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ELLEN TAUSCHER, Representative, 10th Congressional District of California
STEVEN KULL, Director, Program on Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland
DANIEL SNEIDER, National/Foreign Editor, San Jose Mercury News
JANE WALES, President and CEO, World Affairs Council of Northern California
Moderated by ELIZABETH SHERWOOD-RANDALL, Former U.S.Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense; Senior Research Scholar, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Sherwood-Randall: What is the role of citizen diplomacy as a complement to more formal diplomacy? There is government-to-government interaction, but “track two” dialogues and other kinds of NGO efforts are also under taken – are they effective?
Wales: One of the most dramatic examples of this was in 1993-94 when Jimmy Carter, as a private citizen, went to North Korea. The government had narrowed our options pretty much down to one, and that was war. This was when we discovered that the North Koreans were producing enough plutonium for a series of nuclear weapons. They claimed they were producing plutonium for the purpose of getting nuclear power. The U.S. government said that wasn’t credible and a confrontation resulted. Carter chose to call their bluff and went over there and said respectfully, “I understand you need nuclear power. What about if we provide that for you?” It gave the North Koreans a face-saving way to back down. We agreed, along with Japan and South Korea, to provide light water reactors and fuel for nuclear power. It bought us a considerable amount of time, and it prevented what could have been an extremely devastating war.
Sherwood-Randall: Jimmy Carter is not your average citizen; he was acting in an independent capacity.
Wales: Carter was welcomed by the White House about as much as Mike Tyson would have been. This was seen as a non-governmental actor at work.
Sneider: I have sometimes taken time off from being a journalist to work in policy research areas, participating in what’s called “track two” diplomacy. Governments often find it convenient for this type of diplomacy to take place when they cannot talk to each other in an open and formal way. It’s a way for people to talk with a greater degree of freedom without the responsibilities that a formal type of dialogue ensues. I have also found very valuable the citizen diplomacy – the town hall discussions that take place on “Nightline” for instance – that provides a way for citizens to talk directly to each other without the mediation of the media, as well as governments.
Sherwood-Randall: There’s too much politics and too little content: How does the public ask for better information so we can play a productive role?
Tauscher: There is a lot of information out there. The Iraq issue has been going on since July when the administration started floating the idea that it had to be the next target in the war on terrorism, and everybody asked why. I don’t think 48 hours has gone by without my asking serious questions of the administration, writing letters, being on the floor, writing op-eds, being on TV – and I still have constituents of mine, considered smart people, who haven’t kept current with what we call “the arc.” It’s difficult; people are enormously busy. They are challenged with concerns of physical security, pension security, economic security; certainly the politics part of government takes advantage of the fact that people don’t have the time and the attention span to be on this issue all day long. I’m enormously concerned about the telegenic issues of the way television is feeding us our public policy and our positions on things as “facts.” We’re able to have our own opinions, but we can’t all have our own set of facts. People are enormously frustrated. That’s why you see such a dereliction of duty when it comes to voting – people don’t feel they are being treated honestly, that they are not able to keep themselves informed, so they have opted out. That works to the credit of the people who want to feed a small number of people a lot of information, and then send them to the polls. It’s difficult for us to get people to engage, and it is frightening for the health of our democracy.
Sherwood-Randall: Does the Internet help or hurt when you’re talking about getting access to information?Tauscher: It cuts both ways like every part of the media does. We’re fighting, to a certain extent, the proliferation of information and not being able to control its accuracy or veracity. People are not challenging the place where this information is coming from. Dan Rather said it, Walter Cronkite said it; it’s got to be true. When there’s such little aperture for information to come to somebody and they get one of these crazy, insidious, dreamworld kind of plot thickeners out there, and that’s what they believe, that corrodes the ability for them to have good judgment about other things they hear. We have a proliferation of bad information that is meant to cloud people’s perspective and force people to step away.
Sneider: Good journalists understand that governments are going to try and put things in the best possible light for themselves. It’s our job to use our critical faculties to try and provide our readers as much accurate information as possible, and not be driven by the agenda of government.
