NDN Blog

Are Millennials the New GI Generation?

This piece was originally published in the Los Angeles Times

It's a daunting time to be entering the workplace. Today's young adults -- like their great-grandparents eight decades earlier -- are graduating from high school and college and starting careers at a time when the American economy is shedding jobs at a record pace.

This newest adult generation, dubbed the Millennials, is known for its optimism and sense of personal confidence. But will those traits survive the new economic realities? Recent survey results suggest the answer is a resounding yes. Millennials are demonstrating remarkable resilience in the face of an economic crisis, even though the downturn has affected them disproportionately.

Through the first quarter of 2009, employment for 16- to 24-year-olds dropped by 5%, the largest decline for any age cohort surveyed by Merrill Lynch. This produced the lowest employment rates for young people in nearly 40 years. And the situation isn't likely to get better soon. A survey by the National Assn. of Colleges and Employers found that employers plan to hire 22% fewer graduates this spring than last, and that, so far, less than 20% of 2009 graduates who applied for a job have one.

But Millennials have adopted a number of coping strategies to help them weather the economic maelstrom. An AP-mtvU poll found that nearly one in five undergraduates have decided to prolong their education, hoping the storm will pass. Others have enthusiastically turned to the government and nonprofit sectors to fulfill their generation's desire to serve. Teach for America, which places new graduates in low-income schools, saw a 42% increase in applications over 2008. And the recent enactment of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act will allow many more Millennials to serve at home or abroad while also providing Pell Grant-level support for their future education.

One thing Millennials are not doing is losing confidence in themselves or their government. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press found that 56% of Millennials were fairly satisfied with the way things were going for them financially, a significantly greater degree of optimism than aging baby boomers expressed in the same survey (46%). Two-thirds of Millennials told Pew survey researchers that they approved of the way President Obama was handling the economy, with only 5% saying his economic policies have made things worse. And although 32% of undergraduates at four-year colleges told Edison Media Research that financial worries have increased the stress they're under, 75% of Millennials expressed confidence that Obama was doing the right things to fix the economy.

This type of relentless optimism and faith in collective action in the face of hardship is typical of civic generations such as the Millennials. And judging by history, their attitudes will serve them well. Their great-grandparents, the GI Generation, learned to make do with less as they entered adulthood in the 1930s and then went on to defeat fascism in World War II and build the strongest economy the world has known. As young Millennials absorb the lessons of America's greatest economic downturn since the 1930s, their determination to succeed, like that of the GI Generation before them, will be the source of the economic rejuvenation that in all likelihood will accompany their full entry into America's economic life.

Specter Party Switch Inevitable? History Holds the Answer

While Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter's announcement that he was switching from the Republicans to the Democrats may have gratified the latter and upset the former, no one should have been surprised by it. Historically, party switching is common, indeed inevitable, at times of party realignment.

Spurred by the rise of a new large dynamic generation and the emergence of a new communication technology, realignments occur about every four decades in U.S. politics.

The most recent one began with the election of Barack Obama last November. These large political makeovers normally enthrone a new dominant national party. Beneath the surface, realignments are characterized by major shifts in the voting coalitions that support the two parties. Demographic groups and regions move to and fro between the parties. These demographic shifts, and the attendant ideological solidification of the two parties, leave some politicians, like Senator Specter, who no longer represent their party's mainstream thinking, as outliers and essentially marooned.

Faced with the prospect of almost certain defeat by a reduced and much more conservative base in next year's Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary, the politically moderate Specter made the only rational choice he could and left the Republican Party.

The last previous realignment, which began with election of Richard Nixon in 1968, saw the movement of numerous Democrats, primarily Southerners, to the Republican Party. Starting with Strom Thurmond and continuing through Richard Shelby, these conservative Democrats, along with many of their constituents, saw the GOP as a more comfortable political home. But the movement between the parties wasn't only Southern, nor was it only in one direction. Conservative Colorado Democratic Senator, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, became a Republican and liberal Republicans like New York's John Lindsay and Don Riegle of Michigan went the other way.

If history is any guide, Arlen Specter's move from the Republican to the Democratic column will not be the last during the next several years. Other moderate Republicans, most likely from New England, the Northeast, and the upper Midwest, will almost certainly join him. At some point, it is also probable that a smaller number of conservative Democrats, who feel uncomfortable or politically threatened by President Obama's activist agenda, will find the GOP more compatible with their beliefs and fortunes. Just as the baseball offseason is a time for trading players, a political realignment leads to changes in the rosters of the two parties. Let the switching begin.

Here in the Real World They're Shutting Detroit Down

Note: Rob Shaprio also has a great post about the auto bailouts from yesterday.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, in a city at the heart of the American continent, General Motors produced cars, like Pontiac’s “Little GTO,” celebrated in Beach Boys songs that captured the thrill of driving Detroit’s latest creations. Today, as GM struggles to appease the government’s auditors just to stay alive, Kris Kristofferson, with a little help from Mickey Rourke, curses the financial wizards from Wall Street that are “Shutting Detroit Down” while “livin’ it up in that New York town.”

Never has the inherent tension between the investor class and the country’s manufacturing sector been more pronounced or the stakes in this particular poker game higher for the future of America. Chrysler may be forced into bankruptcy first, but it’s GM's downfall that represents the true mid-American earthquake.

