Renewing Democracy, Reinventing Government

Transcript

M. Armacost: Welcome everybody. It's a pleasure to welcome you to this second of our National Issues Forum during the 2000 presidential campaign. For an institution like ours, the campaign years are special because we like to think at least the public's attention is more focused on the substantive issues on which we work. And since 1916, when we were established, we have always been interested in the process of governance and the means by which decisions in Washington are made. And that will provide a lot of the focus for this morning. We will feature our Government Studies Program with Paul Light, Tom Mann, E.J. Dionne, Sarah Binder carrying much of the load.

But first, we are honored to have as our keynote speaker Senator Chuck Hagel, who has been one of the real stars in the Senate since elected in 1996. And he has been hailed almost universally in the press among his colleagues for his effectiveness and for his common-sense approach to both domestic and foreign issues.

I'd like to think a lot of Chuck's success in the Senate reflects the broad life experience he brought — outside Washington. He was a combat veteran in Vietnam. He had an immensely successful cellular telephone business. He has been active in investment banking. He has worked on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, as an aide to Congressman McAllister [sp] in the 1970s and as a senior official deputy administrator of the Veterans Affairs Administration during the Reagan administration.

We are delighted he is back. As you know, he was one of the four senators that backed Senator McCain's campaign, which brought such a sharp focus to campaign finance reform. And Senator Hagel has introduced his own legislation on that issue. And he is very active in four major Senate committees. So it's a great honor, Senator Hagel, to have you here this morning. And after he speaks, he'll take some questions before our panel convenes.

Sen. Hagel: Mike, thank you.

And good morning. I am grateful for an opportunity to say hello and share some thoughts with you, concerning the theme that you are going to dissect today, "Renewing Democracy."

I jotted down this morning some thoughts about what's happened in American politics the last few years. How have we got to where we are, and — wherever that is, and whatever that is. And then I want to address some things that I think are critically important to reconnect our representative government with the people.

These are not profound observations. These are rather simple, direct, basic foundational observations. But these are foundational dynamics that have held this country and this democracy in good stead for over 200 years, and like all things in life, democracy is dynamic, representative government is dynamic, new challenges arise, and new solutions are demanded to deal with those new challenges.

Let me begin by offering something that Hugh Sidey said in 1979. Hugh Sidey said this in one of his wonderful Time magazine columns that many of you remember, entitled "The Presidency." I confess that I am a great admirer of Mr. Sidey, not just because he got a significant amount of his grounding and experience and knowledge in Omaha, Nebraska, working as an editor for the Omaha World Herald, but he's also from Greenfield, Iowa, which is about 50 miles east of Nebraska. And in the old days, that really was Nebraska. The Missouri River just constricted somewhat and has allowed Iowa to take more land from us. So I really believe that Sidey is a legitimate Nebraskan.

But he said — in 1979, in kind of an offhand remark about politics, he said this: "Politics, when all is said and done, is the business of belief and enthusiasm. Hope energizes. Doubt destroys. Hopelessness is not our heritage."

I have always found that to be the most succinct explanation of politics that I have ever read. He embodies it all.

Now, with that, I begin with the premise that Sidey laid out in 1979. Politics reflects society. A nation's government, our democracy, is our society. Our democracy is us. And we connect that to the fact that we're all products of our own environment. Each of us in this room, every American, is a product of his or her environment — where they come from, experience, how they were raised. So there's a culture or institutional process that's built into democratic government. And that means expectations, that's standards, it's values. It's the completeness of who we are as an individual first, first, and then representative government broadens that because representative government, democracy, is self-government.

So, what's the one currency most critical in the process, especially as we review the topic, "Renewing Democracy"? It's trust. There cannot be self-government without trust. And when that one currency that is most important — trust — when that one currency is debased, then you have no currency, you have no trust; and you have trouble within the process of self-government.

And as we go back for 30 years, we recall what was going on in this country in that 25- to 30-year period. Ron Nessen's in the back. He recalls it vividly. Vietnam. Watergate. I think those two issues have sometimes been overstated and overplayed as to how our democracy and our government and our politics have been conditioned over the years as a result of those two, but nonetheless, those two very dramatic events in the history of our nation conditioned and developed a generation. And there is some reference point back to those days in this business.

That may well explain some of why, when you look at the numbers, in 1960 the presidential election of 1960 produced more than 60 percent of the eligible voters as actual participating voters. More than 60 percent of the eligible voters in America voted in 1960. The last presidential election we had in this country, 1996, we had less than 50 percent — 48, 49 percent of the eligible voters. That's a rather dramatic drop. And when you compare that with the rest of the world, that's beyond embarrassing. The world's greatest democracy, the greatest democracy of mankind, has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the world.

Now, that in itself is worthy of a lot of very bright scholars dealing with it. And they have dealt with it and, I suspect, will deal with it more this year. But that's a piece of this conversation that needs to be set into place.

I've always believed that, both as a practitioner of politics and an observer and a participant, that people in this country generally want to believe in things. They want to believe in things that are bigger than themselves. They want to attach themselves to things, causes, noble causes, bigger than themselves. And one of the phenomenons about John McCain's campaign, I think, this year as I traveled across this country with him was part of that. John McCain was seen by many people as something bigger than a politician. He appealed especially to younger people, and this is reflected very clearly in the exit polls and the kind of turnout that he inspired in the states where he was competitive. Record turnouts of young people. Record turnouts of Independent, Democrat and Republican voters in many of these states. But he seized upon that one element, and that is, be part of something bigger than yourself, be part of something more important than your individual self-interest. The nobleness of that, the inspiration of that is very much part of our culture, very much part of who we are.

Now, cutting against that, that distresses people, that confuses people, is what politics has in many people's minds has become in the last 20 years, especially in the last 10 years: a very negative, nasty, gut 'em, gotcha kind of business. Now that isn't new. Many of you who read a little bit of history and have gone back in the 200 years of this democracy know that there were far worse political times than what we are seeing today. The difference today is that we have a new awareness because we are a much more sophisticated society, partly because we have a news media today that reports everything. There's a transparency in politics and democracy today that has never been anywhere like we see it today. And occasionally I'm asked, well, how can you stand to serve with all those thieves and those terrible people up in that Capitol? Of course, never directing that to me. But I said, I think pound for pound, man for man, woman for woman, we probably have the best people we've ever had in the history of our country serve. And why is that? Well, partly because the system is more open and more transparent than we've ever had. And that's partly a result of the news media, that's partly a result of many things. And we'll get into campaign finance reform, and Mike talked about that, and other parts of the process that we need to use and need to address to make it a better process.

But nonetheless, what we've got here is a society that is now more immediate than ever before, it's more complicated and complex than ever before. And as you fragment this, which is probably as much a problem as anything else, you fragment it into essentially segmented marketing, is where we have gotten to in American politics; meaning that you take the lobbyists, you take the lawyers, you take everybody in this business now, who make a lot of money at it, and they will then target the special interests of their cause — environment, business, nurses, doctors, insurance, football players. Everybody has a lobbyist. Most everybody has an association. Most everybody has representation in some way.

And I'm always a little amused when I have people come into my office and say, "Well but, you know, it's the poor guy out there on the street who's not represented." And I said, "Well what do you do?" "I'm a steelworker" or "I work for Microsoft." I say, "Well, but you are represented." Steelworkers are represented. Microsoft is certainly represented. Unless you live in a cave and have no social interaction or any kind of interaction, you're probably represented.

So the very self-interest that most of us cry out about, we're part of that. It's just the way it is. We are all entangled in that process. And as that process has developed, the greater cause, the greater good for our democracy sometimes gets put in third and fourth place. And I deal with this every day as a policymaker, and I hear every good cause, and I hear some bad causes. But I hear every cause: "Senator, you must do this, We need more money for this. Our cause is greater, ours is better. Now, these are okay, but ours is better." That does not generate the completeness of a strong fabric that must be and stay woven together for a strong democracy.

Now, would I change any of that, if I could? No. We do have constitutional protections, thank God, in this country. Everyone is certainly able, certainly constitutionally protected to make their point, to make their case--as it should be. But sometimes we tend to drift from that fact and blame others for, in fact, what we are part of.

Now, the Internet is going to be an interesting part of this as well. I mentioned information, awareness, the news media, and we are all bombarded with so much of it that it's hard to filter it. And I get dozens and dozens of magazines and newspapers and periodicals; all good, all great. I don't, obviously, have the time to absorb all that. That's why weak-minded senators like me have to rely on smart staff to keep you propped up and help you with this.

But the fact is, this comes at us at such an incredible rate, and the world is changing at an almost incalculable rate. So our policies, our politics, everything lags behind. Our regulations lag behind. Look at what Congress has been dealing with the last year, for example. The Export Administration Act — how are we going to deal with selling satellites and satellite components and dual-use computer products to the world? And what we're doing in the process, in my opinion, and because we're not keeping up with it, we're hurting our own self-interests.

And if you look at satellites, for example, how much our sales have gone down dramatically in the last three years because it's all been tangled up with the State Department, with the Commerce Department, with the Defense Department, with intelligence, with the White House — it's shifted now back to the State Department — and to what end? The world is a different kind of a world today. Hardly a product today cannot be gained or gotten somewhere outside the United States. Maybe ours is better, maybe they're not. But the fact is, that is another part of democracy that gets to be the real focus of a representative government and responsive government.

Is the government now not responsive enough? Is is not accountable enough? Is it, in fact — sanctions, for example — is it hurting our own interests when we have sanctions, as we do on many nations, arbitrarily imposed, unilateral sanctions? What is the end product? What are we trying to achieve, altering the behavior of another nation? The China vote is exactly on point, the vote on permanent normal trading relations on that issue. I feel pretty strongly the other way, that history, I think, is rather clear on that; if you have any hope to change behaviors, alter the course of history, make the world better, improve the security and stability of the world, then I think it's far better — clear-eyed, absolutely; strong, yes — but far better to engage and allow societies to be opened through natural processes of bridges of trade and commerce, social discourse, programmed exchange. That's the way to do it.

And no longer do we live in a world where we isolate anybody. There once was a time when America could do that, but we're not isolating China, we're not isolating Cuba.

So much, I think, of our foreign policy — and I'm not here to give a foreign policy talk, but it is connected with what we're talking about — much of that is folly. Much of that is outdated. Much of that has no relevancy to the world today.

That's what government should be about. Government should be relevant. Democracy has that one responsibility, as much as anything else; it's to be relevant to the needs and the challenges of the people. And of course it shifts. Every year it shifts.

So the rate of change, as it's developing, has presented us new challenges that we've never, ever had before. And a couple of the things that I mentioned earlier — the political process that determines our leaders, that determine our policy, that determine events and have consequences — that process is pretty damn important, especially for young people.

When I go back to Nebraska — and I'm back there at least a couple of times a month — I always speak to colleges, high schools, grade schools. And one of the points I try to make is, "Pay attention a little bit to this, because what I'm doing here in Washington is impacting your life. We've already rung up a $5.8 trillion debt that you young people in the audience are going to have to continue to deal with, and Social Security reform — all the things that government is responsible for. And more government gobbles up and takes away from the private sector, those are going to impact you — those decisions."

