Transcript
MR. RON NESSEN: Good morning. I'm Ron Nessen with the Brookings Institution. I want to welcome you to the Brookings, and I welcome you to this press briefing on the new report, the Government's Fifty Greatest Endeavors of the Past Half Century. And we want to give a special welcome to our C-SPAN viewers. I'm going to turn the program over in just a second to Paul Light, who is the vice president and director of the governmental studies program here at Brookings. He is the founding director of the Brookings Center for Public Service, and he is the author of the report that will be discussed this morning.
Paul has surveyed historians and political scientists to come up with the 50 greatest achievements/endeavors of the government in the past fifty years. And as you'll see on these big posters here, he has designated the ten best, or most successful, and the ten least successful, and we'll talk about all of this in much greater detail. He has also drawn some lessons from this report and this research that may be helpful to President-elect Bush and to the very evenly balanced new Senate and House.
Following Paul's report, there will be a discussion of the report and the issues raised, involving Dan Schorr, who has been an intelligent and insightful correspondent and commentator for the entire period covered by this report.
MR. DANIEL SCHORR: And then some.
MR. NESSEN: And by E.J. Dionne, so well known in Washington that he's just called by his initials E.J. He, as you know, is a columnist for The Washington Post, syndicated to 90 other newspapers, and he's a senior fellow here at Brookings. Let me just say that there will be a complete text of the report. There will be a full transcript of this event and a video of this event available on the Brookings website at www. Brookings.edu. Among other things there, you'll find a survey form that was used in compiling this list that was sent out to the historians and political scientists, and you can fill in the form yourself, based on your own judgments and rankings of these endeavors, and then you can see how your rankings compare with those in the final report.
I want to say that this event is being carried on the Brookings website by live streaming video, and for those who are watching on their computers or watching on C-SPAN, if you want to send in a question or a comment by e-mail, you can do so, and Paul will try to work that into the program. The e-mail address, if you're watching live streaming video or C-SPAN, to send you comments and questions, is communications@Brookings.edu. And with those housekeeping chores done, I will turn you over to Paul Light.
MR. PAUL LIGHT: It's a joy to be here today to talk about this report; it was a joy to do. And the lessons in this report, I think, are significant and important for the next administration, and the next administration, and the next administration thereafter. I should say, at the very beginning, that election system reform did not make the top ten list of government achievements. We didn't invest much in it, and I don't think we were very successful, but we may yet have a big endeavor in the next Congress to improve the way states and localities record votes.
Our purpose in writing this report and the event today is not to ask whether government should have endeavored to make the changes it did. We did not do a study of whether government should have tried to reduce disease, or should have tried to expand the right to vote, or should have tried to contain communism. This is a report and a study about what the federal government was asked to do, and whether or not a reasonable set of observers would say that government tackled important problems that were difficult to solve and was mostly successful or unsuccessful in doing so. So this is a report about what government did, not what it should have done.
Our job today and in the report is to celebrate government's achievements and also to acknowledge its failures. But before doing so, I want to celebrate the achievement of the project team that worked on this. Judith Labiner, who joined us about a year ago as deputy, now deputy director of the Center for Public Service, was a key part of the project design, helped me at every stage of the effort and statistical analysis. In overall enthusiasm, I give here a solid success in tackling an important project that was arguably the most difficult project of my career. So, thank you Judy; I appreciate it very much.
And Mary McIntosh from Princeton Survey Research, who did all of the field work, all of the hard analysis to really make this survey go. It was a difficult survey. I'm not necessarily the easiest project investigator to work with, and she gets a top score in all aspects of the fieldwork and the design work. So thank you very much to both of you.
I want to just briefly talk a little bit about the methodology and give you the top line from the report, again, starting with this notion that we wanted to know what government tried to do. We did not want to look at individual statutes here. We did not want to take a look at whether Medicare was successful, or the Civil Rights Act was successful, or revenue sharing, or the Marshall Plan, or the GI Bill. Our interest in this project is on the broad problem solving efforts that those statutes were designed to augment. In other words, not looking at the individual statutes, but looking at the overall endeavor involved in solving problems like providing health care for the elderly, the problems facing returning veterans of war, the problems of hazardous waste or endangered species, or protecting citizens' privacy.
What we did was identify or start the project by identifying over 500 major statutes passed by Congress since 1944. The GI Bill actually predated the end of World War II, and slips into our net a little bit before the end of war. But this is really a study that goes back to right at the end of World War II and looks at 530 odd major statutes passed by Congress that we identified through a standard methodology in political science for identifying major statutes. We then grouped the 535 statutes by policy areas such as foreign policy, or housing, or income security, or health, and then we grouped the statutes within those areas around problems, such as the lack of health care for the elderly.
So the general endeavor, for example, of providing health care for the elderly involved three statutes that we found in this big pile of major statutes since the end of the war. Overall, what we tried to do here was do a fair analysis of the problems that the federal government tried to solve using these 535 statutes to identify exactly where the federal government made its greatest effort. Basically here, we were asking "What were the problems the federal government tried to solve? Were those problems important and difficult? Conversely, were they trivial or easy, and did the federal government actually have some success in getting forward or making forward progress in actually solving those problems?"
Our answers to those three questions - importance, difficulty, and success - involved a mail survey of 1,000 political scientists and historians who were identified from the membership list of the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association. We did a random sample of experts in American government and American history post 1920 and sent them a survey asking them three questions about each of the 50 endeavors: Was it an important problem? Was it a difficult problem to solve? And was the federal government successful in solving the problem?
And you can go to our website, you can take the survey yourself, and compare your rankings with the rankings that emerged from the historians. It's important to note, by way of introduction here, that there was a bias in this sample; because we drew from historians and political scientists at colleges and universities, we reflected, in the sample, the biases, the demographic and political biases in American higher education today. So the sample is heavily dominated by white male, liberal Democratic professors. Now, I will tell you to begin with, and this will be a question that comes up I'm sure, what would a parallel sample of other, let's say, conservative historians or conservative political scientists, or a more demographically diverse sample have produced in terms of these final rankings? We believe not much change would have occurred at the top and the bottom of the list.
The sensitivity analysis that we did looking at conservatives or Republicans suggests that the top three or four items on the list and the bottom three or four items would have remained exactly the same. The Marshall Plan emerged as number one among all groups. It is deemed to be an almost unanimous consensus top achievement of the federal government over the last fifty years, as is expanding voting rights, as is opening public accommodations to all races.
At the bottom of the list, devolving responsibilities for the state is a sort of shared agreement that we didn't do very well at doing it. Now, the different samples, if we talk to conservative historians and political scientists, we suspect that if we ask them "Should the federal government have done this; should the federal government do more of this," we get a different answer. But, remember, this was a study of what the federal government tried to do. It's an objective analysis. Really, the 50 endeavors come from an objective analysis of what we asked the federal government to do. We did not look at whether the government should have tried that, and that may be a question that comes up for our panelists looking at the 50 endeavors.
