By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Nov 20, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
What the band U2 means to you at 50.
A portrait of human philosophical maturation and wisdom.
In my late 20s and early 30s, I listened over and over to “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” I wasn’t sure what the song was about. It had a great sound and the lyrics sounded very deep.
So I listened to the song frequently because it made me feel smart and depressed about the right philosophical questions in life. (Always better than being depressed about the wrong philosophical questions in life).
At 50, it’s still a great song. And I enjoy listening to it.
But I have an entirely different perspective on it when I just heard it again tonight for the fist time in a while.
I thought to myself, “I found what I was looking for but can’t remember why I started looking for it in the first place and now don’t know what to do with it now that I’ve found it.”
Followed by, “Dang it! Where did I put it? Now I can’t find it again. Oh well. Who cares. Maybe a bird will eat it.”
There are no ties weaker than the ones that bind politicians. So, no major surprise that surrogates who were just trumpeting Mitt Romney’s election as essential to the country’s future and celebrating his record as ideally suited to cracking open the partisan gridlock are doing their share of distancing from the defeated candidate. They have a lot to distance from: ranging from internal polling that was so off base it wasted the ticket’s precious time with last-minute campaigning in states they did not come close to winning, to Romney’s characterization of the Democratic base as tools whose affection was bought off by “gifts”.
But a cautionary note: Romney’s frustrations are the musing of a candidate legitimately perplexed by the Democrats’ ability to hold together a base that should have been frayed by the economic deterioration of the last four years. And if Republicans are being brutal but right about the politics of dismissing Romney, they are wrong if they ignore the question he was stabbing at: exactly how does a political majority keep intact when so many of its underlying policies aren’t exactly working in the interests of the coalition inside that majority? And if a flailing economy was not enough to weaken that base, what does that mean for the future given the unmistakable shifts in the national demographic?
Case in point: the African American solidarity behind Barack Obama in the face of severe black unemployment and poverty, and at the same time that Obama has aligned himself with a gay rights movement that is disdained by a consistent 30 to 40 percent of the black voter community. Another example is the 70 plus percent support Obama amassed from a Latino community that barely yielded him 50 percent approval ratings for much of 2011 and that was openly critical of his failure to push, much less pull off, comprehensive immigration reform. And for good measure throw in Obama’s sixty percent with voters 18-29 and more improbably, his ability to sustain their participation at 2008 levels despite months of polling evidence that the poor job market for young adults would diminish their enthusiasm.
Arguably, (and amusingly given the backlash from inside the party) Romney’s observations were only a clumsily put version of what numerous Republican commentators have said in a more sanitized way—that Democrats have nursed an entitlement culture that promises an engaged, assertive government to a variety of groups who are facing the imperfections of the free market. (Conservatives who argue that a softening of the GOP’s hard-line on immigration will be outweighed by Democratic pledges of more government benefits for Hispanics are channeling Romney). There is something to this assessment in its most reductionist form: between a health care law that has, for all its other imperfections, insured more young adults and low income minorities, to an executive order that eases off on the deportation of young undocumented immigrants, to a student loan reform that has cut the borrowing obligations of recent college undergraduates, the Obama administration has built a portfolio that delivered results for elements of its base that might have drifted.
Dismissing that record as a bounty of gifts was both impolitic and naive. There is nothing untoward or unpredictable in electoral groups siding with a party that has pursued initiatives friendly to their interests. But even the glossier version of Romney’ remarks, the pundit classes’ abstracting of initiatives that are base-friendly as an entitlement culture, is off-key because it underestimates exactly what else Democrats have managed to do. The more accurate assessment is that Democrats have stitched together a coalition that is linked less by dependency on government than by a shared perception of Republican and conservative insularity.
Republicans who marvel at the loyalty of the 08 Obama coalition fail to appreciate that the coalition was and remains socially aspirational rather than economic. Its foundation is a yearning for a culture that is stripped of its ethnic and social boundaries and hierarchies, an embrace of diversity as a strength rather than a source of disarray, and a suspicion that conservative individualism is both un-cool and at odds with the wired, interconnected reality of the 21st century. It should have been no surprise that the black/Latino/youth base responded so powerfully to Democratic insinuations that Obama’s defeat would mean a retreat from a modernist notion of American identity, and that consolidating that identity proved more compelling than jobless numbers (especially when Obama’s argument that Republican intransigence was more at fault than his own policies took hold).
To be sure, the Obama campaign did not trust its appeal entirely to inspiration. There was a healthy dose of fear-mongering: witness the demonization of voter ID laws, which Democratic operatives relentlessly painted as a scheme to suppress minority and youth turnout, as well as the allegations from Obama allies that ordinary Republican partisanship was deep seated revanchism and white backlash.