In this new immediacy that we now live with — "let's get it done" — [snaps fingers] — Columbine in Colorado, the tragedy that occurred about a year ago — perfect example.

What happened? Let's go up, let's talk to Congress, let's get some gun control laws, one-two-three, and let us move on. That'll take care of it, won't it? More gun control? Well, I don't think so. I don't think so.

What happened in Columbine, Colorado, or at the Columbine school had nothing to do with gun control, it was a societal problem. What happened to those two young men? How were they able to generate such evilness and perpetuate that evilness and do what they did, using the Internet to build pipe bombs? What happened there? Where was the disconnect, where was the hole in the screen?

Now, we don't want to deal with that. That's pretty tough to deal with. But, you see, my point is let's run to Washington, let's pass a law. And we'll just pass some more gun control laws, and we'll fix it, won't we? No, we won't. But the immediacy of that — it's revolting on TV, it's revolting when we see anything happen in Africa, wherever, and we're enraged by that. We respond to that, especially Americans. We are a culture that is based on common sense and fairness. And so, how do you deal with this? How do you fix these problems?

Well, I said earlier that some of the observations, if not all, that I offer this morning are not profound or new. They are pretty basic. And you deal with them in a lot of ways. But you can never, ever substitute at the beginning as we shape and mold and build young citizens how we do that: high expectations in schools, high expectations for young people, high standards, high values. That's where you start. And that means parenting. That means responsible parenting. And education, and teachers, and private organizations. That's where it begins. You don't change any of this by another law or a good politician. That's where it is. That's where it begins.

Now, we're a nation of almost 270 million people. Are we going to have some problems? Yes. Is some nut going to do something? Yes. But let's keep some perspective on this as well. And if we continue to build young responsible citizens who believe in things, who understand they have a personal responsibility first to their own — to themselves, meaning responsible for their own conduct and own behavior and accountable, then this nation will be just fine well into the next century — will be just fine.

But if we don't build those young people right from the beginning with high expectations, understanding they have high expectations and high standards, then what you will find is a political system that will reflect that; you will find people elected to the Congress who will reflect that. There's no other explanation. Politics reflects society. Representative government reflects who we are.

Rarely in the Congress do we lead; we respond, mostly. That isn't bad. That's the way the framers of the Constitution designed it. Should we lead on issues and have courage to step up and say we need to reform Social Security, or whatever those big issues are? Of course we should. But that is in many ways a response to society, to the needs of society, to the dynamics and the challenges of society. In time of great crisis, you produce great leaders. But most of the time, you don't have that overall crisis, so most of the time democracy plods along, representative government plods along and deals with the issues of our time.

I want to talk a little bit about political parties and our political landscape today because I think there is something going on out there, and I'm not near wise enough to be able to figure it out. But I would make some of these observations based on running for the United States Senate in 1996, now being in the Senate for almost four years; being on the campaign trail with John McCain all over this country for a year, listening, learning. And I have now come out about here.

Politics is always personality driven. Talk about what we've talked about the last few minutes about challenges and dynamics, issues, immediacy. But personalities always overwhelm a system — any system. Go back to your days in school, the kids who were most popular. Whatever it is, personalities dominate. They dominate the landscape of politics, of business and entertainment. Look at our media today. I mean, our national television anchors are personalities, bigger personalities than many of the movie actors and actresses. So we have drifted to business /slash/ entertainment. And I know my friend Brokaw and others would probably take some issue with that. But in fact, that's what's happened. We are partly now a complete entertainment society. Politicians are kind of entertainers. There has always been a great amount of show business in politics.

So if you look back over the last 30 years, the political personalities that have dominated the landscape, who have generated the inspiration and the turnout, and the engagement and the interest--and I started with John F. Kennedy because he represented, not only a new generation, but a generation of politics that began a new sophistication in how we deal with politics: pollsters, focus groups, the media, TV debates. Politics really started to shift in 1960, so John F. Kennedy dominated the landscape.

His brother came along eight years later, Bobby Kennedy, and dominated the political landscape for a short while before he was assassinated. Then the most — probably the most engaging dominant political figure was Reagan, and then Clinton.

And what's happened, partly as a result of that, partly as a result of the dynamics of our country and society, and democracy, and the changes and the demands, is that politics is dynamic, as well. So Bill Clinton, who I do not agree with on a lot of things, I think, has probably redefined politics more than anybody in modern times, and here is why I say that — because there is a point to "renewing democracy" issue here that you are talking about this morning.

What Clinton has done over the last eight years, he essentially has taken the Republican Party and picked pieces out of the general Republican Party philosophy that the Republican Party has been about since World War II and tailored those pieces into his own abstraction of what the Democratic Party should be, what America wants. Being a masterful salesman and very smart and very articulate and understanding government, he crafted and literally redefined American politics, and in the process, he changed the dynamics of the parties.

The Republican Party today is essentially anchorless. What is the Republican Party about today? Front page of the Washington Post this morning, Governor Bush, over the last few days, has recommended over $50 billion in new programs. This is a conservative Republican presidential candidate. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but this is the point that helps me illustrate my theory, here, is that we've got a conservative, compassionate conservative Republican candidate for president, every day this week has been out saying we're going to spend more. We're going to do more in education, we're going to do more in health.

Look at the Republican Congress the last six years. The Republican Congress that was elected in 1994, we were going to balance the budget, we were going to cut government, we were going to cut federal agencies, we were going to spend less and lower everybody's tax. Last year's budget, you know what happened? The Republican Congress actually put more money in education, in the Department of Education, than even Clinton asked for, than even Ted Kennedy and the Democrats wanted. Now, I'm not saying that's bad, but what I'm saying is, What's happened here? Where are the lines? Where is the Republican Party?

The Soviet Union, obviously, had a major role in this. The implosion of the Soviet Union took away from the Republican Party a very strong dynamic and anchor of what the Republican Party has been and has run on and been successful at the last 50 years: strong national defense. Now, does that mean the world is any safer? No. But we in the Republican Party haven't been able to come yet together with how we articulate this and what do we say about this? So we're floundering here. We're working our way along a very interesting fault line in American politics that doesn't occur very often.

Now, many of you have written about, and I believe, that Ronald Reagan changed politics to a certain extent, but I'm not sure that he did it like Bill Clinton has done it. I think what Clinton has done here is he has changed American politics forever, in the sense that you're probably not going to go back, nor can the Republican Party go back to a time that it was represented by tenets of lower taxes, less government, strong national defense. Some of the basic four or five tenets that we were always about have changed dramatically. And when the Republican Congress continues, as we have the last five years, to produce bigger and bigger budgets with more and more federal spending, it's hard to go out as a Republican, a conservative Republican, and say we're for less government.

Now, a lot of reasons why all this happened, as you know, and I'm not here to talk about that. But my point is that we are seeing a dramatic shift in politics today, a redefinition of the parties, a redefinition of American politics. And that has happened, I think, for some of the reasons I mentioned and some other reasons that we probably haven't been able to quite yet figure out, and we're still in the middle of that shift.

Now the '90s, as we look at it from the lens of democracy, I suspect as history writes about the '90s, we'll reflect on a self-analysis, self-renewal, a self-reflection. We've had an incredible eight years of strong economic growth. So America has not — most Americans — have not been focused on keeping a job, wanting a job, economic issues. We're not at war. So, many of the big issues that dominate politics and dominate elections haven't been there the last eight years, haven't been there, literally. Not everybody is doing well. Not everybody's got a lot of America Online stock. But generally, society, in big numbers, is doing pretty well.

And what I think that has allowed us to do as a society and as a generation, and you look at some of the societal problems that get amplified — I'll use Columbine as one — is given us some luxury of time to analyze ourselves, to renew who we are, to reflect on who we are and think about where we want to go. What is it that I want my life to mean? What is it that I want to be? What is it I want my children to do?

When societies are busy building societies and building economies and worrying about making the next payment on your mortgage, you don't have much time for that self-analysis. But I think we have gone through that. And again, I come back to where I started; that is reflected in politics because politics reflect our society, and our leaders reflect that.

And again, I go back to my friend, John McCain. In part, what I think that phenomenon was about, he was seen as somebody who was apart from what we've seen over the last few years. His own story is an incredible story--his reform story. And I want to add just a word about reform, and then we'll here, in a minute, get to whatever you want to talk about.

Going back to the Clinton-Gore campaign of eight years ago, much of what Clinton and Gore talked about eight years ago in rebuilding a democracy, rebuilding our country, was centered on reform. And you remember the things that they talked about: "I will give you a government that is worthy of you; a better government, better people. And we are going to take care of these problems that we've had to deal with and we're going to reform the system." And you remember we had the commissions about getting at waste in government and slimming government down. You remember, Gore was in charge of many of those. So reform was very much a centerpiece of American politics eight years ago.

Now we reel forward seven years and what does John McCain anchor his campaign on? Reform. After George Bush lost New Hampshire by 19 points, within days moving to South Carolina, what does George Bush do? He scraps "compassionate conservative" and he has something new, "Reformer With Results." At the same time he offers a campaign finance reform bill. So there is a little something to this reform, or at least in the eyes of Americans. "We're going to reform. We're going to do it better. We're going to inspire. It will be nobler. It will be loftier. We will soar like eagles."

Now that isn't all new rhetoric. But there is a connection to all of this. Third parties. In 1992 Ross Perot took about 19 percent of the popular vote in this country. Now, that was pretty significant. Now, in '96 there wasn't as much of an effort to develop that alternative for many reasons. But as you see democracy bubble a little bit and percolate and there's something under the surface here — Jesse Ventura: Is he an aberration, is he anomaly? No, he's wrestler, I guess. But there's something to all this. Where Buchanan goes, I don't know. But whether Buchanan has had his day, what he says, I don't know. We'll see where that goes. But there are some alternatives that are being looked for out there. There are some different approaches. And I think that's healthy for a democracy. I think that's healthy. It means at least some people are thinking. And I think that is good for our system.

Now, to finalize this, what do we do about where we are? Well, some of it is just the dynamics of democracy. Some of this is the fact that each year that democracy deals with the demands of our time, the great challenges of our time, searches for solutions to deal with those challenges of our time. Part of that is uncontrollable. What politics has always been about, I thought, is making the world better and believing that you can make the world better. And everybody who offers themselves as a candidate should fundamentally believe that. If you don't believe that, then you shouldn't do it.

Now, I don't believe everybody has that centerpiece as the most inspirational and guiding principle of their career. But that's up to the voters to decide, who has it and who doesn't. But it must be manifested in some way as to how we do make the world better. And we're caught in this web of — which is all part of what I was saying over the last eight years, we're going through this very interesting kind of schizophrenic process, especially in the Republican Party, when you look at polling numbers, you look at any other numbers, or at focus groups, or I go out to Nebraska and ask people what's most important, we have long passed, we have long passed the line where the debate about whether conservative Republicans, for example, see any role for government. Conservative Republicans are no different than liberal Democrats when it comes to save Social Security, reform Medicare, and do the things that we as a society, have now decided we are going to do and commit to future generations. And we will use the government to do that.

