BOOK REVIEWS

Confessions of a Civil Servant: Lessons in Changing America's Government and Military by Bob Stone

Very few longtime civil servants write their memoirs. This book shows that this is a mistake. The author makes the every day conflicts of civil service life live and breathe and shows how they can be overcome to serve great purposes in the public interest. Introduction writer Tom Peters quotes Peter Drucker's aphorism that "Ninety percent of what we call 'management' consists of making it difficult to get things done." He produces "12 Lessons in Stone" which summarize his approaches. Stone used (1) Demos and Models; (2) Heroes; (3) Stories and Storytellers; (4) Chroniclers; (5) Cheerleaders and Recognition; (6) New Language; (7) Seekers (of change); (8) Protectors (of innovators); (9) Support Groups; (10) End Runs (around hierarchies)/Pull (from outsiders) Strategy; (11) Field/"Real People" Focus, and (12) Speed to push his goals forward. The author himself describes his goals as "decentralization, deregulation, and devolution of authority in a value-centered organization." These were goals gradually developed after years of frustration mixed with achievement in the Defense Department, to which he had been recruited by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis in 1969. He quickly clashed with the centralization of all authority for planning imposed during the seven plus years of Secretary Robert McNamara. His first work was to research the question of how big the army should be. He led successful efforts to change the evaluation formula from on tons of artillery ammunition fired times lethal area per ton to one that applied informed military judgements to the weapons on both sides, what the army dubbed the Weighted Effect Indicators/Weighted Unit Value method. The effect of this change in formulas was to demonstrate the feasibility of NATO surpassing the Warsaw Pact in effectiveness, something later accomplished in the Carter and Reagan Administrations. From this effort, the author learned the power of asking naieve questions, such as "Why? What's that mean? Says who?" The author subsequently went on to become assistant secretary of defense for installations, where he rapidly shrunk regulations and improved the quality of life for residents of military bases. This raised hackles which put him under a glass ceiling for awhile, but he recovered with the Clinton/Gore election in 1992, when he got appointed to the National Performance Review staff, and ultimately became its leader in reinventing government. This book demonstrates his struggles and his triumphs and is essential reading for anyone seeking to aid in the cause of responsive government. "Some people look for things that went wrong and try to fix them," he said. "I look for things that went right and try to build upon them." He called himself "Mr. ReGo" (Reinventing Government) and "Energizer in Chief." His critics had undoubtedly had other words for him, but this book is a very clear record of his vision and accomplishments. It is an extremely useful introduction to the whole field of Reinventing Government, with its orientation of customer service and customer satisfaction and the eliminations of excess regulation and bureaucratic red tape. It is one man's anecdotal summary, but it provides a firm basis for more rigorous empiricial investigations by others. It is a call to action as well as a memoir, and as such it will likely be heeded by dedicated professionals for many years to come.

December 30, 2007

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What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness by Stanley Bing

With this book, businessman and Fortune Magazine columnist Stanley Bing began a long and continuing career of attacking outrageous bosses and managerial practices. There is no shortage of material in these categories, and this book is a good introduction to how rich the field of managerial abuse is. This is not a book for true Machiavelli fans. Those who want to savor the finely nuanced distinctions and advices of Machiavelli's THE PRINCE will not be able to do so here. Indeed Bing delivers a classic put-down to the man he calls "the master": "the fact that it's very difficult to understand anything the master says gets in the way of our ability to walk, straight and secure, down his path." What we have dissected here is not Machiavelli the sagacious adviser and pioneer of the field of Political Science, but Machiavelli as a cultural icon standing for the extension of personal wealth and power to the exclusion of all other considerations. "To live true to the vision of the master, we must be as selfish, narcisstic, manipulative, driven and creative in getting what we want as we can be, not just in our important business actions, but where it really counts: in our hearts. You can do it. This book will help." A true Machiavellian, in the author's sense of the term, would always be unpredictable, and thus would gain the advantage of keeping everyone else off balance. In love with his destiny, always at war, for the most part a paranoid freak, he would think BIG, acquire his neighbor, move like a shark, eating as he goes, killing people's careers, but only if he could feel good about himself afterwards. A true Machiavellian would fire his own mother if necessary, make a virtue out of his obnoxiousness, be way upbeat, be satisfied with nobody but himself, embrace his own madness, do what he feels like doing, say what he feels like saying, delegate all the crummy tasks except the ones that he enjoys, respond poorly to criticism, perennially carry grudges, lie when necessary, be proud of his cruelty and see it as strength, permanently cripple those who disappoint him, torture people until they were only too happy to destroy themselves, feast on other people's discord, make you fear for your life, be loyal to people who could put up with him, have no patience for anybody, never say he's sorry, have no conscience to speak of, scream at people a lot, establish and maintain a psychotic level of control, would eat to kill, and would have fun with his career and his life. The author drifts in and out of satire and sober evaluation. His concluding paragraph summarizes much of the book: "Good may often be its own--and only--reward in this competitive, malevolent, and unfair world. This may be most true in business, where the unsympathetic aspects of human character are compensated most lavishly. But evil does have its limitations, ones that even the biggest, baddest Machiavellis around should keep in mind." This book would be a great supplement to courses on business ethics and courses on management. Its tongue in cheek evocations of Saddam Hussein, Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, and Caligua grab attention and serve as a warning to the those humor-deprived people who might view sections of this book as a serious guide. Its graphs--based on no hard information whatsoever--demonstrate serious points. The "normal world view" is that the vast majority of people are friends or potential friends while the "Machiavelli world view" is that the vast majority of people are enemies or potential enemies. "The bigger you are" the "less you like" criticism. "Performance" is greater "with ruthless competition" than without it. The Machiavelli personality is high on fear, aggression, self, and golf to the exclusion of conscience and hobbies and to the marginalization of family and friends. The greater the control a Machiavelli has, the more fun he has. The joys of retirement--golf and not being bothered by idiots--wear off after a couple of years. This book, in short, could be retitled "How to Succeed in Business by Failing as a Human Being." In the author's words, "only individuals who are monmaniacal and driven to the exclusion of all else stand a chance of rising to the top." The price of success, the author says, "is to adjust your personality to remove as much conscience as is possible." The price of getting to the top, the author makes clear, is not worth it by the rules of the modern day Machiavellis.

December 19, 2007

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A Leader For Business Organization Change Offers A Checklist For Leaders And Potential Leaders, September 18, 2007
The author, Richard A. Moran, is the National Director of Organizational Change Practice for Price Waterhouse. "He has worked," his biographical profile in the back of this book state, "for all types of organizations worldwide, from Apple Computer to Zurich Insurance. Moran helps organizations implement their strategies by keeping management focused and by getting lots of help from employees. He is the co-athor of the landmark study POSTCARDS FROM EMPLOYEES, which capture the perceptions of more than 50,000 employees regarding their organizations and managements as well as well as customer service and other work-related areas...." This book, a collection of 361 aphorisms gleaned from his experience, is in individual parts, both superficial and profound. The aphorisms are simple and not always appropriate for each individual in each situation. His advice on dating (don't date co-workers), oneupsmanship (get into the office a half hour before your boss), honesty (don't take sick days unless you are sick), holiday parties (don't get drunk there), traveling on corporate jets (know the seating protocol before you get there), and racist jokes (expect to be fired if you tell them) may strike people as overly obvious or overly general. What the author offers is a checklist of advice that is useful to anyone who works as part of, in cooperation with, a complex bureaucratic structure. "Most observations that made it to the pages of this book were learned from other people's mistakes, even though most of the blunders went unnoticed by the offenders. To them I am most indebted," he says. "....The obervations in this outlined in this book," the author says, "were not derived through the rigorous application of conjoint analysis in a JIT environment with the Black-Scholes methodology as a denominator. Rather, they are based on the simple organizational truths that I find people should know--but don't. I hope this book bridges the gap in the knowledge frontier and makes you more successful." Based on one's life experiences, one will have different views of the value of this book, and the value of the individual aphorisms it contains. My nominees for the best three dozen aphorisms are as follows: #5. "Simplify, don't complicate--especially processes, procedures, and policies." #7. "Spend five minutes figuring out how to communicate the decision for every ten minutes you spend deciding." #8. "Believe that change can happen, even after overwhelming evidence says that things never seem to get better." #15. "Don't promise what you can't deliver." #25. "Never confuse a memo with reality...most memos from the top are political fantasy." #27. "Don't look at change as bad." #31. "Share the credit for successful projects and make sure everyone's supervisor knows of everyone's contribution." #50. "If you're going to complain about something, have a solution in mind and make it clear what you want." #57. "Develop a high tolerance for ambiguity--you'll be more satisfied." #64. "Don't micromanage your people, your projects, or your own life." #86. "Read your job description but never be restricted by it. Do what needs to be done." #96. "When giving a talk or presentation, always consider what thought you want the audience to walk away with." #120. "Recognizing someone else's contribution will repay you doubly." #126. "Make time for life outside of work." #130. "You're never too old to change, learn a new job, start over, or try something new." #142. "Life is choices: always choose to do what you will remember ten years from now." #164. "You will never regret having spent too much time with your kids." #167. "Take risks with your ideas and with implementing them." #171. "Being good is important; being trusted is essential." #174. "Always strive for a deeper level of truth with business associates. Posturing and pretending is always transparent to everyone." #185. "Do something good early in your new job or assignment." #209. "Don't surround yourself with people who are like you; strive for difference and diversity." #226. "Those who do the work should have a say in how it's to be organized." #241. "Remember that almost all business is painfully simple. Strive to demsystify." #247. "Teamwork will become more and more important. Lean what it is and how to be a good team member." #251. "Don't get hung up defining whether you're working on a vision or a mission or goals or objectives--do what's important." #266. "Work on problems, not symptoms. Morale itself is never a problem; something is happening that causes low morale, which creates a problem." #288. "Be a supporter of the latest fad, but don't build your career around it." #308. "Performance evaluations take place every day, not every six months or every year." #322. "Technology cannot solve all problems. It can only make the real work cheaper, faster, and less tedious." #330. "Make decisions in a timely fashion, even if you're not 100% certain it's the right decision. Not deciding is a decision, too." #342. "Follw Stephen Covey's suggestion of knowing how to distinguish what's important and what's urgent." #344. "Treat everyone in the organization with respect and dignity whether it be the janitor or the president. Don't ever be patronizing." #352. "All employees--including the management--want to know three things when they show up for work: What's my job? How am I doing? and, How does my contribution help serve the organization's mission? #355. "Always know the answer to the question, "What business are we in?" The simplicity of this book does not undermine its profundity. This an excellent book for someone new to an organization, to someone trying to explain things to someone new to an organization, or to an experienced person fighting burnout, loss of focus, or simply too much to do to concentrate on what is essential. The author has written a provocative checklist of things everyone in leadership, or aspiring to leadership, ought to look at closely.