That Republicans minimized this demonization while it was in progress meant that it was rarely answered. GOP strategists comforted themselves with assumptions that liberals were practicing an identity politics that would backfire, or that cold economic realities would thwart the Democrats’ tactics, or at least constrain their turnout. Instead, the best evidence is that Democrats pulled off the feat of turning Republican orthodoxy into a cultural identity in its own right, one that was white, traditional and unattractively reactionary. The result was a galvanized Obama base that shattered Republican voter models.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: The Real Reason Democrats Held Their Base
By Zack Adams, RP Staff, on Mon Nov 19, 2012 at 3:00 PM ET
The Politics of Pigskin
With a healthy Ben Roethlisberger it might have been a different outcome, but on Sunday night the Ravens beat the Steelers in one of the NFL’s premiere rivalries. [ESPN]
Lots of QB accomplishments on Sunday – RG III managed to pick up an impressive perfect QB rating (158.3) on Sunday. [Sports Grid]
“Matt Ryan: 0 TD, 5 INT. He’s the 1st QB with 0 TD, 5 INT in a win since Bart Starr, 1967 Packers!” [Twitter]
On Sunday, Matt Shaub tied Warren Moon for the 2nd most passing yards in a game all time with 527. [Pro Football Reference]
Here is a wrap-up of Sunday’s action by the always great Peter King. Don’t miss his response to Chris Kluwe in “Things I Think.” [SI]
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Nov 19, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Genealogy and cultural symbolism.
I have never been very good at quickly following family relationships on large family trees. I get parents and children and even grandparents and first cousins. But after that, it starts to get confusing. …
Which got me wondering about metaphorical family trees.
I’ve been reading a lot recently about the show Modern Family is emblematic of America—and the American family—today. I love the show and don’t argue much with the contention.
Likewise, when I was a boy I liked The Waltons. They were described back then as emblematic of America –and the American family.
But that was 40 years ago. Which leads to my next question:
Is Cam John Boy’s son or nephew? And which one of the Waltons gets blamed for Phil Dunphy?
By Jonathan Miller, on Mon Nov 19, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET
My good friend, Thomas Perez — formerly the Montgomery County (MD) Council President, and currently the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice — has a great idea on how to help solve the continuing problem of our ineffective national voter registration system.
Writes Pete Yost of the Associated Press:
One of the top enforcers of the nation’s civil rights laws said Friday government should be responsible for automatically registering citizens to vote by using existing databases to compile lists of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction.
The proposal by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, follows an election with breakdowns that forced voters in many states to wait in line for hours.
In remarks at George Washington University law school, Perez said census data shows that of 75 million adult citizens who failed to vote in the 2008 presidential election, 60 million were not registered and therefore ineligible to cast a ballot.
Perez says one of the biggest barriers to voting in this country is an antiquated registration system.
President Barack Obama has said the problem must be dealt with and “we in the Justice Department … have already begun discussing ways to address long lines and other election administration problems, whether through proposed legislation, executive action and other policy measures,” Perez said in prepared remarks. He welcomed his audience to contribute suggestions.
“For too many people in our democracy, the act of voting has become an endurance contest,” said Perez. “I used to run marathons; you should not feel like you have endured a marathon when you vote.”
Perez said the current registration system is needlessly complex and forces state and local officials to manually process a crush of new registrations, most handwritten, every election season. This leaves “the system riddled with errors, too often, creating chaos at the polls,” Perez said. “That’s exactly what we saw at a number of polling places on Election Day last week.”
“Fortunately, modern technology provides a straightforward fix for these problems – if we have the political will to bring our election systems into the 21st century,” Perez said. “It should be the government’s responsibility to automatically register citizens to vote, by compiling – from databases that already exist – a list of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction. Of course, these lists would be used solely to administer elections – and would protect essential privacy rights.” He did not say which level of government should be responsible for implementing such changes.
Perez said the nation also must address the problem that 1 in 9 Americans moves every year, but voter registration often does not move with people who move.
Election officials should work together to establish a program of “permanent, portable registration so that voters who move can vote at their new polling place on Election Day,” Perez said. In the meantime, he said states should implement fail-safe procedures to correct voter-roll errors and omissions by allowing every voter to cast a regular, nonprovisional ballot on Election Day.
Perez supported allowing voters to register and cast their ballots on the same day. He called same-day registration “a reform we should be considering seriously” because it would promote voter participation.
He said that in the 2008 presidential election, five of the six states with the highest turnout in the country were states with same-day registration. Preliminary turnout estimates for the 2012 election, he said, show that this pattern will likely continue.
Is it worth daring to be great? No buzzwords, no ambiguity, just a simple question that couldn’t matter more. Business model innovation starts by realizing you are contributing to a movement that is bigger than you. It’s global, self-organizing, and transformative. Lead by letting go. The first and most important step in the business model innovation process requires a change in perspective for both you and your organization. Looking through the lens of your current business model will most likely result in incremental changes at best. Business model innovation requires a different perspective. It requires a different set of lenses to examine new opportunities. It starts by realizing transformational opportunities are bigger than you and your organization. Business model innovation must be treated like an epoch journey with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a young child exploring new territory for the first time.
