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[Woodstock Report, June 1997, No. 50]
Copyright © 1997 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
In May the Woodstock Theological Center sponsored a forum entitled "Civil Discourse and American Politics: Reality and Responsibility." The panelists examined the erosion in civil conversation and discussed ways to restore trust in our public officials and institutions. The three panelists were The Honorable Elaine L. Chao, distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation; The Honorable Ray LaHood, United States Representative, 18th district, Illinois; and Thomas E. Mann, director of the governmental studies program and the W. Averell Harriman senior fellow in American governance at the Brookings Institution. Gordon Peterson, anchor for the 6 and 11 p.m. news, WUSA Channel 9, moderated the discussion. We publish here an edited and abridged version of the forum.
James L. Connor, S.J., is director of the Woodstock Theological Center.
It’s a privilege to welcome you to this forum, "Civil Discourse and American Politics: Reality and Responsibility." Civil discourse, as I’m sure we’ll all agree, is a precondition of a democratic society. Yet, over the last several years it seems that an excessive partisanship has tended to threaten our democratic way of life. In a letter to a friend in the spring of 1776, John Adams said, "We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments, God grant us the way. But I fear that in every assembly members will obtain an influence by noise rather than sense, by meanness rather than greatness, and by ignorance and not learning, by contracted hearts and not large souls. There is one thing, my dear sir, that must be attempted and most sacredly observed, or we are all undone. There must be decency and respect and veneration introduced for persons of every rank, or we are undone. In a popular government, this is our only way." 1776!
Our moderator this evening is Mr. Gordon Peterson and it is with great pleasure that I turn the program over to him.
Gordon Peterson is the anchor for the 6 and 11 p.m. news on WUSA Channel 9 and moderator for WUSA’s "Inside Washington," a public affairs talk show.
We want to talk about civility. In this evening’s program, it says: "When politicians resort to mudslinging and name-calling, Americans become cynical and distrustful of political institutions and public officials." I’m from Massachusetts, and if it weren’t for invective, I don’t think I’d be interested in politics at all! Seriously, however, I’m reminded of Tip O’Neill. When he won his first election for Congress, there was an ad that appeared in the Boston Globe. All 118 of his former opponents signed it in support of him. That speaks well for civility.
Our first panelist is The Honorable Elaine Chao.
Elaine Chao is a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the former president and chief executive officer of the United Way, and former director of the Peace Corps.
The issue that we are talking about tonight is an extraordinarily important one. There is a tremendous amount of interest and concern in the American public about the level of civility, moral decline, and the loss of values in our country today. We see it reported in the media and in polls. A new organization called the National Commission on Civic Renewal is chaired by Bill Bennett and Sam Nunn to gauge the level of incivility today. How pervasive is it; what can we do about it? Lamar Alexander is setting up the National Commission on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal which asks, "Where is our society going? Why are we so incivil toward one another? And what does this mean for democratic nations such as ours?"
If we look overseas we see other countries just entering the throes of democracy. For example, in Taiwan and Korea, you will see televised fistfights, with men literally rolling on the floor in disagreement with one another. In these societies civility is supposedly highly treasured, everyone is so polite, but there’s no adequate safety valve or established pattern for the people to express their different points of view in a civilized manner. They are experimenting with this new freedom called democracy and have to acquire the language of civil discourse.
Here at home we have heard a great deal about the increasing incivility among our political leaders. I wonder whether these charges of incivility come at a time when a conservative Congress has taken over, and really stem from the fact that a different type of philosophical thought is being espoused, and that the liberal media is really quite uncomfortable with the more conservative thoughts that are being discussed more openly. But the rise of conservative talk shows reveals a heretofore unheard-of portion of our population. If you really listen to these talk shows, you will agree that they are not uncivil. They do express a different point of view, but they are not uncivil.
Nevertheless, I do think there has been a coarsening of our daily life, and of our political life as well. It began with the political appointment process of Bob Bork. I don’t think there has ever been such a staged and organized effort to discredit a person. It continued in the Clarence Thomas case and has gone on for a number of federal judges for participating in all-white clubs. I will not defend that, but the nominations and appointments occasioned the roughness of political life.
I think political debate is much more robust these days because there is a much greater philosophical difference among the participants in this debate. It used to be that the Republicans, who were in the minority, were deemed more likable, more civil, basically because they played dead and did not really offer much of an alternative. A very different philosophical debate is occurring within our country today.
Having said that, I do think that we need to have a more civil way in which we address our differences, respect those with whom we differ, and have the courage to listen and to change if necessary.