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Authority On Leadership Sees Attitude As Key, September 16, 2007
The author, leadership authority John Maxwell, says "Attitude is always a 'player' on your team....Your attitude and potential go hand in hand....A lot goes into an attitude--but a lot more comes out of it!....The key to having a good attitude is the willingness to change....The greatest battle you wage against failure occurs on the inside, not the outside....Every successful person is someone who failed, yet never regarded himself as a failure....Attitude determines how far you can go on the success journey....Leaders have to give up to go up." Maxwell's book is full of commonsense aphorisms that are both thoughtful and appropriate. Taken together, along with personal reflections and apt quotations from people who are famous and/or insightful, they provide an excellent roadmap to analyzing the attitudes that people have, and taking practical steps toward improving them. Attitude impacts leadership. "Attitudes have the power to lift up or tear down a team....An attitude compounds when exposed to others....Attitude is catching....Bad attitudes compound faster than good ones....Attitudes are subjective so identifying a wrong one can be difficult." "Common rotten attitudes that ruin a team" include "an inability to admit wrongdoing....failing to forgive....petty jealousy....the disease of me...a critical spirit....a desire to hog all the credit....Rotten attitudes, left alone, ruin everything." Clara Barton, when asked to recall a wrong that was done to her, replied "I distinctly remember forgetting that." NBA basketball great Bill Russell said "The most important measure of how good a game I played was how much better I made my teammates play." These are examples of exemplary attitudes. The visionary Thomas Jefferson believed in the importance of attitude himself, saying "Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude." "Attitude determines success or failure," the author believes. He has seven attitude axioms: "Our attitude determines our approach to life...Our attitudes determines our relationships with people....Often our attitude is the only difference between success and failure....Our attitude at the beginning of a task will affect its outcome more than anything else....Our attitude can turn our problems into blessings....Our attitude can give us an uncommonly positive perspective....Your attitude is not particularly good because you are a religious person." The author believes that attitudes are shaped by the interrelationship between one's personality, environment, expression, feelings,self-image, opportunities for growth, associations with others, phiysical appearance, marriage, job and family. "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care, " he says. To change one's attitude, one should evaluate your present attitude, realize that faith is stronger than fear, write a statement of purpose, including what you desire to accomplish each day, verbalizing to an encouraging friend what you intend to accomplish each day, and taking action on your goal every day. One must have the desire to change, to fall in love with the challenge of change and watch the desire to change grow. One must live one day at a time,change your thought patterns, develop good habits, and continually choose to have a right attitude. Attitudes can be strengthened by the overcoming of obstacles, by regarding failure as an event and not as a description of one's character, by seeing success as a journey and not as a destination, and by recognizing that leaders have to make sacrifices in order to go where they want to go. Martin Luther King and Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton are both exemplified in this book; King is viewed as typical of the best possible type of leaders because he so devoted his life to the service of others. This is an excellent book for persons, organizations, corporations, and groups stuck in a rut and needing renewal. The simple writing here contains many simple truths, with an emphasis on the belief that there is a large element of personal control in one's destiny. Those who read this book will find the investment of time to be well spent.

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The Essence of Leadership
by Mac Anderson

Author Mac Anderson is the founder of Successories, Inc., billed as "the leader in designing and marketing products for motivation and recognition." The author here combines the compelling photographs and quotations for which Successories is well known with wisdom from both his extensive business experience and his reading of other leadership gurus. A good leader, the author says, should "walk the talk; keep it simple and keep it real; celebrate successes; know that courage matters; keep hope alive; take responsibility; develop a 'service attitude'; aim for the heart; and make a difference when wherever" possible. "If you throw your heart over the fence, the rest will follow," the author says illustrating the virtue of Heartpower. "Don't be afraid to go out on a limb," the author says illustrating the virtue of Risk. "That's where the fruit is." "Integrity does not blow in the wind or change with the tide," the author says in promiting Integrity. "It is the inner image of our true selves." Other virtues the author promotes are LEADERSHIP ("By the work, one knows the workman," Jean de la Fontaine said), ATTITUDE ("Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference),DISCOVERY ("Leaders are like eagles," said Henry David Thoreau. "They don't flock, you find them one at a time"), GOALS ("Dream big dreams but never forget that realistic short-term goals are the keys to your success"), KINDNESS ("The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched," Helen Keller said. "They must be felt in the heart"), OPTIMISM ("Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement," Helen Keller said), VISION ("...The music makers...the dreamers of dreams...are the movers and shakers of the world forever it seems," said Arthur O'Shaughnessy), RECHARGE ("My attitude, my energy, my levels of motivation are directly tied to exercise"), PERSEVERANCE ("Go over, go under, go around, or go through, but never give up"), VALUES ("Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least," said Goethe),CULTIVATE ("Pull the weeds. Otherwise the team, just like the garden, cannot grow," said John Murphy), TRUST ("Trust, not technology, is the issue of the decade," said Tom Peters, EXCELLENCE ("Excellence is not an act...It's a habit," said Artistotle), SERVICE ("Service is the lifeblood of any organization. Everything flows from it, and is nourished by it. Customer service is not a department...it's an attitude"), LEADERSHIP ("A leader's job is to look into the future and see the organization, not as it is, but as it should be"), QUALITY ("In the race for quality, there is no finish line,"),FOCUS ("Focus on the critical few, not the insignificant many"), FEELINGS ("You may not remember what someone says or does, but you'll never forget about how they made you feel,"), SUCCESS ("Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value," Albert Einstein said), INTEGRITY ("Wisdom is knowing the right path to take. Integrity is taking it"), PASSION ("To love what you do and feel that it matters...How could anything be more fun," said Katherine Graham), and PURPOSE ("Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your father in heaven," said Matthew in the New Testament). Ideals the author pushes include "aim for the heart;" "develop a service attitude," "think change"; "strive for authenticity;" "take action;" "hre great people;" "expect the unexpected;" "take the inch by inch approach;" "walk a mile in their shoes;" "embrace humor, hope, and optimism;" "reward the gift of imagination;" "manage your energy;" "develop a 'refuse to lose' attitude;" "reinforce core values;" "pull the weeds (among employees);" "create an attitude of ownership;" "make good habits;" "learn from Southwest Airlines (about making customers have fun and feel respected)"; "your customers must come in second (to your employees);" "make your brand stand for something;" "focus on your priorities;" "understand the soft stuff;" "lead with values;" "lead with integrity;" "love what you do;" "make a difference." The author has written a book to be read quickly, and a book to be reread time and again. The author has written a book to keep, and a book to give away. The author has boiled leadership down to its essence, and created a basis for future thought and research. It seems there are an unlimited number of books on leadership, and none are either omniscent or indispensable. The author has written a good book to read at the start of leadership responsibilities, and a good book to read when one is enmeshed in leadership responsiblities. The author has made a contribution both to leadership itself, and to aiding in the communication of what leaders do from veteran leaders to newer leaders. Woodrow Wilson famously said that the more time he had to prepare a speech, the shorter he could make it. With many years in the business of leadership instruction, the author has written a short but comprehensive outline of what leadership is all about in a manner that provokes sustained thought and provides inspiration. This book deserves a wide audience in business, government, volunteer organization, and non-profits. Wherever leadership is needed and there is doubt as to what leadership entails, this is a book to begin the discussions and help start developing the solutions.

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Close Personal Friends of the Mayor
by Michael Stack

Michael Stack's fourth novel (the first about politics from this veteran Philadelphia politican) is a triumph at various levels. First, it is a darn good read for anyone interested in the machinations of local politics. Its characters are realistic portrayals of the people who participate in politics: public-spirited, but also self-interested; honest, but not saintly; responsible, but not masochistic; strong, but not incapable of yielding to superior power. The author's characters are artfully drawn. They come across as real people and not ideological caricatures. They are the kind of people one might want to have a beer with, not the kind of people who debate on CNN or wind up engraved at Mount Rushmore. They face moral and practical questions, and deal with them imperfectly but in a manner that saves face and minimizes conflict. A reader who cares about politics will find himself or herself caring about these protagonists and engrossed in their story. The author provides a case study--fictional but inspired by a real-life example--of how sheer willpower was able to triumph over the power of media and party organization. The author deals with timeless themes of the results of political participation on family life, the hanging onto power by those who have lost sense of its purpose, the battle between the old and the new, and the struggles of women and minorities to make their presence felt. The author also provides key insights into politics at its rawest in an era before the domination of public opinion polls, saturation television advertising, the blogosphere, 24 hour a day news coverage, and endless fundraisers. Second, the book's ironic title makes an important point. The mayor in question seems to have few or no close personal friends. His backers are on the whole motivated by self-interest or fear, and not by friendship. Harry Truman's well known saying--"If you want a friend in Washington,get a dog."--is not an absolute rule, but it is an aphorism that makes clear that claims of friendship in politics are inherently limited by the multitude of pressures, demands, and ambitions. Mayor James J. Walsh never appears in this book doing anything except engaging in politics; he seems to have no time for friendship. Third, the author creates a guessing game as to who in Philly history his characters most strongly resemble. "This book is a work of fiction," the standard disclaimer runs. "People, places, events and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events is purely coincidental." Neverthess, some "purely coincidental" resemblances can be inferred by this reviewer. Despite a few references to later events, the author's description of the undated Philadelphia mayoral election uncannily resembles the 1967 mayoral election, where both the author and this reviewer were deeply involved. The fictional Mayor James J. Walsh appears to be very much like the real mayor James H. J. Tate; his Democratic challenger Bradley Wentworth appears very much like the real-life Alexander Hemphill; Republican candidate Morey Stern appears very much like 1967 Republican mayoral nominee Arlen Specter; Democratic City Chairman Gus Kelly appears to be very much like Democratic Chairman Francis R. Smith; campaign manager John Bell appears very much like author Michael Stack; Congressman William A. Corcoran appears very much like Congressman William Barrett; Councilman George Fox appears very much like Council President George Schwartz; House Speaker Ira Goldman appears very much like House Speaker Herbert Fineman; Herb McIlvaney appears very much like State Senator Herbert McGlinchey; Plumbers Union leader Jimmy O'Rourke appears very much like Plumbers Union leaders Jimmy O'Neill; AFL-CIO leader Ed Sweeney appears very much like AFL-CIO leader Ed Toohey; campaign aide Ellen Black appears very much like campaign aide Evelyn White; Police Commissioner Sal Nardi appears very much like Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo; black leader Wesley Johnson appears very much like black leader and Deputy Mayor Charles Bowser; U.S. Senator Lewis appears very much like U.S. Senator Joseph Clark; Lewis aide Mike Sullivan appears very much like Clark aide Mike Byrne. Campaign aide Ruth Wolfe appears to be a composite of the political savvy of campaign aide Natalie Saxe, the ambition of District Attorney Lynn Abraham, the speechwriting skill of Dick Doran, and the career strategy of Wilson Goode. And an offhand reference to a Council candidate named Kaplan appears to refer to my late father, longtime City Councilman David Cohen. Fourth, due to all the above, and likely other similarities with other actors in the 1967 Philadelphia mayoral election, the author has succeeded in giving this long-slighted historical event some of the recognition it deserves. The 1967 mayoral election was the year black voters became a decisive force for the first time; the year both that both the pride and resentments of voters of Italian descent emerged on the political stage; the year of the triumph of law and order politics; the only year in the history of the current city charter that Philadelphia got a majority of new City Council members; a year that demonstrated the vulnerability of the City's Democratic machine; a year that led to a rare general election defeat for current U.S. Senator Arlen Specter; a year that presaged both the rise of Frank Rizzo and his eventual fall from power. Any interested in studying the 1967 mayoral election or the rise of Frank Rizzo would do well to read this book. This book can be read in conjunction with John Taglianetti's Shaking Hands With the Devil to get an increased understanding of Philadelphia politics in the 1960's and 1970's. Fifth, this book calls renewed attention to the legendary Philadelphia Congressman William Barrett, whose fictional counterpart, Congressman William Corcoran, steals the show in this book, creating an insurgent campaign out of nothing, winning support through a shrewd mixture of persuasion and coercion, showing diplomatic skills that both dazzle and instruct, being a strong influence for inclusion of new people and new ideas, and being, in short, the indispensable man in converting what was widely perceived as a doomed effort into a political juggernaut. Barrett also deserves far more attention than he has gotten from historians. Sixth, the author raises here the implicit question as to the purpose of politics, the relationship between means and ends, and the limits of political commitments. The more impressive candidate as an individual was Republican nominee Mory Stern (Arlen Specter), but the author and his protagonists worked hard for James Walsh (Mayor James Tate) to preserve Democratic Party control of the city government and to strengthen the Democratic Party both statewide and nationally. Forty years later, this reviewer thinks that was the right thing to do, and suspects the author does also. The author though makes it clear that there was a legitimate question of what action was appropriate involved. The author also makes clear the ironic effect of term limits: it provided a rationale for support of the incumbent that might not have existed otherwise. The fact that Mayor Walsh could only serve one term if re-elected, while other candidates could serve two two terms, was a key motivating factor for the two characters showing mayoral ambition to support him. Without their support, he would likely not have won in the world of this novel. The same was true in the real world in the case of Mayor James Tate: he owed his victory to those who had a keen interest in there being an open seat four years later. This book should widely read by those who like a good political novel with genuine people instead of political caricatures. It should be read by those who interested in the political history of Philadelphia, and those who are veterans of Philadelphia politics. It is probably the best political novel about Philadelphia politics ever written.

