Common Ground, How to Stop the Partisan War That Is Destroying America

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I was attracted to this book because I liked the concept of staunch Conservative Cal Thomas coauthoring a book with staunch Liberal Bob Beckel. However, the book misses the mark. There book predicts a less partisan election campaign in 2008 because Barrack Obama was a likely Democratic candidate, and he was viewed by the authors as a moderate. One passage is that “Senator Barrack Obama has already embraced the call for common ground (and an end to polarization) in his campaign for president…”.

I found it difficult to believe that two such astute political observers could misinterpret by such a wide margin. Mr. Obama was the most liberal Senator when he began his campaign. He followed the standard game plan of campaigning to gain votes from the hard left liberals in the primaries and then portrayed himself as moving to the middle in the Presidential campaign. I believe it is safe to say President Obama has not been the moderate unifier predicted by the authors

I believe the book has value for the analysis of recent political history that has led to radical polarization of the two political parties. The far right and left have both been encouraged by the news media’s thirst for stories of conflict. The book criticizes recent leaders of both parties for contributing to the polarization.

It is also pointed out that JFK was given a free ride on his sexual escapades while other politicians have been forced out for less. There is no holding back on what the book calls “bottom feeders,” and Ann Coulter and Michael Moore are named in that category. They are described as “…polarizers who make money by keeping politics inflamed …” MoveOn.org and Focus on the Family are named as organizations that thrive on polarization. “Polarizers could care less about unity. Indeed, finding common ground and consensus is their worst nightmare, especially for the bottom feeders.”

The authors lay a large portion of blame for the evolution of polarization on voters. Middle American stays home for the primaries while political activists select the candidates for the general election. Politicians are clever enough to try to appeal to their base to gain the nomination. It also doesn’t help that moderate voters are showing up in declining numbers in general elections. For some reason not well explained, the authors predict that polarization is coming to an end. That prediction is, for the present, widely off the mark.

The quotes that lead off the individual chapters are the part of the book I enjoyed the most, and the quote leading off Chapter 3 about the impact of voters is a good example. “Bad officials are elected by good citizens, who do not vote.”

Mr. Beckel and Mr. Thomas give arguments for their Liberal/Conservative positions in the preface to the book. One would think that my Libertarian leanings would make me more sympathetic to the Conservative argument. Not so. I agreed with many of Mr. Thomas’s statements, but give Mr. Beckel credit for what I thought was a better presentation.

One of my favorite descriptions of how partisan polarization is destructive is the McCain/Kennedy immigration bill that attempted to “thread the needle” and begin to solve a very difficult problem. The bill was gathering strong support from both parties, and the Bush White House announced support, “…but Harry Reid was not about to let it pass.” Reid could not allow Bush to get credit for a legislative victory. He used a parliamentary maneuver to delay the bill and talk radio eventually destroyed any hope of the legislation being passed.

The book declares that the designation of Red and Blue states is a myth, because Middle America is in basic agreement on most issues regardless of the section of the country. “To characterize an entire state as Republican or Democrat base on the popular vote to one candidate is absurd.” Ohio was given a red state designation because 50.5 percent voted for George Bush over John Kerry. The red state label has stuck despite the fact Ohio has several Democrats in their congressional delegation. In the quest to “color” states, Ohio should be called a blue state.

The book does give at least a partial answer to the puzzling question as to why blacks are dominantly Democrats despite years of “Jim Crow” laws advocated by that party in the past. “The dramatic shift occurred in 1960 when an overwhelming number of black voters—many loyal to the Republicans since Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation a century earlier—moved their allegiance to the Democrats…President Lyndon Johnson sealed that allegiance by signing the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and the 1965 Civil Rights Act.” (Legislation opposed by many Southern Democrats.)

Another interesting cultural observation is that blue-collar workers who voted dominantly Democrat saw their sons go to Vietnam while sons of white-collar workers went to college under draft deferments. Growing opposition to that war has led to the Democrats being the party considered to be soft on commitment to national defense.

