpg. Often called “the moon shot of the 90s,” each car company was to make a prototype of such a vehicle by the politically convenient year of 2000 and begin mass production by 2004, another presidential election year.

    After a few years of technological research, reviewed by the independent National Research Council (NRC), the partnership settled on the combination of a hybrid gasoline and electric powered propulsion system as the most promising approach. But by 1997, the car companies were resisting development of even a prototype for such a vehicle.

    Vice President Gore, who had been in charge of the PNGV program since its inception, decided to meet with the Big Three CEOs to make sure they did not forget their past commitments. The answer from Detroit was emphatic: profits were coming from SUVs and heavy-duty trucks, not cars. Gore suggested they deploy a 60 mpg hybrid passenger sedan in 2002 rather than waiting for an 80 mpg version in 2004. Ford’s Peter Pestillo and his UAW ally, Steve Yokich, quickly replied, “no way.” Pestillo maintained, “we need much more time than that to make them cost competitive.” Gore could have, but didn’t, embarrass his host by pointing out that Toyota’s Prius was already delivering 55 mpg.

    Not all executives were blind to the challenge. General Motors’ Vice-Chairman, Harry Pearce had been the driving force behind GM’s ill-fated EV1 electric car experiment. Despite a bout with leukemia that took him out of consideration for CEO of the company, he and his allies within GM exerted powerful influence on the company’s CEO, Jack Smith. He also won over an influential ally at Ford, the Chairman of its Board of Directors, William Clay “Bill” Ford, Jr., great grandson of the company’s founder.

    At the Detroit Auto Show in January, 1999 Bill Ford personally introduced a new line of electric cars, under the brand name, THINK. Even though Honda and GM had abandoned the concept of an all electric vehicle by then, Ford said he thought there was still a niche market for such a car. Tellingly, Jac Nasser, Ford’s newly installed CEO, demonstrated his attitude toward these ideas by treating the visiting Secretary of Transportation, Rodney Slater, to a personal trip in a new Jaguar Roadster with the highest horsepower and worst gasoline mileage of any car at the show.

    Right after that display of internal differences at Ford, Harry Pearce personally presided over the public introduction of General Motors’ PNGV hybrid prototype car, which delivered 80 mpg fuel efficiency, while seating a family of five comfortably. He then surprised everyone by revealing GM’s real vision of the future – a hydrogen fuel cell powered car called the “Precept” that got 108 mpg in its initial EPA tests. He grandly predicted that such cars would be on the road by 2010.

    Clearly the industry was at a critical fork in the road. At a 2000 meeting at the Detroit airport, almost exactly one year to the day since their last meeting, Vice President Gore suggested to auto company executives that developing these products could enhance both the industry’s image and each company’s individual brands. Gore reminded his listeners, “It’s not just the substance of the issue you need to consider. You also need to think about the symbolism of the decision. Putting SUVs into the PNGV project would change the public’s perception of where you are going in the future.”

    Jac Nasser wanted to know if such a commitment would change the dialogue between the industry and government. Gore suggested he would put his personal reputation behind such an agreement, which would garner the auto industry a great deal of positive press and appeal to the growing ranks of environmentally minded consumers.

    But when it came time to put their reputation on the line, the auto executives blinked. The CEOs were not ready to commit to any specific production goals. This less-than-clarion call for a green automotive industry future made it only to page B4 of the Wall Street Journal the next day and was otherwise ignored by the rest of the public that the participants were hoping to impress.

    Today, only Ford, the one American auto company not to ask for a bailout in 2008, is ready to offer a car that meets the original Clinton target. In showrooms in 2009, its Fusion Hybrid five-passenger sedan uses the hybrid technologies first explored in the PNGV to get 45 mpg in city driving, more on the highway, and costs about $30,000. As a result, Ford is in a much better position today to weather the whirlwind of change in consumer tastes and financial markets, even without the support of the federal government.

    Unfortunately for America, General Motors, the largest of the Big Three, went in almost the opposite direction. Rick Wagoner, who became General Motors’ CEO in June 2000, chose to pursue an SUV-centered strategy that won big profits for a brief period. Since then, however, GM stock has plunged 95%, from $60 per share to roughly $3 in late 2008. General Motors, which lost $70 billion since 2005, has seen its market share cut in half. Having failed to embrace a public partnership with a sympathetic government, Wagoner was forced to beg for a federal bailout with onerous conditions. Seven years after the fateful auto summit with Al Gore, when asked what decision he most regretted, Wagoner told Motor Trend magazine, “ending the EV1 electric car program and not putting the right resources into PNGV. It didn’t affect profitability but it did affect image.” [emphasis added]

    Had the auto industry taken Gore’s lead a decade ago and built a positive image among the very environmentally conscious Millennial Generation, it might have built a constituency to support the government’s bailout. Instead, the companies’ brands, particularly GM’s, have taken such a beating that the President-elect recently reminded the car companies that “the American people’s patience is wearing thin.” In contrast to young Baby Boomers buying songs by the Beach Boys celebrating the Motor City’s products, the country seems ready to drive their “Chevy to the levee” and tell the company “the levee is dry.”