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On the Move
by Bono





This book documents the emergence of Rock superstar Bono as a major theological force in the interest of ending extreme poverty in Africa, where six thousand die of AIDS each day. He is becoming the Martin Luther King of Africa aid relief. "There is a continent--Africa--being consumed by flames. I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did--or did not do--to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do." This quote is accompanied by the words FREEDOM and EQUALITY repeated numerous times in the form of a map of Africa. Bono updates Isaiah 58:9-11 to report on the presence of God in today's world. "God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both of their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them." Bono founded the advocacy group DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) in 2002. It is a member of ONE, the Camapaign to Make Poverty History. In 2006 he launched Product (RED) to engage businesses in the fight against AIDS. He lives in Dublin, Ireland with his wife and four children. Bono wants the United States to give an additional one percent of its federal budget annually to end world poverty. Beside a picture of a barely clothed African child, Bono says "Where you live should no longer determine whether you live." He adds, "We hear that call in the One Campaign, a growing movement of more than two million Americans left and right together, united in the belief that where you live should no longer determine whether you live." Bono eloquently summarizes more of his agenda, "Preventing the poorest of the poor from selling their products while we sing the virtues of the free market--that's a justice issue. Holding children ransom for the debts of their grandparents--that's a justice issue. Withholding the life-saving medicines out of defeerence to the Office of Patents--that's a justice issue. And while the law is what wwe say it is, God is not silent on the subject." Bono is of both Protestant and Catholic ancestry in a land deeply divided by literal warfare over the differences between these religions. "Religion often gets in the way of God, " Bono says. "I was cynical. Not about God, but about God's politics." Bono was called to action by concept of the millennial year of 2000 being a Jubilee year, "an opportunity to cancel the chronic debts of the world's poorest people. They (the advocates of a Jubilee year) had the audacity to renew the Lord's call--and they were joined by Pope John Paul II, who, from an Irish half-Catholic's point of view, may have had a more direct line to the Almighty." This is a book to stir people to action by man who, the publisher notes, "has brought about tremendous change--billions of dollars in debt relief have been forgiven and thousands of lives have been saved. But more than that, he has opened our eyes to the dignity, beauty, and strength of this continent. His eloquence when speaking about Africa at the National Prayer Breakfast inspired this book. My hope is that it will inspire you as well." This is a book that does stir people to action, that ought to be read by people who want ideas on how to use their time and money to solve major problems facing the world. Bill Clinton, active in raising money and public consciousness for African relief in the years since he left the White House, describes this book as "Inspirational words from a man of faith and action. Bono's message is one of unparalled hope and challenge. He goes where others don't and makes us want to follow." A rock star as an international moral leader? It is an unusual concept to be sure. But Bono says, "When churches started deomonstrating on debt, governments listened--and acted. When churches started organizing, petitioning, and even that most unholy of acts today, God forbid, lobbying on AIDS and global health, governments listened and acted. "I'm here (at the National Prayer breakfast) today in all humility to say: you changed minds; you changed policy; you changed the world. "Look, whatever thoughts you have about God, who God is or if God exists--most will agree that if there is a God, God has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives." Bono notes the intense interest in poverty in the scriptures. "It's not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. That's a lot of airtime, 2,100 mentions." He praises our country for doubling aid to Africa, tripling funding for global health, putting 900,000 people onto life-saving anti-viral drugs and providing 11,000,000 bed nets to protect children from malaria. "Outstanding human achievements. Counterintuitive. Historic. Be very, very proud. But here's the bad news. There is much more to do. There's a gigantic chasm between the scale of the emergency and the scale of the respons. And finally, it's not a questions about charity after all, is it? It's about justice." Bono works to incite his audience to action. "But justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties; it doubts our concern; it questions our commitment." This is book that is moving, provocative, and insightful. The greater its audience, the greater will be the world's response to one of the great international challenges of our time.

*

Relationships 101 (Maxwell, John C.)
by John C. Maxwell

Leadership expert John Maxwell is extremely good at expressing complex truths in series of simple sentences that individually seem obvious. As the pages go by, one realizes one is being exposed to a well-thought out comprehensive world view as to how people should lead other people in a manner than benefits society as a whole. Relationships are important to success, the author writes, because relationships are the glue that holds team members together. What a leader needs to know about others, the author writes, is that people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Leaders can encourage others, the author says, by believing in people before they have proved themselves. This is the key to motivating people to reach their potential. Leaders can connect with people, the author says, by always remembering that the heart comes before the head. Leaders can become better listeners, the author says, by treating every person as if he or she were the most important person in the world. Leaders can build trust with others, the author says, by having their words and actions match. The most important relationships, the author says, are at home. Succeed at home, and all other relationships become easier. A leader can serve and lead people at the same time by loving the people he or she leads more than his or her position, the author says. As the author always does in the many books he writes, he backs up his views with famous historical quotes and anecdotes.. He quotes longtime Reagan aide Michael Deaver on how Reagan managed the press--he liked people and succeeded in getting the press corps to like him--and his staff--he found ways to make clear to everyone how important they were to him. The author quotes President Harry Truman that "When we understand the other fellow's viewpoint--understand what he is trying to do--nine times out of ten he is trying to do right." He quotes President Woodrow Wilson as saying "The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people" and President Lyndon Johnson as keeping a sign in his office saying "You ain't learnin' nothin' when you're doin' all the talkin." The author quotes World War I hero Marshal Ferdinand Foch: "There are no hopeless situations; there are only men and women who have grown helpless about them." The author quotes Pennsylvania Revolutionary War era great Benjamin Franklin as saying that "Those things that hurt, instruct." He quotes Pennsylvania founder William Penn as saying "Never despise or oppose what thou does not understand." The author quotes philosopher-poet-longshoreman Eric Hoffer: "It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at root of the troubles that afflict our world." He quotes Jeff MacNelly's comic strip character Shoe, a crusty newspaper editor, as saying "When it comes to believing in myself, I'm an agnostic." He quotes the evangelist Bill Glass as saying "Over 90% of prison inmates were told by their parents while growing up, 'Thy're going to put you in jail.'" The author says that solid relationships are built by respect, shared experiences, trust, reciprocity, and mutual enjoyment. The author says that important things to know about people is that everybody wants to be somebody, nobody cares how much you know until he knows how much you care, that everybody needs somebody to come alongside and help, and everybody can be somebody when somebody understands and believes him or her. The author says that most people don't have faith in themselves, most people don't have someone who has faith in them, most people can tell when someone else has faith in them, and most people will do anything to live up to faith in them. To become a believer in people, the author advises that people emphasize their strengths, list their past successes, instill confidence when they fail, visualize thier future successes, and expect a new level of living. Leaders should recognize that the heart comes first, they should connect in public and in private, they should connect with people one at a time, they should expect the best of them, and they should recognize that the tougher the challenge the greater the connection. Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher is cited for the many ways in which he makes meaningful connections with his employees; Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton is also cited for going out of his way to have a long talk with a company truckdriver to both pay him respect and gain information from him. The author's advice for developing listening skills is: look at the speaker, don't interrupt,focus on understanding, determine the need of the moment, check your emotions, suspend your judgment, sum up at major intervals, ask questions for clarity,and always make listening your priority. Personal integrity is key to building trust with others, the author says. Integrity is not determined by circumstances, not based on credentials, and not to be confused with reputation. One can become a person of integrity by committing oneself to honesty, reliability and confidentiality; deciding ahead of time that you don't have a price; and each day doing what you should do before what you want to do. To build a strong family, the author says, both partners have to work to stay together, express appreciation for each other, structure their lives to spend time together, deal with crises in a positive way, communicate continually, and share the same values. To serve and lead people at the same time, one should have a servant's heart, put others ahead of one's own agenda, possess the confidence to serve, initiate service to others, not be position conscious, and serve out of love. To improve one's servanthood, one should perform small acts of kindness for others; learn to walk slowly through the crowd, making it your agenda to get to know each person's needs, wants, and desires; and to move into action and start serving. Anyone in a leadership position, or aspiring to a leadership position, will benefit from reading this book. All the wisdom of the world can not be summarized in lists and aphorisms, but the author's methods go a long way to bringing common sense to the uncommon responsibilities many people face on a daily basis. This is an excellent book for those who wish to use their power to do much, much more than advance themselves.

*


Desperate deliverance: The story of African Americans in the Civil War
by Robert P Broadwater