Back in the late 1950s, General Motors so dominated the American automobile market that its corporate goals were focused on achieving a 60% market share. The hubris of its executives led them to decide to pick up more and more costs for medical insurance, pensions and retiree benefits, beginning GM’s slide down a slippery slope of poor financial performance

This posed a huge but not initially recognized risk to GM. By taking on these obligations that didn't show up as a cost or balance-sheet liability until the government changed its accounting rules in 1992 and required companies to show the cost of “other post-employment benefits” (OPEB) on their books, General Motors lit a ticking time bomb that has now exploded in its face. In 1972, as GM came the closest it would ever come to achieving its sixty-percent market share goal, GM was paying the entire health insurance bill for its employees, survivors and retirees, and had agreed to "30 and out" early retirement that granted workers full pensions after 30 years on the job, regardless of age. Its world then began to come apart.

In 1973, OPEC’s embargo tripled the price of oil. GM failed to respond quickly enough to the consumer’s sudden demand for fuel-efficient cars. At the same time, the Japanese with their then superior, lean manufacturing techniques stepped into the vacuum, gaining a foothold in the North American car market that they have continued to expand. Ironically, thirty years later the very same inability to shift product offerings during a spike in oil prices precipitated GM’s current difficulties.

GM’s reluctance to go green is often cited by its new government owners as the reason it’s in so much trouble now, but the crux of GM’s problems really go back to those heady days of market domination and financial profligacy.

In the 1960s GM’s annual operating margin (profits divided by revenues) averaged 8.7%. The turmoil of the seventies and the pressure from Japanese competition drove those average margins down to 5.5%. Margins fell by about half to an average of 3% in the 1980s, and about half again to 1.3% in the 1990s (not counting the $20 billion hit GM took when the new accounting rules for OPEB took effect.) Finally, in this decade the slide has actually taken the company into an average of negative margins. Now only the government’s suggested radical restructuring seems to offer a way to stop the bleeding.

It is estimated that the cost of OPEB, essentially GM’s retiree pension and health care programs, have cost the company about $7 billion each year since 1993 and are probably around $10 billion per year now. The bargain auto company management made back in the 60s with labor to provide generous off the balance sheet benefits has now become an albatross that threatens the manufacturing jobs for the Big Three’s own current workers and suppliers across the Midwest. It’s the kind of problem only government can solve.

But the Obama Administration’s early efforts to do so have been far from promising. First it selected Steve Rattner as its “car czar”, a politically well-connected private equity investor and turnaround artist from “that New York town,” someone with no significant automobile industry experience. In addition, the government's demands that GM dismantle more brands and shut down more dealerships suggests the process may get a lot uglier by the May 31 decision deadline.

Luckily the United Auto Workers remain on watch to try to ensure that whatever concessions are demanded of GM’s current and retired employees reflect an equitable shared sacrifice with the company’s bondholders and investors. The kind of GM that emerges from these negotiations will have a huge impact on these workers and on the many industrial towns that depend on the car business for their basic existence.

Ultimately, the decision on how best to “rescue” GM may turn out to be the most difficult call President Obama will make in his first year in office. He will be pulled by pressures from the green gentry left to force GM’s future products to conform to a pre-determined environmental agenda. He also will face predictable Republican calls to let the market work its will, even if it means the end of the company.

President Obama will need the wisdom of Solomon to recognize that today’s workers no more deserve to be punished for the mistakes of prior management than CIA agents do for carrying out the orders of their equally arrogant Republican counselors during George W. Bush's administration. To paraphrase the President’s words, it’s “time to move on” and offer GM the support it needs to “Catch a Wave” and start producing more “Good Vibrations” for America’s hard pressed, but still very critical manufacturing sector.

Cross-posted at New Geography.

The Honeymoon Isn't Over Until the Public Sings

While noting that President Barack Obama has higher job approval scores than any president in the past three decades, some in Washington also wonder how long this honeymoon can last and how much Obama can get done before it ends. The answer to those two questions lays in placing both Obama's performance and the questions themselves in historical context. 

As the late V.O. Key, the founder of modern political science research, pointed out in his masterful 1960 book, The Responsible Electorate, voters make their decisions in retrospect. Specifically, the public's judgment about how well a president is doing is based in part on how it evaluates his predecessors, especially the president who immediately preceded the current president. There is no doubt that at least a part of Obama's appeal is simply that he is NOT George W. Bush, the most poorly evaluated president in polling history. Similarly, President Jimmy Carter had slightly higher numbers than Obama at this point in his presidency, presumably because his style was so different than that of Richard Nixon, the only president forced to resign because of his malfeasance in office.

But positive attitudes toward Barack Obama are based on far more than negative attitudes toward his Republican predecessor. Outside of Carter, President Obama's approval score is higher than for any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, two Presidents who served toward the end of the last civic era in American history, a period that ended with the election of Nixon in 1968. In civic eras, Americans have much more positive attitudes toward political institutions than in politically divided and gridlocked idealist eras such as the Baby Boomer-dominated one we just left. In civic eras, the public wants and expects governmental action. By contrast, in idealist eras, presidential approval ratings tend to fall fairly quickly in a President's term, signaling the end of the honeymoon. This happens as soon as the President begins to take action that is bound to offend at least one half of the divided electorate.