That debate is over. That's another complication of what's happened here in the Republican Party, that we used to be able to debate those kind of things, that "scurrilous big federal government. We ought to stand on our own. We don't need government." No, no; that's over. There are very significant programs that all people want.

And by the way, when you look at the numbers on that, that represents about two-thirds of our federal budget. So this is a very expensive issue. And then on top of that, we are talking about prescription drugs, and we'll be talking about other issues; that no one will escape that. That's going to be a major part of the dynamics of Congress this year and the presidential election.

Self-government is about responsibility. And we all, as individuals, have some responsibility to make this work; not just me, but we all do. And we all can do a better job of playing our role, starting with the media.

One of the things that has amused me, as I have sat with John McCain in many of the debates this year, was how asinine the debates were; the stupid questions asked by the media. All the big issues out there — on foreign policy, on Social Security reform, Medicare reform — and you're asking, "Who is your favorite poet?"; I mean, literally, some of the stupid, stupid questions that the media asked, when we have got serious challenges and issues out there that we ought to be taking these guys down, these candidates, two and three and four levels.

What does George Bush know about foreign policy? What's Al Gore know about foreign policy; what's John McCain? Why don't we make these relevant and important? Why don't we ask those questions? Why don't we take Bush and Gore — and all during the primary we should have done this — and said: "Okay. Let's go down as deep as we can on education and on Medicare and on foreign policy." We didn't do that. So the media, I think, bears some responsibility here of letting a lot of these guys off, with kind of a glib smile and a little fancy footwork and the rest. And the media, I think, have to do a better job.

American citizens have to do a better job. I think they must demand higher expectations and higher standards. Just like in life, just like in this institution or anything else, if you don't recruit good people, then you're not going to have a very good system; you're not going to have a good program; this institution will not be very effective. It's the same as in politics as in anything else: Encourage good people to be involved.

The last thing I will say — and then we'll get to whatever you want to talk about — I want to talk just briefly about money in politics, campaign finance reform.

I started out by talking about the currency in this business, the only currency that we have in this business, those of us who have the great privilege to hold high office, and that's trust. And when you debase that currency, you have debased everything. You've debased the office, you've debased yourself, but most important and most dangerous is you have disconnected the trust and the credibility and the confidence that the people have in you and in that office.

Money is seen now by everyone in this land as a very corrupting element of American politics, and that's due to many, many things, and I mentioned a lot of them — special interests and so on. Now what do you do about that?

Well, I've thought about this for some time, long before I was ever a candidate for office, because I have been a participant. I've helped other candidates. I've run campaigns. I've seen this from many dynamics, and I again wish I was wise enough to sort it out, figure it out, and give you a good answer. I am not.

But in order to reclaim the trust and the confidence that is critical in a democracy, then we are going to have to address this issue of money. And we're going to have to do it in a way that's relevant, that complies with the Constitution, but disclosure is the first part of this, in my opinion. Where is that money coming from that goes into campaigns? And one of the problems we have are the so-called third party or independent organizations that can play in this business, but are not subjected to the same rules. That has to stop. We need to start getting a hold of that.

We are all sitting ducks, any of us, and so anything can be said about me at any time. That's just part of the business. So anybody can run millions of dollars of advertisement for me or against me. And the way our system works now is much of that doesn't have to be disclosed. I mean, we saw it in Texas when Mr. Wyly did what he did in New York, in California, against John McCain on the environmental issue — just outrageous. I mean, you sit back for a moment, and you think, "How could that happen in this country?" It's all legal. It's all constitutional.

So disclosure is the first part of this — where's the money coming from, who's putting the money in, where's it going — and some sense for the media to pick up and American citizens to understand why are you doing that to George Bush or Al Gore or John McCain? What's the deal here? What's the angle?

Second, we are going to have to put some limits on the so-called "soft money." We have limits on hard dollars, and it has been able to pass muster with the court. We are going to have to define this in some way that, if nothing else, starts to reacquaint and reconnect and reestablish a line of confidence and trust of the American public. And we can get to that. It's going to be difficult to do it this year, for reasons that most of you know and understand. Mike mentioned I have a bill. My bill is as flawed as the rest of them. But at least if we can make this an issue — and I think it will make it an issue — McCain surely has put it right in square one of campaign finance, as I mentioned, or the campaign, Bush has put forward a bill, or at least an idea, Gore has — that is a relevant part of the presidential debate about this country that far exceeds just the election this year. The consequences for that are enormous for our country.

But let's, again, not forget; good people, responsible citizens, and always working towards something bigger than oneself. That's how you renew democracy.

Thank you for giving me a chance to visit with you this morning, and I'd be glad to respond to any questions. [Applause]

Question: Thank you. I'm Elisa Newman Carney from National Journal.

Senator, you referenced your campaign finance bill. Do you think the Senate will act on this, and do you think senators feel more pressure to act as a result of the McCain candidacy?

Sen. Hagel: Well, first, on my bill. As you know, Senator McConnell has been holding a series of hearings in the Rules Committee. We will get a day of hearings devoted to my bill. He's had a number of witnesses that have led up to my bill. So the short answer to your question is, yes. I think I will get at least a hearing. Where all of that goes I don't know. I'm working hard to enlist more support. My bill is the only Republican bill ever offered that had initial Democratic co-sponsorship, and I'm proud of that. But I needed that. I'm serious about trying to do something that would allow my bill — and there's no pride of authorship here; my bill and everybody else who's part of it — to be a legitimate, realistic, commonsense vehicle to get some legitimate debate started on this.

We've had this test of manhood in the last three years that's been complete nonsense. We get a procedural vote, and that's all. We've not have any debate about campaign finance reform on the floor of the Senate. Both sides get up and scream at each other, accuse each other of things. But we've never really been able to work it through. And every time we thought we had an opportunity late last year, and that got tangled up in the underbrush of procedure as well.

So I'm hoping that we can get a bill out of that committee, the Rules Committee. I'm hoping it will be my vehicle. It can be improved on. I hope it will be. But it's a beginning.

And second question, I said earlier I think this is an issue that is not going to go away. McCain has essentially, in my opinion, anchored this issue, and that's somewhat reflected by Gore and Bush's response on this. But Congress I don't think is going to let up on this, although some of my colleagues just as soon see it fade away. But I don't think that's going to happen. And I'll tell you another reason. Those protectors in my party of soft money, because they believe that's to the Republicans' advantage: what I'm saying is that's complete nonsense. The three sources of soft money are corporations, unions, individuals. And when you start to look down the charts on who gives to whom, the Democrats play both ways with business. Business plays both ways with Democrats and Republicans. So when you look at the last two years, look at the last year, look at 1999 on soft money contributions from corporations, you may be surprised to find that there's an awful lot of money that has gone to the Democratic Party from American business.

So first category, business. Republicans usually do a little better, but Democrats do pretty well.

Second category, unions. Do the Republicans get any union money? No. The Democrats get all big soft money from unions.

Third category, individual contributors. You might be a little surprised on that. There are a lot of very wealthy trial lawyers, and when you start looking down where those individual soft money donations are coming from, I think you'll be quite astounded at just how well the Democrats do and are continuing to do better and better.

So my point is this. I am trying to convince my Republican brethren on this, that it's in the interest, our own self-interest, and what a hell of a motivator in this business, a real self-motivation interest of self-preservation, that it is in our best interest to get control of soft money before it undoes us, the Republican Party, if for no other reason. Now, I think there are nobler reasons to do something about soft money and money in politics than that. But if that's the only way I can appeal to some of my Republican friends, I'll do that. But I'm very serious about, if we don't make some significant progress this year, then I think the Republican Party will eventually be the big, big loser on this because if you roll this thing out to November, what happens if Gore's elected, the Democrats take back the House; we'll lose some Senate seats, then who's got the high ground on this? Who's going to be the chairman of the committees that will make decisions on this? And who will be controlling the terms?

So it's a self-preservation issue as much as anything else, although I think that's not the most important reason we should do it.

Yes.

Question: Marcia Kurop, Defense News.

I'm interested in your comments about the Export Administration Act. What is your position on this debate about international competition versus national security where commercial satellite exports are concerned? Thank you.

Sen. Hagel: What's my position? Common sense. The bill that we passed out of the Banking Committee, 22-0, is a good bill. I mean if you look at who's on that committee — I'm on the Banking Committee — Phil Gramm is chairman, to start with. Now there's a liberal. There's a guy who doesn't care about national defense. Everybody knows that he's a squishy fellow. And you can take it right on down the line. Jim Bunning. There's another squishy fellow. Jim Bunning likes nobody. I mean he doesn't take it out on the Russians and Chinese. He just likes nobody. And that's a joke, by the way, if the media's here.

The fact is that Banking Committee is full of strong, pro-defense Republicans, conservative Republicans. But yet we passed that Export Administration Act, the reauthorization, 22-0. Well, what we've got here is we've got some jurisdictional issues, and it's very dangerous because you look at the numbers in the last two years how our satellite sales have fallen dramatically, dangerously fallen, the components, the dual use, all the pieces. Yes, these are complicated. But we've got to bring some common sense to this. And I think it was a terrible mistake to take this back to the State Department, take it out of the hands of the Commerce Department. The State Department is not qualified to do this. They don't have anybody who understands the first thing about sales, about the real world, about economics. And I love them all over there. But it is misplaced. And it is only going to hurt us. And the French, the British, the Germans, the Israelis: all taking sales away from us. Why? Because we're sitting around with our thumbs in our nose trying to figure out what do you think? I don't know. Could they use that laptop, put it in a tank, or what do you think? And the reality of that is there is nothing the world cannot get today if they want to get it.

Now, does that mean we should just throw away to the wind precaution and procedures and intelligence? Of course not. But again, I come back to "Let's use some common sense here. What's the objective?" And that bill that we passed does it. Nothing's perfect. But I think we're not paying attention to the bigger pictures here. The economic power base here that is in play in the world today is very important, because we could see ourselves outgunned here within five years of many of these high-tech issues because of what? What do we get in return?

So I've been rather outspoken on this and been supportive of what we did, because I think it's the right thing to do. And unfortunately, I think it's gotten tangled up with some jurisdictional prerogatives. And I find that, quite frankly, irresponsible.

Last question.

Question: Thank you for coming today, Senator Hagel. My name is Lorelei Kelly. I'm a fellow in the House of Representatives. I was hoping you could stay on the foreign policy theme.

I would like to know what your reflections or insights were when you were out campaigning with Senator McCain about the increasing link between domestic and foreign policy. And the theme I'm thinking of is in peacekeeping where you have the Texas National Guard now in Bosnia and soon it's going to be Pennsylvania, and then it'll be Virginia. And the increasing realization that long-term investments are needed for stable democracies and how important that is for the United States to assume a leadership in that. Do you see that realization and that link being made in the general public when you were out talking to the American people in the campaign?