Novels, movies, television shows and historical commemorations of the Civil War have generally created the impression of a conflict between white people: the North fighting to free the slaves, the South fighting to maintain slavery. But the author of this book--a white man with three ancestors who fought for the Union and one who fought for the Confederacy-- notes that the official figures show that 178,975 blacks were enrolled in the Union Army, and about 21% of them, 36,847, died of all causes. The overall percentage of deaths over enlistments in the Civil War was only 10.4%, he says. This is only the beginning of the black role in the Civil War. Over 200,000 blacks fled slavery to join the Union Army; some were accepted as soldiers and others were not, but those who were not often did very useful work at the garrisons in a support capacity. And some blacks fought for state militias on the Confederate side; while the North had many black regiments, the South had none. The author makes clear that the mission of the war to end slavery--he likes to think of it as the War of Black Independence--only became clear over time. At the start of the war, the enlistment of free blacks into the Confederate Army peaked and the enlistment of blacks into the Union Army stalled. He documents numerous attempts by blacks to form regiments that were ignored; at one point New York free blacks even offered to pay the entire cost of a black regiment themselves in order to entice the federal government to accept one. The reluctance to accept blacks as soldiers was caused by both prejudiced doubts that they could fight and political desires not to inflame the Confederates or to lose the loyalty of the pro-slavery boarder states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee which stayed on as part of the Union. It was originally hoped that it would be a short war after which everything could return to normal. But the intensity of Southern resistance soon became clear. General David Hunter, stationed at Port Royal in Charleston, South Carolina, immediately began to enroll fugitive slaves upon replacing General Sherman there on March 31, 1861 for what became known as the 1st South Carolina Colored Infantry. Hunter's approach was to inform Washington of what he was doing and assume he had permission to continue unless he was ordered to stop. On May 8, 1862 Hunter even issued his own early version of the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Lincoln, fearful of the reactions from the boarder states, made him rescind his proclamation. Hunter on May 9,1862 began to round up able-bodied blackss from plantations and urge them to join the Union army. He would then return those who declined to their plantations. This was going to far for all but the Radical Republicans in Congress, and on August 10, 1862 he was forced to disband his regiment. But others who were used less controversial methods to recruit black troops kept doing so. A few days before Butler was forced to disband his regiment, General Ben Butler, in command of captured areas around New Orleans, wired Secretary of War Stanton on August 5, 1862: "I shall call on Africa to intervene, and I do not think I shall call in vain." By August 22,1862 Butler had issued a general order authorizing the enlistment of blacks, offering a bounty and generous pay. The hiring practices of his regiment was an early example of what is now known as "Don't ask, don't tell;" he got around orders requiring him to only enroll free blacks by simply not checking on who was free and who was not, and the author concludes that "most of the regiment was probably made up of runaway slaves." On the same day that Butler wired Scretary Stanton, a wire was sent to Stanton by General James Lane, in the Kansas-Missouri theatre, who also sought to recruit black troops. After the first battle in which his black troops had fought, Lane was enthusiastic in his praise. "It is useless to talk any more about Negro courage, " he said. "The men fought like tigers, each and every one of them, and the main difficulty was to hold them well in hand. Saddle and mount is the word. These are boys to clean out the bushwackers." Lane's troops functioned without authorization until January 13, 1863, when they became the 1st Kansas Colored Regiment. Lane also symbolizes the gradual transition of the Democratic Party from the party of slavery to the party of civil rights. "As an old Democrat, I felt a little repugnance at having anything to do with Negroes, but having got fairly over that, am in the work. They are just as good tools to crush the rebellion with as any that can be got." Other Democratic generals in the Union Army would soon be echoing these sentiments. The author focuses intensely on the formation of the early Negro regiments, and then starts listing subsequent ones in groups. He notes the reluctance of their commanders--all of whom were white--to order them into battle, but describes the military pressures that overcame such reluctance. The author also notes that some blacks won admission to state regiments on their own iniitiative: 65 year old Nicholas Biddle, a runaway slave long a resident of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, attached himself to the Washington Artillerists, and is considered by some to have been the first Union soldier to have been wounded in the Civil War "while marching through Baltimore with the first volunteers from Schuylkill County, 18 April 1861." The author details at length the resistance blacks faced in the Union Army. A black surgeon from Canada, given command over 8 white surgeons, was ulitmately forced to resign despite excellent performance because his subordinates felt demeaned at working under a black man. Even within battles, there was reluctance to have black soldiers be the first to attack. But the author notes that black soldiers were the most zealous, perhaps because they felt they had the biggest stake in the conflict. They took risks that white soldiers were reluctant to take, and they sometimes kept fighting rather than surrender even when battles had been lost. The author details Southern attempts to send captured black soldiers into slavery; Congress retaliated by threatening other actions against Southern captured soldiers, and this threat seems to have ended that Southern threat. The black regiments consistently won plaudits from their supervisors and observers, even when they lost battles, the author finds. And the author notes that in the last year of the war, when the Union Army losses had piled up, black soldiers played an important role in Union victories. Without discussing issues broader than the Civil War, the author sheds light on the disturbing historical paradox that so many backers of the Union became apathetic or actively hostile to the idea of full black participation in American life. The author documents the prejudice that advocates of black participation in the armed forces--white and black alike--had to overcome, and the step by step and sometimes guerilla tactics that had to be used to get black soldiers into uniform and into battle. The author even notes that Congress tried to iniitally pay black soldiers $10 a day while white soliders were being paid $13 a day, and pay at least one black doctor at the soldier's rate. Massachusetts black soldiers rejected the lesser salaries, and even rejected an attempt by the Massachusetts legislature to pay the difference. Their protest eventually led to Congress agreeing to pay the same salaries to black soldiers as to white soldiers. And the black doctor who got paid at the soldier's rate eventually got four years of back pay at the surgeons rate. The author has a keen sense of military detail, and devotees of military history will enjoy this book. Future historians should also use this book--culled largely from secondary sources listed in the back of the book--as a source of ideas for further research. This book is highly relevant to the history of American civil rights as well as the history of the Civil War. It answers the question of why Martin Luther King was so insistent on "Freedom NOW," why black history adds needed context to what has been traditionally considered American history, and how the armed forces got enmeshed in the tradition of separate units for blacks--a practiced not changed until the Truman Administration. This is an excellent book well worth reading by black and white alike, by those who care about military history and those who care about social history, by those interested in the Civil War and those interested in military history in general. It should lead readers to both seek greater historical recognition of black troops in the Civil War, and to seek greater understanding of the evolution of the role of blacks in American society.

*

Beware of Those Who Ask for Feedback by Richard A. Moran

Author Richard A. Moran, Ph.D.,is the National Director of Organization Change for Price Waterhouse. His biography in this book says "He has worked in all types of organizations worldwide, from Apple Computer to Zurich Insurance. Moran helps organizations implement their strategies by keeping management focused and by getting lots of help from employees. He is the author of NEVER CONFUSE A MEMO WITH REALITY. In addition he is co-author of the 1993 landmark studey, POSTCARDS FROM EMPLOYEES, which captured the perceptions of over 50,000 employees regarding their organizations and management as well as customer service and other work-related areas." The author says his "continuing source of material are those thousands of employees, at all levels of all organizations, who tell me the truth and make me aware of what a struggle it can be to thrive in today's complex organizations." The author describes this second collection of business related aphorisms as "a book of business bread and butter." He says he has continued his attempt, begun in his first book NEVER CONFUSE A MEMO WITH REALITY "to capture the conventional wisdom that people in business should know--but either ignore or never learned in the first place." He sees several advantage to his writing style: "First, it represents what many people know is the truth about life in today's organizations. Second, it is accessible: It features no complex models or theories that make anyone feel guilty or inadequate for not understanding. Third the lessons from the book apply. No matter what their level, industry, or position, people understand. Fourth, there is humor in the book that makes people chuckle about their own situations. And, lastly, the price is right." As in his first book, the advice offered is simply expressed and sometimes overgeneralized. But inevitably, what is familiar for one person will be a new insight for another. Once again, the author presents a checklist. A reader may wish to reject any individual item on it as in appropriate for his or her particular situation, but it is a valuable guide to both self-appraisal and organizational appraisal. There are 371 aphorisms or collections of aphorisms in this book. From my experience of more than 40 years in the workforce, the 40 most valueable are as follows: #1. Always tell the truth to employees and your boss. It's easier to remember what you said. #3. "Just because you're a supervisor doesn't mean you have a license to be a jerk." #7. "Beware those who ask for feedback. They are really asking for validation. #20. "Be more results-driven than methodology driven." #23. "Trust your instincts. There is a reason why people value your experience. You should as well." #29. "In your written work, say something meaningful in the first sentence." #31. "Too much resistance to a new system or change probably means there's something wrong with it. Employees will usually act in the organization's best interest. Listen to them." #43. "Doing a great job often means you'll get more work. Understand this and use it to your advantage." #57. "Work gravitates to the most competent." #71. "Never confuse making people happy with what needs to be done." #86. "Hope is a required ingredient for success." #95. "Progress is made when the choices that are presented are limited and clearly defined...." #120. "When the outcome of a meeting is to have another meeting, it has been a lousy meeting." #124. "Start with a rough draft as soon as possible and fill in the details as you go. You'll find the end product will be similar to the original intention." #125. "To what end? is always a good question to asky at the beginning of a big project." #130. "Never give up on projects until they are implemented." #140. "The goal is not to be busy. The goal is to contribute something of worth that will make you glow." #154. "Worry about the big things, and the little things will fall into place." #181. "There are no such things as communicationns, turnover, or morale problems. They are symptoms of other problems--usually autocratic managemetn. Don't try to fix the symptoms. Fix the problems." #183. "Never be embarrassed about where you grew up, where you went to school, how you look, your name, or anything else that it's too late to fix. Be proud of who you are." #192. "Next steps from meetings must always be clear." #201. "Casey Stengel said some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, and some people say what happened. Be in the first category." #213. "Learn what the labor movement is all about, how it's changing, and what it means to your industry. Be unbiased as you learn." #214. "Spend time understanding what "real work" is. like working on an assembly line or driving trucks. It will ground you in reality." #233. The most effective suggestion system is the one where the CEO puts a sign over his or her door that says "Suggestion Box." #243. "Organization change will not occur unless employees believe it is in their best interest." #250. "When giving a talk, think of what people will remember. And that's only one or two things." #261. "Pessimistic futurists are to be ignored." #277. "Understand the concept before spending lots of time on the mechanics and the details." #281. An abundance of worker's compensation issues either means people are getting hurt or people don';t want to go back--or both. #283. "'Career path' implies a well-worn route. The truth is that you make your own way running around the organizational bushes and brambles." #296. "Listen to field people." #297. "Technology eventually evens out. Compete on service and talented people." #318. "'Find a passion and follow it' is all the career advice you'll ever need." #322. "Ask yourself, 'What can I be an expert in?' and become one." #327. "Bite off more than you can chew and chew it well." #331. "Facilitate or lead meetings with a point of veiw about what needs to be done and how we get there. Be open to changing your mind." #367. "Convert training into experience as soon as possible." This is an excellent book for someone new to working in or with a business organization of any size. It is also an excellent book for mid-career people looking for a checklist on how they are doing, and a general guide both to doing things better and doing better things. Finally, it is an excellent books for those suffering from burnout, lack of focus, or overwork.

*

What Would Maciavelli Do? by Stanley Bing

With this book, businessman and Fortune Magazine columnist Stanley Bing began a long and continuing career of attacking outrageous bosses and managerial practices. There is no shortage of material in these categories, and this book is a good introduction to how rich the field of managerial abuse is. This is not a book for true Machiavelli fans. Those who want to savor the finely nuanced distinctions and advices of Machiavelli's THE PRINCE will not be able to do so here. Indeed Bing delivers a classic put-down to the man he calls "the master": "the fact that it's very difficult to understand anything the master says gets in the way of our ability to walk, straight and secure, down his path." What we have dissected here is not Machiavelli the sagacious adviser and pioneer of the field of Political Science, but Machiavelli as a cultural icon standing for the extension of personal wealth and power to the exclusion of all other considerations. "To live true to the vision of the master, we must be as selfish, narcisstic, manipulative, driven and creative in getting what we want as we can be, not just in our important business actions, but where it really counts: in our hearts. You can do it. This book will help." A true Machiavellian, in the author's sense of the term, would always be unpredictable, and thus would gain the advantage of keeping everyone else off balance. In love with his destiny, always at war, for the most part a paranoid freak, he would think BIG, acquire his neighbor, move like a shark, eating as he goes, killing people's careers, but only if he could feel good about himself afterwards. A true Machiavellian would fire his own mother if necessary, make a virtue out of his obnoxiousness, be way upbeat, be satisfied with nobody but himself, embrace his own madness, do what he feels like doing, say what he feels like saying, delegate all the crummy tasks except the ones that he enjoys, respond poorly to criticism, perennially carry grudges, lie when necessary, be proud of his cruelty and see it as strength, permanently cripple those who disappoint him, torture people until they were only too happy to destroy themselves, feast on other people's discord, make you fear for your life, be loyal to people who could put up with him, have no patience for anybody, never say he's sorry, have no conscience to speak of, scream at people a lot, establish and maintain a psychotic level of control, would eat to kill, and would have fun with his career and his life. The author drifts in and out of satire and sober evaluation. His concluding paragraph summarizes much of the book: "Good may often be its own--and only--reward in this competitive, malevolent, and unfair world. This may be most true in business, where the unsympathetic aspects of human character are compensated most lavishly. But evil does have its limitations, ones that even the biggest, baddest Machiavellis around should keep in mind." This book would be a great supplement to courses on business ethics and courses on management. Its tongue in cheek evocations of Saddam Hussein, Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, and Caligua grab attention and serve as a warning to the those humor-deprived people who might view sections of this book as a serious guide. Its graphs--based on no hard information whatsoever--demonstrate serious points. The "normal world view" is that the vast majority of people are friends or potential friends while the "Machiavelli world view" is that the vast majority of people are enemies or potential enemies. "The bigger you are" the "less you like" criticism. "Performance" is greater "with ruthless competition" than without it. The Machiavelli personality is high on fear, aggression, self, and golf to the exclusion of conscience and hobbies and to the marginalization of family and friends. The greater the control a Machiavelli has, the more fun he has. The joys of retirement--golf and not being bothered by idiots--wear off after a couple of years. This book, in short, could be retitled "How to Succeed in Business by Failing as a Human Being." In the author's words, "only individuals who are monmaniacal and driven to the exclusion of all else stand a chance of rising to the top." The price of success, the author says, "is to adjust your personality to remove as much conscience as is possible." The price of getting to the top, the author makes clear, is not worth it by the rules of the modern day Machiavellis.