Even at a time of war when there are serious issues of secrecy, we generally do this job fairly well. If you look at what’s published in the American media every day in terms of the activities of the armed forces or our government, it’s remarkable in terms of the openness. Nonetheless, we need to be more challenging because the pressure is intense on us to support our government in times of war.
There is a lot of bad stuff out there on the Internet. People will say to me, “Why didn’t you cover this?” Of course, the thing that they’re talking about really didn’t happen at all. But then replying that it didn’t exist is only implying that we are part of the conspiracy. I rely on the Internet heavily because it gives me quick access to a diversity of information sources. I’m an avid reader of the BBC ’s website – terrific global information site, and most importantly to me, a site that is not framed from an American point of view.
Wales: Secrecy really is an enormous barrier to citizen involvement, and as long as we treat the campaign to eradicate terror as a permanent war, secrecy will always be justified. But on the larger question of getting, absorbing and acting on information, there is a worrisome situation with not just the Internet but also cable. The effect of the information revolution is that we can tailor our own community. We can decide to just listen to the one channel or one show that agrees with us and constantly have our own opinions reinforced. We can create new communities, we can disband those communities, and we can walk away from those communities. And that ability to be, in essence, fickle, and not to hear the views of others can undermine community. That’s one reason why organizations like The Commonwealth Club are so fundamentally important and why real journalism – journalism that does not try to offer a biased view but forces you to see lots of views – is essential to a functioning democracy and sound decision-making.
Sherwood-Randall: The American public lacks interest in understanding other countries, particularly the less-developed world. What should we do to make that happen – shouldn’t we begin with schools?
Wales: Yes. The state of California has embraced that notion in the past and provided significant funding from tax dollars for the purpose of bringing to the schools a real curriculum on world affairs. But this state is facing a fiscal crisis and so now it’s left to the rest of us to make sure that it’s not lost. We define our relationship with the rest of the globe very early in life, so the burden is on all of us – on parents and on communities – to expose young people to a much wider neighborhood. Californians live in a borderless world already – most of us owe our jobs to the global economy and most of us have either parents or grandparents who came from another country.
Sherwood-Randall: What is the impact of domestic interest groups, of whatever color and stripe, on foreign policy?
Tauscher: Most of us believe that we have three masters when we are deliberating on behalf of our friends and neighbors who have launched us to Washington to represent them – the Constitution, our constituents and our conscience. It causes me to have to fly back and forth to Washington and here to speak with my constituents because it’s important for me to hear from them not only through phone calls, the Internet and letters, but to look at them in the eye at the Safeway and have them ask me a question.
It is also important for us to lead. Leadership is a difficult role to play in a vastly changing world with lots of complicated things happening when people can’t always focus on them. You send people like me back to Washington to know more, not better. When I sit in secret meetings all day long, travel to Europe and meet with world leaders, I have to absorb all that and make decisions. A lot of times I have to act alone at three in the morning without a lot of notice on behalf of my constituents. I have to use those three “Cs ” – the Constitution, my conscience and what I believe my constituents think about it, even when I may not have heard from one of them about that issue.
But in a time where there are so many people attempting to influence, when a 501(c)(3)called Citizens for a Happy Day can influence all of you – but when you find out that Citizens for a Happy Day actually is the Philip Morris corporation, then all of sudden you’re not so interested in hearing from them. But nobody has to tell you who Citizens for a Happy Day is. When you are influenced by them either because they’ve done a radio commercial or they sent something to your home – probably in an election year – you’re pretty much innocent in your understanding of it. It’s difficult for many people to deal with how complicated it is. That leaves open a fissure for people that are very determined, very organized, very ideological and well funded to take our place in the voice of the people, to appear to have disproportional influence. So it’s our job in Washington to say, “What are the people in Alamo, people in Livermore, people in Fairfield saying?” and get back home and talk to them.
Sherwood-Randall: We encourage people to organize and create a community around which activism might take place. Where do we draw the line between interest groups that are playing a constructive versus a destructive role?