Sen. Hagel: Do you need a job? You've said it exactly right. You have said it exactly right. The world is now completely interconnected, all six billion people. We live in a global community underpinned by a global economy. And there is not a piece of the process in the world today that doesn't impact America, and especially our future. And you're right. This is an investment issue. This is a complete issue. The National Guard example is a perfect example of what's going on.

I always have had a great admiration for the House since I served as chief of staff to a congressman. But I didn't know that you were that smart over there, really. But I appreciate very much your comments, because, seriously, you have framed it up right. This election should be much about that. Bob Kagan had a — or was it Kagan? I think in Monday's Washington Post, from the Carnegie Institute, had a good piece, I thought, suggesting that Bush and Gore talk about these issues. It's critically important they talk about these issues. And I hope they will. I have been in touch over the last few weeks with George Shultz and suggested that Governor Bush start to frame some of this up. I've spoken to Governor Bush about it. And I hope they do. I hope both Gore and Bush do. It's just absolutely critical to our world and to help educate and inform our people, which politics should also be about. We should be elevating the debate. Debate should be about knowledge and information. But the process should be about elevating the debate. And I would help that we'll be able to force that, if nothing else. And I again go back to the media. I hope the media will do its part in this and force these guys to talk about the relevancy, because this is relevant.

Ron, thank you. Well, good luck to all of you. And I, again, am grateful for a chance to say hello.

[APPLAUSE AND END OF INTRODUCTORY SESSION]

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: I think we're going to start the next part, if everyone can grab another cup of coffee and come on in.

Thank you very much.

First, I want to thank you all for coming and to thank Senator Hagel. I think the only shortcoming of his talk is that he didn't tell us who his favorite poet is, which I really wanted to know and I was going to ask him on his way out as a representative of the media. But I couldn't. I couldn't get to him. I was very struck by his comments at the beginning about the differences in generational attitudes toward government. And I think that may be something we want to get into, because I think he's absolutely right. He was absolutely right when he spoke of how so much of our attitude toward government is shaped by what we grew up with, the spirit in which we grew up. I know my own attraction to politics as shaped partly by growing up in Massachusetts where, as Mary McGrory once pointed out, every baby is born with a campaign manager's gene, and partly from growing up in that period in the late '50s and early 1960s when there was a sense that government could accomplish great things, the sense which I think Senator Hagel got right when he said we've lost something since that period.

I just want to begin by saying that whenever I get depressed about the state of American politics, I think Louisiana. I say that. My parents lived there; I have nothing against Louisiana. My dear friend and assistant, Stacy Simmons, grew up there. But if you ever worry about corruption in American government, just remember that Governor Earl Long of Louisiana once told potential contributors that early money gets consideration and late money gets good government. And if you're concerned about how nasty politics has gotten in Washington, remember that Edwin Edwards once said of one of his opponents that he is so dumb that it takes him two hours to watch "60 Minutes." And I haven't yet heard even in the bitter Republican primary fight or the bitter fight between Al Gore and George Bush — I haven't heard that one yet.

You may have noticed on the website or on your piece of paper that the way we've cast this is, Are Americans Happy nor Dissatisfied? And the answer is "Yes." And we did it that way — I want to thank Ron Nessen, because it came out of a discussion in our group. I think that is one of the paradoxes of this moment, that you have at one and the same time a certain public happiness, happiness about the economy, a certain satisfaction with the way things are, combined with a deep sense that something is wrong. Now this is very peculiar. It's not like 1992 when there was just a general sense of unease and unhappiness, a sense of real crisis in the country. It's not like 1984. It's not exactly morning in America; it's not exactly midnight in America.

I was trying to think of a metaphor. And in some ways it's like a wonderful car that runs quite well, but has this very annoying ping that won't go away. And I think that the annoying ping has to do with public life and a dissatisfaction with public life, a sense that we can expect more from it than we're getting, and perhaps also that we can expect more from ourselves. I think one of the most enlightening things about the McCain campaign was that the line that Senator McCain used over and over again that got the biggest response, especially from young people, was when he said that I want to inspire a new generation of young Americans to reach for something beyond their own self-interest. In New Hampshire during the primary ten or fifteen young people independently came up to me at some point when you ask the question, "Why do you like McCain?," and they repeated that line. I think that suggests that the dissatisfaction in the country is linked with a yearning for something different, and I think that's good news.

The good news now obviously is in the economy, not only growth, not only in the stock market, but also the low unemployment rate, which has begun to lift the standard of living of people at the bottom. I think we have a more rational discussion of government. And Senator Hagel talked about this. I don't think that we have the deep anti-government rhetoric that we had through much of the 1980s and also in the 1994 elections. I think it's very striking that while President Reagan used to say government is not the solution; government is the problem, George W. Bush has put his case much more modestly. He said government, if necessary, but not necessarily government. He's criticized the destructive mindset holding that only if government would get out of the way, all our problems would be solved. And it was striking, as Senator Hagel said, how much new money Governor Bush is proposing to spend. The Washington Post coined a good line today, I thought, "the tax cut and spend program of Governor Bush." I think that suggests a change in attitude toward government in a sense that people are looking for something from government.

The other piece of good news is a certain optimism about the future. You're seeing a lot of numbers in polls when you ask people "Are your kids going to do better than you are? Are you going to do better in the coming years?" Those numbers are much, much better now than they were several years ago. But there is the bad news. There is the bad news, first, of political polarization in Washington that both Tom and Sarah are going to talk about. I think some of that is the product of this moment when there is a fierce fight going on in this election for control over every branch of government. It is a three-branch election going on out there. Not only is the House very closely divided. Not only is there a close race for President, but whoever wins the presidential election will have a huge impact on the future of the Supreme Court. In that climate, I think it's very difficult for either party to give any ground. And I think you're going to see as much fighting over making sure that things that pass as you will fighting in order to get something passed this year.

Obviously, dissatisfaction of government also flows from the recent impeachment fight. For some it's frustration with President Clinton and what he did. For some, it's frustration with his opponents and what they did. And for some, it's both coming together. And I think that when we look back we will see a large lost opportunity in this period that President Clinton, I think, did have an opportunity to make some of the changes that you can see out there already, the way that Senator Hagel spoke about government. I think that is a product of the Clinton years. And yet in the end I think the impeachment fight and all of its effects led to dissatisfaction. And I think you can also see it even in the economy itself. We're going to have some demonstrations here in the city in a few days. And I think it's a peculiar thing about this prosperity that most people, even people now at the bottom, are starting to be lifted up by it. And yet the prosperity itself is producing frustrations, both a sense of whether it's fairly distributed, and also, I think, questioning on the part of individuals. Up in New Hampshire, I talked to a young woman who said, you know, it's really tough being a student who wants to go into public service, because you turn on the TV and there is a 25 year-old kid who is a dot.com millionaire who is about to retire and you say to yourself, "What am I doing?" And I think that there is an inchoate sense of that and how are we going to make sense of this new economy with these vast opportunities, on the one hand, and some real concerns about how other people are going to make it.

And I think, finally, just to close on the bad news, I think the sense that there is both satisfaction and dissatisfaction helps explain why this presidential campaign is so close, that if you look at the traditional models of elections, look at how good the economy is, how satisfied people are with President Clinton's performance, job performance, Al Gore should have a much bigger lead over George Bush now. Not only does he not have a big lead, according to recent polls he doesn't have a lead at all. Bush is ahead a little bit. And I think that suggests the peculiar ambivalence in the country: "Are you happy or dissatisfied?" "Yes."

And we've got a very good panel here today to discuss this. Tom Mann, the Director of Governmental Studies. I noted that Norm Ornstein is in the audience, so we have the two most quoted people in America on American politics in this one room. The quotes can't fit in this room if we stack them up. And Tom is also one of the most thoughtful people I know. And he has written very powerfully on the question of how the political mood in Washington both compares with and contrasts to the mood out in the country. And he's going to talk about that.

Then we're going to have Sarah Binder, who has done some of the best work on the Congress and on the filibuster. And Sarah is going to talk about the various culprits in creating the kind of — it's not exactly gridlock. Maybe we can invent a new word today for what's going on in Congress. But divided government, how the deficits created problems, and then how the surplus has made it hard for us to reach any decisions as well. She'll talk about the disappearing political center and also the politics of the filibuster.

And finally, Paul Light, who knows more about bureaucrats, and he uses the word with great respect, I think, than anyone in our country and knows how organizations actually work. He's the head of the Governmental Studies Program, and I can tell you he certainly understands how our organization works. And he's going to talk about an ambivalence in people's attitudes toward the bureaucracy that is very similar to the ambivalence you can see more generally, that people are actually much more satisfied with the performance of individual government workers than you might expect, and yet they're not always happy with the product.

And so to begin our discussion today, I turn to Tom Mann. I just want to say that very early on I want all of you to participate. I always say it's very hard for people to ask the first question. So consider me the first questioner. You'll be asking the second question. After we go through the panel, I want to turn to you right away to make sure you can get into the discussion, and we're going to have a kind of discussion up here and with you, and we want you very much to be part of it. And I'm sure that Norm Ornstein is going to have some brilliant words from the audience at the beginning.

So, Tom, just back from Australia, doesn't look jet-lagged at all. Take it away, Tom.

T. Mann: Looks are deceiving. A disclaimer. I managed to spend 30 hours traveling home yesterday. In a 24 hour day, that isn't bad.

Listen, the theme in many respects of E.J.'s remarks and picked up very much by Senator Hagel reflecting the sort of sentiment in the country is the country works and Washington doesn't. We're happy about the conditions under which in the country, economically, socially, we're optimistic; we're positive. But that hasn't in many respects altered our feelings about the political process and about democracy more generally. And as a born-again student of comparative politics, having just returned from Australia, I can't help but begin by sort of drawing on the perspectives of having been outside the country for ten days or two weeks, observing the machinations of politics in another country and, at the same time, trying to explain what's going on in American politics and Campaign 2000 to another country. I'm struck by both obvious differences that exist, but the similarities. And the similarities help us, I think, understand the nature of contemporary politics and what's changeable and what isn't. So I thought I'd really begin with that.

Listen, I don't presume to draw great lessons from a country whose physical size is as large our own, but which numbers 19 million people compared to 270 million people. And with the hybrid constitutional system that tried to borrow from the worst aspects of our system, namely the bicameralism and a constitutionally powerful Senate, but which is in many respects a parliamentary system. What I was struck by, though, are two things that I wish I had a way of bringing to America. One is compulsory voting. There is something about a system in which routinely all of the eligible electorate shows up at the polls. And knowing that they're going to show up, it really fundamentally alters the way in which you run your politics and campaigns. It obviates the need for either mobilization efforts of demobilization efforts, which are so much a part of American politics.