*

Confessions of a Civil Servant by Bob Stone

Very few longtime civil servants write their memoirs. This book shows that this is a mistake. The author makes the every day conflicts of civil service life live and breathe and shows how they can be overcome to serve great purposes in the public interest. Introduction writer Tom Peters quotes Peter Drucker's aphorism that "Ninety percent of what we call 'management' consists of making it difficult to get things done." He produces "12 Lessons in Stone" which summarize his approaches. Stone used (1) Demos and Models; (2) Heroes; (3) Stories and Storytellers; (4) Chroniclers; (5) Cheerleaders and Recognition; (6) New Language; (7) Seekers (of change); (8) Protectors (of innovators); (9) Support Groups; (10) End Runs (around hierarchies)/Pull (from outsiders) Strategy; (11) Field/"Real People" Focus, and (12) Speed to push his goals forward. The author himself describes his goals as "decentralization, deregulation, and devolution of authority in a value-centered organization." These were goals gradually developed after years of frustration mixed with achievement in the Defense Department, to which he had been recruited by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis in 1969. He quickly clashed with the centralization of all authority for planning imposed during the seven plus years of Secretary Robert McNamara. His first work was to research the question of how big the army should be. He led successful efforts to change the evaluation formula from on tons of artillery ammunition fired times lethal area per ton to one that applied informed military judgements to the weapons on both sides, what the army dubbed the Weighted Effect Indicators/Weighted Unit Value method. The effect of this change in formulas was to demonstrate the feasibility of NATO surpassing the Warsaw Pact in effectiveness, something later accomplished in the Carter and Reagan Administrations. From this effort, the author learned the power of asking naieve questions, such as "Why? What's that mean? Says who?" The author subsequently went on to become assistant secretary of defense for installations, where he rapidly shrunk regulations and improved the quality of life for residents of military bases. This raised hackles which put him under a glass ceiling for awhile, but he recovered with the Clinton/Gore election in 1992, when he got appointed to the National Performance Review staff, and ultimately became its leader in reinventing government. This book demonstrates his struggles and his triumphs and is essential reading for anyone seeking to aid in the cause of responsive government. "Some people look for things that went wrong and try to fix them," he said. "I look for things that went right and try to build upon them." He called himself "Mr. ReGo" (Reinventing Government) and "Energizer in Chief." His critics had undoubtedly had other words for him, but this book is a very clear record of his vision and accomplishments. It is an extremely useful introduction to the whole field of Reinventing Government, with its orientation of customer service and customer satisfaction and the eliminations of excess regulation and bureaucratic red tape. It is one man's anecdotal summary, but it provides a firm basis for more rigorous empiricial investigations by others. It is a call to action as well as a memoir, and as such it will likely be heeded by dedicated professionals for many years to come.

*

50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know: Reclaiming American Patriotism
by Mickey Z Edition: Paperback








Where There Is Injustice, Resistance is Possible, November 19, 2006
Mickey Z is a dissenting American radical who deeply admires diverse forms of passionate dissent. He is mainstream enough to cite legislation passed as a result of radical protest as a vindication of that protest, but his general vision of government is that of a passive agent, awaiting the next protest demonstration to get a sense of direction. The theme of this book is best stated in a quotation from Barbra Ehreneich. "Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots," she says. This a book for the age of soundbites and hyperlinks. It provides an introduction to many diverse individuals and social movements, so that virtually everyone will learn something from it. And it deals with Bob Dylan's complaint about history: "I've never seen a history book that tells me how anybody feels," he said. One of the few Presidents in this book to earn a mention--and perhaps the only President to be praised for an action taken--is Chester A. Arthur who--it turns out--at age 24 was a pioneering civil rights attorney representing Lizzie Jennings, the Rosa Parks of 1854, who sued and won after being denied admission to a New York City horse drawn carriage. Arthur's representation of Jennings is called a "classic 'who knew' situation. " It certainly justifies taking another look at Arthur. Another surprising fact--for me, at least--was the deep passion and antagonisms resulting from Jack Johnson, an African-American, being named heavyweight champion of the world in 1908: an uproar that perhaps slowed down black admission to other professional sports. And then, in a section on Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers, there is this cogent political analysis from key Richard Nixon Presidential aide H.R. Haldeman on June 14, 1969: To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of all the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of Presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it is wrong, and the President can be wrong. I also like Martin Luther King's telegram to farmworker's leader Cesar Chavez,after a United Farmworker organizing victory, which puts King's eloquence, profundity, and coalition building on display all at once: The fight for equality must be fought on many fronts--in urban slums, in the sweatshops of the factories and fields. Our separate struggles are really one--a struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity. You and your valiant fellow workers have demonstrated your commitment to righting grievous wrongs forced upon exploited people. We are together with you in spirit and it determination that our dreams for a better tomorrow will be realized. In summary, this is a provocative and stimulating little book which should encourage interest in American history, provide new insights to many readers, and provide no shortage of inspirational material. Because of ideological biases, which give violent protests a stature they do not deserve, it is less than the sum of its parts. But many of the parts are very, very good. Politicians seeking to keep the attention of audiences, columnists seeking to say memorable things, and teachers seeking to counter student apathy all can find useful material here.






Vito Marcantonio (Suny Series in American Labor History)
by Gerald MeyerEdition: Paperback







Vito Marcantonio and the Inherent Compromises of American Radicalism, November 18, 2006
Congressman Vito Marcantonio was once one of the most famous and most infamous political figures in America. Richard Nixon won a Senate seat in 1950 by linking his Democratic opponent's record to that of Marcantonio, and Marcantonio was harassed by fellow members of Congress and the media alike. He is likely the only member of Congress who ever served as a lawyer for the Communist Party, and the only member of Congress who relied on the Communist Party as a key component of his political machine. Yet the Communist Party was only one element of his electoral coalition. The Republican Party was the party that got him started (he was a protege of Republican Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who set an example for Marcantonio by once winning election to Congress on the Socialist Party ticket when the Republicans would not back him), and the Republican Party nominated Marcantonio in 1934, 1936, 1938, 1940, 1942, and 1944. Marcantonio only lost the Republican Party nomination narrowly in 1946 at the beginning of the Cold War when he was elected to Congress on the Democratic and American Labor Party tickets. By 1948, the law had been changed to make it impossible for him to seek the Republican and Democratic nominations while serving as the leader of the American Labor Party, but he won a plurality on the American Labor Party ticket standing alone. In 1950, the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal parties all nominated the same candidate, James Donovan, who defeated Marcantonio by a 4 to 3 margin, 49,448 to 36,095. As the statewide leader of the American Labor Party from 1941 on, and as an active leader of the American Labor Party from 1937 on, Marcantonio gained the power to cross-endorse Democratic and Republican candidates. He used this power to get Republicans elected in otherwise unfriendly districts, giving the Republican Party extra state legislative power in return for giving his own American Labor Party--and the Communists who somewhat influenced it--a national spokesman. The author presents exhaustive evidence of Marcantonio's deep passion for the welfare of his poverty stricken Italian-American, Puerto Rican, and African American constituents, a concern which made his office a model of constituent service and advocacy for the poor and discriminated against. Income from Marcantonio's law practice went to both supplementing his constituent service and his political campaigns. He died at age 52 in 1954 with less than $10,000 in assets. The author discusses at length the symbiotic relationship between Marcantonio and the Republican Party--and to a lesser degree, Marcantonio and the Democratic Party--but does not fully investigate the full implications of that alliance. We do not learn for instance how American Labor Party Republicans elected to the New York legislature used their power to advance or to thwart the public policy goals that Marcantonio pushed in Washington. This is a book that should be read for historical perspective by anyone pondering the past and potential future role of the Green Party in American politics, or third party politics in general. This book also sheds valuable light on the generally underreported story of the rise of Americans of Italian descent from poverty to solid middle class status, the early and since abandoned efforts to classify them as a racial minority analagous to African Americans, the development of bilingual education and other educational innovations of Marcantonio's friend, neighbor, and mentor Leonard Covello, the struggles for civil rights before Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Montgomery Bus Boycott a year and a few months after Marcantonio's death, and the role and limitations of political machines as social and political forces in New York City history. At a time in which Joe Lieberman has won election to the Senate as a third-party Republican-backed candidate, when former New York Mayor Rudolph Giulani--Marcantonio's polar opposite in many ways-- appears poised to be the first major American Presidential candidate of Italian descent, when the Green Party struggles against constant allegations that it's operational goals are to elect Republicans, the story of Vito Marcantonio and his long-dead allies and opponents has a surprising and growing continuing relevance.






