Progressive Patriotism

Mark's Introduction to Change For America January, 2009

How the 44th President Can Change Washington and America

From Politics to Governance

It was a “change” election all right, but will it actually change Washington and America?

November 2008 wasn’t so much a culmination as the beginning of a new chapter in our national story. For America is as much a notion as a nation, the notion being that a government “of, by and for the people,” still the best definition of democracy, is a continuously self-correcting mechanism where the pursuit of progress is our secular religion. “America,” wrote Walt Whitman, “is always becoming.”

But that idealized process presumes a continuing conversation between leaders and stakeholders so that government reflects popular opinion and therefore produces good results. This is the opposite of President George W. Bush’s almost authoritarian assertion after his reelection that the country had had its “accountability moment” and, as the “decider,” he’d lead where he chose. November 5, then, shouldn’t end but ignite a public conversation among all of us about what’s next. As politics now elides into policies, the story of 2009 is only starting to be written.

Hence Change for America.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund and the New Democracy Project have created this nonpartisan volume based on the belief that the “charisma of ideas” could help shape policy for whoever was elected the 44th president. Presidential candidates concentrate far more on votes, money, press, and primaries than on how to actually run the government post-election. That’s why we thought the winner would benefit from the best thinking from 86 progressive scholars, authors, advocates, and officials, all of whom pooled their collective years of experience and thinking into one volume of solutions. Change for America contains both thematic overview essays and detailed agency-by-agency proposals about how to best renew and reform the next America.

The model for this book was President John F. Kennedy, who in 1962 said he “threw his hat over the wall of space” when he predicted that America would land a man on the moon by decade’s end. We similarly look ahead to imagining America in 2016—how do we want our government and country to look then? Unless the new administration has a clear destination, it will never get there.

Change for America offers several hundred ways both to fix our broken government and provide benchmarks against which the new administration can be measured. We focused far more on prescription than description, on ideas for the future rather than the failures of the past. But because context counts, it was occasionally necessary to explain how deep a hole the Bush administration has dug us into in order to better grasp how to climb out and make progress.

Change, however, is hard. Machiavelli rightly noted that “there is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things whilst those who expect to be benefited by the new in situations will be lukewarm defenders.” The American democratic system—with its bicameral legislature, Senate filibuster rules, and executive veto—bends toward stasis rather than rapid reform. But dramatic change can occasionally happen all at once—as happened in 1933 and 1965—when public pressure forces tectonic plates to shift, and when there is presidential leadership to direct the released energy.

Teddy Roosevelt realized that only government could protect the environment and police big corporations—and he did so. Of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to respond dramatically to the Great Depression. Harry Truman understood that Europe’s recovery after World War II would enhance America’s recovery—hence the Marshall Plan. Monumental civil rights laws emerged from the combination of Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson’s resulting win in 1964, and the latter president’s legislative acumen.

The editors and authors of this volume believe that America is on the brink of a new, progressive era, commencing with the exhaustion of the 1968-2008 conservative period. Considering two significant books this past year on the two leading conservative presidents of the late 20th century—Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland and Sean Wilentz’s Era of Reagan—it’s safe to conclude that 1968 was the start of a 40-year conservative reign, interrupted by the anomaly of Watergate and Bill Clinton. Clinton understood the era he governed in, once referring to himself as a “progressive president in a conservative era.”

The 44th president, on the other hand, now has the historic opportunity to be a progressive president in a progressive era and therefore take America to a different place, one where elected leaders focus on issues beyond only taxes and terrorism.

Preconditions for a New Era

The late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. articulated the theory that, in a two-party country, there are 30-year or so political cycles that swing like a pendulum from right to left and back. While he did not think there was such a thing as historical inevitability, it is true that, looking back, there has been something of a pendulum effect from conservative president William McKinley to progressive Teddy Roosevelt, and from the FDR-Truman-JFK-LBJ era to the conservative years of Reagan and the two president Bushes. Still, the assumption that the 44th president can be a progressive president in a progressive era rests on recognizing several preconditions.

Bush’s Conservatism Failed

Every presidency makes mistakes, blunders, and shades the truth. And conversations about presidential administrations usually permit a healthy debate on whether the gains exceed the failures. George W. Bush is provably different. He and those who have embraced a conservative approach to governing were the dog that caught the car when in 2001 they controlled the executive branch, the legislative branch, a majority of the judiciary, and the corporate community as well—and then they proceeded to blow it.

