Time for Hillary's Team to Craft a New Message

Some of the reasons why Bernie still lingers around winning the odd primary here and there, and dominating a  news cycle or two, is the difficulty Clinton has had so far articulating a winning message. One way to characterized the problem is whether after so many speeches, campaign rallies and interviews the difficulty anyone experiences in trying to sum up precisely what  Hillary’s candidacy is all about? Take her first major speech that launched her candidacy the one she gave on Roosevelt Island in New York back in June last year.  A speech that was far from off the cuff--one she had time to prepare and refine for a two years after she had resigned from Secretary of State back in February 2013. The speech’s central conceit  that there is a unifying bond that connects FDR with the other successful presidents, notably her husband and of course Barack Obama and that is “America’s basic bargain. If you do your part you ought to be able to get ahead. And when everybody does their part, America gets ahead too.” But also woven into the speech is her unique background as a problem solver and a compassionate believer in an inclusive society. But  what is noticeable is the  scant reference to the last eight years and the fact that eight years after the depression was supposedly fixed in which Wall Street bankers profited to the tune of $281 billion dollars, a majority of working Americans are still suffering. She nods her head to this in a fairly routine way,

“You worked extra shifts, took second jobs, postponed home repairs… you figured out how to make it work. And now people are beginning to think about their future again – going to college, starting a business, buying a house, finally being able to put away something for retirement.”

 It is not that Hillary cannot excite her audience or refrains from giving them red meat or is afraid of stoking a class war it is that the language she uses to describe their plight is so lifeless and abstract that it reeks of condescension.

She does not seem to be able to grasp that the Obama administration has to also account for why most middle class people feel squeezed and why in many US cities more African American youth stand more chance of going to prison than to college? Is it purely due to a poor economy that has not recovered from the great recession? Or that the economy is not working for all Americans the way it once did. In either case what has the Obama administration done to alleviate these trends?  One of the reasons that Bernie Sanders has resonated so well among young people is that he at least has found the language to describe the last eight years, used in his own campaign launch speech back in May last year.

“There is something profoundly wrong when, in recent years, we have seen a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires at the same time as millions of Americans work longer hours for lower wages and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on earth. There is something profoundly wrong when one family owns more wealth than the bottom 130 million Americans. This grotesque level of inequality is immoral. It is bad economics. It is unsustainable.”

Bernie makes what happened to the American economy in the last eight years-- underlines the economic crises moral dimensions by focusing on the way the billionaire class has flourished during this period. He does not blame Obama but he does not want to run for his third term either as Clinton seems to want to do. Bernie wants fundamental reform of the system, starting with the repeal of Citizens United and campaign financing. What is Clinton's narrative?
If you parse her words carefully her Roosevelt Island speech --goes something like this--trust me I know I know you are all frustrated with a gridlocked dysfunctional Congress but I rather than Obama have the political skills to fix the mess. How else to interpret the following passage,

“Our political system is so paralyzed by gridlock and dysfunction that most Americans have lost confidence that anything can actually get done. And they’ve lost trust in the ability of both government and Big Business to change course. Now, we can blame historic forces beyond our control for some of this, but the choices we’ve made as a nation, leaders and citizens alike, have also played a big role. Our next President must work with Congress and every other willing partner across our entire country. And I will do just that — to turn the tide so these currents start working for us more than against us. At our best, that’s what Americans do. We’re problem solvers, not deniers. We don’t hide from change, we harness it.”

So President Obama is not a problem solver?  Wasn't it rather the case that the GOP Congress in the second term refused to cooperate with the President? The question she does not answer is why given the obstructionism of the GOP should a Clinton administration be treated  any differently?  That is the central flaw in the message. Hillary wants us to see her as a transcendent political force that can somehow magically make the system work again and get the Republicans to behave more reasonably when it comes to their determination to continue to shower their rich backers with tax cuts.