Civic eras begin when a generation, such as today’s young Millennials, enters the electorate with an overwhelming preference for one party’s presidential candidate and his policy agenda. This causes the President’s popularity to go up or remain stable at a high level, not down, as the newly elected candidate takes steps to implement his campaign pledges. For example, Franklin Roosevelt, who kicked off America's last previous civic era in 1932, never really did see an end to his honeymoon in terms of decreasing popularity, at least not until well into his second term. FDR's Democrats even gained seats in both the House and Senate in 1934, the only time in U.S. history that the party of a newly elected president has ever gained seats in the mid-term elections that followed his winning the presidency. And, of course FDR won reelection to a second term in 1936 by an even larger margin than he did in 1932.

As long as Democrats in Congress support Obama’s blueprint for change, he should continue to accomplish big things, which will have the effect of reinforcing, not decreasing, his popularity. While many inside the beltway may not recognize that we have entered a new era in American politics, both the President and the public do.  Barack Obama should have the popularity to prove it for some time to come.

Obama's Millennial Moment: President to Sign National Service Bill Today

In a ceremony fraught with political and generational symbolism, President Barack Obama today will sign the aptly named “Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education” (GIVE) Act (now the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act) at the SEED school, a DC public school that caters to underserved children. This ceremony caps his campaign promise to ask Americans to reinvigorate their country through community service. GIVE represents a major redemption of candidate Obama’s promise to offer his most loyal and largest constituency, Millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, a chance to serve their country at the community level and in return earn assistance with the cost of their college education.

Not everyone is ready to join hands and sing the praises of the concept, however. While GIVE enjoyed bipartisan sponsorship in both the Senate and the House, that didn’t prevent a majority of Republicans from voting against the bill on final passage. They complained that the bill was “too expensive” and would crowd out pure volunteer work with program participants receiving a modicum of financial support for their efforts from the federal government. In the House, 149 of 175 Republicans voted “no,” joined by 19 of their colleagues in the Senate, including the party's two top leaders. With all Democrats voting in favor of GIVE, the core of the Republican’s “Just say no” caucus demonstrated how out of touch with the Millennial Generation they are.

Of those Republicans expressing their opposition in the Senate, only one, John Ensign of Nevada, was from a state that Obama carried. Even though both Republican Senators from such bright red states as Utah, Georgia and Mississippi could see the potential value of increasing the number of volunteers and college students in the country’s civic life, both GOP Senators from South Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Idaho made it clear that there were no circumstances under which their hostility to government could be softened by the merits of a patriotic cause.

As Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina put it on his Web site, "We need to recognize that this bill does represent a lot of what's wrong with our federal government today.... civil society works, because it is everything that government is not. It's small, it's personal, it's responsible, it's accountable.” And Louisiana Senator David Vitter spuriously argued, “This new federal bureaucracy would, in effect, politicize charitable activity around the country." Echoing Governor Sarah Palin’s horribly off key comment at her party’s convention last August that “the world isn’t a community and it doesn’t need an organizer,” these Republicans demonstrated just how out of touch they are with Millennial thinking.

Meanwhile, President Obama’s signature initiative is drawing Millennials ever closer to his political agenda. Chris Golden and Nick Troiano, Millennial co-founders of myImpact.org plan on launching a social network designed to connect volunteers and their experiences to others with similar interests as soon as the legislation creates a market for such sharing and support. Two Millennials who served a term in the New Hampshire legislature as they began their college careers, Andrew Edwards and Jeff Fontas, are now anxious to play “a central role in getting a ‘Spirit of Service’ off the ground” as their next step in a career of civic involvement. These are just two examples of Millennials deep desire to serve.

Already the shift toward civic involvement by this new generation, in contrast to its Generation X predecessors, has doubled the proportion of 16-24 year olds serving in the nation’s existing volunteer corps. Ninety-four percent of Millennials believes community service is an effective way to solve problems at the local level and 85 percent thinks that is true for national problems as well. CIRCLE, an organization devoted to tracking the interests of Millennials in serving their country, points out that the second most important factor, other than having time, “in deciding whether or not to get involved in an activity is the impact that they [Millennials] think it will yield.” With the elevated profile such activities will enjoy under provisions of the GIVE Act, it is not too difficult to imagine Millennials taking up over 80,000 of the 250,000 volunteer slots that will be made available under GIVE’s provisions—greater than the number of all Americans currently serving their country’s communities.

At the signing ceremony, the President will be joined by many other equally committed sponsors of the concept of national service, including Senator Ted Kennedy in honor of whom the final legislation was named "The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act,” to celebrate the country’s embrace of this new ethos of service. While Millennials across the country join with them to celebrate this historic change in America’s behavior, Republicans will be left, once again, locked in the dogmas of their past, unable to imagine a country where government encourages private initiative and the nation is far better off for it.

Everybody's Wrong But Us

In Wednesday’s Washington Post, conservative columnist Michael Gerson, citing a recent Pew Research Center poll, says that the "polarization" between Democrats and Republicans in their approval of President Barack Obama's performance is greater than for any other president in surveys stretching back to the early days of the Nixon administration. In the Pew survey, a nearly unanimous 88 percent of Democratic identifiers, as opposed to a scant 27 percent of Republicans, approved of the president's performance, a gap of 61 percentage points. Independents (57% approve) fall precisely between the Democrats and Republicans. Overall, in that survey, 59 percent of all Americans approved of the job the president was doing, a number that rose slightly (to 61%) in the most recent Pew survey, conducted in the wake of Obama's European trip.