The Bush administration can take credit for ruining our global reputation; condoning torture; invading a country that never attacked us based on an avalanche of false information; borrowing trillions from the Chinese to enrich our wealthiest citizens; generating only one third the jobs produced during the preceding administration; ignoring global warming; failing to respond to Hurricane Katrina; watching 50 top appointees resign after scandals alongside two White House staffers who were convicted of crimes, the first in 150 years; and—for an encore—presiding over the near collapse of our financial system and ushering in a economic recession. And all of this done while waving both the flag and the bloody shirt of 9/11.

Bush’s dwindling supporters are now left with predicting a Truman-like vindication in 50 years. The last refuge of those losing a debate on the facts is to hypothesize future redemption since that cannot be logically disproved today. Already only 2 of a group of 121 presidential historians have concluded that his presidency is a success, and 98.4 percent is a big negative vote whether in elections or among historians.

Nor can conservatives argue that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney betrayed conservatism. This administration was plenty conservative on the core tests of national security, taxes, and culture. But when confronted with the 21st-century problems of slow job growth, accelerating gas prices, stunning income and wealth inequality, and Wall Street “greed and fraud,” to quote John McCain, conservatism had no ready answers. A foreign policy based on “might makes right” and a domestic policy based on laissez faire had nothing to say to families with shrinking incomes who were losing their homes to shady mortgage brokers. Laissez wasn’t always fair.

America Is More Progressive

In large measure because of this failure, America is changing into a more progressive place. Karl Rove’s grandiose plan for a 50-year conservative realignment is obviously in ruins.

Rhetorically, it is still a pretty conservative country, with denunciations of “tax-and-spend liberals” and “activist judges” continuing to be popular. But operationally, the country is more liberal. All polls indicate significant majorities who are pro-environment, pro-choice, pro-civil rights, pro-Social Security, and against the war in Iraq, anti-big business, and anti-tax breaks for the top 1 percent.

Popularly elected officials often reflect the ardent movements of their eras. In a democracy, intensity can count every bit as much as a majority. Labor organizers pushed FDR to propose many of his New Deal reforms. The civil rights laws of the 1960s were preceded by protests comprised largely of blacks and students. Environmentalists organizing Earth Day (not President Richard Nixon’s walks on the beach in his dress shoes) crystallized into the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the late 1970s, due to stagflation, the Iranian hostage crisis, and a very spirited conservative movement, the public began demanding less government and taxes. That led to the enactment of Proposition 13 in California, which slashed property taxes, and the defeat of the federal Consumer Protection Agency bill. Then, of course, came the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Antitax libertarians and pin-stripped populists were on the march.

But today, as discussed in such books as Laura Flanders’s Blue Grit, David Sirota’s The Uprising, and Markos Moulitsas’s Taking on the System, the new energy appears to be far more economically populist, antiwar, and pro-environment. And the explosive growth of the Internet and the online community—a real democratization of news and views—means that millions now get their information directly, quickly, and inexpensively from independent advocates, not just through such intermediaries as the major corporate news media.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin framed it well: “History suggests that unless a progressive president is able to mobilize widespread support for significant change in the country at large, it’s not enough to have a congressional majority. For example, Bill Clinton had a Democratic majority when he failed to get health reform. When you look at the periods of social change, in each instance the president used leadership not only to get the public involved in understanding what the problems were but to create a fervent desire to address those problems in a meaningful way.”

Smart Government Is Back

For years government has been a four-letter word invariably indistinguishable from bureaucracy. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan rode antigovernment sentiment into the White House, as the belief that government could help people fell by half from the 1970s to the 1990s. Even Bill Clinton famously said that “the era of big government is over,” although the blame-government-first crowd blithely chose to ignore his next qualifier: “but we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.”

Indeed, it was government failures such as the Vietnam War and Watergate—epical events having nothing to do with the progressive community or values—that shrank the credibility of government. Now, however, Reagan’s inaugural observation that, “Government is not the solution, government is the problem,” falls flat after events from Hurricane Katrina to E. coli outbreaks, from dangerous Chinese toys to collapsed mines in West Virginia and Utah, from millions losing their homes in foreclosures to inadequate care in veterans facilities. No, the “problems” were weakened levees, uninsured and unemployed Americans, mortgage crooks, Enron executives, and tax cuts to billionaires while fighting two wars. Explained author Jacob Hacker in The Great Risk Shift: “People are more worried about Big Insecurity than Big Government.”