Who Runs For The Legislature?
by Gary F. MoncriefEdition: Paperback






Why Legislative Candidates Are Scarce, Inexperienced, and Often Unsuccessful, August 20, 2006
All over America, people complain about politicians. And all over America, politicians run for re-election unopposed. The three authors of this book--political scientists long interested in state legislatures--attempt to resolve this paradox by focusing on both the long-term factors leading to unopposed candidates and interviews with candidates running for the legislature as non-incumbents. 90% of incumbent legislators running for re-election win, the authors say. 1/3 of legislative seats in the U.S. are filled without opposition. Therefore, in a the formal sense of accountability being due impending contested elections, many incumbent legislators are not accountable to the public. The authors do not discuss informal but powerful means of accountability such as legislator/constituent and legislator/party contacts or media coverage or interest group pressures in any significant detail. As a long-term legislator running for re-election unopposed in a general election for the third time out of 18 successful candidacies, I am fascinated by the issues involved in this paradox. But I know what the answer is in many cases, including my own. Incumbents who run unopposed tend be hard workers. Yesterday--on a Saturday in August, for instance--I kept up with the news in newspapers and online, met with a constituent complaining about her low level of Social Security Disability income and committed my office to help her and her sister who has a similar problem, gave a newspaper interview after initially answering the reporter's questions by email, had discussions with two local business owners and a community leader, wrote a blog entry on my efforts at the National Conference of State Legislatures on behalf of internet network neutrality, and responded to one of the blog commenters. The work I do does not have the physical danger of being a policeman or a construction worker or a soldier in wartime, the level of economic sacrifice of being a social worker, the stress of being a small business person competing with Walmart, or the economic risks of being a daytrader. Nevertheless, it is real work leading to real achievements in the public interest. Directly on the point the authors raise, it is work that defends me from the accusations of a prospective challenger that I am not doing anything. My last general election challenger got 20% of the vote; my last on ballot primary challenger got 13% of the vote; my only write-in primary challenger got 5% of the vote. I discuss my record in some detail because my victory percentages are typical of the point the authors make: opposition candidates often do not want to run races that they cannot win. The political term for such candidates who carefully weigh the odds before proceeding is strategic candidates. The authors conclude that, at least in their sample, women were more likely to be cautious strategic candidates than men, but many, many men are in the cautious strategic candidate category too. The authors discuss the now universal and increasingly controversial pattern of trageting races that appear to be "winnable" for extra resources and drying up resources for races that appear to be unwinnable. Targeting both focuses resources and encourages bipartisanship simultaneously. It is a prime cause of unopposed candidacies because it is widely perceived that a candidate not targeted by his or her party has no realistic chance of winning. The Democratic Party's leading critic of longterm targeting practices is Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean. Dean's views may be influenced to a degree by his experience--referred to in this book--as the assistant minority leader in the Vermont House of Representatives, charged with aiding in the recruitment of legislative candidates as part of a long-term successful drive to create a Democratic majority in the Vermont House of Representatives. If this book is re-written for a second edition, the authors may want to give added focus to Dean's role as a Vermont candidate recruiter. (I confess to having been a Dean delegate at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and a backer of Dean's candidacy for Democratic National Chairman.) The authors find that candidates who do run for office fall into various categories. They often have less political experience than one would expect. Of their sample, 76.3% had never run for the legislature before, 75.2% do not currently hold any elective office, 90.3% do not currently hold any appointive office, 91.2% had never served on legislative staff, and 39.9% had never even held a political party position. Most of the candidates did have in common work on political campaigns. But 37.1% had not been active in federal campaigns, 34.1% had not been active in statewide campaigns, 26.6% had not been active in local campaigns, and 28.5% had not been active in state legislative campaigns. 27.8% decided to run with 2 months of the primary, 28.9% decided to run within 3 to 5 months before the primary, 23.5% decided to run 6 to 12 months before the primary, and 19.8% decided to run more than a year before the primary. 32.1% said running was entirely their idea; 46.6% had already thought about it when someone else encouraged them to run; and 21.3% had not seriously thought about it until someone else suggested it. 92.9% discussed their candidacy with family members before announcing. 69.3% discussed their candidacy with officials in the local party. Others consulted as part of the decision-making process include local elected officials and leaders in the state legislature (51.9% each), officials in the state party (50.5%) co-workers or business partners (49.4%), friends or neighborhood acquaintances (36.1%), friends or acquaintances in a service organization (33.2%), friends or acquaintances from church (28.7%), members of an interest group or association (19.4%), and others (9.3%). Those challenging incumbents in primaries discuss their decision with members of a greater variety of groups than do general election challengers, although members of both groups speak to only an average of five groups or individuals before making their decision to run. The top five sources of encouragement to run were officials in the local party (46.1%), local elected officials (33.5%),leaders in the state legislature (33.3%), officials in the state party (32.9%), and family members (32.7%). But some received encouragement to run from friends or acquaintances in the neighborhood (22.7%), co-workers or business partners (19.0%), friends or acquaintances in a service organization (17.7%), members of an interest group or association (13.6%), friends or acquaintances from church (13.1%), or other sources (7.8%). Despite a serious erosion of power over the years, party organizations still reign supreme in the area of recruiting and encouraging candidates. The candidates, the authors say, are pretty much normal folks--with the differences that they are likely to have above average civic involvement and political campaign involvement, to have above average incomes, and to be empty nesters at the time of their candidacy. They enjoy many aspects of campaigning--especially door to door campaigning--but intensely dislike fundraising. They are horrified by the viciousness of name-calling and character assassination that they are sometimes the victims of. They often--but not always--decide the experience of running for office was too frustrating and emotionally draining to be considered in the future. Political scientists will likely find the original survey data and review of the literature to be the most important parts of this book. But future candidates themselves will likely be most interested in the profiles of some of the candidates who were interviewed, their election outcomes, and samples of their campaign literature. Promises to listen to voters were the most frequently made. From a politician's point of view the most useful document in the book is unsuccessful legislative candidate Dave Custer's Things to Do Differently. They are, in streamlined form: (1)Qualify your answers on questionnaires and refer them to your position paper on the subject where possible; (2) Examine your issues and prioritize them; (3) Don't wrote off any newspaper endorsements; (4) Make a detailed plan to walk the district, and stick to it; (5) Try to find a catch phrase that describes what you want to do on an issue; (6) Write a position paper for each of your major issues; (7) Tell all your friends and coworkers that you are running for office; (8) If you can afford positive things to aid your campaign, do them whether they offend your sensitivities or not; (9) Use full color and a picture of yourself on every piece of literature you can; (10) Move to the political center on all issues where you can do so in good conscience; (11) Find a real blunt SOB to serve on your committee and criticize you when necessary; (12) Always have the outline of a speech in your pocket; (13) Videotape and re-videotape your canned speech and keep practicing improvement of the versions you watch; (14) Leave to your supporters the watching of the audience when you speak, and listen to their views of what works and doesn't work; (15) Be prepared to work harder than you have ever had to before. The idealism and civic dedication of many of the interviewed candidates comes through in this book, as does the idealism of the authors. Ironically, many of the candidates focused on are such hard workers, and such all-around good people, that their victories will likely lead ultimately to their running unopposed sometime in the future. Candidates willing to run, the authors note, are not professional politicians, and are in short supply. "The kinds of persons who run for the legislature are not the ones who spend every evening sitting in front of the television set," the authors conclude. "....It is our hope that readers will begin to see candidates as real people who undertake a difficult but vitally important role and will come to appreciate the effort that candidates put forth in running for election." The authors achieve this objective. If the political system does not always get "the best possible participants" for state legislatures playing "an increasingly important role in public policymaking," no one can that the authors did not do what they could to both straighten out the political maze that candidates must run through and humanize the candidates simultaneously.






The Airway to Everywhere: A History of All American Aviation, 1937-1953
by Walter David LewisEdition: Hardcover






How An Idea To Benefit Small Communities Become An Airline, July 18, 2006
Lytle S. Adams, a descendant of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, clearly saw that smaller communitiies were at a substantial disadvantage in the emerging field of airmail. The process of landing and take-off of airplanes was so time-consuming that it limited the number of stops an airplane could make to the larger communities with larger airports. So he developed a plan to solve the problem, a problem which was similar to the difficulty of bringing electricity to rural areas (solved by the Rural Electric Administration and the cooperatives it spawned), bringing transportation to rural areas (solved by the U.S. Interstate Highway network), bringing television to rural areas (solved by the laying of cable to them). His plan involved technical ingenuity: the development of a device to hook on to an overhead cable where containers of mail would be be placed, so that mail could be picked up on regularly defined roots without a plane taking the trouble to land to take-off. His idea gained political backing in the Roosevelt Administration and from the New Deal Democrats in Congress, because it fit in with their strategies to integrate isolated communities into the mainstream of American life. Through Roosevelt's daughter who had married into the DuPont family, he met Richard C. DuPont, an aviation enthusiast, who had the money and the skill to develop Adams' idea into a functioning company called All American Aviation. The Adams-DuPont relationship had tragic personal overtones, although it was extremely productive in the long run. DuPont did not give Adams the financial rewards he hoped for, added insult to injury by reworking Adams' technology to make it more effective, and ultimately bought him out as the relationship became increasingly bitter and mutually distrustful. And DuPont's dynamic corporate leadership--he had become head of the corporation at the age of 28-- led him to be offered to take over the U.S. Army's glider program as a special assistant to Army Air Forces Chief Henry H. "Hap" Arnold. In this position, DuPont was testing one of the new motorless airships, when the craft fell into a spin, his parachute malfunctioned, and he fell to his death at the age of 33. During World War II, the company's no-landing pickup system hit its peak in utilization, but it failed to make money and relied on governmental subsidies. After World War II, it faced the additional problem of steadily improving highways, which allowed mail to be picked up faster and cheaper without the no-landing pickup system. With its back to the wall, All-American Aviation was offered a chance to become a passenger airline serving new or under-utilized routes. It leaped at this chance for financial salvation, and evolved over time into Alleheny Airlines and then U.S. Air. The strengths of this book are many: detailed explanations of technology and technological changes, clear explanations of business strategy and the regulatory system, and concise explanations of both the internal politics of the company and the politics of Congress and the executive branch. This book is a great introduction to the field of airline regulation, a valuable addition to anyone's understanding of Pennsylvania business history, and a compelling case study of the importance and the limits of technological innovation. The concise nature of the book--and its technological orientation--means that some intriguing political angles go uncovered. The irony of a descendant of rivals of two of 19th Century America's leading Democrats--party founder Thomas Jefferson and and party definer Andrew Jackson--relying on New Deal regulation and Democratic Party allies to start his business goes unmentioned. And the political analysis of the company's large base of Congressional support is matter of fact and unquestioning of motives and rationales. Virtually no one who reads this book will ever look at the history of American air travel the same way again. This book is an inspiring example for those who seek to solve societal problems through business, and those who seek to grow new businesses from scratch. It offers a clear warning of the dangers--as well as the opportunities--posed by the search for venture capital.












John Kerry's Alternative Vision for America, July 14, 2006
"I don't consider myself a policy wonk," John Kerry writes, "but I was brought up to care about big issues and think for myself, not hire others to do the thinking for me." While preparing a detailed statement of his views in the middle of a Presidential campaign "is obviously a task in which I relied on the generous help of many talented and trustworthy advisors," it is clear that Kerry has attempted with a large degree of success to integrate their recommendations, his record and his life into a coherent whole. A book that relied more heavily on autobiography would have been more compelling. But Kerry, in what might have been his Achilles Heel in the 2004 general election, takes the idealistic position that "For my part, I intend to run a presidential campaign organized around a contest of ideas, values, and policies, rather than a clash of personalities or a war between political tribes." This approach clearly helped him get the Democratic nomination when major rivals Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt, and Joseph Lieberman became mired in controversies, other rivals were not able to develop a broad enough appeal to become serious contenders, and serious contender John Edwards failed to match Kerry's breadth of appeal. The fundamental theme of this book, as one could guess from the title, is that John Kerry feels called to public service by a combination of life experiences and family background (he is the son of a diplomat father and a civic activist mother), and that he wishes to call others to public service as well. It was my thought in 2003-2004 that Howard Dean was the best of an excellent field of candidates. I filed for Delegate to the Democratic National Convention from Pennsylvania on behalf of Howard Dean the day he lost his make or break Wisconsin primary and stopped actively campaigning, and I became the only Dean delegate candidate in the Mid-Atlantic States to actually get elected. After Dean's formal withdrawal and release of his delegates, I made Pennsylvania's convention vote for Kerry unanimous and contributed his campaign. Kerry grew on me as a candidate in 2004, and he grows on me again in carefully reading this book. Kerry clearly conveys that he is a serious man with serious ideas for leading our country. He has written a book of continuing relevance for the years ahead, whether or not he seeks a future Presidential nomination. This is a book that can be utilized by anyone with a deep interest in Presidential politics, the future choices our country faces, and the differences between the Democratic and Republican parties. Because it covers a lot of subjects briefly, it is a book that can usefully be read sitting near a computer, so that one can use a search engine to learn more about whatever issues one finds intriguing. Kerry's first chapter--Why I am Running for President--sets out his general philosophy and an outline of his goals. "Democrats and Republicans must also take a long look at our recent tendency to compete in a politics of personal self-interest," he writes. "One of our central goals is to convince people to think beyond their own selfish interests and accept the responsibilities of citizenship and the mission of spreading freedom and democracy." Perhaps offering a counterpoint to Richard Nixon--who famously wrote a book entitled Six Crises--Kerry offers six challenges. These are The Challenge of Protecting America and Promoting Its Values and Interests, The Challenge of Expanding Our Common Wealth, The Challenge of Creating World-Class Schools, The Challenge of Creating a Modern Health-Care System, The Challenge of Defending the Environment and Achieving Energy Independence, and The Challenge of Reviving Democracy and Citizenship. His proposals are less than a detailed blueprint--the sheer number of them and the book's 200 pages would not allow for that--but much, much more than a general expression of concern. His chapter on health care, a perennial concern of mine in 33 years of service in the Pennsylvania legislature, for instance, recommends "a proposal that breaks new ground in the health-insurance debate by simultaneously addressing three challenges that are central to modernizing our health care system: first and foremost, bringing costs under control; offering access to affordable coverage, with plenty of choices, to every American; and guaranteeing that every child in America will have health care insurance." His goals have subgoals. For instance, he favors health insurance cost-reduction strategies such as having the federal government pay for 3/4 of catastrophic health insurance claims (those claims of $50,000 and over), "preventive care and programs to promote better overall health," public disclosure of incentives for benefit managers and doctors to prescribe individual drugs, expansion of generic drug offerings by plugging loopholes in patent law, letting states negotiate better prices for consumers by bargaining for bulk rates for their citizens, screening out frivolous medical malpractice claims, encouraging the use of new information technologies, expanding the use of patient record computerization, and reducing medical errors. This is certainly a useful place to begin for anyone who, like myself, is interested in having my state seek to comprehensively reform health care. In this book, he is not content to issue laundry lists. We see some of his persuasive power. He is an advocate--generally understated--for the positions he seeks. I cannot say I am unmoved by his advocacy. His strong passion for national service, for instance, has convinced me that the service learning requirements for students in Maryland--and the service learning options in many other states--is probably worth emulating in Pennsylvania. Kerry looks to help build America as a place "where everybody does serve, because there is work for all to do, a place for all to serve, and no reason at all to stay on the sidelines." "I see an America where, in a seamless web of service and concern," Kerry says, "we offer Americans the challenge and the chance to do their duty--and an America were Americans, in turn, step forward and give something back." In a Presidential campaign, voters are encouraged to engage in comparison shopping. Whether one favored Kerry or not in 2004, his book is an articulate and detailed exposition of his views, and is well worth reading by concerned people throughout the political spectrum who want a better country and are looking for specific directions in which to travel.