While Gerson's statement of the facts may be correct, his interpretation is dead wrong. The election of President Obama last year brought America into a new civic era, a turning point that has occurred roughly every eighty years throughout American history. Each time the country enters a civic era there is a rise in partisan identifications, a more coherent ideological divide between the two parties, and an increase in straight ticket voting. Even Gerson noted that polarization might be a good thing when it is a "decisive" and "ambitious" president like Franklin D. Roosevelt who is doing the polarizing to achieve overriding national goals. Despite Gerson's attempts to blame Obama for our current level of partisan divide, the truth is that such a division is inevitable in a civic era.

The polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the Pew and every other survey has much less to do with President Obama's personal and political style, as Gerson suggested, than it does with the inability of his own Republican Party to adapt to this new era. From the earliest Pew survey conducted in 1989, the first year of George H.W. Bush's administration, through 2005, there was near parity in the distribution of party identifiers within the electorate; no more than three or four percentage points ever separated the Democrats from the Republicans. By contrast, since 2006 the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Democrats has risen significantly, while the number saying they are Republican has fallen. In the most recent Pew study, conducted early this month, the Democrats held a clear 52% to 35% lead over the Republicans in party ID, a 13 percentage point shift toward the Democratic Party since 2004. And, only 21 percent of American voters are "pure" Republicans, a group that consists only of those willing to call themselves Republicans and does not include independents that say they lean toward the GOP. This is the smallest number of "pure" partisans for either party in any survey ever conducted by Pew.

Quite simply, the GOP has become an ever-declining corps of conservative true believers. A recent Frank N. Magid Associates survey indicates that while Democratic identifiers are almost evenly divided between liberals or progressives (45%) and moderates (42%), among Republicans, conservatives outnumber moderates by more than 2:1 (61% vs. 26%).

As a result, Republicans see things very differently than almost everyone else. The latest Daily Kos weekly tracking poll, for example, indicates that more than two-thirds of Americans (67%) have a favorable opinion of President Obama. In that poll at least sixty percent of both women and men and all age and ethnic groups have a positive impression of the president. Only among Republicans (23%) and in the geographic center of the GOP, the South, (41%), is only a minority favorable toward Obama.

Given the distance of the Republican Party from the current American political mainstream, and the increased sense of party loyalty felt by many Americans, it shouldn't be surprising that most of the public is reticent to see President Obama compromise with Republicans on important public policy questions as Gerson suggests. In a March CBS/New York Times poll, a clear majority (56%) wanted President Obama to pursue the policies he promised in the campaign rather than working in a bipartisan way with Republicans (39%). An even larger majority (79%) wanted Congressional Republicans to work in a bipartisan way with the President rather than sticking to Republican policies.

By refusing to do so, it is the Republicans and not Barack Obama who are now polarizing American politics and, as a result, it is they who are polarized from most of their fellow citizens as well.

If Republicans like Michael Gerson truly want to see bipartisan policymaking, they will have to retreat from their position as a corporal's guard on the right wing of American politics and join the rest of the country in seeking real solutions to the major issues facing the United States at the dawn of the 21st Century.

Lessons from Detroit: 10 Years Later, the Overhaul of the Domestic Auto Industry and Its Parallels with the Republicans' Problem

Note: Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, NDN Fellows, are co-authors of the critically acclaimed Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, & the Future of American Politics. Winograd and Hais also have a long history with Detroit and Michigan. Winograd lived there for 50 years and was Chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party from 1973 to 1979. Winograd later served in Washington, DC, as Senior Policy Advisor to Vice President Gore, during which time he witnessed the events described in the essay below. Prior to joining Frank N. Magid Associates in 1983, Hais was a political pollster for Democrats in Michigan and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Detroit.

With President Barack Obama's expected annoucement later this morning, 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 is whether the industry  should bend to the will of the government’s and taxpayers' priorities or serve only the needs of the companies’ customers and their shareholders. 

Detroit had an opportunity -- nearly 10 years ago to the date -- to change. To understand the globalizing world around it, to understand that consumers' priorities and values -- especially those of the rising Millennial Generation -- were changing drastically. While some may think it's a leap to compare an overhaul of Detroit with an overhaul of the discredited Republican Party, the similarities are there:  

But when the government becomes a major stockholder in private enterprises, the brand becomes political. And as General Motors learned to its regret, when a company’s brand is as damaged as badly as the Republican Party’s is now, the chances of it prevailing in any debate about the automotive industry’s future is greatly diminished. Very aware of the public tsunami of anger over AIG bonuses, Wall Street excesses and public perception of corruption and lack of accountability, President Obama is not in a forgiving mood. He has made clear the domestic automobile industry has to be seen as a contributor in ending America’s dependence on foreign oil and improving our environment to secure his support. Almost exactly ten years since the debate at the Detroit airport, as a price for its financial support, the federal government will in fact be telling at least General Motors which vehicles to produce for its customers.  Given that arrangement, both parties to this newest partnership need to find “win-win” solutions for the industry’s future that match the optimism and civic spirit of the Millennial generation who will have to pay for the results of their decisions.

The last time the industry seriously engaged in such a debate was during the Clinton Administration and the companies’ failure to effectively respond to Vice President Al Gore’s offer to partner with them in producing more environmentally sensitive products gives substance to President Obama’s charge last week that their current difficulties were caused by executive “mismanagement” in the past.