Sneider: The media gets lobbied by these same organizations to cover certain things or to alter our coverage of foreign affairs. On one hand, it’s easy to discount these things because they come in an organized fashion. There are always complaints about bias. On the other hand, I meet regularly with community organizations that represent a particular point of view: Jewish organizations, Islamic organizations, Arab-American organizations and talk about our Middle East coverage. I listen carefully to what they have to say, as do other people on the paper. In every one of these meetings we come away with something that we need to change. Sometimes it’s a use of language. Sometimes it’s how we used photographs in relationship to a story. Sometimes it will be things that we don’t think about that are perceived as prejudice, as injurious. We need to be sensitive to those things. At the same time, we need to hold to our fundamental values of journalism. We’re not going to alter how we cover things and what we believe are the issues of fairness and balance, but when people point out to us that we may have strayed from those values, then we need to be there to correct it.
Sherwood-Randall: What are the polls that you trust and respect?
Kull: Most of the polls that are done by the media are done in a professional fashion. The key thing is that you have to look at more than one poll and more than one poll question – you have to see the context, read the question and look at multiple sources. You have to be careful about polls that are sponsored by advocacy groups; sometimes they are almost funny, with very loaded questions. That doesn’t mean that those questions don’t have value. If you see a loaded question you have to see its context, its argument.
Sherwood-Randall: It seems as if our current administration’s foreign policy concerns have come at the expense of attention to pressing domestic concerns. How might we address both without diminishing the importance of either?
Wales: In the era of globalization the tradeoffs aren’t real. If your goal is to improve the economy, which should be one of President Bush’s highest objectives, he should be concerned with building stability abroad by expanding markets and sustainable development worldwide, since we are a market-driven economy. I’m not sure that you can pursue domestic objectives without pursuing a sound foreign policy: Look at all the issues that are transnational in nature. We were talking earlier about the role of government. When I was in the Carter administration, public health was in the Domestic Policy Council; when I was in the Clinton administration it was in the National Security Council. The environment was in the Domestic Policy Council, by the 1990s it was considered an international issue – it was in the National Security Council. Crime used to be in the Domestic Policy Council, now it’s in the international. There’s an understanding, and the bureaucracy is slowly following this understanding, that most issues we face have transnational implications.
Sneider: I’m maybe like a lot of people; it’s very hard to focus on all of these issues at the same time. It’s natural, particularly when war is imminent, to focus more on those types of things than on domestic policy. Though the reverse is also true: People tend to look too much sometimes at the domestic side and not see something outside that is more dangerous than they think. The administration understands this extremely well. We saw it in the way that they tried to marshal public opinion for the war in Iraq, and the way that they’ve also tried to obscure the economic implications of what they’re doing, not to mention the budgetary implications. For journalists and the media, it is a real challenge to cut through some of that. It’s not always easy to do because there tend to be fairly complex sets of relationships.
Sherwood-Randall: How can we expose the world more effectively to the good things about America? Shouldn’t we use the Peace Corps more? How do we shape international opinion about the U.S.?
Wales: One phenomenon that you are seeing now is, in the eyes of folks overseas, a separation between the American public and its government. It’s a perception that many members of the public would like to advance; there is a sense that policy is not necessarily reflecting our most basic values.
We have been told repeatedly by the administration that “they” hate our values. I’m not sure who “they” is. If it’s Al Qaeda, yes, Al Qaeda does not like us. But if “they” is whole swaths of the Muslim and Arab world, then there is overwhelming evidence that they like our values but hate our policies. The real challenge for us is to bring those policies in line with our basic values. We need to get out there with things like the Peace Corps and also attract students from around the world to come and take advantage of our superior colleges and graduate schools. To the extent that we can keep that interaction going it is positive, but bear in mind that will not necessarily make them like our policies.
Sneider: My experience living and working overseas is that people have a tremendous fascination with American society and culture. But there is a problem outside the U.S. with the flow of information about this country; they often have standards that are not standards that we American journalists tend to follow when it comes to accuracy and balance. There is a lot of distorted information carried regularly on the news pages and radio and television in many countries around the world. The bizarre conspiracy theories that end up on your email are on the front pages of newspapers and on the evening broadcasts in Cairo. I remember this thing about how all the Jews who worked at the World Trade Center left before the planes hit; I had a reporter who was in Pakistan who was actually one of the first people to report this and he heard it at a prayer service in Rawalpindi. It showed up all over the place and is widely believed to this day.