Let me turn very quickly to the list of successes or important difficulty in success. You'll see in the report, at page eight, looking at what were the most important problems the federal government tried to tackle? Our respondents generally agreed that expanding the right to vote, rebuilding Europe after World War II, increasing low income families access to health care, and reducing discrimination in the workplace were the most difficult problems that the federal government sought to address. At the bottom of that list in terms of important problems, you'll find promoting space exploration, controlling immigration, increasing market competition through deregulation and devolving responsibility to the states. Our respondents simply did not believe those were important problems to tackle.
The second question is, "What were the most difficult the federal government endeavored to solve?" And at the top of that list, our respondents generally agreed that advancing human rights and providing humanitarians relief abroad was the most difficult or was a very difficult problem to solve, followed by increasing arms control and disarmament, reducing workplace discrimination, and renewing impoverished communities. At the bottom of the list, promoting scientific and technological research, promoting veterans readjustment, strengthening the highway systems and expanding how ownership.
Our respondents were basically telling us it's not hard to solve those particular problems; it's not hard to build highways. You lay concrete, you provide appropriations. It's not hard to help veterans adjust to civilian life after war. You spend money, you build hospitals, you provide benefits. It's far more difficult, at the top of the list, to deal with things like advancing human rights abroad.
Finally, we asked our respondents about the federal government's success in solving these problems. These respondents were overwhelmingly in agreement that the federal government was most successful in rebuilding Europe, expanding the right to vote, building highways, and containing communism. They were in general agreement at the bottom of the list or in sharp agreement that we didn't do very well advancing human rights, improving government performance, renewing poor communities, and increasing the supply of low income housing. And these ratings tend to fit with objective realities.
If you talk to the nation's governors, for example, they're going to tell you that we haven't done very well at devolving responsibility to the states. If you look at the development of Europe, you can see the success of the Marshall Plan, for example. And perhaps we can talk a little bit about this in our panel discussion. We then turned to the question of achievement, because we didn't believe in this project that achievement is just the sum of success; it reflects kind of a normative judgment about what we favor here.
Judy and I did these weightings and struggled with how do you define achievement? If you want to talk about government's ultimate impact, how do you define its success in actually solving problems that are difficult and important? In the end, we agreed on a measure of achievement that weighted success as 60 percent of the total, importance of the problem to be solved at 30 percent of the total, and the difficulty of the problem to be solved at 10 percent. It's kind of like Olympic gymnastics, you know. You take the ultimate success, you give it a heavy weight, you say there's a difficulty factor in here, and there's sort of an artistic quality to all of this. And our ratings system is kind of an Olympic style judgment, which expresses our belief that government should endeavor to solve important problems, that the government should be given extra credit for attempting to solve difficult problems, but the lion's share of achievements is based on real success. We don't want to encourage government just to solve easy, trivial problems. We want the government to attempt to go where other sectors of the nation will not go and tackle problems that can't be solved easily.
Now, this is the list then of the government's top ten achievements rated by the historians and political scientists. And we have the list over there from 41 to 50 of its bottom ten achievements, or we can invert it and say, its top ten disappointments. Again, there's fairly good, objective reality in here to confirm the historian's judgment. There were some changes in this list depending on which subset of our respondents you would have talked to. But, generally, there's extraordinary consensus at the top of the achievements list and at the bottom of the disappointments. But there's general agreement among the conservatives, the moderates, and liberals around the top of the list, general agreement among the Democrats and Republicans. At the bottom of the list, general agreement among women and men professors on where these rankings occur.
The main difference is if there's one area where there was disagreement it's on containing communism. The male professors rated containing communism the number 7 achievement; women rated it number 38. Conservatives rated containing communism number 2; liberals number 22. And that's where you get some motion. If you take containing communism out here, however, then there's broad consensus on the general list.
Let me sum up here by talking a little bit about lessons and achievement, and then we'll turn to our panel. If you look at this list, if you look at the endeavors first and then you look at the achievements, I see three basic lessons here for George W. Bush and people who despair about this dark cloud of partisanship that hangs over the country. First of all, there's extraordinary difficulty assigning credit for any of the achievements to a single party, to the president, to the Congress, or to any particular historical epoch. Only six of the fifty endeavors on this list can be credited to unified government; that's six of the 50.
And on the top ten list, what you see is extraordinary consensus over time, during periods of unified government, the occasional periods, but profoundly during periods of divided government. Divided government is not the worst thing that can happen to a government. In fact, what you see here is that these achievements, to a certain extent, are the glue that keeps us together through periods of extraordinary tension. I mean just think back over the last 50 years. We've had impeachments, assassinations, scandals, urban unrest, riots. We've had two unpopular wars, scandals. It's been an unbelievable period, not to mention Jimmy Carter's battle with that water bunny. (Laughter.) I mean I remember that during periods like this.
And yet, look what we've produced. In a sense, through periods of extraordinary tension and difficulty, we kept grinding away. And that takes us to the second lesson of this list, which is endurance. The federal government does very well when it sticks to a problem with a coherent policy strategy year in and year out, just grinding away at an issue like civil rights, grinding away at reducing disease. And if you look at the reducing disease endeavor, you will not find a star statute in that endeavor. There's not a single scintillating statute that pops out and says - like Medicare or the Americans with Disabilities Act - it is an incremental effort to reduce disease year in and year out over time.
And when you look at our accomplishment in reducing disease, this number four rating here suggests the power of a certain incrementalism, a grinding away, a perseverance, a stick-to-it and a stubbornness about the government's commitment to making an achievement. And we know that we've made success in reducing disease; it's showing up now in one of our biggest problems facing the Bush administration, the looming problems with Social Security, some of which is embedded in that fact that life spans have increased so dramatically.
The third lesson of the achievements is just raw courage. Government tried here to accomplish goals that involved hard pressure on the American public to reach high. We did things here that no one else would do. When we look down to the bottom of the list, there's some evidence of a lack of coherence, a lack of agreement, a sort of over reliance on one party or one President to advance issues like controlling immigration. We haven't known what our goal is in controlling immigration, and it shows in this list of ratings. What is our current policy? It's confused. We haven't been clear about it. We're really not sure. But at the top of the list, we see that the government is aiming high, working hard, tackling tough problems that aren't necessarily easy to solve and actually succeeding.
The lesson here to me is that one of the most important things a President can do is stick with it; you don't have to reinvent the wheel to have a successful presidency, you just keep grinding away at things where we've made progress over the last 50 years. One of the questions we have for our panel here is whether or not the next fifty years of endeavor will produce a similar list of achievement. I mean when you look back from the edge of the new millennium at this list, and you feel a certain despair, a kind of frustration through this vote counting, for example, I kept looking at this list and saying, "Hey, you know, we're going to do fine; we accomplished things during tough times."
We've asked Dan Schorr here to look back a little bit and give us some reflections what he's seen over the pasty 50 years, and then we want E.J. to look forward and say, "Well, what's the list going to be at the end of the next 50 years? Are these items still going to be on it? Is there going to be anything on it? Do we have the perseverance, the dedication, just the raw courage now to tackle something like expanding the right to vote, or civil rights, or the stick-to-it-tiveness to continue reducing disease.
I'll sit down; we'll take five to seven minutes for each panelist, and then we'll open this up for questions and answers. Thank you.