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 original fuel efficiency target was for cars to meet an average of 27.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 1985. On Earth Day, 1992, candidate Bill Clinton proposed to raise that standard even further to 45 mpg if he were 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.  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.  

After a few years of technological research, 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 began to resist expending their resources to develop 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 countered that argument by offering to trade the administration’s support for tougher regulations on the permissible amount of sulfur content in the diesel fuels that would power some of the new hybrid SUVs, if the car companies would join in expanding the scope of the PNGV plan to include SUVs, the very product they said the marketplace was asking for. Gore suggested each company produce a concept SUV by 2002 and three production prototypes by 2006, capable of getting 80 mpg. He also suggested they advance the mass production goal for cars to 2002 by deploying a 60 mpg five 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.”  Not all of the auto 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. And William Clay “Bill” Ford, Jr., great grandson of the company’s founder and Chairman of its Board of Directors envisioned building  a 21st century version of the Model T that would be environmentally friendly as well as inexpensive. Gore asked the companies to respond to his suggestions by September 1998, the fifth anniversary of PNGV.  

But it wasn’t until May of 1999, that the auto company CEOs joined the Vice President to settle the issue of SUVs and PNGV.  Gore began the meeting, held in a back room at the Detroit airport, by suggesting that developing these products could enhance the industry’s image as well as each company’s individual brands.  Ford's Pestillo asked for still more time to consider the idea: “While we love the progress we are making in PNGV as it’s currently constituted, it’s not yet clear to us that the technologies we have been working on apply to the design of an SUV.”  But Pearce used the platform (basic body design) issue raised by Ford to make Gore’s point. He sketched a future auto industry where the line between cars and trucks would not be as clear, describing what we know today as “crossovers”.  It might therefore be wrong, he suggested, for PNGV to be limited to just one platform. 

Gore took the opening and suggested the companies think about what such an announcement might mean to the industry’s image and their individual brands. “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.”  When Pestillo attempted to return to his original arguments, he was overridden on the spot.  GM said, “If you will include lean burn technology (for diesel SUV’s) into the project that might work.” Gore responded, “Let’s work on this as a package.”

Recognizing the breakthrough they had just achieved, the participants began to think about what the future might look like if they formed a true partnership -- not too dissimilar from what is being contemplated now under the terms of the automotive industry loan. Gore said he would put his personal reputation behind such an agreement, which the press would think of as a “Nixon goes to China” event, garnering the auto industry a great deal of positive press. 

But when it came time for the true test of their commitment to this new partnership, the autos blinked. The Vice President suggested they sign off on a press release, conveniently drawn up before the meeting started, announcing the inclusion of SUVs in an expanded PNGV project. The CEOs argued for a less definitive announcement stating that they would address the issue of highly fuel efficient SUVs within the context of the PNGV partnership, but not commit to any specific goals for their production. This less-than-definitive agreement barely made it to page B4 of the Wall Street Journal the next day and was generally ignored by the public the participants were hoping to impress.

Unfortunately for America, General Motors then decided to go 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 just under $4 today. General Motors, which has lost $70 billion since 2005, has seen its market share cut in half.  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].

His lack of commitment to the type of automobile industry that PNGV envisioned ultimately led to his downfall with the Obama Administration now demanding his resignation as part their plan to save GM.

The importance of a company’s public image or brand value has never been greater than in this new civic era, where the lines between democratic decision-making and private sector planning are becoming increasingly blurred. The organizing cry of Boomer feminists was “the personal is political.”

The paragraph from above bears repeating: 

But when the government becomes a major stockholder in private enterprises, the brand becomes political. And as General Motors learned to its regret, when a company’s brand is as damaged as badly as the Republican Party’s is now, the chances of it prevailing in any debate about the automotive industry’s future is greatly diminished. Very aware of the public tsunami of anger over AIG bonuses, Wall Street excesses and public perception of corruption and lack of accountability, President Obama is not in a forgiving mood. He has made clear the domestic automobile industry has to be seen as a contributor in ending America’s dependence on foreign oil and improving our environment to secure his support. Almost exactly ten years since the debate at the Detroit airport, as a price for its financial support, the federal government will in fact be telling at least General Motors which vehicles to produce for its customers.  Given that arrangement, both parties to this newest partnership need to find “win-win” solutions for the industry’s future that match the optimism and civic spirit of the Millennial generation who will have to pay for the results of their decisions.

Positive Partisanship for a New Era

Bipartisanship. Other than "stimulus" or "bailout," perhaps no word has been written or spoken more often by politicians and pundits alike in Washington since the inauguration of Barack Obama. Commentators have generally characterized President Obama's attempts to engage Republicans as almost completely unsuccessful, while Republicans have derided his efforts as charming but ineffective, especially in light of the more partisan approach of his party’s Congressional leadership. Liberals such as Thomas Frank dismissed bipartisanship as a "silly Beltway obsession," calling it "the most cynical stance possible."

For his part, the President told columnist E.J. Dionne that the almost complete rejection of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act by congressional Republicans reflected a combination of genuine "core differences between Democrats and Republicans" and an opportunistic attempt to "enforce conformity" and "reinvigorate their base." Obama then outlined the limits of his good will in a phrase sure to be repeated as the debate continues: "You know, I'm an eternal optimist. That doesn't mean I'm a sap."