Clinton’s and Bush’s presidential terms, then, for very different reasons, have helped to restore public faith in the power of positive government. For his part, Clinton’s agenda of crime reduction, welfare reform, and budget balancing not only worked programmatically but also helped to restore the public’s faith in smart government. And Bush’s failures made the public yearn for real solutions rather than merely invoking the “greed is good” ethic of Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street.

At the same time, progressives have continued to rethink and replan. By November 2008, a body of work had developed over time that constituted a progressive plan to renew Washington and America. Change for America is not based on more big government, but on more smart, transparent, and accountable government that looks to the market when it can and to itself and a vibrant not-for-profit sector otherwise.

A Progressive Blueprint for America

The 44th president can find early and dramatic success by reaching for three pieces of low-hanging fruit missed by his predecessor—appoint competent people, obey the law, and tell the truth. More broadly, however, the new president needs to understand the larger themes of his era and act accordingly.

FDR and Ronald Reagan especially understood that broad themes—like a New Deal and freedom—move America more than this program or that policy. Historian Sean Wilentz reports that Reagan once told his barber that as president he tried to lower taxes, raise morale, increase defense spending, face down the Soviet Union, and shrink government. Contending that he had done all but the last, Reagan concluded, “four out of five ain’t bad.”

In that spirit, this volume is built around four fundamental themes: democracy, security and diplomacy, economic opportunity, and a greener world. For each, we will describe what is wrong and then what is next, in the expectation of what our 44th president can hypothetically hope to look back on with satisfaction as he approaches presidential retirement by 2016.

A Stronger Democracy

While issues involving war and economy invariably trump other voter concerns—and 2008 was no exception—the process of democracy should be a bedrock American concern because process is policy. “If we want to solve our problems,” writes contributor Michael Waldman in his book A Return to Common Sense, then “we have to fix our systems.” When the mechanism of democracy is broken—when there’s such secrecy, disenfranchisement, lawlessness, dishonesty, and special interest domination that people cannot convey what they want or need—the government cannot act in the public interest.

From the Federalist Papers to James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, the theory of democracy presumes that when citizens participate in their own governance, it is more likely that public decisions reflect majority sentiment and are also thoughtful, respected, and obeyed. So as Ronald Reagan kept referring back to freedom as a primary value, our new president must hold up democracy as his primary value. It is a good time to not only wave the flag but also to pursue policies that honor what it symbolizes. It is especially a good time because, in Professor John Gaddis’s view, “the world came closer than ever before to reaching a consensus…that only democracy confers legitimacy,” even as the world’s oldest democracy became less democratic over the past eight years.

For two centuries America has been lurching toward a “more perfect union.” Slavery was abolished, women and then blacks won the right to vote, workers pioneered workplace democracy by winning the right to collectively bargain, and limits were put on what big interests could contribute to campaigns. During the past eight years, however, a group of new authoritarians in the executive branch, Congress, and the courts have posed a clear and present danger to our democratic and constitutional traditions.

A “democracy audit” today would show a balance sheet marred by large liabilities. Consider voting rights, abuse of executive power, and the rule of law. Although our democracy ranks in the bottom fifth of all democracies in terms of voter turnout, the Bush administration’s Justice Department focused not on widespread voter turnout but on so-called voter fraud.

As discussed in our chapters on civil rights and the Department of Justice, the Bush administration’s Civil Rights Division did not bring one case against the suppression of minority voters, but instead pressured U.S. attorneys to concentrate on cases against people presumably voting illegally. This happens, however, about as often as someone gets hit by lightning, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. It is extremely unlikely that someone will risk prosecution and jail to join a conspiracy that adds one extra vote to an election.

Citing the “war on terror” after 9/11, the Bush-Cheney administration cited the conservative theory of the “unitary executive,” which basically assumed that the president could ignore any law during wartime as commander-in-chief. This was both unprecedented and radical since the war on terror would never be over and the president under the Constitution is commander-in-chief of the military, not the country. But the theory should not have been surprising, for it was Rep. Richard Cheney of Wyoming whose dissent to the congressional Iran-Contra Report said that a president, in emergencies, had to resort to “monarchical” remedies.