MR. DAN SCHORR: Thanks, Paul, and thank you, Ron Nessen, for that lovely introduction. The only one who would know how to respond to it would be Henry Kissinger, if he were here. Everybody tells me I had to do radio. (Laughter). That wonderful introduction of Ron's would be well responded to by Henry Kissinger if he were here. He was very good at taking accolades. I remember that when he got the Nobel Peace Prize at a large reception at the State Department, a woman walked up to him and took his hand in her two hands and said, "Mr. Secretary, I simply wanted to thank you for saving the world." And he looked back at her and he said, "You're welcome." (Laughter.)
Let me for a moment go back and use the fact that I've been around longer than anybody. And I was here when number one this list -- rebuild Europe after World War II, namely the Marshall Plan -- came into being. And you have to go back and read the history to know how close it came to not happening. It only worked in the end because there was an election coming up in Italy and fear that the communists might win that election. And the Marshall Plan was sold to the Senate of the United States on the assumption that only trying to beat the Soviets would be taken by Congress as a reason to spend a lot of money.
And at least also then, when you ask about the future, one thing to bear in mind is this country has always done very well with a clear and present enemy. And we're running short of enemies. If we can figure out a new big enemy, we may get another number one again. With a couple of other things I wanted to say, I think it's a serendipitous time to be discussing government issues. And we have growing blackouts in California, and people want their government to do something about it, and non-rolling airplanes all over the country, and people want something to do about that, and government tends to function best when there is sharp and perceived need.
Now, I've spent some time studying your 50, and I'd like to say a couple of things about them before we go to the future. First of all, I think it's interesting at how you arrived at 50, starting with 538 major statutes, getting it down to 67, and finally to 50. And when I looked at the 17 that didn't make the final cut, they were no mean performances in themselves: ending discrimination in the armed services, aiding victims of disasters, promoting the arts, reforming the campaign finance system. You may not know that the campaign finance system was reformed. (Laughter.) That happened shortly after Nixon, and it didn't take.
I'm also interested in some of, what I consider to be, major achievements that are not on your list, or at least they're not on your list explicitly. Veterans readjustment is there, yes; but the GI Bill of Rights is not there. You say it's because the GI Bill of Rights basically antedated your 50-year period. But, then, so, in fact, did the Marshall Plan come before 1950. You have there improved elementary and secondary education at number 35; no mention of that revolutionary preschool programs called Headstart, probably one of the great achievements because it was original and has made this enormous accomplishment in itself.
You have containing communism there at number 14, but no mention of the Peace Corps, which I consider to be another considerable achievement in itself. You have food safety, but not food stamps. And I think also is quite interesting. It's interesting what you find in the top 25 and then what you find in the bottom 25: expand the right to vote ranks as number 2, yes, which we may have to go back to and do some more work on. Promote access to public accommodations is number 3, but increasing low income housing is 45, and developing impoverished communities is number 46.
The national highway system is number 7, but improving mass transportation is number 47. And you see the line that goes there, which I think you referred to when you said that the people who responded to this were not basically demographically chosen. Health care for older Americans is number 8; health care for low income families is number 34. I think it is very interesting. There are lessons to learn from this; I think it takes a consensus to get great achievements, and you find it's easier to get consensus if you're not trying to solve problems of a minority of Americans but responding to the wishes of the majority of Americans. You get more effort into serving majorities than if you were serving minorities.
Also, government tends to favor things that can be easily counted. How do you count what the Peace Corps has done in America? How do you count how many people were kept alive with food stamps and welfare and all the rest of it? But if you can get things and say here are the results counted one, two, three, four, five, government tends to go for that. I also think it is true, as you noted in your report, that intents of the moral rightness of a cause helped to get the government to do it. I think that is true. And thirdly, that great achievements often entail great risks, that's true. But, it is less risky for the government to desegregate a lunch counter than it is to try to make it possible for people to buy lunch at that counter.
And so, I thought I would say to that, after being a reporter, it's interesting when you can examine this from many points of view. It's fascinating for what it says; it's fascinating for the way it apportions wastes to various achievements. Most of the achievements that you will find there are achievements easily recognized by most Americans. I'd like to see some achievements that are dedicated to poorer people.
MR. LIGHT: Let me just say one quick thing. This wonderful comment - and I think what we hope to happen with this report is to stimulate conversation about why things end up down at the bottom and what government should have tried. Some of the legislation you mentioned Dan is in the report, but it's part of endeavor. So the Food Stamps Act is under the endeavor of improving nutrition and addressing hunger, but it didn't score very high; we didn't do very well with that. The Peace Corps is under the endeavor of advancing humanitarian relief abroad and sort of promoting democracy; and we didn't to very well with that either.
They are very, very important statutes; if you looked at them as individual statutes, we'd probably say tremendously successful. But the overall goal that they tried to address, at least according to these respondents, we didn't get as far as perhaps the designers of those statutes wanted. In fact, food stamps was a product of the Great Society, and it's not clear that it reached beyond the borders of the Great Society to be fully embraced by Americans, which goes to this issue of what the public will tolerate by way of addressing the problems in specific communities. E.J., you get to look forward and backward, and one can say that you've been around since the founding, at some level, philosophically at least. Please weigh in.
MR. E.J. DIONNE: Well, I want to say Paul Light is obviously intelligent, because there's a very intelligent division of labor here. In order to talk about the past, you need to know a lot of things, so he chose Dan Schorr. In order to talk about the future, you don't need to know anything at all, so he chose me. (Laughter.) I want to say there are two of my favorite people and journalists; Dave Broder and Mark Shields are here. And if somebody actually wants to learn something, at the end of my talk I'll gladly trade places with either of them so they can reflect on this.
I'd just like to say one other thing about this survey; I happen to work three doors down from Judy, and so it's said you shouldn't watch sauces made, or legislation, or the making of surveys up close. But they really made a very, very powerful effort. I watched as they were trying to go through this list to create as fair a list as possible. And I think we've heard in Paul's comments that great care was taken to make sure that whatever the results were they were presented accurately, and if there were hidden biases, they wouldn't stay hidden. And so I appreciate what Paul said, and they worked very hard on getting this done right.
And just on Dan's point, I think he makes a very interesting point, and Paul touched on this. If you think about what was at the top and what was at the bottom in terms of some of those achievements, it's quite clear we did much better at some things than others. We did much better at providing universal health care for the elderly than we did for any other group in society. We actually did much better in building highways than we did in building mass transit. And so I think when we take this survey apart, we may reflect not peoples view of what was important, but rather, what we ended up being good at. And it's supposed to be easy to build highways. I must say that, in this city, historically, it's been very difficult to clear snow.
And just for the rest of the country, which likes to make fun of our local government, our government actually did quite a good job this morning, which is reflected in how many showed up here. There were some snowstorms where the room would have been empty.
In looking forward, I'd like to talk about what we agree on what government should do, whether it's broad agreement, and then areas where there is less broad agreement on whether government should have a role. I think from libertarian all the way over to democratic socialists and everyone in between, there is agreement that government is there to protect us, essentially, against force and fraud. Basically, to keep people from stealing things from us, or from injuring us, or from taking our lives. And some of those are reflected in this list of achievements.