The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy
by Lisa DugganEdition: Paperback







A Critique of Neoliberalism and the Divided Resistance to It, July 4, 2006
Lisa Duggan is intensely interested in American politics, and has found political life in the United States to have been "such a wild ride, offering moments of of dizzying hope along with long stretches of political depression." She is grateful for "many ideas about political depression, and how to survive it," and she has written a excellent short book that helps make sense of many widely divergent political trends. Her book is well-summarized by its concluding paragraph, which I am breaking up into additional paragraphs for greater clarity: "Now at this moment of danger and opportunity, the progressive left is mobilizing against neoliberalism and possible new or continuing wars. "These mobilizations might become sites for factional struggles over the disciplining of troops, in the name of unity at a time of crisis and necessity. But such efforts will fail; the troops will not be disciplined, and the disciplinarians will be left to their bitterness. "Or, we might find ways of think, speaking, writing and acting that are engaged and curious about "other people's" struggles for social justice, that are respectfully affiliative and dialogic rather than pedagogical, that that look for the hopeful spots to expand upon, and that revel in the pleasure of political life. "For it is pleasure AND collective caretaking, love AND the egalitarian circulation of money--allied to clear and hard-headed political analysis offered generously--that will create the space for a progressive politics that might both imagine and create...something worth living for." The titles of her four chapters--Downsizing Democracy, The Incredible Shrinking Public, Equality, Inc., Love AND Money--summarize her argument. She expected upon her high school graduation in 1972, she writes, that "active and expanding social movements seemed capable of ameliorating conditions of injustice and inequality, poverty, war and imperialism....I had no idea I was not perched at a great beginning, but rather at a denouement, as the possibilities for progressive social change encountered daunting historical setbacks beginning in 1972...." Her target is neoliberalism, which she sees as a broadly controlling corporate agenda which seeks world domination, privatization of governmental decision-making, and marginalization of unions, low-income people, racial and sexual minorities while presenting to the public a benign and inclusive facade. Neo-liberalism seeks to upwardly distribute money, power, and status, she writes, while progressive movements seek to downwardly distribute money, power, and status. The unity of the downwardly distribution advocates should match the unity of the upwardly distribution advocates in order to be effective, she writes. Her belief is that all groups threatened by the neoliberal paradigm should unite against it, but such unity is threatened by endless differences of perspectives. By minutely analyzing many of the differences, and expanding understanding of diverse perspectives, she tries to remove them as obstacles towards people and organizations working together to achieve both unique and common aims. This is good book for those interested in the history and current significance of numerous progressive ideological arguments. It is a good book for organizers of umbrella organizations and elected officials who work with diverse social movements. By articulating points of difference, the author depersonalizes them and aids in overcoming them. Those who are interested in electoral strategies, however, will be disappointed. The interrelationship between neoliberalism as a governing ideology and neoliberalism as a political strategy is not discussed here. It is my view that greater and more focused and inclusive political organizing has the potential to win over a good number of the those who see support of neoliberalism's policy initiatives as a base-broadening tactic more than as a sacred cause. "There is nothing stable or inevitable in the alliances supporting neoliberal agendas in the U.S. and globally," she writes. "The alliances linking neoliberal global economics, and conservative and right-wing domestic politics, and the culture wars are provisional--and fading...." Reading this book adds to one's understanding of labels, and political and intellectual distinctions. It has too much jargon for my taste, but not so much as to be impenetrable. It is an excellent summarization and synthesis of the goals, ideologies, and histories of numerous social movements, both famous and obscure.






My Declaration of Independence
by James M. JeffordsEdition: Hardcover





How the Republican Party Lost A Leading Moderate Voice, June 24, 2006
As a Pennsylvania state legislative leader, I have suffered a demotion from Majority Whip to Minority Caucus Chairman for the past twelve years because several Democrats switched to the Republican Party in 1993 and 1994 and turned the Pennsylvania House over to the Republicans. Two of those converts were then defeated by Democratic nominees, but two others were not, and having the majority helped the Pennsylvania Republicans gain other seats. So I read the story of Jeffords' abandonment of the party that elected him, and his turning control of the U.S. Senate over to the Democrats, with a sense of having seen this before. Policy differences lead to personal confrontations and personal slights which, in turn, raise new questions about partisan commitments. The chance to play a starring role in the new party seems preferable to being an outcast in the old party. The change is made, and old alliances and friendships are sundered, while new ones are made. Running for re-election after a party switch can be tricky, but Jeffords, with four years left on his Senate term, "doubted" that he would be running again in 2006. In fact, he did not run again this year. With re-election clearly not a top priority for him--"it was the furthest thing from my thoughts at that point," he says--a major obstacle to switching parties was removed. The Jeffords switch came in May, 200l. George Bush had been elected President in key respects by a 5 to 4 U.S. Supreme Court decision stopping the counting of votes in Florida where Bush held a lead of only a little more than 500 votes. The Democrats had gained four seats in the U.S. Senate in the 2000 elections, and the parties were now evenly divided in the Senate. It seemed quite possible that the Democrats had a future of surging ahead. Further, although he does not mention it, his home state clearly was trending Democratic, with Howard Dean as Governor, Patrick Leahy as the other U.S. Senator, and Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist who often sided with the Democrats, repeatedly elected with Democratic support as an Independent. For some reason, Sanders' name is never mentioned in this book; in 2006, he was the winning Democratic-backed candidate to succeed Jeffords. Jeffords had leverage in the budget negotiations, and was determined to use it. He decided his top priority, as chair of the Senate committee dealing with education, was giving new life to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) by increasing special education funding by removing $200 billion a year from President Bush's tax cut and paying "40 percent of the national average per public expenditure for each disabled child's education." This formulation comes out to about 20% of total national special education expenses. Jeffords was motivated by personal values and constituent accountability in pushing his educational program. He did not share the belief that tax cuts for the wealthy were the highest Republican priority. "But how our children lag behind their international peers strikes me as a bigger long-term threat to our national security and stability than the rate of taxation paid on multimillion dollar estates," he writes. "In my mind, the education we give to all our children is far more important than the size of the fortunes left to a fortunate few...." "But tax cuts had not been what animated the people of Vermont I talked to on the campaign trail in the fall," he says. "They seemed to be far more concerned with meeting human needs." Ultimately, the Senate Republicans were able to regain the Senate control in the 2002 and 2004 elections, returning Jeffords to minority status and reducing the significance of his action. This book makes clear Jefford's enjoyment of being in the limelight, even though he was somewhat uncomfortable at times there. I cannot help but believe that the "Who Lost Jeffords?" question was likely a contributing factor in Trent Lott's being removed as Senate majority leader after the 2004 elections. This is a good short book for anyone interested in the differences between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate, the history of Vermont Senators, or the personal dynamics of the U.S. Senate, to read carefully. Jeffords clearly identifies with the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Vermont Senators George Aiken and Ralph Flanders, critics of the War in Vietnam and Sen. Joseph McCarthy respectively. It is the modern Republicans he has difficulty with. "There was an admixture of religion, a sense of stewardship, and plain common sense," he writes. "....(T)he issues that gave birth to the Republican Party are still among our most important challenges. Will we strengthen public education and the ladder of opportunity it provides? Or will be decide through our funding decisions that this is not a very high federal priority? Will we leave the land better than we found it for our descendants a hundred and fifty years hence? Or will we be blinded by the ensuing crises and leave it despoiled? Will we accord full rights to all Americans? Or will we continue to condone the denial of the protections of our laws to those who are gay? "It is clear what I hope for. This is the kind of Washington I hope to forge with what little influence is available to me. We have crying needs in our society that we must tackle rather than ignore. And we can never even begin if we are consumed by trying to take petty partisan advantage at every opportunity. The American people will not stand for it." When the Republican Party lost Jeffords, they lost a lot. He is typical of some voters. And I believe listening intently to his views would add a great deal to the Bush Administration and any successor administration. The negative, petty, and personal attacks on Jeffords that helped motivate him to leave the Republican Party are a case of a the quest for power overwhelming more lasting and important factors.





Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
by Richard RortyEdition: Paperback







A Plea to Work for Governmental Action to the Academic Left, June 24, 2006
Richard Rorty is a prominent philosopher and academic with deep family roots in the anti-communist efforts of Norman Thomas' Socialist Party, the societal amelioration of the New Deal, and the Social Gospel movement. He is appalled by the failure of advocates of continued governmental involvement in societal problem-solving to win enough elections to keep political progress moving ahead during a time of ever-increasing globalization and general income stagnation. He sees a vibrant Academic Left--which he admits has valid critiques of the reformist Left with which he most identifies--but he is appalled that its members have little interest in developing workable programs for societal betterment or engaging in active campaigns for change or the inner workings of government. He is not David Horowitz. His attacks on the Academic Left are meant to persuade its members, not to rally support of others against them. He praises academic teachings against sadism, bullying, racism, sexism, and homophobia--but feels that merely dealing with how people relate to each other is an inadequate response to the many institutional failings of American society. He describes the Academic Left's abstention from wider political conflict as to the economic direction of our country as "an inability to do two things at once." "Sometime in the Seventies, " he writes, "American middle-class idealism went into a stall. Under Presidents Carter and Clinton, the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from unions and any mention of redistribution, and moving into a sterile vacuum called the "center."....So the choice between the two major parties has come down to a choice between cynical lies and terrified silence." In the Pennsylvania legislature, I have long been a leader of efforts to improve the economic welfare of struggling citizens: from repealing laws raising consumer prices and the law establishing welfare liens, to raising the minimum wage and establishing and increasing subsidized senior citizen prescriptions and property tax rebates. So I am in complete agreement with Rorty's argument for greater involvement to reduce economic injustices. He writes with a scathing eloquence and a deep political understanding that the only way to arouse public support on a national level for new policies is to be able to place them in a context of both patriotism and attention to the genuine needs of the American people. Because he is largely addressing the Academic Left, he spends too much time for my taste enmeshing himself in leftist sectarian discussions. I hope he persuades some of his intended audience, but his book is also useful for the more general audience of people who, in Robert Kennedy's words, "see suffering and want to stop it." "I have been arguing that...we Americans should not take the view of a detached cosmopolitan spectator," he writes. "We should face unpleasant truths about ourselves, but we should not take these truths to be the last word about our chances for happiness, or about our national character. Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women's Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress. "(Walt)Whitman and (John) Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams--dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society--in the place of knowledge of God's Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science. Their party, the party of hope, made twentieth-century America more than just an economic and military giant...." I don't think any one group is responsible for the failure of the public to adaquately organize to protect its common interests. I feel we need active organizing everywhere across ideological, geographical, generational, racial, religious, sexual, and other lines. So I do not attribute nearly the significance to the Academic Left that he does. But I think he has written a book well worth reading by those who very much want a more empowered public, as well as those who want university studies and faculty research to include a greater focus on how the vast knowledge of the universities and their faculties can be better employed for social good.






