The Courage Primary

By JOE KLEIN

Two years ago, in his second Inaugural Address, George W. Bush called the nation to greatness with some of the most stirring rhetoric ever attempted by an American President. "Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world," he said. "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

These days Bush's inaugural oratory seems, at the very least, a tragic overreach. It was foolishly messianic. It didn't reflect the reality on the ground, or even the reality of U.S. policy, which still supports oppressive regimes around the world. It came after years of grandiloquent sloganeering: "the war on terror," "the axis of evil," wanton talk of crusades and evildoers and an ill-conceived war with Iraq. Furthermore, the President's speech was based on a simplistic vision of America's role in the world, one firmly rooted in American infallibility. And finally, there was a fundamental mismatch between the grandness of Bush's oratory and his unwillingness to summon the nation to an actual war footing, in which real sacrifice was required. "I think the American people are sacrificing now," the President said. "I think they're waiting in airport lines longer than they've ever had before."

Still, if Bush's sense of national greatness has been misguided, his impulse is perfectly American: the U.S. has always thought of itself as something special, has always sought new national challenges in order to "form a more perfect union." It is a frontier impulse firmly rooted in the American DNA, subtly essential to the nation's growth. The mere "pursuit of happiness" can never be enough; we must also go to the moon. Ten years ago, the political writer David Brooks decided that there was a need for "national greatness," for larger national goals, but as a conservative, he had trouble responding to a very basic question: What are those goals? "It almost doesn't matter what great task government sets for itself," he wrote, "as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness."

But it does matter. And a Presidential election would seem a perfect moment for laying out an ambitious new goal or two, especially at a moment when 70% of the public thinks the country is moving in the wrong direction. The problem is, politicians hate having to talk about anything remotely adventurous in the midst of an campaign. They prefer safe recitations of conventional wisdom: We need to do something about government waste... the tax code... the health-care system. If you actually make a bold promise--health care for all, for example--you will be asked for specifics. If you give specifics, as Bill Bradley did when he proposed universal care in 1999, your opponents and the press will tear your proposal to shreds. That's because there is no such thing as a perfect policy idea; even great ones, like Social Security, have obvious flaws, and it's tough to deal with complexity on the stump. There's another problem: governing is vastly different from campaigning. Any big new program has to be negotiated with the Congress. There's no guarantee a President won't change his priorities or be forced by events into a whole new way of looking at things. Bush promised a humble foreign policy, but after Sept. 11, his "war on terror" was anything but.

So why even bother to bother candidates about substance? Because it is, nominally, what elections are all about. The candidates owe us answers, whether they want to give them or not. At the very least, you can learn a lot from the character of their evasions--how their minds work, how much they know, what their basic principles are. Occasionally, they might even say something courageous. And very occasionally, there comes an election where the ability to be courageous, to tell the public things it may not want to hear, is the most important quality we need in a leader. I suspect 2008 will be that sort of election. The public has come to understand what market-tested political blather sounds like, and it may be ready to reward a politician who tells some inconvenient truths, to coin a phrase, who asks for the sort of sacrifices, in pursuit of specific goals, that President Bush refused to do. But which sacrifices, which goals?

What follows is my dream agenda, the issues I will use, as a voter and as a journalist, to judge how seriously the various presidential hopefuls should be taken in the election to come. There is only one issue area--foreign policy and national security--that I considered to be an absolute, drop-dead threshold test. The next President will have to be far more knowledgeable about the rest of the world than the current one was when he came to office. He (or she) will also have to recognize that the most important global threats we're facing--terrorism, for example--require American leadership but that they can't be solved by unilateral American action. After the past six years, that should be an easy test to pass.

My four other tests--energy independence, universal health insurance, education reform and mandatory national service--are more difficult. Solutions are possible, but they will require drastic changes in the way we go to school, get our health care, serve our country, live our lives. No politician with any sense would attempt to join all these battles, all at once, in the midst of a presidential campaign. But in 2008 a candidate who refuses to show some courage on at least one of these issues probably lacks the character to be President. I should emphasize that these are my priorities, not those of TIME magazine. You and I can argue about my choices over at TIME.com's political blog Swampland. You can find out more about the issues I did choose, and read the studies and documents that I read, over at the website as well.

Foreign Policy and National Security In March 2001, in this magazine, Charles Krauthammer baldly stated what would become the foreign policy of the brand-new Bush Administration: "America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will."