Containing communism, which is really a way of protecting our country from aggression, is that sort of achievement. Cutting crime, which is lower down on the list, is part of that sort of achievement. But I think under a democratic government - that's democratic with a small "d" - we also decide that government can and should do other things. In general, we decide that through government we can solve problems together that we might not be able to solve on our own, or through private mechanisms. And I think many things on this list reflect that sort of collective or community endeavor.
And in trying to figure out what government might achieve in the next 50 years, I thought it might be useful to break down this list into some broad categories and to see where government might act in the future in these broad categories. I think the Marshall Plan is a special case but actually quite relevant, and I want to close with that. And expanding the rights of voters, as Dan mentioned, is something we still obviously need to keep at after this election. But I discerned at least six broad categories in no particular order but just as they jumped out at me.
It's very striking how important environmental protection is in this list. There are so many individual mentions of it - ensure safe food and drinking water, improve water quality, improve air quality, protect the wilderness, protect endangered species, reduce exposure to hazardous waste. It strikes me that these were, in fact, real achievements; they are likely to be taken on by government in different ways in the future. The second category: research and development. Government can invest risk capital, if you will, because it doesn't have to worry about making a profit.
And clearly, in areas such as disease, or, to paraphrase Al Gore, government was there at the inception of the internet. And there are a whole series of research and development goals that the government actually achieved, especially in the area of health care. The fourth is a combination of economic regulation, which is one way to look at it; the other way is making markets more efficient and making them work for more people. You look at the enhancing consumer protection, expanding foreign markets for U.S. goods, expanding home ownership. I think this is the category that will always remain relevant to governments in the context of a free market economy.
And then finally, and in some ways most importantly, securing rights, or making sure that peoples individual rights are protected. Obviously, you see that in expanding the right to vote. You see that in areas of discrimination later on in this list; and then, broadly speaking, social justice, which goes right through this list, whether you're talking about health care for the elderly or reducing poverty.
Now, the question is "What would government do in these broad areas over the next 50 years?" It seems to me the thing that might be worth thinking about is where government was coming from in this era and what it's going to be confronting in the next era. It seems to me that for about 100 years you had a country and an economy that was becoming less local and more national. And lot of the achievements of this sort of New Deal, Fair Deal, Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson era were achievements that came out of a collective decision to have government at the national levels do more things than it used to do because our circumstance was different, that we moved from the small town to the big city, from farms to factories, from small farms to larger corporations.
And a lot of these achievements reflect a kind of New Deal sensibility, if you will. And I say that personally with a great deal of respect. If you look now, we are moving more and more from a situation that was national and is now global. And so, I think one of the questions we need to ask about this list is "In a global environment, what will government's role be?" These environmental achievements, for example, within our nation's borders, it now becomes essential, as we learn through problems like global warming or how the rain forests affect us in this hemisphere, to start thinking about environmental protection in global terms. That doesn't mean that we will establish a world government; it doesn't mean we will establish some international agency with strong regulatory powers.
On the other hand, it already has begun to mean that through agreements among governments, we've tried to achieve the same goals at a global level that we achieved at the national level. Similarly, in terms of keeping the economy strong, and this is where I think the Marshall Plan came in, the Marshall plan was a huge achievement not only because it protected Europe from communism, not only because it rebuilt a continent that had been largely destroyed by war, but because it was also a powerful lever for the economic growth that we enjoyed from 1945 through 1973, and are picking up again. Without the Marshall Plan that wouldn't have happened.
So I think a second area of achievement - and you've seen that in small pieces in recent years, how our government and other governments respond, say, to the problems with the peso in Mexico, or the problems with the collapse of large banks, which, if they were allowed to fall, might pull down the whole economic system with them - I think you're going to look to the international arena for government or government in common to do some of the same things to protect us and to promote growth that we see in this last list.
And I think you can go right down the list. Securing social justice: that is much harder, obviously, in a global context than it is in a national context. Although again, going back to the Marshall Plan, the Marshall Plan was not just an economic program, it was also a program that existed within a certain consensus. In European terms, it was a kind of Christian Democratic-Social Democratic consensus. In our terms, it was a kind of Eisenhower Republican, New Deal consensus, that there was a role for government to ensure social justice, but we would relay on free markets to produce most of the goods. And I think again, we're looking at the global situation again to see if we can achieve a similar kind of consensus, without which you can't really achieve large goals.
And I'll close just by saying "securing rights," this whole category of securing rights was clearly a great achievement in a democratic government. And I think securing rights is one of those categories that actually does sort of overlap between a more conservative libertarian view and a more liberal or social democratic view. I think in the coming years, you will see, I think, greater achievement in the area of human rights. One of the most effective areas in which non-governmental organizations have been working is on the issue of protecting rights, whether it's on issues such as prison labor or work conditions, or on issues such as torture, imprisonment for political views, in fact, in the case of Amnesty International, also on the death penalty.
So I don't think there is any need for us to look at this list and say we can never do anything like this again. I think, as Paul said, this is an inspiring list for what is possible for government to achieve. What's not on the list is the government's limits. But I think if we understand that we share many of the values reflected in this list and are trying to put those values into effect into new circumstances, we might be able to have at least 30 or 40 good achievements when Paul Light and Dan Schorr are still here to talk about them 50 years from now.
MR. LIGHT: Let me just ask the first question, and then we'll open it up for general questions, which is, sort of, what surprised you on the list? What one or two items, Dan, did you see at the top or the bottom that struck you as either not appropriate or surprising to you on the list? And then, I'll ask E.J.
MR. SCHORR: Well, the number 50, the devolution of responsibility to the states, surprised me only because it's so far down. I would have thought, in the era in which we lived with our politicians running against the federal government - even just before they become President to fix the same thing - there has been this tendency to downgrade the federal government. Now, I thought E.J. made a very interesting point about the fact that from the New Deal until the Great Society, there was this tendency to ask the federal government to do those things which not only individuals could not do, but they didn't trust the states to be able to do anymore.
There was a period when lobbying in state capitals was so strong that you found that you couldn't get anything done except by going to the feds. And I remember during the 1965-66 Great Society period when the federal government simply went over the heads of the states and localities and began dealing with people, communities. And you found a community action program; you found Headstart programs, other things being brought in by the federal government, because they were filling the holes that the states seemed unable to fill. In more recent times, I think that that trend has been reversed. I think it is now the federal government which seems to be partly paralyzed, and the states which are coming back into their glory once again.
It's interesting that while we are debating, for example, whether and how we can get legislation to subsidize prescription drugs for people, that there are 14 states that have their own prescription drug programs. And, at the same time, it's also true - and that's why I can't put it together - it's also true, as E.J. said, that our globalization tends to provide new tasks to new challenges for government to get together with other government in order to protect the equity in this globalization. So I see, at the same time, a devolution of responsibility for the federal government, even as, in other ways, it's assuming new responsibilities.
MR. LIGHT: E.J.?
