It’s time for a new direction

Dennis Weigand
The Edmond Sun

EDMOND March 13, 2008 11:54 am

— Anyone who keeps up with national politics through print media is aware of the enormous number of books on the subject that have appeared in the past five years. I’ve read a lot of them but nothing close to a majority. They deal mostly with U.S. foreign policy in general, and the wars in particular. They vary considerably in journalistic quality. Most are critical; some are supportive. Most are analytical but also partisan. A few are thoughtfully forward-looking. One in the last category, in my view, stands out.
“A Letter to America” by David Boren should be read by everyone concerned about the future of this republic. It should be required reading for every elected government official. It makes the case that our political system is broken, our problems are going unsolved and our outlook is becoming pessimistic and cynical. It then identifies fundamental flaws that underlie that state of affairs and suggests some common sense solutions.
For recent arrivals to Oklahoma, David Boren was a Rhodes Scholar, a state governor and U.S. senator, a longtime chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and lastly, he has been president of the University of Oklahoma for 13 years. Perhaps most significantly, he relinquished his seat in the Senate to become president at OU because of the types of problems discussed in his book. He is now far enough and long enough removed from national politics to take an objective and non-partisan approach to his analyses.
Boren points out that we always have been a nation of problem solvers. We won our independence, we survived a civil war, we pulled through the Great Depression and, with our allies, won World War II and came out of it the leader of the free world. We were the main global force in emergence from the Cold War through a fundamental doctrine of deterrence and containment, with the cooperation of our allies.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have become heavy-handed and arrogant, and have lost respect worldwide despite our position as the sole super power. Dominance through military might cannot reverse this decline. Rather, we must resolve to understand the rest of the world much better than we have heretofore. We must seek common goals with other nations. We must expand and creatively realign our intelligence-gathering efforts. We must build and sustain multinational forces for the military needs created by terrorism, but only as part of a comprehensive multinational effort to prevent it.
If the above-stated goals are to be achieved, we must first reject destructive partisanship. The public clearly recognizes this, but too many of our politicians don’t. Bipartisanship works. It worked for the Marshall Plan. It worked to end the Cold War. Bipartisanship was institutionalized in the halls of Congress many years ago, but now the opposite status prevails.
Along with ideological rigidity lies money as a cause of this problem. I understand the free speech issue in campaign finance, but I really wonder if the founding fathers had money in mind when they wrote the First Amendment to the Constitution. Social Security reform, a national energy policy, and immigration law reform all could have been accomplished in a bipartisan atmosphere. But campaign finance corruption has nourished the vicious partisanship that obstructed them.
Boren believes we need a constitutional amendment to deal with the problem of unlimited money as the fuel of our electoral process. “Free speech” does not mean absolutely unregulated speech, either in the verbal form or the monetary form.
Our status as a world power is threatened by uncontrolled deficit spending. If no changes are made, entitlement programs and interest on the national debt will consume all tax revenue by 2020. This simply cannot go on. The solutions to the problem, such as means testing and other reforms of Medicare and Social Security, are entirely a matter of political will. On the subject of the national economy, we must recognize that education is one essential component of steady economic expansion. Better public education in turn requires better teachers. The societies that have the best teachers draw them from the top third of college graduates. We draw ours from the bottom third. We don’t value our teachers, so we pay them poorly and the vicious cycle goes on.
We also have failed to invest in our infrastructure. We all see this daily on our streets and highways, to say nothing of collapsing bridges and the like. We no longer can view this responsibility and other economic decisions as though they have no impact on our global economic status. This, like any budgetary decision, requires political backbone and attention to the good of the country.
In a chapter titled “Our Disappearing Middle Class” the author lays out the evidence for the widening economic gap in America. It can be summed up in a quote attributed to Justice Louis Brandeis: “You can have a democracy and a society sharply divided between the rich and the poor, but you cannot have both for very long.”
In his final chapter, Boren details how we have failed to transmit to succeeding generations our wisdom and historical memory. Our students are appallingly ignorant of American history and therefore likewise of our cultures and values. This goes back to education, and the teaching of civic responsibility. He then asks the reader, “How long will the United States remain the world’s leading superpower?” The discussion that follows is optimistic, but that optimism is contingent on our willingness to change some of our attitudes and policies regarding the rest of the world.
Get this book. You can read it in an evening. Then pass it on to someone else.

DENNIS WEIGAND is an Edmond resident.