Finally, the role of the media is very important. I’m astounded at the rise of pundits within the American political scene. I admire their quickness and eloquence— many times I wish I were like them. But their six-second messages and ten-second news coverage drives incivility within our society, because it encourages people to jump to conclusions, and to speak without thinking, and to say bombastic things in order to capture attention. Media should play a role in fostering greater civility by giving everyone—especially political leaders—the opportunity to expound, explore, and explain certain issues without having to give a six-second response on any one issue. The media will have a hard time doing this, but because the media are reflective of our society overall, it would be wonderful if they would take the lead.
Ray LaHood is the United States Representative from the 18th district of Illinois. He serves on the House Agriculture and Transportation and Infrastructure Committees. He has been a junior high school teacher and administrative assistant in the House of Representatives.
I come from a district which is right in the middle of the state of Illinois; my hometown is Peoria. My district was represented at one time by Abraham Lincoln, Everett Dirksen, Bob Michel, and a couple of other distinguished members of Congress, and I am very proud of the heritage of the district which I represent.
I will talk briefly about some of the reasons for the uncivil behavior in the House of Representatives in the last several years. Since 1990, a majority of the House of Representatives has been elected. So you have many new members. In the class that I was elected to in 1994, there were 73 new Republicans and thirteen new Democrats. Many of the 73 new Republicans ran against the institution, as did many members elected since 1990. They ran, in their districts, by trashing the institution, running on term limits, running on the idea that Congress and members of Congress are no-good you-know-whats. I also think that there were some hard feelings about the fact that the Republicans took control in 1994. When you’ve been a chairman for 20 to 25 years you can’t help but think that you were born into that position. To be thrown out can be quite disheartening.
Another factor is the way we lead our lives as members of the House of Representatives. The vast majority of the members go back to their home districts every weekend. They board a plane on Thursday afternoon, they go home to their families and their constituents, and come back on Monday or Tuesday. That does not lead you to develop close working relationships with the people you’re elected with. While you’re in Washington you’re running to your committees, which is what I did today. Then I had an office full of people all afternoon from my district who wanted to see me. I’m here this evening. I’ll go back to the House tomorrow. We had two votes today, and we’ll have a number of votes tomorrow and Thursday. When you multiply that by 435 members who are scurrying all over the Capitol, you may have a chance to say hello to colleagues, but you certainly never have an opportunity to get to know them. Most families live in the home districts; there are very few opportunities for spouses to get to know one another.
Thus, Hershey, Pennsylvania. David Skaggs, a Democrat from Boulder, Colorado, came up to me one evening on the House floor about midyear last year and said, "Things have really deteriorated." This was after the Moran-Cunningham bout on the House floor, after Sam Gibbons pulled on somebody’s tie in a Ways and Means hearing. Some of us felt that the body that we were elected to (the highest legislative office in the country!) did not have very much distinction and integrity. Skaggs and I sort of got together and asked, "How can we really begin to form some sort of bipartisan group to deal with this problem in the House of Representatives?"
During the following six months a group of us, (five Republicans and five Democrats), set about planning a bipartisan retreat. We chose Hershey, Pennsylvania, because we could get to it by train, they rolled out the red carpet, it was very secluded, and there were no media there. We had 200 Congress people (almost evenly split, 100 Democrats, 100 Republicans), 150 spouses, and 100 children.
We boarded a train at Union Station on Friday, we rode the train three-and-a-half hours, the children running up and down the aisles. They had a special car for the kids. We had the Speaker of the House and the Democratic leader, so we had our leadership people, and we had people really beginning to get to know one another. And at Hershey, we had the opportunity to hear David McCullough, who gave us a marvelous historical perspective. At workshops we talked about what causes incivility in the House of Representatives and what are the institutional things we should change. But more important than all of that, we had lots of time to socialize with one another and to begin to form friendships and relationships. Spouses got to know one another, children got to know one another as children of Congress people.
All of you have served on boards and committees. When you leave the room you are civil about the discussion which you’ve had about the issues you’ve come to consider because you know one another. In Congress that’s not so true. So, Hershey was the beginning of the development of friendships and relationships that I believe will last way beyond our Congressional careers.
