Think it Through

The eighth anniversary of 9/11 came and went without much thought in the news media about what we have learned from this horrible event. In this age of terror, here are my four personal lessons from 9/11, which, if learned, could help to make us a safer, stronger country.

1. Nothing is inevitable.

In focus group discussions with voters, I have observed that when a horrific tragedy like 9/11 happens, it becomes too painful for people to think that we could have prevented it from happening. That kind of collective guilt is too unbearable. This leads to people saying that if future terrorists want to attack the USA, we really cannot stop them.

Not true.

We know now that 9/11 was preventable. The FBI stifled a memo from at least one of its agents warning of such an attack. The CIA had separate intelligence of an imminent terrorist attack by air, which it brought to President Bush in August of 2001. Ron Suskind has reported that Bush dismissed it and he belittled the person who presented the memo to him at his ranch, saying, “Okay, now you have covered your ass.”

As far as we know, none of his foreign policy or security aides said, “Mr. President, maybe we should take a look at this.”

2. If attacked, do not strike back until we know why we were attacked.

Our country’s response to 9/11 was summed up by President Bush’s statement, “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Other than the obvious point that Islamic fundamentalists hate America, did anyone stop to think of what al Qaeda hoped to accomplish by the attack? Shouldn’t our response be to thwart al Qaeda’s purpose?

All organized terrorists have a purpose. When the Irish Republican Army bombed London pubs that served British soldiers in the 1970’s, they wanted to weaken England’s resolve in Northern Ireland. When Islamic fundamentalists kidnapped and killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, they were sending a message to the U.S. media that “it’s time for you to leave.” If you agree that terrorism can be defined as the intentional targeting and killing of civilians in order to make a point, then you must consider the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as two of the most horrific terrorist acts of the 20th century. Our objective was to demoralize the Japanese people so completely that they would demand their leaders end the war. All of these examples had a strategy and all of them succeeded to some extent.

After 9/11 we should have asked, “What did al Qaeda hope to gain by this? “ In November 2001, I was at a Washington party, arguing that it served no meaningful purpose for the U.S. to bomb the caves of Afghanistan as a response to 9/11. I suggested to a friend, who has been a high level member of the Washington foreign policy establishment for decades, that maybe the attack was designed to provoke the U.S. to respond with a show of force in the Middle East that causes the countries and people of that region to join al Qaeda’s hatred of us. My friend gave me a tutorial look: “Well, no,” he said, “the only thing they understand in the Middle East is muscle and might. We have to hit somebody hard to teach them a lesson.”

I asked myself, what lesson? The fundamentalists already hate us. Why not figure out what might hurt them more—like using the world-wide good will we had gained immediately after 9/11 to persuade countries in the Middle East to ostracize al Qaeda? Other than satisfying a need for revenge, what goal were we serving?

3. Don’t ignore the facts.

Before we went to war as a response to 9/11, here is what was COMMON KNOWLEDGE TO EVERYONE:

The experienced and respected United Nations arms inspector Hans Blix, whom President Bush encouraged to go to Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction, returned saying he could not find any. Even if weapons were found, Iraq had no way of launching them to hit the United States. No one disputed that Iraq did not represent a danger to the United States.

Iraq was – except for Israel – the most inhospitable nation to al Qaeda in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein’s brand of the Muslim religion tolerated out of sight nightclubs more than religious extremism. Saddam made it clear that extremist cells were mot welcome in Iraq. At the same, time American allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan harbored these terrorists.

None of these facts were hidden from the public or the Congress or the pundits who pushed for war. To counter these facts we only had the word of President Bush that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and Colin Powell showing an embarrassingly thin photo exhibit at the United Nations.

Those who excuse the public, the press, and the policy makers by saying they cannot be blamed for embracing the war in Iraq because the nation was shocked after 9/11, need to take a lesson: it is precisely in those times when we are shocked, that our leaders – and the news media – have the responsibility to make sure that they separate the facts from international relations game theory, group think, and political motivations. President Kennedy made the right decision during the Cuban missile crisis after most of his military and top foreign policy experts wanted him to invade Cuba, which might have begun nuclear Armageddon.