This was too much for even a U.S. Supreme Court with a majority of conservative appointees. Four times it ruled that the Bush administration was denying due process of law to Guantanamo detainees. “A state of war,” wrote then-justice Sandra Day O’Connor, “is not a blank check for the president.” It was combination of Kafka and Orwell for an American government to argue that it could imprison people forever without a hearing or a charge—in the name of protecting Western values. Apparently when George W. Bush took his oath of office “to faithfully execute the laws,” he took it literally.

Now that this era of extremism posing as patriotism is ending, the 44th president can pursue a democracy agenda through government transparency, accountability and lawfulness, and by expanding the franchise. Specifically, he should create universal voter enrollment, which could add up to 50 million voters to the rolls; make it a crime for any person or official to actively suppress the vote by any form of intimidation; enact a public finance law to provide a funding floor under congressional candidates to level the financial playing field; establish federal standards for electronic voting, with paper-verifiable ballots, same-day registration, voting by mail, and felony disenfranchisement laws, so all states come into the 21st century in technology and process; and encourage instant runoff elections so primary winners would have majority support in one round of voting.

To ensure our democracy operates at 21st-century levels, the new president should instruct the Federal Communications Commission to confirm that every home has affordable access to a broadband network of at least 100 megabits per second by the year 2012. The president should also make sure there are real local media license renewal hearings to assure local diversity. The only way this will happen, in my personal opinion, is to create a White House Office of Democracy to push for all of the aforementioned reforms, along with other pro-democracy reforms—interagency and interbranch—on behalf of the president. The only way such important but non-urgent reforms can be enacted by the congressional and executive branch bureaucracies is if there is a known emissary advocating on behalf of a committed president.

Economic Opportunity

America never begrudged people becoming rich, so long as everyone had a shot at becoming rich. As Abraham Lincoln put it, all would have “an open field and a fair chance [for their] industry, enterprise, and intelligence.” By that standard, the American economy in 2008 is failing. As the wide-ranging selection of chapters on the economy detail, most Americans feel as if they are always running faster after an accelerating bus called prosperity.

Economic metrics reflect this split-level economy, with a new aristocracy of wealth and a floundering middle class. Between 1979 and 2005, the top 1 percent of income earners enjoyed a 176 percent rise in income while the bottom 20 percent experienced only a 9 percent rise. Based on data going back to 1913, income is now more concentrated among the top 1 percent of households than any in year except one—1928.

While economic insecurity is up, economic mobility is down. About two-fifths of Americans born into a family in the bottom fifth of income distribution stay in that rut as adults, while nearly the same percentage born into the top quintile stay there as adults. The only industrialized country with less upward mobility is Great Britain. Half of all workers report total savings and investments of under $50,000, while a quarter of all workers and retirees report no savings of any kind. In this past decade alone, the number of people without health insurance rose to over 46 million in 2006 from 38.4 million in 2000. And the minimum wage fell a third in real terms over the past two decades.

Why this decline? It is partly due to the “invisible hand” of global economic trends, through which Mexican and Chinese laborers using the same technology as American autoworkers will produce cheaper cars. But it is also due to the visible hand of public policy. Just as Franklin Roosevelt’s labor and regulatory policies and Truman’s GI bill helped create the American middle class, Reagan’s and Bush’s labor, tax, and deregulatory policies are shrinking it. Indeed, over the past 60 years, the real incomes of the middle class rose twice as fast during progressive administrations and six times as fast for the working poor.

The best way to lift people up from poverty and provide real income gains for the middle class is for the 44th president to concentrate on the value of economic opportunity for all, on fulfilling the dream of the first Republican president to provide “a fair chance” to all workers. As discussed later, an Economic Opportunity Agenda would create a progressive tax system by reducing rates on those earning under $200,000 and raising top rates on the fortunate few to at least to 38 percent—as in the 1990s when the economy was steaming ahead. The agenda would also expand the federally funded State Children’s Health Insurance Program so all children have health care irrespective of their parents’ employment—and then push for some version of universal health insurance, ideally with a “Medicare for All” program that the public understands.

The president can cut poverty in half by 2016 by focusing on programs that help children from birth to five years of age. He could start with a program for “Universal Pre-K” for four-year-olds, making sure that they are ready to learn when they enter kindergarten—and he could implement a requirement for a “Children’s Impact Statement” for every federal law or budget decision that might have an impact on children. In addition, he can shift $150 billion spent annually on nation-building in Iraq to nation-building in America by investing in economic growth at home.