This was a profoundly radical vision, a conscious effort to use the U.S. military as the primary instrument of foreign policy, a garbled, brutish update of Theodore Roosevelt's "Big Stick" aggressiveness. But as the rationale for war in Iraq evaporated with the mirage of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the Bush spinmeisters tacked on a new rationale, with rhetoric appropriated from a competing school of foreign policy, one that Roosevelt disdained: Woodrow Wilson's democratic idealism. But utopian militarism just isn't very American, in the end. We like to think of ourselves as having to be dragged, reluctantly, into saving the world and dominating it. And Bush's Administration turned out to be inept at both the military part and the utopian part: it failed at the strategy and logistics of the Iraq war and flirted disastrously with the idea that terrorist groups like Hizballah and Hamas are simply good citizens waiting to happen.

Belatedly, the Administration has attempted to revive diplomacy in the Middle East. But diplomacy isn't a spigot you turn on and off; it is a tepid stream of meetings and consultations. It is not for those with attention-deficit disorder; it requires patient, intensive listening to oft-repeated positions and grievances, the eternal search for a comma that will appease both sides. For that reason alone, it would be wonderful to have a President with lots of stamps in his or her passport or a President who speaks a foreign language fluently or has lived overseas or has spent time in the military or in negotiations with foreign leaders. It was possible for George W. Bush to run for President in 2000 without knowing the name of the President of Pakistan; the next President will have to know the history, politics and tribal leaders of Waziristan, the Pakistani province that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are using as a safe haven.

Beyond that, there are several questions I would ask the candidates: Under which conditions do you think the unilateral use of military force is acceptable? Do you believe that U.S. special forces and covert operators should be able to pursue, kill or capture known terrorists in unconventional ways--even pursue them across borders like Pakistan's? Do you believe the Secretary of State should be more powerful than the Secretary of Defense? Would you appoint members of the other party to be part of your foreign policy team? Can you give some names of people in the other party whose foreign and national-security policies you admire?

The primacy of the Secretary of State is crucial. Since the office of Secretary of Defense was created after World War II, there have been only two who were more powerful than their counterpart at State: Robert McNamara over Dean Rusk in the 1960s and Donald Rumsfeld over Colin Powell in George W. Bush's first term. McNamara and Rumsfeld presided over the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Indeed, the primacy of Rumsfeld and his patron Dick Cheney has created a deep wound. Their constant undermining of the U.S. intelligence community, the putdowns of "old Europe," their impatience with U.N. inspectors, the assumption that might made right--and the hints of racial and religious superiority inherent in these beliefs--all sent a clear message to the rest of the world that America believed itself innately superior to friend and enemy alike, that we didn't need to listen, not even to our allies. The next President will have to find dramatic and public ways to disassociate him- or herself from the damage that has been done.

A final word on foreign policy: beware those candidates who speak glowingly, uncritically about multilateralism. Clearly, a new era of international cooperation is necessary, given the rise of viral nonstate threats like terrorism, global warming, transnational criminal gangs and corporate powers, and actual viruses like hiv. But the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their military quotas in Afghanistan raises a real question about which if any countries will be ready to stand with the U.S. when military action is necessary--a difficult problem for the next President.

There are also times when unilateral action is an absolute advantage. "One of the best decisions Bush made was to resist the calls to put all of the $2.5 billion in AIDS support into the international fund," says Richard Holbrooke. "It was important that the recipients know the medicine was coming directly from the United States. It has helped our reputation throughout Africa." The next President will have to understand that there are tremendous advantages to be gained from benign unilateralism.

Energy Independence Now that the scientific argument about global warming is over, now that defense hawks like former CIA Director James Woolsey are saying dependence on foreign oil is a major national-security concern, now that even the President has, sort of, acknowledged that our "addiction" to oil is real, the question comes: What to do?

The shocking answer is that no one--not even Al Gore--really knows. Not that there aren't solutions. It's just that most of the intellectual energy has gone into diagnoses rather than prescriptions. As a result, you will hear inspiring rhetoric from just about every candidate in the 2008 campaign about how an aggressive assault on global warming will be a test of national greatness--like going to the moon was in the 1960s. You will also hear how an energy-independence campaign will create new industries with tens of thousands of new jobs, plus boon times for farmers who produce ethanol and biodiesel from their crops--all true, by the way--and there will be plenty of talk about tax incentives to encourage people to buy hybrid cars, set up windmills and bring new technologies like coal gasification to scale. There will be plenty of talk about carrots, but very little about sticks.

That's not an excuse for Presidential candidates, however. Any politician who wants to be considered credible on this issue will have to propose some pain--and any pain is likely to fall unfairly on those parts of the country where electricity is generated by coal-fired plants or where urban sprawl dictates long commutes in automobiles. So if you propose, say, a gasoline tax, which hurts the working poor disproportionately, you probably also have to propose something to ease the pain--like spending the gas-tax money on payroll tax relief, which helps the working poor disproportionately. (Gore is the only political figure who has endorsed that sort of tax swap.) Those sorts of discussions get very complicated very quickly.