President Carter advocated reorganizing and streamlining the government, but the large Democratic margins in the House and Senate resisted along with increased lobbying by Liberal special interest groups. All Carter accomplished was flooding Washington D.C. with lobbyists, and the flood hasn’t diminished. Challenges to Carter and then to Ford by their own parties resulted in the political extremists becoming more dominant and moderates becoming more irrelevant. Winston Churchill said, “Some men change their parties for the sake of principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.” An unknown author offered the opinion, “Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics and your opponents will do it for you.”

There is an interesting reminder of the Clinton’s taking up health care as their first priority. The famous “Harry and Louise” commercials showing a couple talking about how the proposed bill would hurt them was instrumental in killing it.

The book was worth reading to find the passage about George McGovern opening an inn after he lost the 1980 election. He said in a Wall Street Journal interview, “…if he had known how difficult it was to run a business, he might have voted differently while in Congress.”

However, the book reminds me in the closing pages how wrong the authors viewed Obama. “Senator Barrack Obama’s message in his presidential campaign is closer, so far, to a common ground message than that of any other candidate in either party.” Cal Thomas does give a warning. “I like Obama’s language, but I want to make sure it isn’t a cover for liberal policies…”

Coal Mining Heritage and Rocky Flats

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The United Mine Workers Union was at the center of violent conflict with coal mining companies described in the book “Killing for Coal” by Thomas G. Andrews.  District 50 of that union was certified to be the sole bargaining agent for over 1700 workers at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado in 1964. The union merged with the United Steelworkers in 1972, and that organization represented the workers until the site was closed.

Many of the “bargaining unit” (union) people I worked with at Rocky Flats were in the area because grandparents or other relatives had immigrated to Colorado for jobs working in the coal mines in and around Lafayette and other nearby towns. “The Coal Mining Heritage of Lafayette,” says that that Lafayette was a “major coal town from the late 1880s to until the 1930s.” My coworkers in the Rocky Flats production areas occasionally told stories about how easy we had it and how safe our jobs were compared to what their Grandfathers and other older relatives described about working in the mines.

There was a strike that began a few months after I began working at the plant, and it did not go well for the union. Dow Chemical was managing the site for the Atomic Energy Commission, and they assigned salaried workers to perform the functions required to meet schedules. They also announced that the union had voided the contract, and any worker who crossed the picket lines would be given seniority. As I wrote in “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats,” the union released reports to the news media that stating that salaried workers were ignoring safety rules and charged that Dow was “…letting radioactive pollution into our state.” The strike was eventually settled, but, in my opinion, conflict among the workers was much more frequent and the reputation of the plant was damaged.

News reports about the dangerous working conditions at Rocky Flats began to be published or aired with increasing frequency, and union officials soon learned the issue of safety gave them tremendous leverage. I always found that to be quite puzzling, since I had been impressed about the continual focus on safety of operations since my first days in the research and production areas after receiving my clearance. I didn’t notice that the new focus resulted in improvements in safety, but there were obvious changes in union-company relations. No manager dared rule that a complaint was baseless without the risk of seeing a headline, “Rocky Flats Management Ignores Safety.”

Of course people performing operations should always be listened to carefully when they suggest safety or efficiency or both can be improved. However, forgive me if I was sometimes skeptical that the purpose of the concern was always improvement. I was in the position of building superintendent when a safety concern shut down the movement of material from one floor to another on an elevator. The concern was that the elevator didn’t have an emergency light. I thought that was a good suggestion, and had a flashlight hung on the wall of the elevator. Another safety concern was filed that it might be difficult to find the flashlight if the lights went out. I had more flashlights placed in the elevator and the material was moved about a week after the project had been suspended while the issue was resolved.

I often thought of the contrast between what I and my coworkers were experiencing working in clean, cool rooms with gloveboxes protecting us from the hazardous materials, including plutonium, and the men of the coal mines breathing toxic dust and chemicals while fearing the next collapse of a wall that would crush them. Many of the miners who survived explosions had “coal tattoos” created by the blast force that drove small particles of coal into their skins. I can only guess what the older relatives who worked the Lafayette coal mines would have thought if they could have seen the contrast. I believe they would have been proud of the many union people I worked with who had a strong work ethic and who often made suggestions that made out work safer and more efficient.