Once you know somebody, it’s a lot tougher to criticize them. We are still going to have our partisan differences and spirited debate. But when the debate is over, we ought to be able to walk off the House floor, shake hands, and move on to the next issue. Our bipartisan committee continues to meet and others attend. We have formulated some ideas about things that need to change within the House. But in the end, it comes down to people really trying to work together.In conclusion I’ll say that I worked for Bob Michel, who was Republican leader for 14 years and served in Congress for 38, always in the minority. He worked with three speakers: Tip O’Neill, Jim Wright, and Tom Foley. There was never a cross word between them, and they worked very well together. A lot of credit was given to President Reagan and others for the things done during the Reagan administration. But I will tell you this: President Reagan’s programs were passed because Bob Michel was able to reach across the aisle to talk to two different Speakers, and talk to Democrats, and persuade them to vote for the program that President Reagan wanted. It was bipartisan. So it can be done.
Thomas Mann is director of the governmental studies program and the W. Averell Harriman senior fellow in American governance at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of A Question of Balance: The President, the Congress, and Foreign Policy; Media Polls in American Politics; and Congress, the Press, and the Public.
It’s possible to have a view of politics that’s brawling, sprawling, irreverent, and fun, and have a belief that our representative democratic institutions ought to operate on the basis of civil discourse.
Democracy is a means of living together despite our differences. Democratic deliberation is an alternative to physical violence. It’s predicated on the assumption that it’s possible to disagree agreeably, that it’s better to laugh than to cry, that one can vigorously contest the positions of one’s adversary without questioning his or her personal integrity or motivation, and that parties to a debate are entitled to the presumption that their views are legitimate if not correct.
Now, members of Congress have been given a special responsibility; it’s found in the Constitution and in James Madison’s reflections on that document in The Federalist Papers. He wrote that members have a special responsibility for seeking to refine and enlarge public views, not simply reflect public sentiment in their districts, much less reinforce and exacerbate existing differences. Vigorous debate is supposed to be followed by good faith efforts at negotiation and bargaining. As I learned it in Government 101, compromise is the currency of our Madisonian system of government. Congress has not always lived up to that high standard, and throughout its history, we’ve had outbreaks of incivility and even physical violence on occasion. On occasions of dramatic change in party control, rapid turnover of membership, or tumultuous conflict in society at large, Congress is going to have a difficult time. Nonetheless, it’s important to keep in mind what it is about, and what the whole process of democratic deliberation is designed for.
But does that mean civil discourse must necessarily be boring, centrist, non-partisan, reverential of authority? Certainly not. I would argue just the opposite. It’s incivility that frustrates the democratic ambition of fully airing honest differences. It’s difficult to focus public attention on choices among legitimate alternatives when rhetoric is dominated by personal demonization. Civility is no obstacle to passionate advocacy, partisanship, wit, and yes, even humor, but it requires some agreement on fundamentals, and it certainly requires mutual respect. In the words of the political philosopher Glenn Tinder, "a society in which people listen seriously to those with whom they fundamentally disagree, an attentive society, is the proper setting for freedom. An attentive society would provide room for strong convictions, but its defining characteristic would be a widespread willingness to give and receive assistance on the road to truth."
Too often in today’s politics, battles are waged as a choice between truth and falsehood, not between competing truths. Every fight is regarded as fundamental, with differences unbridgeable. When the central issues of politics involve competing understandings of morality, the ensuing culture wars involve battles between camps that neither understand nor respect each other. Elaine mentioned the battle over Bob Bork; certainly the culture wars were engaged in that battle. Now, when viewed from within each side, each of these worlds is attractive. One side upholds tradition, religion, the two-parent family, personal responsibility, and hard work; the other, tolerance, openness, diversity, freedom, and creativity. Yet the upholders of tradition are often seen by their foes as bigoted and narrow-minded, repressive and moralistic. The upholders of openness are often seen by their enemies as immoral and irresponsible, libertine and decadent. Such all-out wars over public morality easily spill over into all-out assaults on the moral characters of the individuals who play the central roles in these conflicts. It becomes harder and harder to draw the line between public and private when so much of the political debate is over the public meaning of private moral acts, and the consequences of publicly proclaimed moral codes. If the personal is political, the political becomes very personal.
Now, in contemporary politics, this has taken the form of the politics of accusation and moral annihilation. Rather than engage one’s adversaries substantively, it becomes easier to undermine him or her personally. And as an aside here, I’d say we have whole industries devoted to this business. We now think first in Congress not of engaging a political adversary in debate, but of filing an ethics charge, or of calling for an independent counsel. That’s how we fight our battles today.