The second part of it is the differences in the centrality of political money. I kept asking politicians, elected officials, lobbyists, journalists, well, tell me about the problem of money, political money over here, over there. And alas, they had a hard time coming up with them. They have a system of public financing in federal elections and a system of disclosure of private contributions. But alas, there is no arms race in political fundraising. There's rough parity between the parties. The parties basically raise and spend the money. Elected officials keep it at some arm's distance. And while minor scandals arise, it's small potatoes. It's just a central part of their politics. And I think when we come back to look at America and its problems and the challenges of renewing democracy here, we're going to come back to those two elements, the absence of compulsory voting and the extraordinarily low turnout, and the efforts surrounding that to mobilize and demobilize, and the central role of money in our politics here.

But I want you to know there are substantial similarities as well. First of all, the modern tools of campaigning have arrived in Sydney and Melbourne and western Australia, in Tasmania. It's extraordinary just how sophisticated the polling is there, how continuous it is, the sophistication of the targeting. Remember, in a country of really about 11 or 12 million eligible voters, you can get them all in a database. You can do extraordinary canvassing and then put that together with targeting, and suddenly you're in a position of doing very sophisticated campaigning, identifying swing districts and swing voters within swing districts and using the most sophisticated tools of modern campaigning to try to alter an election.

The other thing I picked up there was the Australian discovery of the value of negative campaigning. You know, we ta-ta negative campaigning. What they discovered is that if you say "The Labour Party stands for a strong public educational system," everyone yawns, and it gets no attention. But if you frame the ad, "The Labour Party will no longer allow the dismantlement of the public educational system," if you place it in the negative, it sorts of resonates with an electorate. And that's a lesson that has now pervaded all of their campaigning and politics and helps us to understand sort of what's going on here. Even in a system of compulsory voting and full participation, they need to figure out ways of framing communication in ways that actually get to the electorate and is heard.

Politics in Australia is driven by personalities, celebrities, scandal and an avaricious media. God, you heard Senator Hagel talk about the media here. You haven't seen anything. The British tabloid tradition has carried over to Australia in ways that are really quite remarkable. I walked into Australia at a time when the question of wedge issues was dominating the political dialogue. That is, the politics of racial resentment. I mean it sounded like I was back in America in the '70s and the early '80s. In their case, it was about the Aboriginals and the politics of mandatory sentencing for juveniles that disproportionately affected indigenous people. But all the tactical and strategic maneuvering over to play racial wedge issues. And, of course, I told them the story of how that once dominated our politics and in many respects no longer does because of its elimination here.

So in some respects, we are further ahead of the Australians.

I talked to them about the problems which I will mention in a minute of permanent campaigning in America. And they said, yeah, okay, what's the problem? They call it continuous campaigning, and to them that's the way in which politics operates. They were happy to pick up the lessons of initially of Michael Deaver and now of the Clinton White House of the theme of the day, and the Prime Minister's office is deeply involved in trying to move away from the old practice of putting all of the agenda and all of the issues into the annual budget fight, and instead to stretch them out over the weeks and even days so that they can try to control the message that is being discussed in the media.

I also saw the impact of a competitive party balance. The coalition and the Labour Party are very evenly balanced, just like the Democrats and Republicans are today in American politics. And that alters the stakes associated with every issue that comes up in the House in Australia and in the Senate, as it does in our politics.

And finally, really the shifting ideologies and programs of the parties, the very point that Senator Hagel made. It's a little hard to keep things straight when you leave here from the Seattle protest, the IMF-World Bank protest, the WTO-China vote. And you realize the left party in Australia is the one leading the effort for getting China into the WTO, to have multilateral trade negotiations, to expand global trade, and in some respects the Conservative coalition government who's playing it the other way. So Labour is in the vanguard of the very effort that here is led by business. Sort of fascinating differences, but it helps us understand what to look for when talking about the practice of politics and the capacity of government.

What I'd like to say in addition is just really a few words about a project in a larger effort that Brookings and AEI and Norm Ornstein and myself are involved in; namely, the permanent campaign and the future of American democracy. The permanent campaign is an old term, but in many respects it's a relatively new phenomenon in American politics. Hugh Heclo has described it as a non-stop process seeking to manipulate sources of public approval in order to engage in the act of governing itself. That is, a process in which there's no real distinction between the campaigning phase and the governing phase, that the two merge together in ways that really, really distort what the framers had in mind in differentiating between campaigning and governing and make extraordinarily difficult the task of bringing elected representatives together to sit down and engage in the kind of face-to-face deliberation, negotiation, bargaining and compromise that's the hallmark of a republican form of government.

There're many factors, some identified by Senator Hagel, that account for that: the changing nature of political parties; the open and extensive system of interest group politics; new communications technologies; certainly new political technologies, especially public relations and polling; the ever-growing need for political money, and perhaps most important of all, activist government and the higher stakes for all actors in having a role in this process.

The consequences of the permanent campaign are not all negative. There're benefits. We have a more open, more potentially participatory system in which voices can be heard. But there's substantial costs as well. And part of the cost is not necessarily in the substance of the policies that emerge from the process, but in the ways in which that system looks to the rest of the country. And in Senator Hagel's words, the critical currency of trust and how it becomes diminished. So the question is what to do — what to do about the permanent campaign. Alas, it can't be declared over. It can't be defined out of existence. It has to be coped with. But the trick is to figure out how to harness the self-interest of participants in ways that would allow us to deal with the harmful consequences of the permanent campaign. That means we have to go back to Tocqueville and his phrase "self-interest rightly understood." Part of the effort is to try to resurface important governing questions, so rather than asking about a candidate's favorite poet, we might actually ask them their plans for putting into effect the issue programs that they spend so much time talking about.

Part of it goes to trying to do something about the extraordinary criminalization of politics that's occurred in this country. Little news of the U.S. politics reach me back in Australia. But one thing that did was the possible indictment of the President when he leaves home. And I said "Oh, my God. It's déjà vu all over again." We thought we had put a stake in the heart of the Independent Counsel Act, but it is all sort of very much alive, as is the whole process of civil litigation, discovery, and taking what should be partisan battles fought out in elections with gusto and putting them in the courts. If our politics is to improve, that is going to be a central element.

But campaign finance is also a critical element of that. It's a big topic. But looking again at the experience of other countries, I'd say the most harmful aspect of it is the role of party leaders in raising money, the direct involvement. They do it because of the potential of raising soft money, unlimited contributions. So dealing with soft money and so-called 527s is going to be critical to it.

Finally, to deal with the permanent campaign is to acknowledge the world of the Internet, e-democracy and e-governance, to realize that the plebiscitory forces are building in our politics, that the permanent campaign could actually intensify unless we figure out ways of harnessing digital communications and use it a way of actually increasing the amount of information in genuine engagement of the public, and thereby trying to improve deliberative democracy. Thanks.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Tom, thank you very much. I've always been fascinated by this "you need to put a positive message in a negative form." And I was thinking as Tom was talking that our new fundraising campaign for Brookings could be "Brookings: We Fight Bad Ideas Every Day."

T. Mann: I like that.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Thank you.

Now we have a perfect split. Sarah could tell us why we're having trouble legislating, and Paul can tell us why we're having trouble executing. Sarah, could you take it from here?

S. Binder: Sure. Thanks, E.J. A little worry here that Tom would follow E.J. to the podium, and then you would never, ever see me again. You'd hear me, but you'd never see me over there. So I'm just going to stay put like Tom. And I don't have jet lag as an excuse.

Our challenge here really is to think about the ways either Bush or Gore could reinvigorate the political system. My own assignment, as E.J. said, is to think about the question from a legislative perspective. Are there any prescriptions we might have for Bush or Gore in dealing with what I would call leading the United States Congress. I think the only way of really answering that question is to start with the assumption that Presidents can only influence Congress only at the margins. Now I think if a new President is going to lead Congress, he first has to understand that, and we have to understand that as well. He has to understand the dynamics of law-making. Why do I say we have to understand it, too, because, otherwise, we raise, I think, much too high expectations for a new President in dealing with Congress.

So I want to talk first a little bit about his idea of the dynamics of law-making. That is, what the new President will encounter when he pushes a proposal up on the Hill in 2001, and then speculate a little bit about each candidate's potential for dealing with the new Congress.

What are these dynamics of law-making today? E.J. warned me again, or suggested we get a new term besides gridlock. I want to start still with a claim that we don't have a lot of law-making today. We don't have to call it gridlock. That's the pejorative term. We might want to call it stalemate or deadlock. We can at least call it non-legislating much of the time. Now I think it's fair to say after looking at 1999, the first session of the 106th Congress, and also what's happened so far in the second session, there's a fair amount of stalemate on a host of economic and social issues. Social Security reform was once touted as sort of a major priority for Clinton and both Republicans in the House and Senate. That shows no sign of going anywhere. Campaign finance reform passed several times over recent years by the House, filibustered in the Senate. Managed care reform. It's been passed by both chambers, but it seems unlikely or not quite clear that they'll reach compromise, bicameral compromise this year. Prescription drug benefit reform as part of Medicare reform. Again, little consensus on how to approach that issue. Gun control also stalemated between the chambers. Tax cuts ended in a veto last year. Everybody actually seemed kind of happy about that one. Both sides are given the issue, even if a bill is not enacted.

Education reforms. The two parties have very different ideas about what constitutes education reform, and so on. Even, I think, the most tried and true way of dealing with difficult issues in the last couple of decades, that is delegating authority to independent commissions and instructing them to report back solutions to Congress--it was used successful in '83 for the Social Security bail-out. It was used to close military bases in the late '80s, early '90s. Even that commission route I don't think works. Medicare Commission deadlocked last year. It couldn't reach a majority or super majority consensus on how to proceed. There's an e-commerce commission that's to report, I think, yesterday or today, or so. That also seems quite conflicted about the central core issues to address: how do you tax or not tax Internet commerce? One Republican senator, in fact, said last month we set up a commission that was bound to deadlock. And so on.

Certainly Congress has done a couple of things this year, including Glass-Steagall reform. Others have pointed out that that issue, banking reform, was on the agenda for 20 years. It took quite a while for Congress to get up to it.

Now, someone else will point this out. I might as well beat you to it. There are benefits to stalemate or gridlock. Bob Dole used to say if you're opposed to something, you ought to pray for a little bit of gridlock. Others say that policy gridlock, in fact, has reduced the national debt over the last two years. I think of that as debt reduction by benign neglect. Now clearly though, we can point to benefits, but they're high cost as well, given that both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans have policy priorities. They have a policy agenda that requires legislation. So why the stalemate? And again, it's an important question to ask, because otherwise Bush and Gore have to be aware of this. They have to be aware that the realities of how legislation is done today, the realities of the factors they'll face, the environment they're going to face when they try to pursue a legislative agenda.

I want to make simple claim today, and that is that our conventional explanations only get us so far. We spend an awful lot of time talking about divided government and budget deficits and presidential election year dynamics. I think they're important, but I don't think they're as important as the attention that we pay to them. And the cost has been, as we look at all those three factors, we ignore or we spend less attention thinking about other factors that are going to lead to more problems for Bush and Gore.