 

Drop in the Bucket

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I had always accepted that this idiom is used when referring to something that is too small to make a difference. I was surprised when I looked up the origin. The Phrase Finder writes that it was used in the Bible, Isaiah 40:15, “Behold the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance…” “A “drop in the bucket’ is the predecessor of “drop in the ocean,” which was first published in The Edinburgh Weekly Journal in July 1802.

Coming Apart, The State of White America 1960-2010

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Charles Murray has written this book to describe the formation of American classes that represent a remarkable societal change during the last fifty years. I found the book to be difficult to read despite the fact that I was interested in the overall subject. I sometimes wished for more analysis and less raw data.

The author writes that November 22, 1963 “…became the symbolic first day of what would be known as the Sixties and the cultural transformation…” That was the day after the ashen-faced Walter Cronkite announced that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

The discussion of the early sixties is very interesting. There were limited choices in television stations, and you either saw a movie in the theatre or never saw it (absent DVDs and TiVo). People drove cars made in America, and there were few places where you could go out to a meal with ethnic food. Movies and television were carefully watched to eliminate any hints of racy themes or profanity. Marriage was nearly universal, and divorces were rare. A federal court had declared that the book Fanny Hill couldn’t be sent through the mail despite the fact it was well-written. The court wrote that “…filth, even if wrapped in the finest packaging, is still filth.” The North and South were both segregated, although laws allowing segregation in the North were gone. Most women were expected to stay in the home, and those who wanted to work did so as secretaries or teachers. There were few illegal drugs. Twenty percent of the country fell below the poverty line, but, the statistic I found most startling, was that 95 percent of Americans called themselves working or middle class. That means that most poor people did not believe they were “lower class.”

The author writes “This book is about an evolution in American society that has taken place since November 21, 1963, leading to the formation of classes that are different in kind and in their degree of separation from anything that the nation has ever know. I will argue that the divergence into these separate classes, if it continues, will end what has made America America.”  He often refers to the “American Project” in which he describes that people left free to live their lives as they see fit was the basis for what made the nation such a powerful force in the world. He fears that “…America is coming apart at the seams—not seams of race and ethnicity, but of class”

Part 1 is titled “The Formation of a New Upper Class.” He defines the “Narrow Elite” as those who wield political and economic power. They are the owners and top executives of companies, news media, lawyers and physicians, college executives, and city officials. The children in the families of the new upper class have so many activities outside of school that they don’t have time to be children. The new upper class has become separated from the rest of society, and has become dominantly liberal. The people from the upper class neighborhoods of the four largest cities voted 64% strict liberal and 3% leaning liberal 2002 to 2008.

The new upper class is almost exclusively college educated. The lower end of wages for the top percent of taxpayers was in the $200,000 into the early 1990s, but that number had escalated to $441,000 by 2010. The people of this class are effectively segregated from the rest of the country. They tend to be isolated into what the author describes as “Super Zips,” or zip codes where the very wealthy are congregated. Some of these people have been called overeducated elitist snobs, or OES. They make decisions affecting the lives of everyone else, but increasingly don’t know much about how everybody else lives.

Blacks and Latinos constitute only 3 percent of the Super Zip population, but there is a higher percentage of Asians than what would be expected for their share of the population. On the issue of race, the author predicts that whites will be the minority by midcentury or sooner.

The book analyzes neighborhoods called Belmont (upper class) and Fishtown (working class) to discuss what has happened to marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. Most people of Belmont (just about 90%) are married, the family is intact, the unemployment rate is low, and few have become criminals. In Fishtown the marriage rate has dropped to below 60%, over 20% of the children live in a single parent home, unemployment is more than the national average, and criminal convictions have increased markedly. The only graph that looks similar for the two towns is the one that shows how many “nonbelievers” there are (about 20% in both towns). Self-reported happiness has declined to about 40% in Belmont and a disturbing 20% in Fishtown.