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that it all emerges from Capitol Hill. Many other forces contribute to the decline of civility. The modern press magnifies conflict and controversy and finds irresistible the sensational aspects of personal attacks and failures. Much of the work of the press these days is devoted to revealing to the public the hidden nefarious agendas of politicians. Talk radio contributed to a coarsening of political discussion. What one reporter, Sidney Blumenthal, called the "permanent campaign" is a never-ending campaign to mobilize selectively what is oftentimes a cynical and disengaged public, often involving fear-mongering and an obvious distortion of the choices facing the country.
So what can be done about this? Well, the public’s done something already. The public has a way of collectively sending signals. Signals have been received on Capitol Hill. And that’s why Ray LaHood and David Skaggs went to work, why some of the revolutionary rhetoric of the class of ‘94 has been toned down, and why some of the members who have been most uncivil on the Democratic side, as well, have felt chastened by the electorate. Important initiatives have been taken in Congress, and there is promise of more to come. But I would argue that at the root is the ideological divide that polarizes America’s political class. What we need to do is figure out ways to bring the political and intellectual leaders of opposing movements together on neutral grounds to discuss points of genuine and imagined disagreement.
In democracies, any of the grand ideological debates involve a choice between competing truths rather than between truth and falsehood: the need to promote risk-taking and the need to provide security, the importance of protecting tradition and the importance of preserving tolerance, the imperative of personal responsibility and the imperative of mutual assistance. Perhaps the churches can play a constructive role in this regard, by finding ways of demonstrating that ideological foes oftentimes have important shared values and that religious belief and commitment can be the wellspring of very different and even competing public philosophies and forms of political action. We’ve seen it at times, for instance, when Bill Bennett and Henry Cisneros have been pulled together under the auspices of the Church. Maybe we ought to figure out how the churches can work better to nurture this Tocquevillian life of commitment and association, a life in which we learn to disagree more agreeably.
Peterson: Senator John McCain is no liberal, and Senator John Kerry is no conservative. When John McCain was a prisoner-of-war in Hanoi, John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, was demonstrating against the war in Vietnam in the Capitol. Yet these two men have come to terms on the issue of Vietnam. They stood in the doorway of John McCain’s cell in Hanoi, and something happened between them, as reported by James Carroll recently. And when Carroll asked John McCain if he would consider campaigning against John Kerry, who was running against Governor Weld in Massachusetts, McCain said, "How could you ask me such a thing? John Kerry is my friend." If these men can bridge this gap, why can’t Dick Gephardt and Newt Gingrich and some of the other people in Congress—Tom DeLay, David Obey?
Chao: I do think that the root of all of this is ideological differences. Congressional leaders, being leaders, are held to a higher standard. What is that standard that we seek as people, what is the tolerance level that we will expect, how do we define this higher level of accountability and responsibility? The personalization of political differences, even worse, the criminalization of political differences is unacceptable.
Peterson: Dr. Mann spoke of a cynical and disengaged public. Fewer people are watching television news, fewer people are reading newspapers, fewer people are reading news magazines. They’re sick of it!
Mann: I think that’s right, but unfortunately it creates a vicious cycle. Because people are sick of it, they turn it off. Then, politicians and political consultants and producers and editors feel obliged to get attention because their lives and livelihood depend upon it, so they resort to evermore drastic means of doing so. They sensationalize more, simplify and distort, become more negative and emphasize the controversial. This may succeed in bringing back a sliver of the audience, but the broader effect is to worsen the situation; it’s kind of a downward cycle.
The public can’t be engaged in a rich and continuing fashion by these kinds of ephemeral encounters. They need the real possibility of commitment and activity within smaller groups. The story of John McCain and John Kerry teaches an important lesson; namely, that personal experiences linking political adversaries make an enormous difference. When you can see your supposed political foe in another setting, in this case, having gone through the experience of the Vietnam War, you see him differently. There are some telling personal experiences between Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch. There are plenty of experiences in the House gym, where liberals and conservatives have joined sides in a basketball game. That connection allows them to pull back on the floor of the House, when the ideological instinct was to go for the jugular, and say, "No! He’s on my team!" So, I think that personal experience is terribly important.
LaHood: There are a number of things in the institution that we’ve talked about in our bipartisan group. I’ll give an example. We begin the day in the House by doing three things. We begin with a prayer by the Chaplain. Secondly, we say the Pledge of Allegiance. And thirdly, we spend the next hour giving "one minutes:" Republicans trashing Clinton, Democrats trashing Gingrich.
There’s a task force headed by Congressman Livingston and Ben Cardin, looking at the whole ethics process. You know all of this, because you live around here: for the last two years, we have had a member on the Democratic side who got up every day and tried to figure out how he could bring down the Speaker of the House.