How should she approach the challenge?  For a winning message in 2016 she must stop believing that simply having Bill join her as economic tsar will convince the 65% of the electorate that believe that the system is fundamentally unfair to support her in the swing states. The days of the Clinton magic if they ever existed are over for a variety of reasons--but mostly due to the cozying up of billionaires and hedge fund managers to the Clinton's various operations.  To win she will have to come clean and make public funding of elections as the Atlantic magazine argues "the first issue in her presidency, just as Johnson made passing the Civil Rights Act the first issue of his administration."  It will involve a difficult pivot --but one that she is fully capable of making--from successful power broker to acknowledging the system’s flaws that involve capture of the Congress by special interests most notably by Wall Street. She has no alternative but to  stop taking money from Wall Street and PACS and argue that she henceforth will like Bernie only be accepting donations from individuals. Only then can she find the political breathing space to craft a campaign that genuinely addresses the future and contrast that with the GOP's effort ever since Reagan was elected to turn the country into a plutocracy. She must help the electorate connect the dots between the GOP refusal to acknowledge climate change as a real threat to the planet’s survival by connecting the campaign contributions of Koch and Company to the Republican coffers. She must skewer their tax plans that are based on yet again another discredited idea that trickle down tax relief for the wealthy helps to create jobs. She needs to argue that the GOP are driven by a narrow right wing base that do not believe in government and would prefer to see government fail than work for ordinary people. She has to talk directly to the American people about her candidacy as a moral crusade for the future of the  country. Her candidacy must be less about her as a dynamic competent person (we all know that she is) and more about responding to the current generation who will be graduating from college deeply in debt and with fewer prospects of getting on the economic ladder to start families and to enter the middle class. To make this morally based politics resonate with the electorate she must accept the new political realities that are shaping 2016 as the year when Americans have had enough of status quo politics that no longer works to improve their lives.

Trump Supporters Share One Disturbing Quality

What unites Trump supporters? The media like to suggest that they are all angry at elites, upset by their declining living standards and are less educated. According to a recent University of Massachusetts,  poll as reported in Politico of 1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. found that "education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter."


According to Mathew McWilliams the author of the survey,  "Political pollsters have missed this key component of Trump’s support because they simply don’t include questions about authoritarianism in their polls. In addition to the typical battery of demographic, horse race, thermometer-scale and policy questions, my poll asked a set of four simple survey questions that political scientists have employed since 1992 to measure inclination toward authoritarianism. These questions pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious. Respondents who pick the first option in each of these questions are strongly authoritarian."

We have seen this movie play out before. In Nazi Germany a despondent group of rabid nationalists, wanted to make "Germany great again"--and were looking for scapegoats, simplistic solutions and a totalitarian leader to show them the way.  His bully boy tactics at his rallies where he glories in the crowd's desire to expel any dissenting voices, his contempt for what he sees as weakness--McCain cannot be a war hero because he was captured, people with special needs deserve to be mocked and women who appear too aggressive and his anti Muslim rants need to be put in their place all resemble proto fascist moves. Lately his quick shout out to the KKK and David Duke and his song and dance with torture, suggest how far this ego maniac would go if left to his own devices.

If we learned anything from Nazi Germany it is that such people need to be consistently rejected not to be politely tolerated. Their abhorrent views need to be exposed and confronted at every turn. The Chris Christies' of the world that try to cozy up to power should get their reputations and their careers permanently damaged and the media should be ashamed if they start showing Trump speeches without serious critical commentary that rises above the "oh what large crowds he is attracting variety." They just need to examine the above picture to gain a sense of how Trump is currently taking a look at Mussolini's photo ops to fashion his current "serious" image. They might also benefit themselves and their audiences by reading a little history.  A course that Trump University unfortunately never provided.

Sneak Preview of Chris Rock's Academy Awards Monologue

President Trump how do you all like that one?
So much for President Obama’s hope and change
He is the sort of change that I don’t think Obama was thinking about- a New York billionaire with enough gold fittings in his 757 to feed the population of Haiti for a month.