4. Accountability is not to make us feel good; it is necessary to make us effective.

One truism of government is that the people in it never want to hang their dirty laundry out in public. So they create doomsday scenarios if anyone finds out about their screw-ups.

President Nixon told the New York Times it was committing treason if it published the Pentagon Papers, which told Americans how their government did not follow the facts in escalating the Vietnam War. Nixon claimed executive privilege when he wanted to hide the Watergate scandal.

Now President Obama, and most of the Washington punditry, has opposed prosecuting CIA officials and those who served in the Bush White House and Justice Department.

The pundits pontificate two themes:

First, we should not look backward, we should look forward. Well, all crimes are committed in the past. Should our courts let someone off for murder because, after all, the murder happened in the past and we should all be looking forward?

Second, investigating and prosecuting bad behavior will hurt morale in the CIA and may hurt American security. This morale argument is the equivalent of saying that we should look the other way when we think the local parish priest has been molesting young boys, because if we cause a fuss, it will hurt morale in the priesthood, and fewer young men will want to join into the priesthood. We should take the bishop’s word that he will take care of things.

When Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced he would review evidence of abuses at U.S. prisons overseas, CIA director Leon Panetta sounded like Nixon as he called for an investigation into who let the story out. In other words, our leaders are less concerned about admitting and correcting their mistakes than they are about who squealed.

We should be smart enough to know that holding people in government accountable will get rid of bad people, will raise standards of performance in government, and encourage higher quality people to go into government. Ultimately, it will lead to a more ethical and professional and effective core of public servants to make us safer than we have been.

Eight years after 9/11 our nation still has not learned these lessons. How long will it take?

When President Harry Truman said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog,” he had not met any of the Blue Dog Democrats in the Senate.

Blue Dog senators Evan Bayh of Indiana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and other Democrats such as Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Patty Murray of Washington, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who face reelection next year, have a choice-do they run as Obama Democrats or Obama critics?

They may look at the latest polls and think that the road to reelection points to the critic’s role, but recent history shows that if you are a senator who criticizes a president of your own party, you are more likely to help your senate opponent than yourself.

If the Senate Democrats who must face the voters in 2010 oppose Obama on health care, continue to voice second thoughts over the stimulus bill they helped to pass, and say “no” to more programs to help people get back to work, they may help to create more doubts about Democratic leadership in general. This will damage the President and their own reelections. Ask Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Mike DeWine of Ohio who ran and lost campaigns in which they tried to separate themselves from President George Bush.

If Democratic senators run with – instead of against – Obama’s agenda, they will have a better opportunity to get their message across. If the President’s approval is declining, or the economy is faltering, Democrats could speak with one voice and admit the difficulties, look for positive developments to highlight, and make the alternative unacceptable. If the doubting Blue Dogs are looking for a winning example, they can find it in the Republican senate campaigns of 1982.

President Ronald Reagan’s troubles two years into his presidency were not unlike the problems facing president Obama. Reagan, like Obama, swept into office with a mandate to change the policies of a failed predecessor. Like Obama, Reagan had a healthy majority in the Senate with which to create the Reagan Revolution of smaller government, lower tax rates, and less regulation of business.

Reagan, like Obama, moved quickly to try to make great advances in a short period of time. He cut federal programs and taxes and installed a tight money policy, which choked investment but began to get inflation under control. The result was the 1981-82 recession that put millions more Americans out of work. Disapproval of the new president, particularly of his policies, began to rise not long after his inauguration. Reagan’s popularity surged in March after he was shot (71% approved in March 1981), then tumbled downward for over a year (60% in July 1981 and below 50% in 1982).

This compares to an 11 point dip for Obama in the last seven months, from 66% approval in January, to 57% in ABC’s August survey.