    But that is not the right answer. Millennials bring not only an acute environmental consciousness to the country’s political debate, but a desire for pragmatic solutions to the nation’s problems that promote economic equality and opportunity. To secure Millenials’ support, however, the domestic automobile industry needs to be seen as a contributor in ending America’s dependence on foreign oil and improving our environment. Not only would such an approach assure the industry’s future profitability, it would also remake its image in a way that will appeal to both their future customers and the politicians they support.

    Morley Winograd, co-author with Michael D. Hais of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press: 2008), served as Senior Policy Advisor to Vice President Gore where he witnessed the events described in this article. He and Mike Hais are also fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute.

  • Current Policy Overlooks the New Homeless

    San Francisco: A Chevron employee is forced to move his family of four into their Mitsubishi Gallant after being laid off…

    Atlanta: Jeniece Richards moved from Michigan to Atlanta a year ago, but despite her best efforts, and two college degrees, remains homeless. She is living in temporary housing with her two children and younger brother…

    Denver: As Carrie Hinkle’s hours dwindled, she was forced to choose between paying rent or buying food for her daughter. The two are now working with local agencies towards permanent housing, again…

    These stories, plucked from the headlines of the past months are more than the typical holiday coverage. They show faces of the newly homeless, growing as the economy crumbles and opportunities fade.

    Facing layoffs and deep cuts in working hours, many in fragile circumstances could no longer afford their mortgage. More commonly, they were renting from a landlord who foreclosed on their residence. Healthy, hardworking and addiction-free, the new homeless are closer in demeanor and behavior to our neighbors than the overly-typified street drunk.

    Homeless resource programs across the country have been reporting record requests for assistance. A recent report from the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that, of 21 cities surveyed, 20 reported an increase in requests for food, with 59 percent coming from families. Nationwide, increased food stamps claims – a clear indicator of rising poverty – reached a record 31.6 million in September, up more than four million in a year according to the New York Times.

    California, which has had a homeless problem for decades, has become the epicenter for the newly homeless. The state’s unemployment rate rose to 8.4 percent in November from 5.4 percent in 2007, making it the third highest in the nation. Compounding the homeless problem is the state’s high foreclosure rates (third in the country, according to RealtyTrac data). Homeless programs from San Francisco to San Diego are reporting record numbers, mostly from newly homeless residents impacted by the housing crises or falling economy.

    Sadly this surge in homelessness comes just after a period when the problem was finally getting under control. One study by the Interagency Council on Homelessness found a 12 percent decrease in overall homelessness when comparing 2005 to 2007 data. That same time period also reveals a staggering 30 percent decrease in chronic homelessness (defined as being homeless for either over a year or for multiple stints).

    In 2000, the National Alliance to End Homelessness crafted their landmark Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness. With successful bipartisan funding, 355 Ten Year Plans have been put into action nationwide.

    Such plans, and a strong economy, accelerated the recent gains in the fight against homelessness. But the surge in newly homeless and shrinking budgets now threatens to reverse the progress.

    New York City’s municipal shelter systems have seen record-setting increases over the past three months, according to the City’s Department of Homeless Services, but deep cuts loom ahead. Already, the city’s current budget includes a 3 million dollar decrease in outreach funding.

    Denver plans to slash nearly a fourth of its funding for homeless initiatives at a time when the city reports a 38-percent increase in homelessness over the past year (Denver Post).

    This situation will get much worse. A 20 percent increase of urban homelessness has been projected by the Interagency Council on Homelessness for 2009. Escalating homelessness and looming funding cuts create conditions for a renewed homeless crisis.

    In the past debate has focused on the mentally ill and substance abusers, but the new homeless represent different phenomena. President-elect Obama has the responsibility to increase assistance to the degree that reflects the expanding problem. Washington seems all too willing to prop up the corporate players of the American economy, but let us not forget about the hardest hit by these times. Swift action must be taken to assure that the problem of the new homeless becomes no more than a historical footnote – to assure that we as Americans can look back with pride knowing that even during our hardest hour, all were cared for.

    Ilie Mitaru is the founder and director of WebRoots Campaigns, based in Portland, OR, the company offers web and New Media strategy solutions to non-profits, political campaigns and market-driven clients.