MR. DIONNE: Well, I found it interesting though not surprising that the Marshall Plan ended up being number one. I can imagine a lot of different groups you might poll where that wouldn't be number one. I think it was actually a sensible choice, but that surprised me. I wasn't as surprised as Dan was on the devolution being at the bottom, not only because of the political orientations of the historians that you spoke of, but also because so many of these achievements that people rank highly were actually only achievable through national action. Obviously, the Marshall Plan is one, expanding the rights of the vote, equal access to public accommodations, reduced disease - that's the investment of the NIH - I think all of those were national achievements, and that may reflect why the devolution went to the bottom.
The only two that I thought might have been ranked a little lower than they might have deserved, one was expanding home ownership; that is actually an extraordinary achievement of the last 40 years. Home ownership is now up, I think, at about 67 plus percent. That was a conscious policy choice that was actually done not really so much through direct government action as indirect action - the tax subsidy of home ownership, but that might have gone up a little bit. And perhaps this was because I was a kid when I watched all those missiles go in the air, but I might have ranked space exploration higher, because when you realize where we are now compared to where we were 40 or 50 years ago, and the sense in which we're now all dependent on the satellites to do everything from make phone calls to watch baseball games, you know, that's a huge leap. So those were the two that I might have ranked higher.
MR. LIGHT: I should say to our viewers that you can go to our website at www.Brookings.edu/endeavor, and see all of this stuff laid out, the methodology difference, comparisons of what groups within the sample rated. I have a bet with a friend of mine at the Heritage Foundation, Virginian Thomas, saying that I'll bet her a dinner at any restaurant in Washington that she cannot pick a sample of conservative think tankers, scholars, who would come up with a different top three. I just am totally convinced that it doesn't matter who you pick, the Marshall Plan will be up there; it just is so solidly there. Statistically, we could not do anything to unsettle it, and at the bottom as well. I mean I think there's sort of an objective reality built here that, on the devolution issue that, you know, we talked a lot about it Dan, but we didn't do much about it to make it real. I think conservatives would say do more; and there is some evidence in our sample that conservatives might have said do less at the top, or do less in the middle. Having worked with John Glenn back in the late 80s, boy, was I disappointed about exploring space. I was really hoping it would be way up there.
Let's take some questions from the audience. I'll start over here with Tim Clark, publisher of Government Executive.
MR. CLARK: It strikes me, Paul and the panel, that a lot of what the government has tried to do in these decades has been to help the poor, [whether] it's been the earned income tax credit, food stamps, low income housing, and many, many other programs. And yet if you look at this ranking, at endeavors that seemed to be pretty explicitly aimed at the poor, the highest one I find is number 18, "Reduce Hunger and Improve Nutrition." And the other ones that are prominent are ranked from 34 on downward - 34, 40, 45, 46. Why is it? If my thesis is true here, why is it that government isn't doing better at solving the problems of the poor, given so much effort that has been put into it?
MR. LIGHT: One answer here. I mean, remember that these are the rankings that come from a sample of historians and political scientists. I think that's a fairly accurate portrayal, however. It may be that we just don't have the right answer, that the programs we've designed for helping the poor are really designed to address the symptoms of poverty through earned income tax credits and housing and so forth, but that perhaps we should be working in other areas that might yield greater results, such as economic development in poor communities and so forth.
I mean you can also see some correlations here, Tim. When you look at, for example, improving mass transit being way down at the bottom, is that correlated with the fact that other programs to help the poor are at the bottom? Had we done more on mass transit to deal with reviving our inner cities, would we have done better on programs for the poor? In that regard, our respondents - there is a link I guess. And Dan talked a little bit about it between the fact that we built so many miles of highways out into the suburbs, but we didn't or weren't able to concentrate Americans on mass transit. So, there may be some correlations there.
It may reflect, Tim, the fact that our programs for the poor really are not well concentrated in government. You know that as well as anybody in this room that we've got hundreds and hundreds of programs that are spread out over a dozen or two dozen agencies. We haven't had a policy coherence within and across the endeavors, and that may reflect kind of a scattershot effort. That's the only effort that's possible in a Congress where we don't have a general agreement on just what to do for the poor.
MR. SCHORR: I cannot agree that we don't know how to deal with problems of the poor. I think the answer to why we deal so little with the problems of the poor is rather simple. The poor don't vote in as great numbers as middle class people do. And if you see what happened in Florida the other day, you'll find that when they do get to vote or try to, they don't always succeed in voting. We've gone through experiments, pilot programs for 50 years. Some of them have been tried too little, not enough, reading the wrong signs, not understanding what to make them do. This country could solve the problems of the poor if it wanted to; it simply doesn't want to.
MR. DIONNE: Just a quick point on that. First of all, I think whether you are for them or against them, the initiatives that are described here are rather recent initiatives, and I think we tend to look back more kindly on initiatives that have withstood the test of time. And welfare reform is still something we're trying to figure out. Is it going to work as planned? But I also think that if you look at the period '73 to '93, roughly, or '94, the nature of the economy was such that people at the bottom of the economy were really having a hard time. And that what we may have learned in this last period is the single best program for poor people is to let the unemployment rate get down to 4 percent or under.
And only in that period when unemployment got down that low, did we begin to see the incomes of poor people begin to grow again? In fact, in recent years the bottom quintile has actually had a little bit more growth than the top, and that's the first time that's happened in a very long time. And so I think if you had a sustained experiment in low unemployment, that achievement might be higher on the list.
MR. LIGHT: And earned income tax credit. I mean there's good work here, and among people who study welfare, that the EITC has been successful. It has not been expanded as far as experts might argue it should be. Over here to this hand.
Q: I'm having a little trouble understanding why the ten items on the right are described as failures, but they're included on the list with the 50 greatest achievements of government. Which are they, failures or achievements? And secondly, can you tell me where in the list items like drug abuse abatement, promoting economic prosperity generally and economic independence would fit?
MR. LIGHT: These are the 50 greatest endeavors; and how we define endeavor here is intensity of effort. That's why campaign finance reform did not make the final cut of the top 50. I mean we tried it; it wasn't successful. We would generally agree that it hasn't been successful in its intent. But we didn't try very hard at it, so it didn't make the final cut of the to 50 endeavors. So that's the rating here; those 50 endeavors are what we judged to have been the federal government's most intensive efforts to solve problems. And these ratings then are from a survey asking people how important was the problem, how difficult was the problem, and how successful was government ultimately in solving it?
One of the questions that comes up is "Well, what constitutes a failure?" I talk about this bottom of the list as generally a list of disappointments, where we tried to make an impact and we didn't succeed, but they can be called failures. So we didn't do very well at mass transit. Does that help answer the question?
Q: Yeah, I was, perhaps, a little confused by the language in the report -
MR. LIGHT: Well, you know, that's fine.
MR. DIONNE: Also, I was surprised. Increased market competition is number 44. In the last 20 years, if there's any area in which there has been significant success through the combination of deregulation and new enterprise, that one might be on the top of the list. And my fault was, in looking at it, well, maybe people credit the private sector with that and not the government, which is plausible.
MR. LIGHT: Well, I think there's some evidence in the survey data that, number one, our respondents didn't think that was very important for government to do. And there's a judgment embedded in that about what, perhaps, the respondents thinking about what government should try. Although we did not ask the question about whether governments should have tried any of these. If you go to the website and take this survey, what you're going to find is a difficult survey to fill out. You've got 50 items, three questions per item. I mean we weren't inflicting abuse on our respondents, but this was a tough survey to do.