You mentioned ideology as a problem for civil discourse. I will also mention personal ambition. There are 435 members in the House, and every one of them thinks they’re "class president." When you get elected in a district and come to the House, you think you’re pretty hot stuff, just by the fact that you got elected. And you come with strongly held views. So, ideology is one part of it, but personal ambition is the other part of it. Most House members think they can run for the Senate, some think they can run for President, and when you rise to a position of leadership and take over the House, as we did after 40 plus years of being out in the wilderness, that creates other problems, too. We’re trying to address them.
Peterson: I read a lot of polls about why people feel this way, what people are angry about. There’s a lot of fear out there, a lot of insecurity because of the so-called "down-sizing." There was a day in this country, when if you worked for a big company, you were pretty secure for the next 30 years. And you get a sense as you read these polls that people no longer feel cared for. No matter how hard they work, it doesn’t matter. They’re going to be discarded almost arbitrarily at some juncture.
Mann: I think that underlies many of our problems. Even in periods of economic growth, you get this sense of anxiety. So, besides economic, it’s also partly moral and social. There’s a sense of a breakdown in the order and even with the end of the Cold War, when we should be happy with "winning the war," we feel uncertain about the role the United States will play. We have lost certain categories that organized how we thought about the world. All three of these sources of anxiety—economic, moral/social, and political—lead the public to be confused and uncertain. Politicians don’t have clear, firm answers about how to solve these problems, and so may fall back on the politics of accusation which is a lot easier than offering reasonable and convincing solutions to the anxiety that the public feels.
Peterson: I visited the FDR memorial recently and read the citations. It’s clear that Roosevelt was a political leader who was able to transmit to the American people a sense of optimism, a sense of buoyancy, a sense of "we’re going to be all right." It may hurt for a while, but we’re going to be all right. "The only thing to fear is fear itself." Are the American people looking today for that kind of leadership from the Congress, asking for 400 plus FDRs to transmit this kind of optimism? I don’t know.
LaHood: I think it is much easier for the President to be popular and inspiring than for a member of the Congress. I will give Bill Clinton an awful lot of credit. He is a very good talker, and he has a very good way of inspiring people. He has inspired Americans. There’s no question about it. He would not have won re-election if he was not able to inspire people. Individual members of Congress are elected to work together collectively and that is a big challenge. Once we get in that House of 435 members, it becomes a real pressure cooker of ideology and difference. How do we meld them in order to solve the country’s problems?
Audience question: Senator Daniel Evans from the state of Washington returned to that state and gave up his seat in the Senate. He said that he thought that he had come to Washington to join in the world’s greatest deliberative body, but that in fact very little deliberation took place. In the effort of trying to clarify what we really mean by civility and why civil discourse is important, I thought Thomas Mann put his finger on it when he said, "refine and enlarge public views." One reason the public is turned off is because at the end of the debate, they do not think that they have a deeper and broader understanding of the issues than when it began. That would be true, I think, about welfare reform, about health care, about the debate on Central America. People know the standard positions, but there’s very little in Glenn Tinder’s sense, of giving and receiving the assistance of truth. Lacking that you do not have a more informed and instructed public at the end. Take that as your key, and the public will start listening again.
Peterson: Comments?
LaHood: My only comment is that the vast majority of people in my district get their news from watching the ten o’clock news, which ends up being about six or eight minutes of news. Very few read Newsweek or Time magazine; some may read a newspaper. It is very difficult for the average hard-working citizen to be informed. That’s why they elect me: to study the issues, and to cast the vote on their behalf, because they don’t have time to do it. And it’s my job to try and communicate back to them. We don’t always do it very well, but we do the best we can.
Mann: You’ve really put your finger on something. There’s a real dilemma here. Someone once said something to the effect that democracy may not be the most efficient form of government but it should be the most educational form. And we depend on that and expect it. And yet, Ray LaHood is absolutely right. Americans value their freedom to invest less in public affairs than they might be required to in a more status-oriented society. And they have this desire not to politicize their whole existence, not to spend every family meal debating the issue of the day. But we need some people, we need a lot of people, who do. We need some activists to take seriously the challenge Tinder offers. And finally we need other Americans to invest just enough that they can hold the rest of us accountable for our actions.