I have a reporter in Malaysia and Indonesia trying to understand what public opinion in those largely Muslim countries is about the U.S., and there’s tremendous distortion out there. The U.S. government has to make effort in this regard through its own public broadcasting activities, but there is definitely a role to be played in fighting, if you will, a little information war. We need to bring a more accurate version of factual events and of how American policy is shaped.
Tauscher: We have become quite accustomed, for a few decades, to a CNN war. We saw the bombing of Belgrade, the defeat of the Taliban and the first Gulf War. We will now see the CNN-Al Jazeera War. We will show on CNN command and control centers being taken out, no collateral damage, no losses of American soldiers or coalition soldiers. You’ll see the same picture on Al-Jazeera and I hope that it’s accurately portrayed, but unfortunately, I don’t think it will be. There is a strong chance that the same picture will say that there have been 3,000 women and children injured. That will make it very difficult for us around the world and it will make it very difficult for us to even stand for the honest prosecution of something that the UN may sanction.
Kull: It makes me think of the scenes in movies when a woman comes in and finds her husband in bed with another woman and he looks up at her and says, “No, stop, let me explain, it’s not what you think.” There is a genuine debate here about America’s role in the world and who has the right to do what; it’s not really a question of miscommunication.
Tauscher: This is about us taking ourselves into an honorable position in the 21st century. We can defeat any enemy militarily, but that is not the point. Can we live to the promise of a 21st century where the U.S. is a benevolent superpower, where we are draining the cesspools around the world where these bad guys take harbor and live? Can we lift up the people who have no hope? Can we get rid of Arab tyranny, both secular and nonsecular? Islamists don’t hate us. They hate the fact that we make friendships whenever it’s convenient for us with the bad guys who are holding them down – their own leadership. Which side have we been on in Iraq and Iran? Both sides. We’ve got a position for almost anybody.
We have to put our currency back into international organizations. We have to have engagement and multilateralism and responsibility. We have to stand up for things because if we don’t, that beacon of hope that we show everyone else will dry up. We all know where we are going to have our next meal – we should be worried about other people whose countries have been taken over by tyranny, that are day spots for terrorism, where the children are not going to school because they are picking poppies. We need to have leadership in this country that’s going to stand up and say, “I don’t have to fire a shot to save face, I’m going to save lives.”
Sherwood-Randall : I referred to those “wise men” who used to set American foreign policy in rooms in Washington or New York and the public was not asked to be involved. After Vietnam, American confidence in that kind of foreign policy decision-making was erased and we understood the importance of the public having input into the decisions that were being made about the security of our future. We’ve heard how much higher a standard we need to hold our government to in terms of doing what Congresswoman Tauscher put so eloquently, which was to persuade us that we are on the right course. There are also much greater expectations on us as citizens in that we need to ask our public institutions that they serve us the information we need to help make those decisions. So what can we as citizens do specifically to enhance our participatory role? And what can you, from your professional vantage point, do to be more effective in improving this process?
Kull: It is salient how powerful letters are. Let’s put it in dollar terms. Suppose there was a piece of legislation that involved $10 million – that’s nothing in Washington – and 10,000 letters came in supporting that legislation. That would make it almost certain that the legislation would pass. That means that each of those letters was worth $1,000, giving a sense of the leverage that is involved. But it seems right now that there isn’t a clear understanding of where the public is. We need to marry up other kinds of forms and the polling form. There was something called a Deliberative Poll a few weeks ago in which a representative sample of 344 Americans was brought to Philadelphia for two days where they were briefed by experts on both sides of several issues. They were polled before and after, looking for what kind of changes happened, and it was put on the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” Now they are talking about having these events around the country. In each case they will ask the same question, come to a conclusion, consolidate them and project them to Congress. It is really important for there to be deliberative processes like these, but also to begin toward conclusions and closure, taking a position and then communicating it to a member of Congress or the press. There are already efforts to do this through the Internet; it’s an important development for the future.