Good work Obama to have erased all memory of your campaign. Its as if you did not happen
we just went from the Bush to Trump without missing a beat. That healthcare stuff and saving the economy from fat cat predators like Trump--that did not really happen. You being the first black president --well that was kind of statistically interesting but not really that important in the long term march of progress.  We all  took the Kool Aid--now we are really so excited now to have new and improved healthcare, which means that we go back to our familiar Emergency Room doctor and our friends on Wall Street get to pay less taxes. But be grateful that you are not one of the  11 million illegals that will get deported back to Mexico.  We can all feel so much better to be protected from those rapists and thieves now they will be safely put behind that Mexico will pay for. That wall will also be a new tourist destination. A better legacy  than health care or even Trump Tower. And you can trust that Trump will surround himself with the best deal makers that money can buy.  While he is getting Mexico to pay for the wall they are planning how they can get the Saudis  to pay for the health care and Iran to pay for our nuclear weapons and China for our highways and bridges that are in a state of collapse. I mean he is only going to get the best talent.

I cannot wait to make America great again. I can see Chris Christie might get a job in your administration. How about Transportation secretary to make sure roads get closed at the right time for your limo parades down Trump Avenue--I mean Pennsylvania Avenue is such a boring name, we need some exciting upgrades to accompany that Trump Hotel you built down there in DC.  Maybe you can throw in the Lincoln bedroom as an upgrade to some visiting Saudi prince who knows who might come visiting.

I cannot also wait to see who you might pick as your next Supreme Court justice--who might it be--one of your sons? Your sister a federal judge would certainly qualify but we really don’t need so many females on the Supreme Court after all we have more now than at any time in our history and they can say irritating Megan Kelly type things that can upset you sometimes. We cannot have that.

But it will all be great, huge magnificent. Just like Trump University--that great institution of higher learning you built. Just like those Trump University students we will all study your one great book the "Art of the Deal" or was it the art of the scam. We dont need the Department of Education because its a drain on the Treasury. A better idea would be for people to pour their life savings into some scheme that will make them great millionaires or even billionaires just like you  as a result of  turning up to some drafty Holiday Inn Express somewhere and listening to some clown read from your award winning book.

Yes I can see students all over the country learning many patriotic lessons from your life story --
from the bribery investigation in New Jersey during the nineteen-seventies, to allegations that a Mafia-related company helped to build Trump Tower, to your hiring of illegals on your building projects. It will all make us so proud to have you as our next President. Something that will go down in history.

Posted 2 minutes ago by Laurence Peters

Labels: Academy Awards Chris Christie Chris Rock Donald Trump GOP Megan Kelly Obama President TrumpPresidential politics

  

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Shakespeare and Immigration

I was listening to Sir Ian McKellen who was promoting his new Sherlock Holmes movie on a recent podcast and he ended the interview by quoting from a little known speech from a seldom performed play, Sir Thomas More, that Shakespeare is known to  collaborated on. Known as the "strangers speech" it concerns the 1517 riots against the presence of immigrants in England which were recurring in the 1590s and attracted the censor's pen and the play was never performed despite( according to Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World)  alterations being made and  new scenes inserted. The strangers speech survived and we know it was written by the bard himself because his handwritten version of it is now in the British Library, classified as "Hand D."

It is a speech to the rabble to quell their anarchic and violent tempers made unruly due to their reaction to an influx of  new refugees from Europe. Although  similar in tone to the speeches about law and order the bard had crafted in numerous plays most notably Troilus and Cressida, it is less abstract, more modern and emotionally harder hitting than anything similar he had previously attempted.  I provide the text below but  McKellen's reading allows a modern ear to tune into its heartfelt power.