In his March congressional testimony, Gore laid out a comprehensive series of proposals to combat global warming. With the help of Robert Socolow, a Princeton professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who is a carbon-emissions expert, I've made Gore's general policy prescriptions specific:

-- A $30-per-ton tax on carbon dioxide emissions (which comes to 25 cents per gal. of gasoline and 2 cents per kW-h of electricity), with the proceeds going to payroll-tax relief.

-- Higher fuel-efficiency standards for auto manufacturers. Socolow's goal is 60 m.p.g. by 2056.

-- A $45-per-bbl. floor on petroleum, in order to ensure alternative-energy providers with a stable market.

-- A moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, at least until new carbon-scrubbing techniques are perfected.

-- A cap-and-trade system of controlling carbon emissions, in which major carbon producers--oil companies, public utilities--would have to pay for the right to pollute above a certain level. Those that reduced their pollution below their quota would be able to sell their excess capacity to companies that exceeded their quotas. The amount of pollution permitted would gradually be reduced over time.

Of this wish list, the cap-and-trade idea and the $45-per-bbl. price for oil are the most likely to succeed politically. All Democrats running for President, several Republicans and even some major industries, including Duke Energy and General Motors, favor a serious cap-and-trade program. The days of $45-per-bbl. oil are probably over, in any case. But buyer beware: the higher energy prices likely to result from these programs will be passed along to you, with alacrity, by the energy companies.

Global warming is, of course, global. But it will be difficult to persuade countries like China and India to do anything about the problem if the U.S. doesn't practice some benign unilateralism and take the first step. In 2008 no Presidential candidate should get away with stumping for "energy independence" without addressing both the carrots and, specifically, the sticks that will be needed. According to a recent Time poll, that will take some courage: only 35% of the public says it is willing to pay higher taxes to fight global warming.

Universal Health Insurance This issue has been talked to death for the past 20 years, but there is now a significant change in the political landscape that makes an imminent solution possible: not the ever rising numbers of uninsured Americans, now estimated at 47 million, but corporate America's impatience with the back-breaking financial burden of providing health insurance for its employees. Health care adds $1,500 to the price of every new American car, for instance. "I've had auto executives say to me, We're health-care companies that happen to make cars,'" says Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. As it happens, Wyden has put an elegant and entirely radical health-care plan on the table. According to an independent assessment by the Lewin Group, a nonpartisan health-care consulting firm, it would save $1.48 trillion over the next 10 years.

Wyden would eliminate the current employer-based system. Employers would "cash out" the money they currently pay for health benefits and distribute it as wages; individuals would then pay for their own health insurance--an annual premium to the Federal government, as part of their income taxes. They would choose their own private plans from a system very much like the one currently offered federal employees. But there would be two mandates: one for individuals and one for insurance companies. The individual mandate would require everyone to participate, especially those who can afford health insurance and choose not to buy it. (By most estimates, these mostly younger people represent one-third of the 47 million currently uninsured.) The destitute--those who receive Medicaid--would join the same system as everyone else; their health-care premiums would be paid by the government. The lower middle class--that is, people who make up to 400% of the federal poverty level--would have their health-insurance payments subsidized on a sliding scale according to income. The second mandate would require insurance companies to cover everyone who applies and charge them the same amount, regardless of pre-existing conditions. (This is called "community rating" in the trade.)

So where's the pain? Up the income scale. Health care would no longer be tax deductible. Those with incomes of more than 400% of poverty (about $82,000) would have to pay for their health-insurance premiums themselves. And the insurance industry will certainly yowl over what promises to be a more tightly controlled market. Of the major candidates running for President, only Mitt Romney--a Republican--has actually passed a mandatory universal system, in Massachusetts, which subsidizes health-care premiums for the working poor. So far, two leading Democrats, John Edwards and Barack Obama, have proposed universal plans--but both require employers to provide health insurance, as Hillary Clinton did when she proposed her plan in 1993. The details of any plan will be hammered out in the legislative process, but when universal health insurance comes to America, it will probably look more like the Wyden plan than those being proposed by the Democrats. According to the Time poll, 57% of the public favors a universal system of health insurance based on tax credits.

Education Presidents have very little authority over K-12 education in America. So why even talk about it in 2008? Because the public school system has reached a state of near collapse. The latest results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that only 35% of 12th-graders are "proficient" in reading, which means an eighth-grade level of competence, down from 40% in 1992. More than a quarter (27%) of high school seniors are functionally illiterate. The results are even worse in math. Simply throwing more money at the problem isn't the answer. On K-12 we are spending more than double the amount we spent 30 years ago, and the test results are about the same.