While some of this is just typical Washington politics, there is more to the argument over bipartisanship than mere gamesmanship. American politics has moved to a new era, one in which basic public attitudes toward government and the norms by which political activity is conducted and judged have been altered sharply and profoundly. Spurred as always by the emergence of a large and dynamic new generation, this makeover or realignment has changed almost everything about American politics, including the very meaning and practice of "bipartisanship."

The most striking evidence of just how much things have changed was the extraordinary exchange between the President, congressional leaders from both houses and parties, and leaders from the private sector, both business and labor, at the White House Summit on "Fiscal Sustainability." The entire event was deliberately choreographed by President Obama to be demonstrably bipartisan and televised for the public to see. The dialogue between the President and Members of Congress suggested some principles of an approach to governing that can best be described as "positive partisanship." It is the way in which bipartisanship will be exercised in the new civic era that began with the election and inauguration of Barack Obama. The President himself summarized how this new approach should work, responding to U.S. Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who asked him to take the lead in telling Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats to be inclusive in their approach to developing legislation: "I do agree that the majority has an obligation to try and be as inclusive as they can, but the minority has to be constructive in return. The minority has to come up with their own ideas and not just want to blow things up." Exactly.

In the 40-year long "idealist" era that just ended, bipartisanship reflected the circumstances of a nation dominated by the unflinchingly ideological and profoundly fractured Baby Boomer Generation. Within the electorate, and especially among Boomers, there were approximately an equal number of Republicans and Democrats and, at times, more independents than either. Voters were almost always sharply divided along the demographic lines of gender and ethnicity. In 14 of the 20 Congresses during the era, different parties controlled the presidency and at least one house of Congress, something favored by the American public in attitude surveys throughout the period. As a result, major alterations in public policy were rare and institutional gridlock was the rule rather than the exception.

Historically, in previous idealist eras, "bipartisanship" meant seeking the lowest common denominator to bridge the differences between ideological extremes. During most of the idealist era between the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 and Abraham Lincoln in 1860, attempts to find a literal mathematical midpoint between the slave states and free states were the rule. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 divided the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase into free states north of latitude 36° 30' and slave states south of that line. Later, new states entered the Union in pairs, one slave and one free state at a time. A Whig politician, Henry Clay, gained the nickname "the Great Compromiser" for his efforts to achieve those middle ground solutions.

In the idealist era that has just ended, political leaders, especially Democrats, were often forced to return to the bipartisan model of that earlier era. Bill Clinton, certainly the more successful of the two Democrats elected to the presidency between 1968 and 2004, often pursued an approach of "triangulation" between the ideological liberals of his own party and the conservatives of the opposition Republicans. "Centrist" Democratic groups (the very term obviously implying middle ground positioning) sought a "Third Way" between the ideological and partisan ends of the political spectrum. Party liberals often excoriated Clinton and the "centrist" Democrats for their ideological impurity. But the efforts to seek midpoint bipartisan policies made sense in a politically divided idealist era, especially one in which the opposition party held the presidency most of the time and divided government was the norm.

But in 2008, America moved to a new political era and everything changed, including the meaning of bipartisanship, as the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression pushed the country into another civic era. In this environment, the American public, which had preferred divided government during the previous idealist era, now endorses unified government. A CNN survey conducted immediately after the 2008 general election indicated that a clear majority (59%) favored the idea of the Democrats controlling both elective branches of the federal government. Only 38 percent said that one-party rule was a bad idea. The public used a clearly civic era rationale to explain its changed attitude, telling Wall Street Journal pollsters that when the same party controls both the presidency and Congress, "it will end gridlock in Washington and things will get done." A recent CBS/New York Times survey confirmed the desire for decisive action across the institutional lines of a newly unified government. A clear majority (56%) wants President Obama to pursue the policies he promised in the campaign rather than working in a bipartisan way with Republicans (39%). By contrast, an even larger majority (79%) wants congressional Republicans to work in a bipartisan way with the President rather than sticking to Republican policies.

Faced with the need to deal with the deep national crisis that triggered the birth of the civic era, the majority of Americans no longer have the time or tolerance for the partisan and ideological rancor that fractured the political process and produced gridlock in the previous idealist era. If nothing else, the public expects calm, courteous, and polite discussion that focuses more on possible solutions and less on defining differences and distinctions. That tone was exemplified by the President as he conducted the Q&A with the Summit participants -- listening carefully to what they had to say, agreeing or disagreeing with some comments but always in a civil, and in some cases self-deprecating, way that made it impossible for the participants to engage in their usual hot-button rhetoric.

Beyond demanding a new tone in political discourse, the public is also expressing its desire for decisive action with the majority party, currently the Democrats, having primary responsibility for governing. At the Summit, the President underlined some of the philosophical differences between the parties when discussing the question of individual tax rates or levels of overall revenue. But he made clear by his control of the session what he had told some Republicans earlier: "We won." He acknowledged both that the electorate had asked Democrats to take the lead in developing and implementing policies to deal with the major issues facing the nation and that he wanted the Republicans to play a role in finding the answers so long as they participated in a "constructive" fashion.

This offer to engage puts the GOP in a quandary. It can choose to retain its ideological purity and hope to avoid blame if Democratic decisions turn out to be ineffective or harmful, but in doing so it is denying itself any role policymaking during Obama’s presidency. Furthermore, such posturing is already creating an image in the public’s mind of Republicans being too political and obstructionist.