One cannot help when the world is undergoing its immigrant crisis to understand the message--we are all humans. We all deserve dignity. In a similar vein, Immanuel Kant calls the cosmopolitan  right of strangers "not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another.” It is Shakespeare at his most political and humane--recognizing that the right is a reciprocal one and constitutes our humanity. As the speech builds towards its crescendo we cannot help recognizing the universality of Shakespeare's "stranger's case" and the  "mountainish inhumanity" that allows us to ignore it.

For to the king God hath his office lent
Of dread, of justice, power and command,
Hath bid him rule, and willed you to obey;
And, to add ampler majesty to this,
He hath not only lent the king his figure,
His throne and sword, but given him his own name,
Calls him a god on earth. What do you, then,
Rising ’gainst him that God himself installs,
But rise against God? What do you to your souls
In doing this? O, desperate as you are,
Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands,
That you like rebels lift against the peace,
Lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees,
Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven!
Tell me but this. What rebel captain,
As mutinies are incident, by his name
Can still the rout? Who will obey a traitor?
Or how can well that proclamation sound,
When there is no addition but a rebel
To qualify a rebel? You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in line,
To slip him like a hound. Say now the king
(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)
Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,—
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountanish inhumanity.

The Smartest Kids in the World and how They Got That Way, by Amanda Ripley, A Review

Amanda Ripley a former Time reporter used to try to  avoid education stories because they were in a word “soft”--by this she means that they were largely human interest stories that traded on various cliches--well intentioned adults and kids turned into photo opportunities--smiling and silently following authority figures. Evidence that there was anything particularly replicable or important was usually lacking and the result was invariably feel good mush. Ripley’s book, The Smartest Kids in the World is a praiseworthy step in the opposite direction. Ripley  provides a lucid and largely non mushy account of how and why three school systems (Finland, Poland and South Korea) differ by allowing us to see these systems through the eyes of three articulate Americans as they spend a semester in these countries as a foreign exchange students. For anyone who has been put off by the typical faceless data heavy accounts as to how US schools are typically failing when measured against international metrics this book is for you.  In this book we gather a more nuanced view as to how our schools shape up internationally (or at least in comparison with those that typically excel on international comparison tests South Korea, Poland and Finland) by seeing them through the eyes of three American exchange students. The book is a great example of deep reported journalism for a broad audience of readers who would not normally pick up a book about educational policy for light reading but are drawn in by books’ basic conceit, how three US students who spend a semester studying abroad cope with the complexities such markedly different school systems.

Along the way Ripley helps us to learn a lot about the world of educational comparisons in a way that avoids the usual academic jargon. For example, you are introduced to the Pisa test that undergirds all the international testing which is not as you might have first imagined a
a challenge to build a jenga tower but stands for the Program for International Student  Assessment and developed by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) and not about students solving difficult equations that would fox adults and children alike but rather tests the ability to think creatively.  By taking readers through her own process of preparing and then taking the test itself Ripley leaves us more impressed with the clever way the test really examines whether the student is able to apply critical thinking problem solving and literacy skills to questions that seem on the surface quite simple such as whether an interpretation of some statistics makes sense and to justify their opinion based on the facts they are provided.

Ripley also illuminates the difficult issue of ‘rigor’ a word that is often thrown around in education circles but as you read about the way all the systems discussed in the book treat education comes to mean more than just whether students work hard at school (as it tends to do in the US) but the extent to which all the components of the educational system from teacher training to parental and public expectations converge and support students wrestling with complex ideas.

“it wasn’t that public respect for teachers led to learning, as some American educators claimed after visiting Finland; it was that public respect for learning led to great teaching..one thing led to another. Highly educated teachers also chose material that was more rigorous, and they had the fluency to teach it. Because they were serious people doing hard jobs and everyone knew it they got a lot of autonomy to do their work. That autonomy was another symptom of rigor. Teachers and principals had enough leeway to do their jobs like true professionals. They were accountable for results, but autonomous in their methods.”