Strengthening unions—one of the few mechanisms to improve real income for workers—will require the president and Congress to enact the Employee Free Choice Act; appoint National Labor Relations Board commissioners who do not ignore the labor laws; hire enough inspectors to again effectively enforce labor health and safety laws at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; establish a wage-loss insurance program to help workers, for a specific period of time, who lose their jobs and are forced to take a new job at a lower wage; and create “Flexible Education Accounts” to provide workers with $15,000 in tax credits per decade for retraining.

Is all this just “class warfare,” according to the rhetoric of conservatism? Answers Warren Buffett, the second-wealthiest American: “It’s class warfare only because my class started it and is winning.” What’s required is nothing less than a new social compact between managers/owners, workers, and government.

Diplomacy in Pursuit of Security

Winston Churchill and FDR understood the value of collective security and diplomacy. Both were witness to the fierce nationalism and pride that helped ignite World War I, and they were determined toward the end of World War II to make sure allies with common interests had common institutions. So they began to put in place international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. To them, talking to your enemies was not appeasement but a rational means to avoid conflict. In Churchill’s famous aphorism, “To jaw jaw is always better than to war war.”

George W. Bush graduated from a very different school of thought. In the eyes of the world and many Americans, our leading exports during his terms seem to be war and financial calamity. Given our participation in preemptive war against a country that did not attack us and our participation in torture, it is time to return to FDR’s and Churchill’s vision. The 44th president should in effect issue a Declaration of Interdependence because so many international problems cannot be solved by nations acting alone.

Pollution, extreme weather, AIDS, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation do not respect sovereign borders. The only way to defeat these threats is for nation states to cooperate rather than hide behind Maginot lines or oceans. As the author of the State Department chapter, Gregory B. Craig, puts it, “There are other, more effective ways of exercising influence in this world than military force, such as an America more active and engaged diplomatically on every front.”

Diplomacy simply means using a mix of carrots and sticks to advance our interests, which so often now are also the interests of others. When we are seen as doing good—as Truman did with the Marshall Plan and as George W. Bush has done on HIV/AIDS in much of Africa—we recruit others to join us in common problem solving. As our foreign policy authors explain, the 44th president should withdraw responsibly from Iraq and repudiate the strategy of preemptive regime change by military action by reaffirming the United Nations Charter. He should engage in diplomatic efforts with stakeholders in Iraq and then with its neighbors: Iran, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states.

The 44th president should shut down Guantanamo, provide due process rights to remaining detainees—as the Supreme Court has insisted—and end the practice of torture by again complying with the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. And he should give a speech overseas calling for a new working conference attended by American friends and allies. The goal of the conference should be to develop together a comprehensive plan to combat and prevent terrorism throughout the world, and it should seek to coordinate the work of police and military, to conduct special operations, to share information more quickly, and to create an international legal framework that is more effective in capturing, trying, and convicting terrorists.

In tandem, he should support the creation of an International Peace Corps modeled on our domestic version, which was first proposed by Crown Prince Hamzah of Jordan five years ago; promote more trade with provisions for labor and environmental standards so we do not have a “race to the bottom” like industrial America in the 1890s; participate seriously in the Copenhagen round of talks to reduce global warming, not just issue late rhetorical appeals for reductions decades hence; join the International Criminal Court; and take the lead in pushing for the abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide by establishing the primary strategic objective of preventing any new actors—state or non-state—from seeking or acquiring nuclear weapons and reducing toward zero the risk that actors who already have nuclear arms will use them.

A Greener World

Not that long ago conservatives regularly mocked liberals as “tree huggers” and George H. W. Bush referred to Al Gore as “the ozone man.” But that was before extreme weather produced six of the hottest eight years of the past century, four of the most severe hurricanes, and the melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice, large chunks of which began breaking off into the oceans. Nearly all scientists now agree that unmitigated climate change would lead to massive casualties as oceans surged and desperate neighboring nations went to war.

Despite this niagara of evidence, the past eight years have been lost time when it comes to the problems of environmental pollution and global warming. President Bush, who did not need much hard evidence to invade Iraq, kept insisting on more data before expending any energy on energy. This oil man did richly condemn America’s “addiction to oil” in one State of the Union address—America comprising 4 percent of the world’s population yet consuming 25 percent of its oil. But Vice President Cheney mocked conservation as a “civic religion” as their administration took no active steps to prosecute major polluters, expand conservation or alternative energy, or work with other nations to create a global post-Kyoto treaty to take collective action.