Despite the fact that the subtitle of the book is “The State of White America 1960-2010,” the author reveals that “Expanding the data to all Americans makes hardly any difference at all.” “Coming Apart” may have told the story of white America, but its message is about all of America. It is predicted that we are on the path to no longer being a “super power,”, and unless things change everything that has made the country exceptional will disappear. This is happening because we are handing over the meeting of human needs “…to bureaucracies—the bluntest, clumsiest of all tools for giving people the kind of help they need.”  We seem to want to mimic Europe where “The purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible.” He observes that the more we pass laws and regulations, the closer we move to the European welfare state, and the American Project will be dead.

One of the harshest statements the author makes is how the members of the new upper class won’t use derogatory labels for anyone, including criminals. “When you get down to it, it is not acceptable in the new upper class to use derogatory labels for anyone, with three exceptions: people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites.”

The book does leave hope that a new awakening will overtake the country. This could be based on the “…most lovable of exceptional American qualities: our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class even if we aren’t, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.” That will require that the American new upper class “…must once again fall in love with what makes America different.”

Another False Alarm about Rocky Flats

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There was an opinion article in the New York Times about the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant that was intended to create an emotional response, or at least it created an emotional response from me. The first sentence reports that the author grew up “…in the shadow of a nuclear bomb factory, so I read the just-released report on the Fukushima meltdown in Japan with special interest.” You have to read several paragraphs before you find why the author had a special interest in the Japanese disaster.  “The connection between Fukushima and Rocky Flats was made explicit when recent soil tests for offsite plutonium at Rocky Flats found cesium — from Fukushima.”

Linking Fukushima to Rocky Flats is puzzling. The plant never had a nuclear reactor or a tsunami. There are background levels of cesium around where the plant once operated, but the same can be said of any other location in the world. Am I being too suspicious that the author has written a book about Rocky Flats that might sell better if there is some connection, no matter how tenuous, with a recent disaster?

The local cities, State of Colorado, and Environmental Protection Agency all performed independent monitoring of the site, and probably would find a comment about “little environmental oversight” to be surprising. The State of Colorado funded a massive nine year long project to study Rocky Flats, the environment around the plant, and risks to people living in the area. That one study is an example that oversight was extensive, and “extensive” is undoubtedly understated.

The most shocking statement in the article is that there was “…potentially three tons of plutonium…” released by Rocky Flats. Vincent Carroll has an article in the Denver Post titled “Again, raising a false alarm” (yes, I plagiarized part of my title to this posting from his) in which he describes how he contacted the author to learn the source of that statement.  “She responded in some detail, basing her case on various estimates of what’s known as Material Unaccounted For, or MUF…” She does note that there is “…some plausible explanation for where the MUF went—such as in waste drums buried at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory—hardly pose a threat to metro residents.”

The actual releases ranged from as few as two ounces but less than thirty ounces released from all routine operations, storage areas, and fires over the life of the plant. Details are given in Chapter Twenty-five of “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats” with reference to the Colorado agency that completed the nine year assessment of plutonium releases from the plant.

The New York Times article proves the adage that goes something like, “It is easier to make an accusation than it is to explain the truth.” I do give points for creative language.  I don’t recall seeing “profoundly contaminated” and “drenched in plutonium” in previous articles that were critical of Rocky Flats.

The Nurture Assumption, Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do

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This book by Judith Rich Harris presents some radical ideas that peer groups have much more influence on children than parents. I know that the information is radical, because people I’ve told about the theme are universally skeptical. However, I will say that the evidence presented in the book is quite compelling. The author wrote in 1995, “Do parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child’s personality? This article…concludes that the answer is no.” She expected the academic world that universally believed nurturing to be crucial would be angry, but she reports instead that they were mostly curious.

The skepticism of others is addressed by the author. She expects that people will have difficulty believing what she wrote. Behavioral geneticists continue to search for the key to why parents are more important. “It’s got to be in there somewhere! Everybody knows parents make a difference! Fifty thousand psychologists couldn’t possibly be wrong!” However, she presents very personal information to validate, at least in her personal experience, why her ideas are correct. Her family moved to an area where the school had “snooty” children who would not play or talk to her. She became inhibited and read a lot. The family moved again in the eighth grade, the new group of kids designated her as a “brain,” and she made a few friends on that basis. However, she remained inhibited. The snooty kids had succeeded at changing her personality.