Ripley is eloquent about why rigor matters and why educational policy in the US often interferes with its attainment because it invariably wants to eat away at teachers’ autonomy and prescribe outcomes that should be in the hands of professionals not bureaucrats. The ‘education superpowers’ (as she refers to the countries she studies) had a ‘clarity of purpose’ as to what counted that translated down to the students and their families. The systems enjoyed the synergy that comes from families and schools reinforcing students motivation to learn and do well at school. All students in these countries knew how and why education mattered to their lives but as Ripley sadly opines in many US schools “the priorities were muddled beyond recognition.” One of the chief muddling factors was the oversized space that sports had in American students lives. While only a minority of American students actually played competitive sports they played an outsize role in budgets and time devoted to them. Other countries cared about sports but they were typically organized by parents, community centers or clubs outside of school time. The time and the amount spent on sports in the US all sent the message that was different to the one in the other countries studied that “what mattered, what really led to greatness--had little to do with what happened in the classroom. That lack of drive made the teachers’ jobs harder, undercutting the entire equation.”

The book is worth reading just for the sections on rigor and why and how it makes a difference for disadvantaged students just as much for advantaged ones but there are so many other things to enjoy about the book and more importantly to reflect on. The Korean bargain to place far too much emphasis on testing so that school and cramming colleges turned education into a joyless enterprise should serve as a warning signal to all test minded enthusiasts. However, the opposite was also true--”moon bounce schools” (as Ripley refers to many US schools where improving self esteem rather than achievement were the end goals) produced kids who had no experience of what it meant to fail, and only later would “discover that they had been tricked” and had essentially wasted their time and would have to struggle if they were to obtain even a minimum wage job. Although politicians like Bush and Obama have through their various signature initiatives to inject rigor from the outside into faltering schools through new kinds of testing regimes, Ripley views them as promising more than they could deliver “lifting the floor but not the ceiling.” For a more complete approach one that raised the standards for all students people had to believe in and demand rigor as a result of recognizing why it mattered it economically. The author is persuasive on this point down as she recounts that all three of the countries studied passed reforms that propelled them to the top of the Pisa League Tables as a result of serious threats to their countries’ living standards. Part of the reason the US has resisted adding more rigor to the school experience has been the general preference of some sectors of the society to continue to deny the connection between schooling and economic success. Ripley uses the example of Oklahoma’s resistance to any form of rigorous standards or assessments as something of a test case. The repeated efforts by some Oklahoma lawmakers to defeat a simple graduation test as well as more recently the Common Core make for some bitter if  humorous reading as the old canard of federal control over local standards was wheeled out by a series of demagogic politicians. However, despite examples like Oklahoma Ripley seems encouraged that Americans are beginning to get it and to “feel the urgency, the unsettling proximity of change and competition. The truth is that US is a difficult country to compare internationally as it contains a wide amount of diversity--as she illustrates by one map that looks at states as if they were PISA countries--some states like Texas compare to Poland and many Northeastern states in particular compare well to some top PISA performers. A charter school chain like BASIS (operating in Washington DC and Arizona) can produce students who outscore the average student in Finland, Korea and Poland or even Shanghai the region that ranked first in the world on PISA in 2009. Ripley maintains the issue is one of leadership. Rather than allow politicians to  play with education to indulge in their own pet ideas that might include teacher bashing or federal control, leaders from all sectors including from business and universities need to help build the consensus that what matters is rigor that starts with high standards, accountability for outcomes and market driven compensation for talented teachers. Read this book and then insist that your friends, family and most important your political representatives also read it!

Are We at an Inflection Point for a New Kind of Social Impact Philanthropy?