The best, if prohibitively radical, proposal to fix this is the report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, which draws from an all-star array of education experts from both parties. It would take the funding and much of the control of public schools away from local school boards, give financial and quality control to the states and force each school to become an entrepreneurial competitor for students. It would change the American public school system from one that emphasizes rote learning to a system that encourages and tests for creative and critical thinking. It would establish new incentives--lots more money and more control over teaching methods--to lure the nation's top college graduates into teaching, with bonuses for those willing to teach in the poorest neighborhoods. It would encourage a longer school day and longer school year and would fund universal preschool, and it would do all this, allegedly, for $67 billion less than we're spending on education today. In most of the country, local school boards--especially in affluent communities--would fight a state takeover of funding. Republicans are sticklers for local control. But what would be their argument against an entrepreneurial system, in which students choose among districts, and a curriculum that encourages creativity? In most big cities and their environs, the teachers' unions would rebel. "The teachers' unions want across-the-board raises," says New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, "but we have to create a system where there's a big financial incentive to teach in poorer neighborhoods like Harlem."

This is a big problem for the Democratic Party, spiritual home of the teachers' unions. But it's about time that teachers were treated like professionals rather than assembly-line workers. Professionals work a full year, and they are paid--and hired and fired--according to their skills and their willingness to do tough jobs rather than seniority. There is a simple test of credibility on education for Democrats. You must be willing to say to the unions, We're with you when it comes to building a floor--the highest possible minimum-wage standard for teachers--but we don't want you building ceilings on merit pay or walls to limit hiring, firing, where and how long teachers teach.

National Service Why this? Why not entitlement reform? Why not immigration? Yes, I admit, it's very much a personal preference--and a lonely one at that--but it goes to the heart of what makes for a healthy democracy. And I believe that the failure of my generation, the baby boomers, to sacrifice for the nation in any significant way, as our parents did, is the source of much of the sourness and corrosion that afflict our public life. In a new book, Are We Rome?, Cullen Murphy avoids the standard imperial clichs but finds some interesting parallels, especially the notion that the Roman Empire began to falter when it started hiring out major functions of the government, including military service, to private contractors. Murphy cites the use of corporations like Halliburton to provide services that the military used to perform--like preparing food (or KP duty)--as an example of paying other people to do what Americans should do for themselves. And while the all-volunteer U.S. Army is a far cry from the barbarian mercenaries that Rome eventually used to fill out its legions, there is a dangerous chasm growing between the U.S. military--a subculture with a bracing value system emphasizing service, discipline and common purpose--and the slovenly culture at large. "In my Princeton class of '56, 450 of the 750 graduates served in the military," says Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a military historian. "Elvis Presley was drafted the same year I was. In last year's Princeton class, only 9 out of 1,100 graduates served in the military."

Moskos favors a return of the military draft, and so do I, with modifications. I have no illusions about this. It's not a very popular idea, and especially not with the military brass, who love their all-volunteer army. So let me try to make it more palatable. Not every 18-year-old would be pressed into two years of military service. Other options would be available: service as homeland- and border-security guards or airport check-in inspectors. In each of these cases, two years' service as a draftee would be the first step in a career ladder if you wanted to become, say, a professional border guard. College deferments would be available, but they would come with a price: a third year of mandatory service for a bachelor's degree, a fourth year for an advanced degree. College graduates would also have the option, if they qualified and received intensive training, of working off their student loans by serving as military officers, teachers, police officers, social-service caseworkers, nurses and paramedics. But everyone would serve, and the decision to go to war, say, in Iraq would immediately become a personal one for members of the lite as well as for professional soldiers. The frustrations of teaching or fighting crime would also become better known to a broader swath of future business leaders. And a history of rigorous public service would become a necessary credential for anyone who wanted to be elected President of the U.S.

As I've thought about these issues, a pattern has emerged: they are synergistic, mutually reinforcing. They fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. National service would produce more quality teachers; the Wyden plan would transfer money into teacher salaries and away from health benefits; the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce would produce the scientists and engineers necessary to achieve energy independence. When you put the jigsaw puzzle together, the nation that emerges is more equitable, more efficient, with a reinvigorated citizenry--a safer and more powerful nation, braced by the power of moral example as well as military supremacy.

None of these goals are impossible; some may even be achievable. All that's required is some political courage, which is not a natural commodity in an election year. Indeed, there is only one sure way to inspire courage in politicians. We must demand it. If they choose to avoid these and other serious issues, we should make it clear that we are going to avoid voting for them.