To make a more meaningful contribution, pollsters should participate in contexts that go beyond just the first reaction, to get involved in contexts where people can reflect in a more fundamental way. We need to not just say are they for or against, which is the gist of so many polls – how this is going to play in terms of electoral possibilities. The pollsters need to do more to try to understand the value infrastructure of the public. Even if people don’t have a lot of information, by giving them information you can see how their values interact with it. The values are there; they weren’t created by the information. We need to create more special environments where people get the kind of information that policy-makers have so that the voice of the public becomes more refined, more elaborated and extends into more areas than standard polling currently goes.
Sneider: I’ve always thought that if Henry Kissinger could have had his way, there would have been no public involvement in the formulation of foreign policy. That view is probably still shared by some people in power today. When Don Rumsfeld is up in front of the press corps at the Pentagon, there’s something in his tone of voice that tells me that he views this as an exercise beneath his dignity, one that he wished he didn’t have to engage in at all. He’s pretty much sneering at us all the time.
The greatness of this country is that we’ve had to conduct foreign policy in the context of a democracy, and it’s something that causes other governments a great deal of difficulty most of the time. We are facing the difficulty in the opposite direction. We are watching the governments of France, Germany and Turkey conduct their foreign policy in the structure of democracy, and gee, it’s difficult for us to deal with them as well. Welcome to that world. It’s amazing how we don’t have a sense of self-reflection about this. Since the days of George Washington, that has made the conduct of foreign policy in this country different than it had been in the monarchies of Europe at that time. That depends upon an informed public. The obligation of the public is to make itself as informed as possible and to participate. Luckily, we live in a world in which there is a tremendous wealth of information out there, and if you have the will, it’s not that hard to find it.
Our obligation is to be purveyors of information. We need to be willing to swim against the tide of “PAC-journalism” – the ways in which interest groups and governments try and shape what we do. Individual journalists feel a sense of obligation, but I’m not sure whether media organizations still feel that sense of public obligation, one that’s enshrined, after all, in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Yes, we’re a business, we have to make money, but we have a very important role to play to serve the public, and we have to be reminded of that constantly, particularly at moments like this.
Tauscher: What can I do? I’m going to keep my commitment to be an independent, effective moderate, and someone who tries to find middle ground. When I go to Washington I prefer not to hear what side people are on but what they stand for and whom they work for. If you can keep those kinds of things in your head then you find yourself looking for solutions, not being paralyzed by a partisan point of view that causes you to perhaps not serve the people you actually work for. I don’t work for anybody in Washington; I have to work with them and influence them; I have to persuade them that the people I work for are thoughtful, giving people that are interested in making our communities better – whether it’s Contra Costa, Alameda, Solano and Sacramento Counties, California, the Bay Area or the world.
Wales: Everybody here has got the most important job there is in the U.S., and that’s the job as a citizen. I ask you to think clearly even when the administration does not and to remember the objective. With respect to Iraq the objective is to disarm, the objective is not to go to war. Saddam Hussein is actually saying yes to destroying the only thing he has left to defend himself. This is an extraordinary victory and we should not deny that victory to George W. Bush just because we disagree on other matters.
Which takes me really to my second point, and that’s what not to do. This notion of “you’re with us or you’re against us” was put forth internationally, but it’s playing out domestically. We all run the risk of falling into it. Forget whether the other guys thought of it; just try not to fall into it. I’m struck by the environment in which Congresswoman Tauscher needs to work: she can have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies. She casts a vote and the next day she needs to work with the guy who wrote it on the other side. That’s an extraordinary process and one we need to celebrate and support. When I was describing the way decisions are made in government I hoped to underscore the sense that the U.S. government plays a convening role, a coordinating role; it calls the meeting, it pushes the agenda. Its most important job is to ensure there is accountability, transparency and public judgment brought to the table. Our job is to help government do that. Democracy is about knowledge and deliberative process: keep participating.
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