As Reagan’s popularity dipped in ‘81 and ‘82, so did his popularity in the Senate. Many of the Senators – starting with Majority Leader Howard Baker from Tennessee – were not Reagan revolutionary soldiers who believed in supply side economics. Nonetheless, Reagan used his powers of persuasion and his image of strong leadership that stood for values we all share, to convince the Senators up for reelection in 1982 to fight the Democrats on Reagan’s battlefield, not their own individual state grounds. They embraced a national campaign message around Reagan’s ideas, even if they did not entirely believe in the whole program.

I remember one day in 1982 I was with my boss, Rep. Peter Rodino, Democrat from New Jersey, at an event at the Supreme Court, and we met up with Howard Baker, who wanted to discuss the Reagan proposal of a constitutional amendment to require the federal government to always have a balanced budget. This, of course would be a disaster as a practical matter, but conservatives loved it and were pushing very hard for it, with millions of petitions flooding Capitol Hill. Baker said, “Peter, I know this is a bad deal, but it is like a big wave that I cannot stop. I am going to let it just wash over me.”

Despite their misgivings, the Senate Republicans nationalized the campaign in 1982, blaming the economic mess on President Carter and asserting that they were finally getting a handle on inflation.

On Election Day 1982, the nation suffered under 10% unemployment, yet the Senate Republicans ended the day without any net loss in the Senate – an unusual occurrence for a bi-election year. A relatively large number of non-ideological Republicans, many of whom were tagged as vulnerable, tied themselves to Reagan and won: Senators like Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, William Roth of Delaware, Richard Lugar of Indiana, David Durenberger of Minnesota, John Danforth of Missouri, and John Heinz of Pennsylvania.

So before the Democratic Senators who are up for reelection in 2010 and 2012 decide to strike out on their own and give up on President Obama’s ambitious agenda for America, remember that the presidency casts a long shadow – the Democrats in the Senate can help themselves more by helping Obama lead by than nipping at his heals and doing what the Senate does best, slow down progress.

The epilogue to the Republican story in 1982 is that the recession was harsh but short-lived, Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker successfully defeated inflation and, although the economy was not healthy by the next election, it was healthy enough to allow Hal Riney, Reagan’s talented San Francisco media guru to create ads that told us that in 1984 -”It’s morning again in America…why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?” Take a lesson, Blue Dogs and other Democrats.

The debate over comprehensive health care has made pollsters and others view health care politics in the larger context of generational change and the desire to use government to help people. A look at generational attitudes suggests America is in a transitional phase in its approach to government.

Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center, in an analysis on the Pew website, recently argued that if Medicare was proposed for the first time this year, it would probably not pass the Congress because of public opposition to such a large government program.

Kohut has a good point. Even though most historians credit President Lyndon Johnson’s strong arm tactics as the key to having passed Medicare in 1965, Kohut tells us that, at the time, national polls showed 65% of the public trusted the government in Washington to do the right thing just about always or some of the time. By 1974, he points out, “just 36% of the public trusted the government. And from that point on, pollsters have never found anything close to a majority of Americans saying they trust Washington.”

The serious public opposition to comprehensive changes in our health care system is breathing oxygen from two vents: First, many more Americans – especially older Americans – today, compared to a half century ago hold a negative view of government. Second is the realization that when older Americans fight against government getting involved in health care, it is not because they are stupid and fail to see Medicare as a government program, but rather that elderly voters actually like their government program of Medicare so much that any talk of reform makes them afraid the government will take something away from Medicare – they worry that reform usually means “I get less.”

All of this makes the expansion of Medicare a harder sell to the older generation, mostly, I believe, because of what they have lived through. If Kohut is correct and Medicare would not pass if offered in 2009, then I think it is worth asking: how did we get to this point?