What are the usual suspects here? Divided government, unified party control. That is, unified government is seen as the glue bridging the separation of powers. Unified government gives Congress, the majority party, some shared electoral and policy interests. It's said to make it relatively easy to legislate. Divided government — what happens: electoral and policy interests are at odds against each other, and they institutionalize, or they reinforce institutional rivalries between Congress and the President.

The New Deal in the 1930s, Great Society in the 1960s: these are classic examples of why you want or why you need unified party control. Now that said, I think those historical examples are the exception rather than the rule. Divided government can certainly block legislative agendas. But unified government is not the magic potion for insuring policy success for the President. All you have to do is think back to '93 and '94 where we had what we called unified gridlock. Clinton and the Democrats controlled the Congress, but Clinton made really very little progress on his major initiative of health care reform and a number of other economic issues. Not to say that unified gridlock — unified government didn't grease the skids for a little bit, but it wasn't the magic solution. That's divided government.

The second factor, the budget environment. The argument has been, well, legislation is really tough when you have a budget deficit. You just can't spend your way to pass policies. Now in this case, I think the usual suspect's probably innocent. The politics of surplus seem to me just as tough as the politics of deficit. If anything, budget deficits in the 1980s, they were the symptom of a gridlock. They weren't the cause of gridlock.

Presidential election year. Congress watchers like to argue that stalemate is inevitable in the run-up to a presidential election, especially in an election year where the stakes are so high as E.J. pointed out, not simply for the control of the presidency, but also for the Congress and also for the third branch. We say that the party out of power has an incentive to obstruct legislation in hopes of regaining the White House and saving those issues for a different party. Republicans reluctant to negotiate over tax cuts last year, sort of a prime example of when the sort of electoral environment encourages you to get gridlocked. Now the same goes for the Democrats, who've been accused of obstructing, particularly in the House, because they want to blame a do-nothing Congress, a do-nothing Republican Congress in the 2000 elections.

If this wisdom's right, Bush or Gore will have relatively easy sledding, or easier sledding come January because we're no longer in the presidential election year. I'm kind of skeptical about that one. The President and Congress were quite productive during 1996 leading up to the presidential election year: major welfare reform, telecommunications reform, drinking water reform, lobbying reform, and a number of others all enacted into law in '96. Based on my work looking at legislative records over 50 years, the dynamic holds up. Gridlock is only marginally higher in that presidential election compared to other years.

So those are sort of what I think of as our usual suspects. One of the culprits who tend to get away — I think these guys will still be here. And I think it's important as we make prescriptions or prognosticate about Bush and Gore that we think about the way they'll affect the legislative environment in the new Congress. Let me just talk about three of them here. First, the disappearing political center. Second, bicameralism, as Tom pointed out. And third, the Senate's what we'd call or think about sort of unique way of doing business or, again, not doing business. This is easier now that Senator Hagel has gone on his way.

Okay. He offered someone else a job. He's not offering it to me yet.

Well, anyone who studied Congress and the presidency time and again understand and notices the importance of bipartisan coalitions, large bipartisan coalitions to passing major policy advances. What does it mean? It really means you need two centrist parties so it's easy bipartisan agreement, or you need someone bridging differences between ideologically distant parties. Those of you who wandered in and picked up a packet on your way to the breakfast table there, there's two figures in your packet there. One, probably labeled "A," should show some trends in the size of the political center over time over the last 40 years. If you take a look at it, it really shows a quick downward trend in the size of the political center in the House and Senate. In the 1960s, by my estimate, the political center was roughly 30 plus percent of the chamber, of both chambers. Today, by my count--this is looking at Roll Call records--centrists make up less than a tenth of the House and the Senate.

Just briefly, without being technical, what is a centrist? It means that you're closer to the midpoint of the two parties. You're right in the center of the chamber. You're closer to that point than to the center of your own party. So you're gravitating toward the middle of the political spectrum as it exists in any given Congress. To give some names here, think about the 105th Congress versus 1999, 106th Congress. If you look at your chart, this is the second to last dot there. In 1999, 11% of the House were centrists; 6% of the Senate were centrist. That means six senators out of 100. That's the 105th Congress, '97-'98. In 1999, using Roll Call votes for just that one year, moderation in the House actually goes up. It goes up to 14%. But still, this is not the 30% of the chamber that we once had in the 1960s, probably because there are votes on the floor — gun control, patient's bill of rights. There're some sort of moderate issues being put onto the floor of the House in '99.

In the Senate, however, centrists were down to 3% of the chamber. And we can count them: Specter, Jeffords and Chafee. And we don't need to mention that we're down to Specter, Specter and Jeffords. Senators such as Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, who normally show up in my voting scores over the past decade as centrists, they don't even make the mark. They're closer to the Republican median, the average Republican senator, than they are to that middle point of the two parties in the chamber.

Why? In 1999, senators seemed to be forced on a number of votes that pulled those remaining centrists, or former centrists, over to the Republican Party.

So what do we have today? Incredibly polarized parties, but without the center coalitions that we think can bridge party differences. And it's the lack of this center coalition I think that makes legislating so difficult today, why we think we have such stalemate. If you're going to build a coalition, you can do it from the center out. But there's no center to start with. If you want to build a coalition from within a party and then pick off a few members of the minority party to attract them for bipartisan support, you have a big gulf to leap over until you find a cohort, a large enough cohort of minority party members to join you.

So obviously the center's not immutable. It can be rebuilt by voters sending more moderates to the House and Senate. That's particularly hard to do if there aren't very many competitive seats left at play between the parties. The new President coming in in 2001 can't count on finding a political center from which to build bipartisan coalitions.

Okay. That's the first factor. The second, the Senate filibuster. Let me just simply say it really limits the power of the Senate, and thus Congress's ability to compromise, and thus the President's ability to lead Congress. There is a chart in your packet there showing the trend in filibustering since nineteen what-have-you, 1917 or so. You look at exponential growth since the 1960s. It only goes up with very few times when filibustering goes down. Overlay on top of this an increasingly cohesive minority party, so we get party backed filibusters, something we really haven't seen since the late 1890s. That's over a century ago. We have minority parties fostering filibusters and holding their party together against the majority party's preferences. Some say the Democrats do this I payback to what the Republicans did in '93, '93. Regardless of the motivation, filibustering increases.

We also see the willingness of senators to place holds on particular legislation, and even on particular nominations. And majority leaders tend to be willing to, but not always — tend to be willing to sustain those holds; that is, objections to bringing measures to the floor of the Senate. Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma had a pretty nice hold in December. He had a hold, a blanket hold we call them, on 30-odd judicial nominations to go to the floor of the Senate, unrelated to an issue related to those nominees themselves. It wasn't about the policy views of those judges. It was about other practices in the nominations process. The majority leader actually has since suggested that he's not abiding by that hold. But it certainly delayed the process for filling those vacancies on those affected circuits.

Okay. The third point then, bicameralism. I think we tend to forget the simple thing we learned a long time ago. Congress is a bicameral institution. I'm beginning to think the only one of us who doesn't forget that is Jesse Ventura, to talk about him again, who said we ought to do away with bicameralism, because he understands that it is a key ingredient to gridlock, even in the state of Minnesota. Now what does this mean? Why is this important? It is not enough to have a single chamber legislative strategy. What works in the House won't necessarily work in the Senate. Half the Senate members from the same party don't even necessarily agree with each other. We saw that in '93, '94, Clinton was quite successful in the end corralling House Democrats to line up with him on economic and some social issues, but repeatedly came up against other Senate Democrats who were not willing to go along, in particular the Senate Democrat from Nebraska before Hagel's time.

Now, we've seen this also obviously in divided government. Half the Senate Republicans don't see eye to eye on tax cuts, on budget priorities, on gun control, on patient's bill of rights, and so on. Again, why is this important? A new President has to understand the dynamic, the bicameral dynamic. I guess the alternative, they could propose the Jesse Ventura strategy of doing away with the Senate altogether. I'd be okay with that. I don't think even the most reform-minded senators who've been with us today would be wild about that, and probably rightly so.

Okay. So what's the President to do? Let me just speculate a little bit about what we know about each candidate and their potential for leading the United States Congress, George Bush first. We don't have a lot to go on other than his experience with the Texas Legislature. That experience may or may not be generalizable, the United States Congress. I'm going to leave that one in your trusty hands. But what do we know about Bush, well, from his experience with that Legislature? Reporters tell us, first, he liked to avoid confrontation. He relies on personal relationships. He's said to be a very engaging guy. When asked how would you manage executive-legislative relations, Bush said personal trust, developing trustworthy relationships. If he can do that, I think it will serve him very well. And I think that, in part, reflects Senator Hagel's discussion about the need for restoring this type of trust in politics.

That said, in this type of polarized, partisan environment, facing these types of institutional constraints, trust in that type of personal relationship, it's not enough. It might be necessary, but it's certainly not sufficient, in my view, for overcoming legislative obstacles or leading Congress. Bush also said he'd like to follow the Reagan model of reaching out to Democrats, as Reagan did in '81 and '82, to build bipartisan support. I think that's the appropriate attitude and appropriate approach, but it's not easily done today if you have polarization and you have bicameral differences. Plus, if Bush wants to solve the Reagan model, he has to be prepared to go public, which is very different than the insider strategy that Bush is most personally comfortable with.

Okay. Gore, his challenges. On paper, the guy shouldn't have any problems. He's been in the House. He's been part of Washington all his life. He's been in the House; he's been in the Senate. He's broken tie votes. I mean he's seen everything. Who gets to do all those? The challenge for him, I think, and this is a pretty hokey recommendation, but he has to remember what he learned: the importance of bipartisanship in the Senate, the importance of working with House Republicans if they're in the majority, or reaching out to Republicans if they're in the minority — I mean Democrats. Sorry. The importance of probably here focusing on a narrow agenda early on in his administration, tackle two or three big issues, define them for the public and make it in those legislator's own self-interest to see it in the terms that he does.

I don't think these challenges are easy for Bore. Bore? Bore? That's a problem. That's not even jet lag. I don't think these challenges for either of them are easy to overcome, in large part because, at the end, they're only able to influence legislation, or legislative outcomes at the margin. They can be effective at defining an agenda, but they can't single-handedly deliver a policy change, given how strongly I think these institutional and political, or partisan environments are going to conspire against them. I'll stop there.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Sarah, that was brilliant. Thank you.

I've always been fond of the Agatha Christie approach to social science. List a whole lot of culprits and they always end up guilty. This is sort of "Murder on the Gridlock Express". But I think that Sarah rose to that challenge about a gridlock and thinking another term because in a funny way gridlock is always about the Executive versus Congress, whereas "deadlock" which you introduced, is really about the whole system being sort of seized up. And I was thinking, if Congress can't even duck an issue by kicking it over to a commission anymore, we have a real problem here.

Now, Paul Light is going to "bore" down on the bureaucracy about reinventing government. Go ahead.

P. Light: I have the most boring topic, so I'll talk the least longest.

I was going to start by following up, you know. But I will be brief but I'll always be short.