Saul Kaplan
Business model innovation must be a strategic objective or it won’t happen. One of my biggest pet peeves is setting strategy one tactic at a time. It drives me crazy to be surrounded by people and organizations that think if they just work hard enough and do more things that a strategic direction and destination will emerge. It seems that most of the world works this way. It is terribly inefficient. How many people and organizations do you know that pedal the bicycle like crazy but never seem to arrive anywhere. They just keep pedaling harder hoping that something will eventually stick. It is exhausting watching them. Why not establish business model innovation as a strategic objective, a specific destination, and work hard on those things that help you get there. It seems so simple. Setting a strategic direction provides a way to know which tactics are aligned and contribute to reaching the destination. The destination may change along the way requiring different tactics, and that is OK, but not having a destination at all is a ticket to nowhere.
When John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon” in 1961, Americans rallied around the destination. We believed it was possible and the goal of setting foot on the moon rallied a country to advance its global science and technology leadership. It was cool to study math and science and clear that innovation was the economic engine that would drive American prosperity. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon eight years later and said, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”, we celebrated his achievement as if it was our own and knew at that moment that anything was possible. We have been trying to get that feeling back ever since. Today, we have no clear destination, in space or on earth.
Read the rest of… Saul Kaplan: The Hardest Question Any Leader Can Ask
With his victory over longtime Rep. Dan Lungren now official, Ami Bera is heading to Washington as the newly-elected congressman for the 7th District of California. While Bera’s triumph is a testimony to his political skills and personal appeal, his victory also demonstrates the public’s hunger for a new breed of political leadership, based around problem-solving and underscored by Bera’s championing of the No Labels-endorsed “No Budget, No Pay Act.”
This common sense legislation says that if Congress doesn’t do their job and pass a responsible budget, they don’t get paid. As Bera said on the campaign trail, “Most Americans work hard and play by the rules. We pay the bills, we make tough choices, and we hold up our end of the deal. It may be hard sometimes, but it’s what we always do. It’s time for Congress to play by the same rules as everyone else. We need leaders who will put the people first to break through the gridlock and move forward.”
According to Mark McKinnon, No Labels Co-Founder “Ami Bera’s victory in the congressional race in CA-7 is also a victory for problem-solving leadership in Washington. As indicated by his embrace of ‘No Budget, No Pay,” Bera is the type of leader Americans need and want in Washington. No Labels is proud to congratulate Ami Bera on his victory and to stand behind him and other Members of both parties dedicated to problem solving not point scoring.”
As the Fresno Beenoted, Bera made “No Budget, No Pay” a “central theme of his campaign.” In the campaign’s home stretch, Bera’s campaign released an ad titled, “No Pay,” which highlighted the absurdity of Members of Congress getting paid despite their failure to pass a budget each year. In an Elk Grove Citizen op-ed published in early October, Bera touted his endorsement of “No Budget, No Pay,” saying: “Congress must be held accountable for doing the jobs the people elect them to do. That’s why I pledge to sponsor ‘No Budget, No Pay,’ which would ensure that if members of Congress don’t do their job and pass a responsible budget, they don’t get paid. And that’s why I will work relentlessly with anyone, regardless of party, who is serious about creating jobs and rebuilding an economy that works for the middle class.”
In contrast to Bera, Rep. Lungren denied the legislation even a hearing in the relevant committee he chairs in Congress. As the Fresno Bee reported in a fact check of relevant campaign issues, “A congressional committee chaired by Lungren has not granted requests from other members to hold a hearing on the legislation, which calls for withholding pay for members of Congress if a federal budget resolution is not approved by the deadline. Bera has made his pledge to support the legislation a central theme of his campaign”
Said McKinnon, “Democracy works, after all. Ami Bera clearly understood the power of the public’s desire for action on common-sense measures like ‘No Budget, No Pay’ and recognized that embrace of the issue would also touch upon voters’ desire for something other than the status quo in Washington. Voters in CA-7 and across the nation want their elected representatives to stop fighting and start fixing.”
In addition to “No Budget, No Pay,” No Labels supports a range of common-sense proposals designed to reinvigorate problem-solving in Washington. On January 14, 2013 at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, New York, NY, No Labels will host a meeting titled, “Meeting to Make America Work,” to discuss how we can move forward on problem solving in Washington. At the meeting, No Labels will unveil two national leaders – one Republican, one Democrat – who will help guide the movement in 2013 and the organization will introduce a group of congressional Members who have signed on as members of the “Problem Solvers Bloc” in Congress. Learn more about No Labels and the meeting at http://meetforamerica.com/.
In my late 20s and early 30s, I listened over and over to “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” I wasn’t sure what the song was about. It had a great sound and the lyrics sounded very deep.