Audience question: Congressman LaHood, when I hear you speak of personal ambition on the part of many members of Congress, which is understandable, and of the need for good personal relationships, it seems to me there’s a missing link. I work in mediation. When you get through all the emotional "electricity," you finally get down to issues, actual information, knowledge, exchange of knowledge with people. The committee and subcommittee system, the lobby system, all that business, is there to provide Congresspeople with information on which to make intelligent, informed judgements to the best of their ability. So my question is this: how do you evaluate the role of a member of Congress, in terms of personal ambition vis-a-vis the acquisition of knowledge and the use of that knowledge in trying to serve the public good?
LaHood: In this job, you can’t be expert in everything. You have to listen to other people, and use the expertise of lobbyists sometimes, of people in the administration sometimes, of your own reading, listening to the debate, from somebody who is an expert who is elected to the same job that you are. So it is a wide range of things, but I do think that most members are motivated to really find out what the facts are before they have to vote or make a decision about some important issue.
Mann: I don’t think personal ambition is incompatible with expertise or a quest for substantive knowledge. There are members with no ambition and little expertise—they’re just putting in their time, present company excluded—there are members with personal ambition and lots of interest in getting inside an issue and dealing with it. Remember, James Madison said it’s foolish to deny ambition, that the whole point of our American government and our constitutional system is to channel that ambition to serve the broader public purpose. What we need to ensure is that within Congress, there are structures and processes ensuring that ambition is channeled in a way to gather expertise and apply it to important issues.
Audience question: I just wanted to say one thing: the two former Senators from Maine, Mitchell and Cohen, were on opposite sides, one a Democrat and one a Republican, and yet they got along very well. Once a month, they held a talk show, and anyone in the state of Maine could call in, and they both would answer questions and explain their point of view. Maybe it’s a little simplistic, but I think they had the right idea. I think it could be carried out elsewhere.
Peterson: There was a wonderful series of debates between Bill Weld and John Kerry this last Saturday, and it went on and on and on, and they were all televised.
Chao: I have a couple of comments: one, I think George Mitchell and Bill Cohen probably got along for two reasons, two immediate reasons. One is that Bill Cohen is not that different philosophically from George Mitchell, so there is common ground between the two of them. And also, Bill Cohen and George Mitchell were representing the people of Maine with quite similar interests, so I think that has bound them as well. But the tougher question is: how do you get two Senators from two varying backgrounds, very different experiences, to work together in this body?
LaHood: We have 20 representatives (10 Democrats and 10 Republicans) in Illinois, which is a very diverse state. We get together once a month as a delegation with our two Senators, and we talk about things that affect Illinois, and how we can work together, how we can solve problems for Illinois. It’s a very congenial meeting, a very civil meeting, and I believe the people of Illinois would be very proud of the fact that all of us get together on a regular basis and talk about solving problems for Illinois.
Audience question: My question is about campaign finance reform. It all comes down to money. Would somebody comment on the money part?
Chao: For full disclosure, I should let everyone know I’m married to Mitch McConnell, U.S. Senator from Kentucky, who is a proponent of current campaign practices. It’s hard to be against anything that’s called a campaign finance reform, but the Supreme Court has clearly ruled that campaign spending is part of free speech. And if we think about the lack of awareness Americans have on so many issues, how can we decry the cost of educating the American public? The way in which we educate the American public is to have separate channels, to advertise, and to get across one’s own point of view. If we don’t allow campaign spending, we basically give a monopoly of information channeling to the media. I don’t think that would be very healthy given the traditional bias of the media.
LaHood: The political reality is that there is not going to be campaign reform. It’s not going to happen as much as it’s protested by most politicians. Maybe that should be the topic of another seminar.
Mann: This is one of those areas in which profound philosophical and partisan differences complicate the task of enacting new law. It’s a reality. There are genuine differences. We have been trying to "solve the problem" of money and politics in this country for over two hundred years. It invariably results from the juxtaposition of political equality and economic inequality. It is inevitable. We manage it more or less well. Right now, we’re managing it much less well than we should, and we need to enact some new laws to help us, but this will not be a panacea. You could remove every private dollar from our elections, and we would still face the problems we’ve been discussing here today.
Peterson: I’m sorry, we don’t have any more time. On the issue of the media, you’ll notice I haven’t disagreed with anything. On the issue of the media’s coming to grips with serious issues of the day, I’m reminded of my first job application. In my long talk with the editor, he asked, "Why do you want to do this, kid?" "Because I want to show how decent the American people are," I said, "I want to show them both sides of the coin; I want to give the people a sense of the ultimate goodness of their community." He answered, "That’s all right, kid, but remember one thing: serenity’s not news."