Alternatively, the GOP can resurrect the "Ev and Charlie Show" from the days of Lyndon Johnson when those two Republican congressional leaders participated in the policymaking process as a junior partner. If the Republicans choose this approach, they may leave themselves open to charges, similar to those leveled by Newt Gingrich at Republican congressional leaders when he first arrived in Congress, that they are a pale "me too" reflection of the Democrats, without any guiding principles of their own. But the approach does produce results. In the 1960s, Everett Dirksen and Charles Halleck collaborated with LBJ to provide the crucial votes on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decisive support of Republican Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter for the recently enacted economic recovery act may be an unofficial and limited reflection of this approach early in the new civic era.

Overall, however, the GOP seems inclined to avoid collaborating with Democrats in order to stay true to its idealist era ideology. While that may well promote party unity and discipline, from the perspective of enhancing the Republican brand, it seems to be a major error.

In  a recent Daily Kos survey, clear majorities had favorable opinions of the President (67%) and the Democratic Party (53%). Favorable attitudes toward congressional Democrats (44%), Speaker Nancy Pelosi (39%), and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (34%) were not nearly as high. But, the favorable ratings received by the Democrats were substantially above those given to the Republican Party (27%), congressional Republicans (17%), John Boehner (13%), and Mitch McConnell (19%). Moreover, since the first of the year, favorable ratings of the Democratic leaders and the Democratic Party have remained stable or even increased, while those of the Republicans have declined.

In 2008, the American people chose the Democratic Party to take the lead in confronting and resolving the grave problems facing the nation. They are expecting a decisive, civic-oriented response from President Obama. The Republican Party is left with the options of either joining the struggle or being left behind. Ultimately, both parties behavior will be shaped and judged by a new definition of what it means to exercise positive partisanship in a new era.

New Attitudes for a New Era

President Barack Obama’s signature on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is the clearest signal yet that America has entered a new civic era, very different from the idealist era of the past four decades. As has been the case with all previous realignments or makeovers in our history, this new era will be marked by a far different conception of the role of government and of the way in which public policy is made and judged.

The latest survey results from the Millennial Strategy Program of communication research and consultation firm, Frank N. Magid Associates, demonstrate that the American public fully embraces this new era even as many in the country’s political establishment continue to behave as though the 2008 election never happened.

Conservatives in the media, and virtually everyone on the Republican side of the congressional aisle, amazingly still seem to believe that the country remains "center-right" and is willing to accept an answer to its economic distress that is based on a continuation of the financial and fiscal policies of the past four decades. Many of their counterparts in the liberal media and blogosphere, and some congressional Democrats, are upset that President Obama even deigns to talk to Republicans and are unrealistically disappointed that that the entire Democratic legislative wish list of recent decades has not been fully enacted within the first month of the new Administration. But what both sides fail to fully comprehend is the degree to which public attitudes have shifted. From the perspective of public opinion, America is now a very different country than it was in the 1980s, 1990s, and even what it was before the financial meltdown of last September.

Here are some highlights from the latest results from Magid’s February 2009 survey that clearly document this change and describe the new contours of the public opinion bedrock on which governmental policy will be debated, enacted, and gauged in the coming decades.

  • Governmental activism has replaced a laissez faire approach to societal and economic concerns. By a greater than 2:1 majority, Americans now say they prefer a government that actively tries to solve the problems facing society and the economy rather than one that stays out of society and the economy to the greatest extent possible. (58% vs. 26%). Overwhelming support for an activist approach crosses all demographic and political lines; only Republicans, conservatives, and 2008 McCain voters have any lingering doubts about the matter. In the 1980s and 1990s many, if not most, Americans believed, along with Ronald Reagan, that government was the problem, and not the solution to problems. In 2009, the American people have turned Mr. Reagan's aphorism on its head even as Republicans in Congress and the media continue to preach that very old time religion.
  • Economic equality is a major goal and standard by which to gauge government policy. A majority of the American public now believes that the best policy is to ensure that everyone has at least a basic standard of living and level of income, even if that increases government spending, instead of an approach that lets each person get along economically on their own, even if that means some have more than others (53% vs. 30%). Support for policies that promote economic equality is widespread demographically and politically. Only Republicans and conservatives are opposed. By contrast, in Pew surveys taken in the mid-1990s, only about four in ten Americans endorsed a governmental guarantee of a basic standard of living.
  • Americans favor a foreign policy based on multilateralism. By almost 2:1, Americans agree that the best way to protect our national security is through building strong alliances with other nations rather than by relying primarily on our own military strength (56% vs. 29%). Once again, Republicans and conservatives stand in opposition to all other major demographic and political groups on this matter. And, once again, the American public has clearly moved in a new direction in recent years. Since early 2002, support for relying on military strength for the country's security has fallen by about 15 percentage points while the preference for depending on alliances with other countries has also increased by about the same amount.
  • Pragmatism has replaced ideological purity as the preferred standard for gauging public policy. Half of Americans (49%) say that the best way to judge the correctness of government policies is how well they work. Only a third (31%) believe that the standard should be whether the policies seem to be morally right or wrong. As in other areas, it is only Republicans and conservatives who are out of step with the rest of the public. Clearly, most of the American people, if not many of those inside the Beltway, are ready to say farewell to the ideological gridlock that has characterized U.S. politics for the past 40 years.