MR. DIONNE: It was the butterfly ballot of surveys.
(Laughter.)
MR. LIGHT: Well, I don't want to let you get away with that one; it was not a butterfly ballot, you could figure out how to answer that. Back here to Peter Schoettle.
MR. SCHOETTLE: My question is related to your survey methodology. And this is the question. Your focus on congressional acts, I would suggest downplays the executive branch where things are not done via legislation but through steady nurturing of actions, of policies, of issues, rules, regulations, or federal policies. More specifically, I'm struck that sort of two things are left out, maybe three things are left out, because they're executive branch actions, not legislative branch.
The Marshall Plan is number one. There's nothing about Japan, which I would say is almost an equal achievement, the bringing of democracy to Japan, industrialized growth after World War II, which has kept the stable relations in the Pacific for 50 years. A huge achievement, but it's an executive branch action, not a congressional one. I'm struck it's not up there.
Secondly, foreign policy things, which are executive branch. Keeping NATO strong and active for 50 years. It's an unparalleled historical achievement but no law was related to it; it's not up there. Thirdly, the Cuban Missile Crisis. You have here, for example, maintain stability in the Persian Gulf, but avoiding a nuclear war in '62 I'd say was, you know, an incredible achievement, but it's not up there. Or winning the Cold War.
MR. LIGHT: The Cold War is up there Peter. But let me respond a little bit to this, I mean number one, how do you get at the question of what government tried to do from a research standpoint? The tracks of endeavor can be found all over the place, in the federal register, in inventories of executive orders. You know, I'm encouraging other researchers to take different tacks on this. Take a look at what the Supreme Court tried to do. Take those cases, the body of cases and doctrine, and say, well, how did the Supreme Court do? It's a wonderful exercise to try to tackle this.
NATO is embedded in this, Peter. It's in rebuilding Europe after World War II; the NATO treaty is there. But you know, you make some decisions about how to sort. And we weren't interested in specific statutes. I mean lord knows there's enough research in political science and history on the big statutes of the past 50 years - the Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the GI Bill, which was embedded here in the Veterans Readjustment Endeavor. We wanted to look at what government tried to do in a more general sense, kind of looking for the forest rather than the trees and statutes; so yeah, you miss some things along the way. But it's an interesting exercise to struggle with and to see what we tried to do.
And I guess I ended up, during this recount period, occasionally saying, you know, looking at this list, it sure does take away the recount blues. You get a sense of what we really tried to accomplish. And if a government, if a nation, and if the character of a country is measured in part by what it asks its government to attempt, I'm impressed by this list. And some things fall out, but it's a pretty impressive list. We didn't do well at certain things, and the question should be "Should we drop some of this?"
You'll note, for example, that elementary and secondary education was not rated as a very significant achievement of the federal government, yet that's what we're about to do; that's the first priority on President Elect Bush's agenda. Should it be? Is there good evidence that we can accomplish there as opposed to someplace else? But it's a cautionary note. I encourage you to do the executive branch version of this, Peter, and we'll donate all of the therapy you'll need for the team who tries to dig that one up. (Laughter).
Pat McGinnis.
MS. McGINNIS: Actually, picking up on what you said about dropping some things, it struck me that looking at the bottom 25, which are still achievements, if you look at the ones, the 5 which are rated most important, I mean that strikes me as a possible agenda to figure out how to solve these problems. And they are assistance to the working poor, improve elementary and secondary education, increase low-income families access to health care, ensure an adequate energy supply, and reduce exposure to hazardous waste. That's a pretty good agenda. I mean those are the ones that people say are most important that we haven't succeeded at. I'd love to hear you comment on whether we should keep trying, or, as you suggested, drop some of these.
MR. LIGHT: Well, that's a very interesting way of looking at these data, Pat; Pat McGinnis from the Council for Excellence in Government. I think that's a real novel way of looking at it. I suppose you look at it and you say what haven't we done well, and would more effort there make a difference? One of the answers is that more effort on incoherent policy is not going to be successful than less effort. We've got to figure out what we mean, for example, when we decided to control immigration. Do we want people coming in or do we not want people coming? So, there are some areas down at the bottom of this list where there is a lack of coherence and stick-to-it-tive-ness. But that's a very interesting way of looking at these data and worth trying.
MR. DIONNE: I was just struck when Pat was speaking that the American voters, judging from surveys in election 2000, without conducting an elaborate survey or professors, came up with almost exactly the same list. At least, I guess, hazardous waster, maybe, is not at the top of the list, but environmental issues were important generally, but that sounded like the agenda on the campaign that you just read off.
MR. SCHORR: Is it possible, Paul, that some of the items which are on the lower 25 tier here, are there not because people don't consider them important, but because people think they have been largely solved, and therefore don't rank very high. For example, if you take such things as reform welfare, most people think welfare is reformed. President Clinton tells them, you know, the role has gone down 50 percent; we have taken care of that. And some of these other items, for example, when it comes to health care infrastructure, people don't perceive, apparently, that there are things that need to be done there. Reduce crime: well, we've reduced crime. And is it possible that the weight of shoving it down there doesn't mean that people don't think it's important but that it has been generally solved?
MR. LIGHT: Mixed answer to that, Dan. It's a good point, but rebuilding Europe after World War II, I think our respondents felt that that's done.
MR. SCHORR: No, I'm talking about this -
MR. LIGHT: I know; I understand. I mean there's a little bit of that there. The dominant factor in predicting where an item ended up on the list is whether our respondents thought government had been successful, followed by importance, and then a little bit of extra credit for difficult. Things get on the bottom of that list in part because they don't think that we solved it, that government's been very successful in solving it. So, I mean I'm taking the respondents at their opinion here.
And it could be that, you know, you get into reading these surveys - and I've said this in other settings - that you try to interpret what respondents are saying to you, and you almost become like Shirley MacLaine; you're channeling the respondents' thoughts. And I don't see anything in the data here that tells me that that's the dominant reaction down at the bottom. I think there's disquiet at the bottom of the list that government just hasn't made it yet. Other questions. Yes?
Q: I also was immediately struck by the leaving off of Japan and also the Philippines. It seems to me that government influence there was much more significant than in Europe, and also in Asia generally. When government has seriously been involved in dividing nations and cultures, whether you're talking about China, Vietnam, Korea - and I was just at a very sparsely attended press conference at the Press Club which was dealing with the No Gun Ri of 50 years ago, which, the impression I got, is that government has been delaying and trying to avoid responsibility for a massacre of civilians during the Korean War.
Also, what about CIA intervention throughout the world? I would not consider that great, but certainly it's influential and significant, and has changed governments, cultures, and societies around the globe. And one other thing that I also wanted to bring up was just, I see very significantly, dealing with education; because in the last half century, education has dramatically changed, and I see that people are saying it's very important, but also, they're recognizing that there hasn't been success in education. And it seems to me changes that have taken place in the last 50 years - taking prayer out of schools, taking bible study out of schools, taking pretty much any kind of religious and even moral and ethical training out of the school systems. And I certainly wouldn't see that as a success.