One of the silver linings of a deadlocked congress is that the President has been forced to come up with more creative ways to stay relevant. Rather than just convening the White House conference that ends with a commission report that may or may not make the 24 hour news cycle, the administration has decided that much more good can be done by leveraging private sector philanthropy in connection with governmental actions (such as  regulatory changes) that don’t need the blessing of Congress. Basically  it all goes back to the idea that companies can get rich and  do the right thing and that government should be there to support what they do. This message ever since the G-8 Social Impact investment forum in London last year seriously endorsed a new more progressive minded approach to aligning capital formation with solving large social and economic  issues culminated in an announcement from the White House this week involving  twenty private-sector investors, including the McKnight, Ford, and MacArthur foundations to commit  a collective $1.5 billion dollars to a public private partnership. The  initiative’s goals include delivering “affordable housing and healthcare for low-income communities, carbon footprint reductions for some of the America’s least energy efficient buildings, fresh produce to food deserts, financial services and education to help lift millions out of poverty.”

All of this activity has generated some discussion as to whether we are now at an inflection point here in the development of a new kind of philanthropy? For example, Jean Case, CEO of the Case Foundation took to the Huffington Post to proclaim so “A new day has dawned. Impact investing offers a unique opportunity to "invite business in" - not limiting their role to that of their foundations or social responsibility programs, but rather enabling and encouraging them to use their core areas of expertise, or their established products and services in these efforts.” Case gives the example of Warby Parker, “using fashion and consumer demand to bring eyeglasses to the developing world at scale.”  Why are philanthropies needed when their funding could easily be drowned out by the private sector? For several reasons, philanthropies can invest in that part of the project where the risk of not getting a high enough rate of return (building affordable housing for example) would preclude (based on their fiduciary duty)  a private sector endowment manager from investing. They might also according to the influential report, Private Capital, Public Good:  How Smart Federal Policy Can Galvanize Impact Investing — and Why It’s Urgent by the US Advisory Board  use their own non charitable investments which can all count towards their mandated annual five percent payout. The investments will be watched carefully for impact and if the indicators suggest positive synergies we can expect that this sector with government help will grow and the old divisions between governmental, corporate and private sector philanthropy will for start to fade as a new urgency enters the minds of the global financial elite to save the planet. This shift in thinking cannot come a moment too soon as the Millennials are expected to receive a transfer of $41 trillion in the coming decades and will want to continue to align their investment priorities with their values.

Future of Climate Change

Amy Luers

We are now accepting that the prospects of climate reform are quite bleak.  But the effects of it are quite real, as Luers and Skar write,  the effects of climate change are now real,

"Populations across the globe are beginning to perceive the real or apparent effects of a changing climate. The climate threat is increasingly equated with present-day devastation wrought by storms, floods, wildfires, droughts, and heat waves, rather than abstract catastrophic threats such as a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet or the sudden shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (dramatized in the 2004 science-fiction thriller The Day After Tomorrow). "

These events have forced the media to see climate change, "as the magnifying lens through which we view all other problems: food and water, national security, human health, and poverty." As a result "the climate change narrative has changed. A greater number and diversity of actors are aware of and involved in addressing climate change; yet each is motivated by different concerns, driven by different values, and focused on different outcomes. For many, a rise of average global surface temperatures of two degrees Celsius is not a clear line between the acceptable and unacceptable impacts of climate; we are experiencing unacceptable affects from climate today."

But as the authors write while the narrative may have changed  "the framework originally set in motion in 1992" has not.  The authors argue that "It is time to restructure policy discussions of the climate problem from a simple pollution problem to a more complex risk-management problem. This will mean shifting the goal from averting a global catastrophe to minimizing global collective suffering. This will require: taking on the climate threat as a continuum of risks from variability to change; no longer debating whether any given weather event was the result of climate change; recognizing that stakeholders hold different values and risk perceptions; and addressing climate mitigation and adaptation as truly integrated and equal approaches to managing climate risks. By restructuring the climate challenge as minimizing collective suffering, we may open up new opportunities to address the multiple facets of the systemic risks posed by climate."

It sounds like a more productive approach. Rather than confronting the climate change deniers who may not look at the same facts the same way we could find more opportunities to as the authors challenge us to do, to "minimize  global collective suffering."