The basketball-star-turned-politician issues a call for better citizenship and better leadership in Washington. Excerpt from the talk on May 18, 2012.
BILL BRADLEY, Former U.S. Senator (D-New Jersey); Author, We Can All Do Better
When we talk about our national politics, we must never lose sight of who we are as a people. From the very beginning [of our country] – you remember the stories: The neighbors helped each other raise the barns in the early days of the country. There are always people who give to other people without any expectation of return. Indeed, government is at its best when it takes the ethos of that nonprofit sector, which is “Give to somebody with no expectation of return,” and the ethos of the private sector, which is “Perform or die,” and puts into public policy – into government – the accountability of the private sector and the motivation of the nonprofit sector.
The inspiration for this book came from Abraham Lincoln’s second State of the Union address, in 1862. The war’s been going on about a year; it’s not going well for the North. It’s about six to eight months from the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln sends this incredible address to the Congress. It’s one of the great addresses in American history, and he says so many memorable things, but there are one, two or three sentences that caught my attention in our current context. He says in there, “We can only succeed by concert” – working together. It’s not, “Can any of us imagine better?” but “Can all of us do better?” That’s the question that Lincoln posed, that I pose in this book: Can we all do better? Very relevant, when you look out at the fragility and inequality of our economy, the direction of our foreign policy, the paralysis of our national dialogue. But it goes deeper than that. It goes to us as individuals as well, because if we’re going to meet the challenges of our country in the next 30 or 40 years, each of us is going to have to be at our best, and yet at the same time we must seek to be at our best with an awareness that even if we’re at our best, our fate as individuals will be determined by the success or failure of our national community.
Politics today is really a battle between two competing ethics. There’s the ethic of caring, collective action, usually associated with Democrats; and the ethic of responsibility and individual action, usually associated with Republicans. You see the presidential [race] beginning to heat up, and if we can get beyond these very important issues like, “Did President Obama ever eat a dog?” or, “Did Romney beat up a kid on the playground when he was 12 years old?” If we can get beyond those, to the real issues, then I think it’s a very relevant question: Can we all do better?
We need politicians to put country ahead of party and tell us the truth – the truth is that we need both. Each is incomplete. Only when collective caring and individual responsibility are together can we be at our best as a nation.
For example, health care. Everybody in America should have access to health care. That’s a basic value. Do you believe that, because this is a fellow human being, or do you not believe that? You only do that with collective caring, action that flows from that. At the same time, individual responsibility would say, “You’re in charge of one thing, really – your own body – so the better care you take of your own body, the less you’re going to cost the health-care system, and the more money that would be available to cover people who don’t have health insurance.” Collective caring; individual responsibility. Take pensions, Social Security: collective caring. For 35 percent of the elderly, that Social Security check is the only income they have. They live on it, and yet if you want a full retirement that’s better than Social Security – and Social Security is collective caring – individual responsibility would say, “You’ve got to save.” [There are] people who wake up when they’re 55 and say, “Oh, I’ve got to start saving.” My father taught me very early the power of compound interest. Save a little bit all along. That’s individual responsibility.
The economy
With the economy, what is the issue? The issue is that middle income people have not been moving up in America; that in 2010 the median income was the same as it was in 1996; that there are 66 million Americans who are one paycheck away from economic catastrophe; that who we are as Americans has always been defined by our belief that if you work hard and abide by the rules, you can move up. That upward mobility has driven ambition and it’s driven achievement. For a generation now – because this has been going on for 25 years, 30 years – people have begun to say, “Am I ever going to get ahead?” If that income that one earner in the family makes is not enough, what’s happened of course is a second earner in the family, and when that wasn’t enough, and the family had one asset – their home – they borrowed up to the value of their home and spent it like it was a raise, and then 2007 [and] 2008 came, and suddenly they were in deep trouble.
In foreign policy, the 21st century will be determined by economics more than military action. Twentieth-century military action – two world wars, the Korean War, Vietnam War, all the other little wars; we were deploying forces all over the world; we can go anywhere and fight two wars simultaneously, maybe three – that’s where our power came from. [In the] 21st century, it’s got to come from our economic strength, because we have to understand the world we’re living in, and the world we’re living in is one in which there is a burgeoning economic power: China.
Lee Kuan Yew, who is the founder and former prime minister of Singapore, said, “The 21st century will be determined by intelligence.” He said, “Look at China. They have a talent pool of 1.3 billion.” He said, “The United States has a talent pool of 7 billion,” meaning as long as we are open – as long as we don’t shut off immigration – our value systems, the openness of our society, can attract the best people in the world to come to America and help us excel even as we develop our home-grown talent. That’s even more relevant when you look at replacement rates, the number of people who are born versus the number of people that die. In order to replace your population there has to be [about] 2.1 per 1,000, and we’re now like 1.8, so immigration is also relevant to being able to keep our promises to the elderly in health care, Medicare and other things.