And you can look at something like Goals 2000, which I see you left out too. You mentioned Head Start and some other earlier programs, but it seems like Goals 2000 is a total failure.
MR. LIGHT: Let me just say again that these are endeavors, so embedded in the endeavor of improving elementary and secondary education are the half dozen to a dozen statutes that sought to improve it, including Goals 2000. What's interesting about these endeavors is that they had an average of 9 statutes per endeavor. There was only one endeavor on this list, the Gulf War, where you had just one statute embedded in the effort. The average number of statutes in each one of these 50 endeavors was 9 major statutes, so when you go to our website and click on "endeavors," you'll see an inventory with a little bit of text on each one of these endeavors so that you can explore what was really in there. I mean the issue here is to step back from the trees and take a look at the forest of activities, and see what it was that government aimed to accomplish broadly in solving problems. And that's just the kind of question that we hope will be stimulated by this debate and drive you to our website, take the survey and explore the endeavors.
MR. SCHORR: As I think about why Europe and not Japan, I'm lead almost inevitably to just a little bit of ethnic profiling.
MR. DIONNE: You see, I had a different view. The way I took my mind off the recount is I was reading this wonderful book called Embracing Defeat, about Japan after the war. And what I am wondering about is, is it that, or is it that because American forces occupied Japan, and that there was, in a sense, because of the direct occupation, less complicated than our situation in Europe. And do we not really give enough weight to the importance of what happened in Japan after the war, because so much of the controversy over our policy was around Europe and involving the competition with the Soviet Union.
So journalists are always criticized for only covering areas where there is huge controversy; that may be true of historians and political scientists as well, because I totally agree with both of you, especially because I've been recently influenced very much by this book, that what happened in Japan after the war was hugely important as a historical fact.
MR. SCHORR: But also missing, for example, is the fact that we fought a war for Korea.
MR. LIGHT: Well, that's in the list here, but it did not emerge in containing communism as one of the government's top ten successes. Lincoln? I think we'll take two more questions and then bring it to a close.
MR. GORDON: Oh, thanks. I'm Lincoln Gordon, guest scholar here at Brookings.
I'm surprised, Paul. I haven't seen the whole study, and therefore this may be somewhere in the middle, but macro-economic policy, which is, after all, the biggest, broadest thing in economic policy - the Employment Act was, admittedly, a little more than 50 years ago, but still, it's post World War II. Seeking high employment and low inflation: does that figure? And if so, where is it?
MR. LIGHT: I think the Employment Act and then Humphrey-Hawkins are in the list -- Judy? -- under job training, expanding job training and job placement.
MR. GORDON: But that's not an adequate description of it.
MR. LIGHT: Well, no. I mean, again, we're in a zone where we're looking here at what - you know, we made a decision early on to say "Look, how are we going to determine the tracks of endeavor?" And we decided to look at what Congress asked government to do. So macro-economic policy gets picked up here and there, Lincoln, but not in a direct fashion; it's embedded in a series of endeavors.
MR. GORDON: The Employment Act - that was '46 or '47. I've forgotten the exact year. Surely, it was Congress asking the government to maintain high employment and low inflation.
MR. LIGHT: It's in the list, Lincoln. I'd just refer you to the report. It did not score. It was in the middle, roughly, in terms of its success.
MR. DIONNE: See, you don't realize you're all a focus group so that Paul can do the survey with Judy all over again, and incorporate all these views.
MR. BERMAN: Hi, I'm Al Berman with Government Exec. Hi. There's certainly been a lot of effort over the last two decades in terms of government management, management improvement -- I think of the Grace Commission under President Reagan. We've had all of the reinventing government efforts over the last decade. We've seen legislation now, Government Performance and Results Act, acquisition legislation over this last decade as well. And yet when you look at the list here, including government's performance comes pretty far down it. And I wondered if you have any insight as to why that is. Is it that people feel it's not important? Is it that we just haven't been doing well, that it's just too generic an issue, as opposed to something that's so focused, like rebuilding Europe with the Marshall Plan? I'd be interested in any of the panelists' views.
MR. LIGHT: Well, I'd hate to admit that we just haven't been successful. I'm looking at Pat and Tim. I think there's been a lack of coherence in how we've tried to improve government performance; that's one explanation. We've done a little bit of this and then we've done a little bit of that. We did quality management one year, then we do reinventing. Then we do re-engineering government, and then we're government in the sunshine. We're back and forth and back and forth.
It's also quite possible that our respondents just didn't know very much, or were reflecting in their ranking of improving government performance, their general sense that the federal government is still not as good as it could be. You know, it was a disappointment along with space exploration, because some of us in this room have worked very hard to improve government, and I think we've seen government get better. There's no question about it; we see it in the customer satisfaction surveys, but it can get a whole lot better, and it should get a whole lot better. And certainly, some of these ratings at the top reflect improvements in government performance.
I mean reducing disease is really a success story about NIH and the efforts of our health care agencies, HCFA to make investments that have produced a longer life span. So there's a little bit of an embedded achievement there.
MR. DIONNE: Could I commend everybody; there's a wonderful chart on page eight of the report which ranks it not by importance but by success. And I think that is very revealing about what these numbers show, because improving government performance ranks 48 out of 50 in terms of the judgment of whether it was successful or not; whether that's fair or not is up for debate. But it strikes me that that chart explains a lot about where these achievements ended up in the list.
MR. LIGHT: And there's a lot of objective reality in that chart. I mean we look at that chart and we say "Well yeah, I mean has government gotten as good as it could, has it really improved dramatically. How are we doing on issues of attracting and retaining talented people? How are we doing on improving the Presidential appointments process? How are we doing on computer security and so forth?" We can get better. But now we've got a lot of work to do, and Government Executive is certainly covering these issues beautifully and as well as possible.
Let's take just one more question, and then I think we'll bring it to a close. Two more. I'll take Deborah, and then you. Yes, Deborah?
Q: Paul, I think you said the first lesson was that you can't attribute credit to any one government. But would you comment on the top few endeavors about the political climate, especially in Congress.
MR. LIGHT: Right now, or then?
Q: Then.
MR. LIGHT: I think there was, even during periods of divided government where you had a Republican President. I mean throughout this period we had democratic congresses that were driving forward, and Presidents of both parties who stuck with it. I think there was sort of a general agreement on the top of the list about what we should continue to achieve, and lots of debate toward the bottom of the list surrounding very contentious issues such as tax simplification, immigration, devolution and so forth. But increasing market competition really focused on a short period of time in the late seventies and into the Reagan administration that involved the deregulatory movement.
I don't know, what I see at the top of the list is a general consensus, and putting aside and saying "Look, we've settled the issue about whether government should act here, and we have some general agreement on how government should act; let's just keep at it." Sometimes a little faster, depending on the President, sometimes a little slower, but we kept at it. And at the bottom of the list, you see sporadic fits and starts, periodic effort and then withdrawal. I don't know whether that answers your question or not.
Q: It answers part of it. But I'm really trying to get at how divided the Congress was. I mean these are statutes, as you said, nine statutes. I mean what difference did it make whether we had a truly -- a Congress who was basically bipartisan or really contentious?