Actually, I want to refer you to this wonderful new survey that's out yesterday from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. It's available on people-press.org. It is a survey that we funded while I was still at Pew looking at customer satisfaction at federal agencies.

There's a lot of talk about customer satisfaction. The reinventors at the Gore team use it a lot to say that we ought to change the way government works by bringing the pressure of customer satisfaction to bear on agencies. This survey by Pew was complex and therefore expensive, looking at different customer sets in five high impact agencies. The Federal Aviation Administration, Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, the Food and Drug Administration, and well — EPA, Environmental Protection Agency. Seventeen different sets of customers asking what they thought of the agencies.

Interestingly, elections matter because these customers don't agree on the overall mission of these agencies. And guess what? If you elect George W. Bush he'll pay attention to different customers from Al Gore. That's important stuff. The notion that there's one set of customers that can rate the Federal Government is nonsense. The government has a complex set of customers, and elections at one level are about who we pay attention to, and we ought not delude ourselves about it.

Anyway, three quick points. The survey shows that there are three ways to increase trust in your agency, if you're down at the agency level. Number one, have a really popular mission. That's really helpful. You know, it turns out that favorability towards the mission of an agency, gee, this is really a shocking finding, that favorability toward the mission of the agency has a very significant impact on customer satisfaction. IRS is not very popular in part because the product they deliver is a product that removes dollar bills from your wallet. And therefore, that conditions customer satisfaction. And we have to understand that the Social Security Administration is more popular at one level because it has a product that it delivers that's much more inviting.

Environmental Protection's a little bit different. Federal Aviation Administration's a little bit different. I am one of the frequent fliers that is one of their customer sets, but they're also serving airline companies, they're also serving federal air traffic controllers, and they're serving the pilots of small aircraft.

I kept referring to that last set as small airplane pilots, which is not quite true.

And the Association of Small Airplane Pilots are Airplane Pilots of Small Airplanes, has reminded me frequently not to talk about small airplane pilots. There are no small airplane pilots, just small airplanes.

Number two, the way to increase customer satisfaction is to be nice. It really does matter. And guess what we found? That all of these customers across the sets, from pharmaceutical manufacturers to consumers of over-the-counter drugs, to chronically ill, to health professionals think federal employees in these five high impact agencies are professional, courteous, and well-trained.

Now, we had to spend about $500,000 on this survey to prove that point, and it's an important point. Your contacts with federal employees are usually contacts that make you feel better about the Federal Government.

Now, part of the problem is that when we do focus groups on this stuff, what we find is that when you ask somebody about their positive experience with a federal employee they tend to argue that it was an accident or a blessing. Can you believe they returned my phone call? I can't believe it. That's the context within which most people relate to the Federal Government. But we found wonderful evidence that across the customer sets people believe that federal employees were professional, well-trained, courteous. There's a lot of smiling going on, and we need to give Al Core — Al Gore credit for giving federal employees a bit more pumping up, motivation, pride. There is a lot of smiling going on in the Federal Government, and that's good.

Federal 800 phone lines are being answered faster, people are being nicer. Now, if you call the SSA 800 phone line they will not change the size of your check in response. L.L. Bean will take your pants back if you've gained about 50 pounds. They'll take your boots back that you bought 35 years ago if they're not wearing well. But the SSA 800 phone line operator will not give you more money. They are very nice, but they will not give you more money.

The third thing we found is that again, across the customer sets the general impression that the Federal Government is slow, cumbersome, not doing its job in a timely fashion. What's interesting is that the airline pilots who deal day-to-day, hour-to-hour with FAA air traffic controllers say that, whereas the frequent fliers say that. People at SSA who are dealing with big payroll accounts say that about the agency as do ordinary citizens. And tax preparers, the people who are working today at H&R Block to help their customers get their tax forms filled in, say that the IRS is slow and cumbersome, sometimes loses sight of the forest for the trees, et cetera, et cetera, and so do ordinary taxpayers.

The people most familiar with the agencies say they're slow and cumbersome. The people least familiar say they're slow and cumbersome, they're not getting the information through the same channels, but they're reaching the same results.

Luckily I don't have to talk much about what the two candidates have to say about these problems because they have nothing to say about these two problems. The Gore reinventors are totally focused on customer satisfaction defined as courtesy, professionalism, niceness, and that's terrific. They have had very little to say in part because of gridlock, throttling down, whatever you want to call it on Capital Hill. They've done very little on administrative reform, very little activity over the last eight years on changing the systems that make it difficult for federal employees to change administrative speed.

We know something about Gore and Bush as administrators. Gore isn't — or Bush is a really nice guy if he lets his people go and do their jobs. We did some research on this digging around in his history. He was a good general manager of the Texas Rangers. Didn't deliver a pennant during his leadership, but he was pretty good. Nice, new stadium, nice place to play baseball. And Al Gore's a pretty nice guy too. As managers of government, CEOs of government, I think they'll be really nice. There's not a chainsaw Al between. I mean, they're going to go at the Federal Government hammer and tong.

I'll save for a little bit later the kind of efforts by House Republicans in particular to restart the war on waste. They're getting nowhere, and there's a reason for it. I will say that last week House Republicans unveiled the newest weapon in their war on waste. It's called the waste o'meter.

No, seriously. It's the waste o'meter. And they post particularly egregious examples of federal waste on this waste o'meter, and that's the kind of thing that's more likely to produce a giggle from the American public than any outrage. But we'll save that for later perhaps.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Thank you, Paul. Now you know why customer satisfaction in governmental studies is so high. Confident, well-trained, nice —

P. Light: Can't do much about the speed, but nice.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Who wants to ask the second question in the audience?

Question: I'm with U.S. Public Interest Research Group. And my question is this. We'd say one of the, maybe, biggest problems with American politics is that money plays a heavy role in who decides to run for office and then who ultimately wins elections. And in Australia, where you say that money isn't such a key factor in elections? Do you sense that more candidates run in Australia, or that people are less dissatisfied in Australia? Do you have any sense of that?

T. Mann: It's less of an issue — you know, partly there's less of a tradition of giving money to anything, in Australia and many other countries, to charities, to non-profits, to candidates. And therefore, opportunities for political parties and candidates to raise money is really quite limited. Even in the corporate sector there is a fear with disclosure and transparency that large contributions to partisan politicians will lead to stockholder revolts, and they're having a fair number of those going on right now. So, all-in-all, for a host of reasons money plays a much less significant role.

I think though, having said that, it's important to say that we probably exaggerate the role of money and in doing so set ourselves up for problems. Many people in this country argue that we would have kind of a policy nirvana if we eliminated private money from politics, that it would fundamentally reshape the substance of decisions that are made by legislative bodies. I think there's almost no evidence sort of supporting that. That doesn't mean money at the margin doesn't influence some agendas, influence some amendments, subcommittee, and committee. But the — sort of the big issues of the day are shaped by broad forces of party and ideology and region. And skillful politicians can raise money from diverse groups, play interest off one another, and they are not waifs amid forces.

And I think the model of all this nefarious special interest money out there influencing public policy making greatly under-estimates the power of politicians in the ways in which the state can be used, the power of the state to almost extort funds out of the private sector, who give largely out of fear of being harmed by the state if they refuse to do so. That's no less a problem, but it's a different problem. And I think getting the story straight is the most important element in moving toward a system of reform.

For example, I explained to Australians that we heard so much about money in the primary process, George W. Bush's $70 million raised the candidates leaving because the inability to raise money. Yet I argued money played a relatively modest role in the nomination process and the selection of Bush and Gore, that in the end Bush's money was more an effect than a cause, that much of it was squandered, that McCain's resources flowed when he demonstrated there was a real potential there. And that — Bill Bradley was a great fundraiser, he just really didn't have the other pieces of the campaign that would make it happen.

So yeah, money has a pervasive effect on who runs on the absence of competition in a whole host of congressional races on the money chase, on trust in government and the perception of our politics, therefore we need to do something about it. But in our effort to do something about it we shouldn't lead the public to believe that policy decisions will be dramatically different if we, quote, clean up the campaign finance system.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Thanks for that question. Barney Frank was once said the right thing about being on the banking committee is you can always vote your conscience because there's so much money on every side of every issue.

And I have heard members of Congress talk, Sarah, about certain issues being useful to have around year after year without a resolution and the people can raise money on them. I'm curious if you've looked at the role of money and fund raising as a factor in some of these other — the other things you talked about creating deadlock or gridlock?

S. Binder: I think I haven't really, in part because we've got Tom down the hall taking that load. I guess I see that operating very much at the margins here that on any of these big issues there's money being spent and allocated to the parties, sometimes evenly, sometimes unevenly. But I don't think in the end, evidence shows members and senators own votes aren't determined by money. It's more an effect on probably participation in the process, that is legislative participation might be motivated by money. But I don't really see it influencing the timing of when Congress actually gets around to making these choices.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Sir?

Question: We have a period now of peace and prosperity, we're living longer lives, and arguably better lives than in any time in history. Why is there such an unwillingness on the part of the people to give credit to government for any of this?

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: That's a great question.

P. Light: I think part of it is that government doesn't articulate a good case on its own behalf. Part of it is that government can't claim an explicit link between what it's done and the period of great prosperity. We're doing a project now looking at the top government successes or endeavors of the last 50 years, and some of the most important achievements of government have been through relatively small pieces of legislation are assemble up over a 50 year period into a significant impact, and government doesn't talk well about it.

Government actually is not a non-presence in advertising its own successes, and perhaps that's good in a democratic state like ours. When government does try to advertise, as you know, it generally fumbles all over itself, and we just don't have a way of talking, I think, to the public about what government's contribution has been, where it's been useful, and being clear where government has or hasn't had its greatest impacts.

T. Mann: I think just to follow-up on that, think of the developments in the media over the last couple of decades. The most pronounced are the television news magazines. They take a larger and larger part of primetime television, on every night. And the all sort of follow the 60 Minutes model. If you were to analyze those, seldom would you see sort of stories of great governmental successes. I mean, what makes for good stories is "it's your money," and "this is how it's being ripped off," reality check. You know, it's the failures. It's a sort of inherent negativity bias.

Networks are in the business of making money. They're no longer lost leaders, they're part of large economic conglomerates. And as we saw in Australia it's easier getting audiences for a dramatic tale in which someone has failed and let us down, which there are conspirators, in which there are ne'er-do-wells. And frankly, that is so much of the stimulus that is presented to the public so it's not surprising that they make a link between government and politics and failure. And as Paul said, government hasn't figured out a way to get its own good news out, and that contributes.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Two things. A small one and a large one. Small one is, politics is really the only profession that spends hundreds of millions of dollars advertising against itself. And I'm referring to the kind of advertising you see during television campaigns. I mean, imagine Burger King saying don't eat at McDonalds, they'll poison you, or Fidelity saying Oppenheimer funds too much embezzlement for too long.