China is making very long-term decisions. They’re building the structure for economic power in the 21st century. They’re talking about a high-speed rail line from China into Southeast Asia to Singapore; across Central Asia to Turkey; across Siberia to Moscow and to Berlin, from which they will be able to drain resources into China. They’re talking about building dams on the Mekong, the Ehrolati, the Bama Putra; all rivers originate in the Himalayas and flowing south to Southeast Asia and Asia, and by building those dams they’ll be able to have an influence on these countries by controlling the water supply without firing a shot.
These are long-term decisions. We have to begin to think that way, and we have to begin to act that way.
On October 29th, the front page of The New York Times [featured] two stories. One says, “Europeans Go to China to Seek Investment in Euro Rescue Fund.” The story continues, “The Chinese say they would consider it if Europe would agree to changing their status on the WTO so that they’d be a market economy, and therefore not subject to the kind of sanctions that they can be subject to in their current state.” It was a story of a growing economic power using its muscle, economically.
Right next to it was the following story, “Western Business Looks for Investment in Libya.” It was the story of us, picking over the bones of our latest Mideast adventure. There’s a tremendous opportunity cost for the last 12 years to pouring our best talent, the thinking of our best people, the lives of some of our loyalest citizens into the desert sands of Iraq and Afghanistan. Not that we don’t need a strong military; not that we don’t need a strong navy. Of course we do, but adventures far away from the United States for dubious purposes, and taking all that talent that is then not available for thinking about long-term economic things in our country, has real costs.
The last area is our political institutions. Two problems. First: gerrymandering, drawing congressional district lines. Out of 435 congressmen, only 50 are competitive, and the rest play not to the center – because they’re going to get re-elected if they’re in a 60/40 district, Republican or Democrat – but they worry about a challenge in their primary so that if they’re in the Republican Party, they’ve got to play to the Tea Party; and if they’re in the Democratic Party, they’ve got to play to whatever is to the left of where the mainstream is. Until we deal with that – and California actually is on the cutting edge here, with this idea of commissions drawing lines – we’re going to continue to have this polarization.
Second problem: money in politics. When I ran for the Senate the first time, in 1978, I spent $1.68 million on the primary and general elections. John Corzine ran for that seat in 2000 and spent $63 million, a large part of it his own [money], courtesy of the Supreme Court, who said in 1976, “You can’t limit the amount of money a person spends on his or her campaign, because you’re limiting that person’s right to free speech.” As a result, when a campaign committee says, “Who are we going to get to run in this district, or this state?” and they interview people, and they always ask the same question – “Can you raise money?” – and of course the person says, “Well, I can write the check.” That’s why today 47 percent of the [House] and Senate are millionaires; 9 percent of the people are. Not that that skews policy, but it just simply makes the point about the role of money in politics.
On top of that, in 2010 the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United – that mind-bogglingly disastrous ruling – [to] repeal Teddy Roosevelt’s law in 1907 that said corporations can’t contribute to politicians, because Roosevelt had been appalled at what he’d seen as the vice president to William McKinley in 1900.
This court ruling repealed that law. The thought process was to say [that] since, under rulings of the 19th century a corporation was considered a person, under the law, that you can’t limit what a corporation spends on politics; because that corporation is a person, you’d be limiting that person’s – corporation’s – right to free speech. There[after] was born the Super PAC. I guarantee you, before this campaign is over you’re going to see an orgy of money, and it’s going to be full of destructive lies.
The only way you’re going to deal with it is a constitutional amendment that says, simply, “Federal, state and local governments may limit the amount of money spent in a political campaign.” That has to pass the Congress and Senate, and then it has to be ratified by three quarters of the states. Then we can begin to say, “OK, now what can we do?” and of course at that point, I’d like public financing. For $3 billion a year out of a $3.5 trillion budget, you could take special interests totally out of politics.
No sidelines
In 2008, remember that election night in Chicago? We made a mistake of believing that a leader can renew the country all by himself, but even somebody who touched our hearts as much as Barack Obama couldn’t do that. It takes citizens, people who realize that a democracy is not a vicarious experience, and that in the Internet age, there is no excuse. Apathy can’t be an excuse for inaction.
Citizens have power that we do not even realize we have. Just look at a little history. In the 1830s, a group of people got together and said, “Slavery is immoral. We’re going to end it.” Abolitionists. In the 1880s, a group of people got together and said, “Women should have a right to vote.” The suffragists. In the 1950s, a group got together and said, “We need to perfect this country’s laws so that African Americans have a real shot at a good life in this country.” Civil rights workers. In the 1970s, a group said, “We can’t have this dirty air and dirty water encroaching on natural spaces. We need environmental laws.” The environmentalists.
We ought to be able to have a citizen movement today that says, “Deal with the real issues, like blocking money in politics, like having a plan to raise the living standard of middle-income Americans and create more jobs. Follow a foreign policy that recognizes the reality of the 21st century as opposed to looking in the rear-view mirror at the reality of the 20th century. Make major investments for all of us, not for some of us, in infrastructure.” ...
Unless you grab for the levers of power, you become interesting but people don’t pay attention to you.