MR. LIGHT: That's great. There's some wonderful research in this building that Sarah Binder is working on, looking at the decline of the center in Congress. And there may be a story here that further research will show, that it's really the presence of a strong moderate block in Congress. What we've seen over the last 50 years is the decline in the moderate center; there's more and more polarization in the two parties in Congress, and therefore fewer and fewer number of members at the center who can provide the bridge across the parties. And so you see them moving to either end of the ideological spectrum. And that may reduce the possibility that you can get bipartisan agreement because you lack that block at the center. It's a good question Deborah, as to whether this is real bipartisanship or the presence of a moderate centrist block that you could draw upon for policy success.
Do either of you have a comment? E.J.?
MR. DIONNE: At least my looking at this list, I think it's very mixed. I mean if you look at the Marshall Plan, for example, on the one hand we remember a period of bipartisan foreign policy - Arthur Vandenberg. There was enormous opposition to the Marshall Plan. A lot of Republicans and a few Democrats, but mostly Republicans thought it was a bad idea, and it was very controversial. Similarly, in the environmental area you've had moments of bipartisanship and moments of intense struggle over those issues.
So I'm not sure at least I draw any clear conclusion about whether bipartisan or not is the issue. Civil rights is a fascinating area where you could argue that both things were true at the same time. You had an intense block of opposition, and yet you had bipartisanship with people like Congressman McCullough (sp) and Everett Dirksen, you know, helping those things become law, Republican Congressman McCullough. So I'm not sure I can draw any clear line one way or the other.
MR. LIGHT: Right. It does. I mean you are making the case that you need some people in the center who can bridge across in order to make these things happen when there is opposition. Well, we'll go to you, and then Mark Shields.
MR. SCHORR: Well, let me just add to that. I think that this question that we focus on - bipartisanship, moderate centers - I think we should not neglect the fact that things tend to happen when they develop a constituency in the public rather than a constituency in Congress. In other words, everybody wanted to build more roads in those days; President Eisenhower got to build more roads, but nobody will stand against it if it has general approval.
MR. DIONNE: Civil rights leaders were condemned as radicals, and it took their courage to push this issue to the center of our politics. And it turned out that we decided no, that's not radical, that's American. And sometimes that happens.
Q: I'm really impressed by the top ten list, because with the possible exception of number 7, there is an indisputable moral rightness about all of them. But what I'm really concerned about is, in your report, while looking at the percentages who agreed that things were very important, and there were high percentages all the way down the list, when you look at the percentage of respondents who answered very successful, when you get below the first two items, it just drops off really, really sharply. And so we talk about the top ten, and yet when you get down to number 10, fewer than one in four respondents thought that it was very successful. So I guess I'm having trouble with the definition here of achievement.
MR. LIGHT: Well, I mean we tried a ratings score here which gave heavy weight to success, and then importance and difficulty. The top ten achievements are the top ten. Whether you think they are suitable, or if you look at this and you say, "Well, really there are only three where you had respondents who were really giving a higher score than 3.0," in terms of success and so forth, that's a judgment call. I mean you could say "Well gee, this is a report that's very much a glass half empty, that there's really less achievement there, and that you're just looking at the top ten. I ended up feeling pretty comfortable. I mean what it suggests is that this is hard work, and getting at it is kind of a grind out phenomenon.
MR. DIONNE: Paul, could I ask just a factual question that maybe clears that up? I presume that's at least a four way scale, so that you have very successful to somewhat successful, so I would presume you have higher numbers if you're combining the first two.
MR. LIGHT: You know, at the bottom of the list you have four or five items where one percent or less thought that government's effort was very successful. And you know, there's some effect there; and I mean we do look at this and say there are some failures on this list where we just didn't make it.
Q: I think the report is phenomenal, I was just wondering if most of the people who responded really didn't think the government had been very successful about anything in the last 50 years.
MR. LIGHT: No, I think they thought it was successful. I think it's interesting to look at a parallel survey that Andy Kohut of the Pew Research Center and the people in the press did last year, where he asked the American public - a sample of Americans - what did we do well over this last century? And the survey pointed to things like increasing the lifespan, scientific and technological achievements. They didn't give government credit for that, incidentally. They gave the private sector credit, but there's some evidence here that government really created the conditions under which some things flourished. Please don't pop my bubble. I think this is like a wonderful holiday present for Americans who think that the next four years will be anguish. Actually, I think the next four years could be very helpful.
Mark Shields?
MR. SHIELDS: Paul, and not to challenge your premise that the achievements were wrought in a time of bipartisanship. But if you look at the last 25 years when we've had nothing by Presidents, with the exception of Bush, Sr., who ran against the government, from Carter, to Reagan, to young Bush, to Clinton. And as a consequence, it seems there's been no celebration of success. There's a universal consensus that the GI Bill worked, that we rebuilt Europe, that the Marshall Plan succeeded. But if you look at the page 8, the fascinating page 8 again, when you say improving water quality and improving air quality at 9 percent and 8 percent. Now, yes, Richard Nixon was President, Democratic Congress, EPA, and the environmental movement starts. The Great Lakes are dying; I mean they're virtually dead. You know, 99 percent of the lead has been removed from the air. Yet there's no celebration of this success. And I would suggest the reason is because of bipartisanship, in a very narrow sense. Conservatives don't want to acknowledge the federal government does anything; liberals don't want to celebrate that the federal government could succeed with a conservative leadership in the executive. And so, as a consequence, we go unremarking upon what really are great achievements, and there is no consensus. And then starts the next campaign with someone running not simply against a governmental policy, but against the very legitimacy of government, which I think it's fair to say Carter, Reagan, young Bush, and Clinton did.
MR. LIGHT: There's a very interesting trend in these data. Conservatives tend to overrate -- well, not overrate. They tend to rate government success in these areas as higher than liberals and Democrats, almost like "Enough already. We've done enough on hazardous waste, or we've done enough on this, you know." And liberals and Democrats tend to underrate the failures in a sense. I mean it's just an interesting phenomenon, kind of an intriguing reinforcement, but not strong enough really to build a case here; statistically interesting, provocative to say, well, you know. And women, for example, tend to underrate the success of ending workplace discrimination, as if to say we haven't done enough yet - and arguably so.
I think that the last campaign was better than most. There were only a couple of rats in the campaign that both candidates, I think, introduced. But you're quite right. I hope that this report -- and we hope to do some work with the Council for Excellence in Government -- will help remind us that government is capable of great things, that it's capable of great things during periods of endurance when it takes risks, when it pushes hard against the prevailing wisdom sometimes in strong parts of the public that they just don't act. It can do better. There's some evidence in this survey that perhaps we should drop some things where we're confused and concentrate where we're good. The kind of debate we're having in this room right now is exactly the debate we want to stimulate with this report. Go at it; go at it.
I think we'll end this now by saying I hope you find this report as uplifting as I have. For somebody who has worked on government performance during most of my time, looks at how the forms are so confusing for appointees, spends my time dwelling and drilling into problems in government, boy, this was a joyful report to write. And I hope that it is as uplifting to you as it was to me.
Thank you very much for coming. Thanks to Dan Schorr, E.J. Dionne. We are adjourned. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE AND END OF EVENT.]