These results reflect an almost total shift in the bedrock beliefs of the American people about the purpose of government and the standards for evaluating public policy. Under the heavy influence of the Millennial Generation’s (those born between 1982 and 2003) preference for liberal interventionism in economic matters, activist multilateralism in foreign affairs, and tolerant non-meddling on social issues, the United States has moved squarely into a new civic era.

President Barack Obama intuitively and clearly understands the magnitude of this major change in public opinion. The American people have adopted new attitudes for a new era. It's now time for the Washington political elites to do the same.

It's No Time for Politics as Usual

The U.S. Senate’s “Dr. No,” Republican Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, best captured the need for political leadership in this time of crisis in accepting his nomination by President Barack Obama to be U.S. Secretary of Commerce: "Now is not the time for partisanship. Now is not the time to stand in our ideological corners and shout at each other. Now is the time to govern and govern well."

Unfortunately, many in Congress, including much of the leadership of both parties, still don't understand that the United States has entered a new civic political era, demanding new rules of behavior in response to our dire economic circumstances. Even as President Obama expresses the "fierce urgency of now," pointing out that if government does not act soon and vigorously it "will turn a crisis into a catastrophe," Congress still seems unable to put aside the ideological arguments and constant efforts to win partisan advantage that characterized American politics in the era the country has just left.

Congressional Republicans seem to believe that the economy can only be revitalized by tax cuts while Democrats say that only vast federal spending, some of it on the pet projects of Members, will produce economic recovery. As demonstrated by the recent House vote on final passage of the economic recovery bill, in which virtually all Democrats voted against all Republicans, working across party lines remains an elusive dream. Republican Members of Congress seem intent on following the strategy from their ideological battles with President Bill Clinton a decade ago in which the goal was to enforce party discipline in the hope that the President and his party would fail and Republicans could blame the Democrats in the next election. But with the stakes as high as they are now, the GOP should instead be listening to the author of that earlier strategy, Newt Gingrich, who has publicly made it clear that the country cannot afford for Obama’s economic recovery plan to fail.

Meanwhile, Democrats need to learn some new rules of behavior as well. While NDN's Globalization Initiative Chair Dr. Rob Shapiro has correctly noted that the recovery package now before the Senate contains only the "normal quotient of special interest subsidies on both the spending and tax sides -- think of it as a 'congressional tax,'" -- these clearly aren’t normal times. It may be true that, as Rob says, "they really can’t help themselves." But like others recovering from an addiction, Democrats will have to at least try to change their approach to building legislative consensus in this new era, one step at a time. 

The American public clearly sees the distinction between Congress' approach and that of President Obama. A Pollster.com compendium of national surveys indicates that 70 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of President Obama and 63 percent approve of his performance. By contrast, only 17 percent approve of the job Congress is doing, while 78 percent disapprove. More to the point, in a recent Rasmussen Reports survey, a plurality (42 percent) perceives Obama to be governing in a bipartisan manner. By contrast, only half that number believes the same of both congressional Democrats and Republicans (22 percent each).

Of course, there is a way out. Unlike the social issues that dominated American politics during much of the last four decades, the economic and fiscal issues that are the current focus can be bridged with a non-ideological, post-partisan, and pragmatic approach recognizing that each side may have something to offer. If properly targeted, the tax cuts advocated by Republicans should be useful. If aimed at the right mix of projects, the Democratic spending proposals should help the economy in the short run and provide the conditions for growth in the long run. Keeping people in their homes, as both parties seem to advocate, will help families, neighborhoods, and society.

In short, as Rob Shapiro points out the recovery package can be "a useful first step, and one for which NDN has long argued."

Unlike their legislative representatives, the public has moved on from the cultural wars of the last decade. In a late January Pew survey, more than eight in 10 named the economy (85 percent and jobs (82 percent) as top policy priorities for the federal government, significantly above the numbers saying this about any other issue. In a January Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, only seven percent cited “social issues” as an area on which government should focus compared to 21 percent who cited such cultural issues a decade ago. Paul Helmke, The Republican former mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana, summed up the historical nature of the shift, telling Naftali Bendavid of the Wall Street Journal, that in a time of war and financial crisis, "people tend to focus on pragmatic issues rather than what the framers meant in 1789."

Throughout our history, major transformations or civic realignments have occurred at a time of intense national crisis that threatens the viability or even existence of the Republic. One such crisis occurred in the mid-19th century when the nation, led by Abraham Lincoln, overcame secession and a civil war to preserve the Union and end the moral blight of slavery. Another took place in the 1930s as America, spurred by Franklin D. Roosevelt, created the governmental institutions that allowed it to overcome the greatest economic downturn in its history and later to overcome the threats of fascism and communism.

The makeovers stemming from these crises change almost everything about U.S. government and politics -- voting alignments, public policy, and the rules by which politicians are expected to act and are judged by the American people (as we recently wrote in our essay, New Rules for a New Era). In the idealist periods before these civic realignments political figures more often than not act as moralists bent on the uncompromising advancement of ideological positions across virtually every policy concern--economic, international, and cultural -- and, more often than not, the public applauds and rewards this behavior. But, after civic realignments, faced with overwhelming and severely threatening crisis, the behavioral expectations and evaluative standards of politicians are altered. The public wants politicians to work across party and institutional lines on a non-ideological basis to produce pragmatic policies that deal with the crisis facing the nation. It's time for the House and Senate to follow the lead of President Obama and the American people and adopt new rules for a new era.

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