When Medicare passed in 1965, the wealthy among us paid a top tax rate of 70% on their income, compared to 35% today. Many industries – banks, airlines, telephone companies, even the stock markets – were reined in by much heavier federal regulations than they are today. Still, Americans did not feel particularly oppressed. Lyndon Johnson had just won 44 states against a sincere, articulate, if overly blunt, spokesman for smaller federal government, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

When Medicare passed the nation applauded. We had not yet experienced the collection of historic and faithless acts that would come between the American public and its government in the coming years. The nation had not yet discovered that Lyndon Johnson’s government knew Vietnam was a lost cause, even as it sent 50,000 young Americans to die there, or that President Richard Nixon would run a White House dedicated to lying about nearly everything, from the bombing of Cambodia to the bugging of the Democratic headquarters to his use of the Internal Revenue Service to punish political enemies.

Then came Ronald Reagan, a brilliant communicator who devoted all his skills to communicating one central theme – the federal government is our enemy. It was a song he could sing on any occasion and it would usually allow him to carry the room. One stanza in Reagan’s anti-government songbook was the eight years he spent telling us that Social Security was going to run dry at any moment. Like lemmings, the Democratic leaders in Congress mimicked the President’s line on social security, and the result has been that a majority of Americans have serious, but unfounded, doubts about Social Security’s stability.

In sum, when you look at the behavior and rhetoric of people in the federal government over the last 45 years, you can understand why people tell pollsters they do not trust government. Also the polls tell us that the longer you live, the less trust you have.

Gary Langer, director of the ABC News poll, questions the usefulness of the “trust in government” question because it does not tell us what aspect of government people trust or distrust. Langer believes this question usually is interpreted as asking about national security – but not always. Right now, says Langer, you could even assume that the public’s level of trust in government would track approval ratings for President Obama.

If Langer is right, and I suspect he is, the poll numbers reflect what we hear on the streets and in the town hall meetings – older Americans are unhappy with President Obama, but once you get below age 65, the terrain for Obama and health care reform becomes much firmer. And when you reach into the youngest generation, you find the most support for Obama and the most comfort with the federal government.

ABC News’ August 17th poll has President Obama’s approval rating at just 47% among Americans over age 65, then it jumps to 55% among the 50-64 age group and 54% among 40-49 year olds and 58% among those between 30 and 39. Among the youngest adults, ages 18-29, the President’s approval is at 71%.

When Pew asked recently whether the government “is becoming too involved with health care,” the public, overall, registered only slight disagreement (54% disagreed; 46% agreed). We see differences by age, however, with 18-29 year olds disagreeing by 19 points (58% disagreed; 39% agreed); 30-49 year olds disagreeing by five points (51%; 46%), 50-64 year olds disagreeing by four points (49%; 45%), and older Americans, 65+, disagreeing less (40%) than agreeing (53%).

The youngest adult age cohort – the so-called Millennials, ages 18-29 – is more wary of politicians and political spin, yet very willing to get involved in causes and political movements, if not political parties. Despite the lost potential of the Clinton presidency and the combination of government deceit and failure over the last eight years, young adults have not given up on government. Instead, these young adults have taken a sophisticated approach of making things better one issue at a time. It is why they gave Barack Obama the lion’s share of their votes in 2008.

This consideration of the attitudes and values of each generation opens a window on a new America taking shape in the future. The youngest adult cohort mirrors a commitment to the causes of Teddy Kennedy, such as voting rights, health care, better education for all, gay rights, and opposition to two unnecessary wars against Iraq.

As the oldest cohort is removed from the picture, we will have a more progressive landscape to respond to and perhaps shape our political leadership. This leaves us with two conclusions:

1. Comprehensive health care, with a substantial government role, will probably become a reality sooner or later, as the majority of the nation is taken over by those less hostile to government.

2. How soon this happens is a matter of political leadership. Individual leaders can indeed shape the course of human events.

The Kennedys did. Ronald Reagan did. Not one of these leaders succeeded by tacking to the middle. They helped to create the change in attitudes among generations that we are observing today by making a strong and persuasive case for policies that are rooted in values held deeply by many of us. The health care issue is about security and fairness for our families. It should be a slam dunk for President Obama.