Instead, at the final G8 summit of his presidency, Bush agreed to the unanimous goal “of moving to a carbon-free society” by hoping to reduce heat-trapping gases by 50 percent by the year 2050. He then literally said, “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,” as he left the stage.

The 44th president will have public support to launch an Apollo-like project to produce a green, low-carbon economy that delivers more prosperity by making our nation more energy efficient and internationally competitive. The only way for the United States to serve as a model to China and India is to build a green consciousness into every economic decision, every transportation decision, every tax decision, and every regulatory decision. It will no longer do to treat energy and environment as “an” issue in its own silo. Climate affects our economic health, physical health, and family health.

Since America has been responsible for some 30 percent of worldwide carbon emissions over the past century, we must “own” up to our responsibility and lead the world in declaring that we cannot “drill and burn” our way out of our addiction to fossil fuels. We must “invest, invent, and conserve” our way forward. As Bracken Hendricks and Van Jones write in their overview chapter on the climate crisis, “The ‘clean tech’ revolution and the transformation of our aging energy infrastructure is poised to become the next great engine for American innovation, productivity and job growth, as well as social equity gains. Building a clean energy economy can generate hundreds of billions of dollars of productive new investments on the scale of the greatest periods of past American economic expansion.”

Breaking with the recent past requires the creation of a new White House “National Energy Council” that is the equivalent of the National Security Council for climate change—run by a person with the stature of the NSC chair and with the authority to coordinate all other energy-related departments to advance the president’s message and program for a greener world. Such a program would include implementing a carbon cap-and-trade system that sells corporations permits to emit greenhouse gases and can push us from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy. A cap-and-trade program can generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues to promote alternative energy such as wind, solar, and biomass, and provide rebates to struggling Americans hit with higher energy prices.

A progressive energy agenda entails applying National Energy Efficiency Resource Standards to require utilities to cut energy use by 10 percent by 2020, including retrofits of non-weatherized housing, and implementing the Renewable Energy Policy Project’s $62 billion investment plan to expand wind capacity by 125,000 megawatts over 10 years to help stabilize U.S. carbon emissions and create nearly 400,000 domestic manufacturing jobs. Appliance efficiency standards must be mandatory and reflect the best available technology.

Similarly, we need a program to develop a new line of ultra-efficient vehicles, such as plug-in hybrids that can get 100 miles per gallon and that require new battery systems. Also, we need to enact far stricter auto fuel efficiency standards, since auto fuel efficiency standards were flat for two decades. Europe has achieved averages of 40 miles per gallon as contrasted with our 27 miles per gallon. We need complementary and mandatory policies to increase electricity generated from renewables, something dropped from the 2007 energy bill. And we must create a new “Clean Energy Corps” that would combine service, training, and employment efforts with a special emphasis on cities and neglected rural communities—the work would include retrofitting homes, small businesses, schoolhouses, and public buildings, and preserving and enlarging green public spaces.

Conclusion

Not since 1933 has there been a presidential handoff involving a bigger gap in philosophy at a more difficult time. The economy is misfiring and income insecurity plagues the poor and the middle class. With the backdrop of an intractable war in Iraq, in the most fractious region on earth, America is reviled by many around the world for appearing to emphasize the power of our arms rather the power of our ideas. Terrorism is on the rise around the globe, and climate change threatens our country and planet.

Substantively, four huge policy problems are being left on the new president’s doorstep by George W. Bush. Yet each has answers that are entirely practicable and plausible:

• Withdraw from Iraq safely, end torture, and restore our global standing to solve other transnational challenges

• Stabilize the economy and advance economic opportunity so that average income finally starts rising after a stagnant eight years

• Shift to a low-carbon economy so we enhance our national, family, and economic security

• Fix our democracy so we do not again have public opinion going in one direction but public policy in another.

The greatest obstacle, however, to the progressive reforms detailed in the pages that follow are not the problems we face but rather the collective willpower of the American people and their new government leaders to get behind the change that must occur. Discredited fringe conservatives will do everything possible to stop a program of progressive patriotism. Recall how they stopped President Clinton’s health care plan not because it could not work but precisely because, as William Kristol argued at the time, it might.

The antidote to such unpatriotic cynicism is presidential determination buttressed by grassroots activism. What’s at stake is a better America by 2016.