And that's the kind of thing that you see. So I think there's that narrow fact. And I've always been struck by the — Robert Reich has talked about this and a bunch of other people have talked about this. We went through a period after about 1945 to 1973 where the private sector was seen as having failed fundamentally in the great depression, and government stepped in, accomplished two big things. Ended the Depression; won the war. Now, you could argue the two — that winning the war was what ended the Depression, but as a result of all that, government prestige was very high for an extended period. Then government prestige started going into the tank after Watergate, Vietnam, the great inflation of the late ?80s, a whole series of things. So then there was this kind of switching places. The private sector prestige climbed; government prestige dropped. So where once upon a time a politician would be given great credit for "managing the economy" (in quotes), and for making good decisions, whether or not his or her choices had a lot to do with that, they got the credit. Now it's the other way around. Now it's either the private sector or Saint Alan Greenspan who gets the credit, and politicians don't. And I think there's something to that historical shift that will probably take some time to move back.

Another question? Joyce?

Question: Just wanted to ask you all if you have suggestions on how government can sell its success, and also there seems to be a disconnect, while the overall perception by the public is that government does not do a good job and the government fails across the board. But there does continue to be some — this person to person relationship between politicians as individuals and some constituents. For example, people may speak very highly of their representative, that he's done a good job in bringing industry up or enhancing the economy in our district. But that doesn't convey to the broader congress. So if you were to be given the task of how government — and E.J. could weigh in on this as well since you — because of your last statement — how government can reconceptualize who it is and sell it to the public, or if it's possible.

P. Light: You know, my general view is that government should not get into advertising its successes. That's for the people outside of government to judge and evaluate. Government can do a better job — actually could do anything positive to advertise the public service to the public at large, and talk about the important jobs that are in government to be filled and be much more aggressive right now in the labor market. It isn't. It's absolutely not present in the conversation with young people about bringing them into government. I think, you know, a conversation with the media about how they cover success and failure.

We're doing some content analysis of the top ten events, successes of the government over the last twenty years or so using the Pew Research Center's news interest index. Like the number one story that Americans paid attention to in the last twenty years, in terms of closely following a story, was the Challenger accident. And when you dig down into how the media covered the accident it was really the failure of — they covered the failure of a handful of bureaucrats who were clearly not making good decisions. The real story of Challenger is about the failure of a government system.

And then when you look at how the media covers government successes, let's take John Glenn's return to orbit last year — it was last year, wasn't it? Last October? That was also a very heavily followed story by the American public, and the general tone of the media's coverage was what a miracle John Glenn didn't die.

So when government fails, it's a story of individual bad bureaucrats making terrible decisions, which is always not the case. And when government succeeds it's unbelievable, I can't — can you imagine that they did that? So that's the general tone. And we need to talk a little bit with the media about how stories of failure can be really helpful to government and how they need to dig down a little bit more into the story because there's really good stuff there to write about. That's part of the story. E.J.?

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: The only thought I — partly because there's a new book on Michael Harrington, the late socialist, and he used to talk a lot about how it is the nature of our economic system that success is privatized and problems are socialized, which is to say that if the market can do it efficiently and well, it does it, and it can deliver all kinds of good things. And that the government tends to be there to solve problems, to deal with problems the market can't solve or other forces in the society can't solve. And so government always — I think it's in the nature of government that it's going to have a certain problem because it's dealing with, in a sense, intractable problems. And the other question is how much does it do to make the situation even worse for itself, and what can it do to, you know, suggest if it's true, a willingness to modernize, a willingness to do things differently. But I think that unless you have an economic catastrophe of the sort like the Great Depression that produces a sort of complete lack of confidence in the private sector of a radical sort, I think the government will have this problem. And as Paul says, it's not necessarily terrible that government should be viewed critically, but I think it will have that — it sort of baked in the cake to a certain degree, I think.

Sir?

Question: [I'm from the] German Daily Die Tageszeitung that is published in Berlin. One of the — coming from a different background, one of the things that always stuck me, comparing Europeans' approach together and Americans' approach to government is that if there's something amiss in Europe, especially in Germany people will, they will blame the government, they say the government is not doing enough. If something is wrong in American the general response will be probably government is doing too much and shouldn't be in this business in the first place.

Now, when dealing with private American citizens and asking them what their main gripes are, they have nothing to do with government. They have to do with your bank, the way they process your business. They have to do with your auto insurance, they have to do with your HMO, they have to do with your phone company. None of these things have anything to do with government, and government could probably handle them much more efficiently. Why are Americans so allergic to government bureaucracy and seem to be totally insouciant, at least in public discourse, to corporate bureaucracies?

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: I want to turn it somebody else, but I had exactly that thought recently when I was dealing with the phone company about a particular bill. And I just want to introduce an aphorism in this discussion. Bill Cohen, now our Secretary of Defense, used to be a senator and he talked about everyone saying, after one of the major plane crashes, where was the government, why didn't the government prevent this. And what he said is government is the enemy until you need a friend. And I quoted him in the paper on this and he called me six months later and he said, you've done a terrible thing. The entire Democratic campaign — Bill Cohen is a Republican — the entire Democratic campaign in Maine is based on that slogan. "Government is the enemy until you need a friend." But I think there's a real insight there, and I think even in America, which has a deep, you know, anti-government streak, going back to revolutionary times for all kinds of reasons, that people still respond to Cohen saying that. But I'm curious if anybody else ...

T. Mann: You pointed out a reality about American politics, that antistatist ideology that pervades so much of public views of private and government sectors, and yet underneath that is the reality that Americans expect their government expect their government to deal with the shortcomings of the market. I wrote a piece a year or so ago called "Is The Era Of Big Government Over", playing on Bill Clinton's State of the Union Address term, and of course, the answer is big government American-style, which isn't big European style is far from over. If anything, the impact of the Clinton years has been to restore Americans' believe that government has a critical role to play when the private sector fails. I mean, in some ways, Clinton's failure over health reform provided just the opportunity for government now to be asked to play a role in protecting patients' rights in dealing with private or non-profit HMOs. And you see it in almost every arena.

So think of it this way. We are sort of ideologically against government. We are sort of ideological sort of conservatives, but we are operational Social Democrats. That is, we, in a practical level even while we're damning that government we're demanding that they take care of a whole host of problems that emerge out of the failures of the private sector.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Just to underscore that, two issues that are prominent right now. One is the HMO issue where government is being asked to regulate. It is about government regulation. The other is the high cost of pharmaceuticals. There was a story again today on NPR and in a lot of the papers about what's going on in New England. Again, the government is being asked to step in to regulate, in some way, the private market. Paul?

P. Light: I was just going to see we did a survey asking people whether or not they work themselves for federal, state, or local government or whether they worked, or somebody in their family worked for a contractor who was receiving funds from the Federal Government. The survey was a pretty good survey. Forty percent of Americans are in households where somebody is either working for government or in a job receiving funds from government. And that's a pretty high number. Now, whether this kind of attitude here is like, oh my God, I'm captured and I don't like it, I'm very dependent on the state, I mean, I'd say the era of big government being over, there are two answers to it. Number one, did we ever have one? I don't know. We have a larger government than we think we do. And number two, it's clearly not over as Tom so rightly is saying.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: We have time for one last question. Sir?

Question: Another European perspective. You've blamed the government intermittently for this problem and you've blamed the media. I just wonder if you think that some blame attaches to the unrealistic expectations of the public? It seems to me that basically what you're saying is yes, the people have entire unrealistic expectations, they've got split opinions about what the government can do and one of the results, I wonder, is this sort of sense of dissatisfaction and satisfaction existing at the same time.

P. Light: Think tanks are not responsible for any of this.

T. Mann: Let's be clear about that!

P. Light: You're basically saying that, you know, the media runs the stories because in part the public consumes them and pays attention to them. And there's a market for this kind of news and there's a market for this kind of ambivalence. And I think that's true, is it not?

Question: You criticized the media for sort of stoking expectations. Oddly you've suggested there's institutional gridlock in the Congress. But quite a lot of what you've been saying now seems to me to say there are split opinions — I'm just repeating myself now. I wasn't concerned about your views about the media but I was just struck that the thing you haven't mentioned much is that some of the problems you're dealing with stem not from — either from the media or from the institutions of government but they stem from the attitudes of the public.

T. Mann: It's one of the ironies that the public doesn't like to see politicians fighting, arguing. They think it should all be consensual. Yet the fights emerge out of genuine differences that exist in the broader public. In fact, you're quite correct. There are real differences in the public on a whole host of matters that sort of complicate the task of governance. And Barney Frank — E.J. has this great line, voters aren't so great either.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Barney Frank once was speaking to an audience — and my job today is to pour out aphorisms — and somebody at the back of the room asked an obnoxious question and Barney Frank looked at the voter, looked at this group of citizens and said, look, you know, we politicians are no great shakes, but you voters are day at the beach either.

T. Mann: But I think it's a mistake to, quote, blame the public. I mean, one of the problems in the political system, partly because of certain lower participation among many and higher participation among few is that in the nature of congressional districts, the ideological polarization is that on a number of issues there is a sort of broader, pragmatic, centrist about what ought to be done, and that doesn't get through to the political system because of the bias towards those who contribute the bias toward those who are politically active, the homogenous nature of congressional districts which tends to produce a polarization among elites and activists that is — that does not well reflect the broader public sentiment.

Now, I think in recent years, and E.J. has argued this in a piece in the last Brookings Review that some of our political encounters and some of our political leaders are drawing debates back to the political center which connect out more with sentiments of ordinary Americans. And that is the challenge. Can we figure out a way to make our differences real as opposed to artificial? Can we make political debates in campaigns about matters that affect the lives of citizens instead of sort of artificially contrived debates that are generated simply to gain political advantage but that have no meaning for the broader public.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: If I could just add one thing. I think your point's well taken that there is a kind of contradiction in the public's attitude. I mean, what you hear a lot from the same person is these politicians fight all the time and get nothing done, and they're in bed with each other and much too cozy. Now, you can make a case that there are times that the fighting is seen as ineffective and not getting anywhere and that on certain other issues, you know, often economic issues, people say they're too cozy. But I think there is a kind of contradiction.

I think there is also, and this is beyond the scope of this meeting, a kind of crisis in civics education in the country that I think we are dealing with. I think we don't do a great job understanding our own democracy not only for the ways it works but also the ways it doesn't. And I think there are some interesting people, Bill Galston over at the University of Maryland is setting up a big project, and actually Tom's wife is working on another project on civics education to say, you know, are we explaining the way democracy works? And that's a problem for think tanks, a problem for journalists, and it's a problem in civics education. And there things in the political system that encourage people to have this kind of bifurcated view.

And this allows me, not so neatly, to segue into one announcement which is there is going to be on Monday at 10:00 a meeting here on Steve Hess' wonderful book called The Little Book of Campaign Etiquette. Those of you who haven't seen it, it's a wonderful and quite funny, and at the same time, very informative book. It's a panel that includes Steve, Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners, Chris Matthews, Al Hunt. And I'll be here too. And that's Monday at 10:00.

I want to thank you all and thank this distinguished panel. And we will revisit deadlock in a few years.

[APPLAUSE AND END OF EVENT]