The first paragraph of the book discusses how the author as a teenager would respond to her parents yelling at her that “…if they didn’t like the way I was turning out they had no one to blame but themselves: they had provided both my heredity and my environment.” What eventually changed her mind was what she considers to be compelling evidence that parents have little to do with the environmental part of the equation. The peer group of the child provides nearly everything of importance. The power of the peer group is reinforced by the demand at home that children not behave like their parents. They can’t drive cars, light matches, boss people around, come and go as they please, and in general not do “…lots of things that look like fun…” Kids quickly learn that what they learn at home about expected behavior will be “…cast off when they step outside as easily as they shed the dorky sweater their mother made them wear.”

One example of information that validates the author’s theories is that many people struggle with why children raised in the same home do not turn out the same. Behavioral geneticists found that growing up in the same home with the same parents “…had little or no effect on the adult personalities of siblings.” There is even a comment that children with homosexual parents have no increase in being homosexuals. Another example is that children living homes where a language other than English is spoken learn to speak English without an accent. An example given late in the book is about a child in a Chinese-speaking home who asks for milk by saying “nai, nai” at home and “ba ba” at daycare. Sons of upper class English families who are raised by nannies until they go to exclusive schools and seldom have any contact with their fathers grow up to be just like their fathers. Both of them were molded by the environment at the schools with no impact from their family life, or lack of a family life. The peer group is demanding, and children work hard to fit in. They know that there will be penalties for behaving differently than expected. The adage, “The nail that sticks up is hammered down” applies.

I had several surprises from the book. One was that studies have not found any consistent differences between only children and children with siblings. Minor differences “…sometimes favor the only child, sometimes the child with the siblings.” Another surprise is that birth order doesn’t make a difference in the way children turn out.

One study that impressively validates the author’s idea included twenty boys selected for an experiment based on their similarities. They were randomly divided into two groups in a camp area and not told about the other group. They named themselves the “Rattlers” and “Eagles,” and in true Lord of the Flies tradition became bitter enemies. They were soon gathering sticks and stones to do battle with the other group.

I searched the book for information that could be used by parents who want to validate that their parenting efforts will make a difference in the outcome of raising their kids. Asian-American parents are likely to be quite authoritarian, and their children are the most likely to turn out competent and successful. The author writes that home life usually has some small influence, but there are exceptions. “It is time to admit that I have been misleading you: the correlation between behavior at home and behavior outside the home may be low, but it is not zero.” “Parents influence the way their children behave at home. They also supply knowledge and training that their children can take with them…” The author also notes that children conceived by donor insemination and raised by lesbians or by single or married heterosexuals turned out “well adjusted and well-behaved.” I infer from this information that children are positively influenced by parents who want them.

There was also an example of identical twins adopted to different families. One piano-teacher mother offered lessons, but did not insist. The non-musical mother insisted the other twin take lessons and practice. The child raised with the non-demanding musical mother grew up unable to play a note. The other child became a concert pianist. That seems to be solid evidence that dedicated parenting can make a difference. Another was the story of The Ditchdigger’s Daughters. The laborer father and chambermaid mother had five daughters, and the man’s fellow workers teased him about being unable to father sons. He responded by insisting his daughters would be women of accomplishment. He told them they were going to grow up to be doctors, and he established that the peer group would be the five girls. Two of the daughters indeed became physicians, one an oral surgeon, on a lawyer, and one a court stenographer.

As a final observation, the author notes that children of two smart people are smarter in part because of heredity. Those parents often do a good job of raising their kids because they enjoy parenting smart kids. They usually work hard to get their kids into good schools with good teachers, where the peer groups in that atmosphere is much more likely to provide a positive influence. However, it needs to be understood that the world outside the home is tough. Parents at home might tell a child that something they did made the parent feel bad. On the playground they are told “You shithead!”

I believe the most important advice to parents is that they should understand the influence the peer group. The author advises, “At least in the early years, they can determine who the child’s peers are.” The author closes with, “As for what’s wrong with you” don’t blame your parents.”