We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People
by Dan GillmorEdition: Paperback







A Journalist Passionately Embraces the Internet, June 21, 2006
Many people blame the Internet for accelerating the long-term decline of newspaper circulation, and think that the Internet is crippling the future of American journalism. Don Gillmor believes that the Internet has the potential to dramatically improve American journalism and widen its appeal. Gillmor is no naive innocent. He demonstrates that he has an extraordinarily detailed command of the interrelationships and applications of the many internet and software technologies and journalism. I met Gillmor in April, 2004, at the BloggerconII conference organized by Dave Winer and held at Harvard Law School. He held the attention of his audience of bloggers through his mixture of detailed knowledge and passionate advocacy for the worth of blogging and the value of it becoming an income-generating activity. No journalist should fail to read this book. Nor should any citizen consumer of journalism who participates online. Only a small part manifesto, this book is a detailed roadmap of the future of journalism for those informed enough and bold enough to take it. Those in business and government who are the subjects of journalism would also do well to read it. The future of journalism, Gillmor says, will be much more participatory in the future than it has been in the past. The many to many communications style of the Internet will become the style of successful journalism. Journalism will less about lecturing and more about leading a discussion. The "eat your spinach" school of civic advocacy will be replaced by a greater connection between readers and journalists in which readers will influence both the definition of news and the content of individual news stories. The proliferation of tens of millions of blogs means that the separation of news producers and news consumers is far less than it used to be. Everyone can produce news in the blogosphere. One duty of journalists is to sift the through the blogosphere and find out what is relevant. Another duty of journalists is to actively engage the public in the news gathering process. The definition of what professionalism in journalism is will be rapidly changing. What is now at the edges, Gillmour says, will and should be moved to the center. Public concerns that once were marginal now will become mainstream. As a Pennsylvania state legislator, I believe that this will have significant public policy effects--especially the areas of taxation and public welfare expenditures. For the first time, those with average and below average incomes are able to communicate their concerns to a mass audience. The more the digital divide in Internet access erodes, as the divide in telephone and television access has eroded, the greater the erosion will be of the upper middle class dominance of the political process. The stakes for putting the brakes on the trends Gillmor describes will get increasingly large in the years ahead. This is not just a book for journalists and the subjects of journalism, or even just a book for currently active internet participants. The detailed accounts of the consumer applications of various technologies of what he calls the "the read-write web" or "technology that makes we the media possible" are alone worth the effort to get through this book. Others may understand individual technologies better than Gillmor, but it is unlikely that anyone has a better understanding of how they all--HTML,mail lists and forums, weblogs, wikis, SMS, mobile connected cameras, internet "broadcasting," peer to peer, RSS,Technorati, API, and many others--come to together to create a radically different architecture of information, news, personal reach, and circle of potential friends and allies for many millions of Americans. This is not a book to be read and put aside. Gillmor clearly struggled to get his text into 241 pages, plus 36 pages of acknowledgements, websites, and detailed notes. While there is occasional redundancy, on the whole a longer book would have been clearer in some respects. This is a book to be carefully studied and used as a springboard to continued learning about new applications, new technologies, and new interrelationships as they emerge. The idea of the public as part of the media is not totally new. Going back at least to the 1940's, public opinion research focused on the stages of influence: the mass media first influenced the opinion leaders in a community, who then influenced others by word of mouth. What is new is the dramatically improved publishing capacity for the individual citizen, regardless of whether he or she had the community stature and web of influence to have been a community leader--formal or informal--in the past. The media had been steadily eroding the influence of opinion leaders, by influencing more and more people directly, but now the opinion leaders are back in record-high numbers and with greatly expanded spheres of influence. "I hope I've helped you understand how this media shift--this explosion of conversations--is taking place and where it is headed," Gllmour says on the last page of his book. "Most of all, I hope I've persuaded you to take up the challenge yourself. "Your voice matters. Now, if you have something to say, you can be heard. "You can make your own news. We all can. "Let's get started."






The Medium is the Massage
by Marshall McLuhanEdition: Paperback







Wisdom from the Prophet of the Internet, June 20, 2006
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) never conceived of the Internet. But the great communications theorist understood where communications was going, and the revolutionary effects of its direction. This book takes his sometimes impenetrable prose and places it in a context of compelling photographs, advertisements, and cartoons in order to dramatically illustrate the meaning of his words, and the radical effect that changes in communications technology have on the lives of all the world's citizens. "It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of the media," he writes. The Medium is the Massage begins and ends with quotes from Albert North Whitehead. The first is that "The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur." The last is that "It is the business of the future to be dangerous." There always are jeremiads against the new by those who are accustomed to the old. McLuhan quotes Socrates: "The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves...You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing." The effects of the media on individuals are profound. "All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty--psychic or physical." Media affect you, the individual citizen. "Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community's need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions--the patterns of mechanistic technologies--are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank--that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early 'mistakes.' We have already reached a point where remedial control, born of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted...." Media affect your family. "The family circle has widened. The whirlpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage." Media affect your neighborhood. "Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of 'time' and 'space' and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. The old civic, state, and national groupings have become unworkable. Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than 'a place for everything and everything in its place.' You can't GO home again." Media affect your education. "Today's television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute 'adult' news--inflation, rioting, war, taxes, crime, bathing beauties--and is bewildered when he enters the nineteenth century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally an environment much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines." Media affect your job. "From the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work that constitute 'mechanization' and 'specialism.' These procedures cannot serve for survival or sanity in this new time. Under conditions of electric circuitry, all the fragmented job patterns tend to blend once more into involving and demanding roles or forms of work that more and more resemble teaching, learning, and 'human' service, in the older sense of dedicated loyalty." Media affect your government. "Nose-counting, a cherished part of the eighteenth century fragmentation process, has rapidly become a cumbersome and ineffectual form of social assessment in an environment of instant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished. Today, the mass audience (the successor to the 'public') can be used as a creative, participating force. It is instead merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions. A new form of 'politics' is emerging, and in ways we haven't yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing EVERYTHING." Media affect our relationships with groups of other citizens. "The shock of recognition. In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained, ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other. There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." This book is, in short, a superb introduction to McLuhan's thinking. Ideally, it would be read before any of McLuhan's other books. Understanding McLuhan takes some time and thought, but the effort is well worth it to understand today's media and today's world. "Only the hand that erases can write the true thing," McLuhan quotes Meister Eckhardt as saying. McLuhan erases preconceptions of media being relatively insignificant, and demonstrates how the media affect the way each of us sees the world in which we live. A memorable photo in the book is one of a middle-aged man dressed in a business suit and carrying a briefcase standing upon a surfboard, riding the waves. "In his amusement born of rational detachment of his own situation, Poe's mariner in 'The Descent Into the Maelstrom' staved off disaster by understanding the action of the whirlpool," says McLuhan's accompanying prose. "His insight offers a possible strategem for understanding our predicament, our electrically-configured whirl." The last cartoon in the book--from the New Yorker in 1966--summarizes McLuhan's essential theme. A young man with a guitar discusses McLuhan with his father in a well-appointed library. "You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says the enviroment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential, thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?" We all should get McLuhan. The development of Internet--likely even more transformative than television--has greatly revived interest in McLuhan's view of technological changes as changing us as people, and of creating a global village for all of us to live in. "We impose the form of the old on the content of the new. The malady lingers on," McLuhan warns. We should heed his warnings and recognize, embrace, and work for constructive improvements in the ever-changing world in which we live.


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Have You Ever Lied to a Pollster or Told Someone Else To Do It?

When my late friend Dick Doran (1935-2007) died earlier this year, I learned for the first time that my former supervisor when I was a Congressional intern in 1967 had published a novel entitled It Takes A Villain in 2003. Reading it, I became fascinated with its theme: political polling leads to the manipulation of public opinion by candidates with a lot of money from special interests. You can read my customer review of his novel--a fable in the tradition of George Orwell--at amazon.com.
The hero of this novel--a Dick Doran kind of guy named Charlie Coons--brilliantly orchestrates a campaign to have the constituency of Sen. Jo Stephenson, a courageous maverick elected over a big money Republican from Vermont in a special election two years before, lie to all polling inquires.
The cooperative Stephenson backers tell pollsters they like her opponent--the well named Ethan Allen Aiken--precisely because he is against political reforms and for big business domination of politics. Armed with this disinformation, the Aiken campaign produces counterproductive spots that drive undecided voters to Stephenson, hand her a landslide victory, and give pollsters and campaign consultants a nationwide black eye.
That Dick Doran emerged as one of our nation's strongest critics of political polling is an interesting tale. As executive director of the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee in 1969, he recommended a reform package requiring the city committee to endorse candidates based on public opinion polling; it was overwhelmingly voted down by the city's wardleaders, and both Doran and Democratic City Chairman Bill Green resigned their positions.
Green went on to be elected Mayor of Philadelphia in 1979, and appointed Doran as City Representative and Director of Commerce, a position that kept a permanent place for Doran as a part of the city's political/corporate/non-profit establishment; previously he had been head of a major corporate funded non-profit, the Greater Philadelphia First Corporation. It is reasonable to infer from this book that Doran was somewhat torn about his insider status.
It Takes A Villain Is full of cardboard characters who openly brag of the villainy in making big bucks for themselves and subverting the public interest in every way possible. My favorite villain is Dr. Ludwig Controller--a pschiatrist who has become the "Mr. Big" of the Washington lobbyist community--who Coons both admires for his success and wants to destroy as an effective lobbying force.
It is hard to imagine a real-life campaign successfully orchestrating an effort to deceive all the pollsters. It is also hard to imagine them doing it and keeping it such a secret that the opposition campaign relies on the disinformation as the gospel truth.
But this political fable raises the interesting question: have you ever lied to a pollster? Have you ever gotten anyone else to lie to a pollster?
The conventional wisdom has been that pollsters are the good guys, enabling the silent public to speak. But Doran says they merely enable the big money people to manipulate public opinion. Do you agree with this? Does it matter much if the poll is released publicly or kept a secret? Are we better off with more and more publicly released polls then we were when the vast majority of them were secret?

February 17, 2007

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/10/3/23532/1622

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Dr. Dana Fisher's Activism, Inc. Focuses on Ethical Dilemmas of Volunteer Recruitment

In her new book Activism, Inc: How the Outsourcing of Progressive Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America, political sociologist Dr. Dana Fisher focuses on the ethics and practical effects of having organizations specializing in canvassing hire low-wage workers for progressive organizations to do the physically and emotionally draining work of door to door canvassing.
Michael Connery--at http://michael-connery.dailykos.com/-- wrote an excellent diary on this important book earlier today for the Daily Kos. Connery's diary and Fisher's podcast accessible from the dairy is vital must reading and listening for anyone who deals with canvassing operations.
The ethics of campaign recruitment is both an old subject and a subject perennially in need of current re-examination. The paradox is this: to get needed change requires people willing to sacrifice. The sacrifice may be greater than the benefit of the change for those who make the sacrifice. The biggest winners of the change may be those "free riders" who do nothing. But, if everyone does nothing, there will be no change and no winners at all. In the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his closest associates believed that the only way to win the battle for civil rights in the South was to get white people from the North involved. But doing so endangered the lives of white volunteers and blacks who worked with them.
It also hurt the feelings of black leaders, who felt that they were being devalued. These hurt feelings led to bitter rhetoric which undermined the climate of racial brotherhood that King was desiring to create. They also made it much easier for the FBI and other agencies interested in discrediting the civil rights movement to find grievances and rivalries with which to work.
Organizing social movements takes a leadership with extraordinary skill, dedication, competence, purpose, financial resources, media credibility, and luck. Critiquing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., likely the greatest organizer of social movements in the history of our country and a phenomenal moral leader on an international scale, shows how extraordinarily difficult and virtually impossible the task is. The window of opportunity is open just a small fraction of an inch.
A few of the civil rights volunteers were killed--Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner, Liuzzo most famously and others more obscurely. A much larger number were wounded or beaten or burned out.
An organizer of student volunteers--Allard K. Lowenstein, later an anti-war organizer and one-term Long Island Congressman--was killed in 1980 by a mentally disturbed volunteer furious that Lowenstein had exposed him to a destructive life-altering severe beating and had made what he considered manipulative and outrageous homosexual advances towards him.
As one who has organized volunteer work and seen the risks of physical and emotional injury that are associated with it, I have become very cautious in what I am willing to ask of people. I tend to believe in the applicability of the priniciple of the Hippocratic Oath for doctors: at least do no harm.
For instance, I vigorously argued against any attempt to advance the bill I was sponsoring--ultimately successfully--to raise Pennsylvania's minimum wage by 39% by 2007, by employing the tactics of civil disobedience. I feared civil disobedience would alienate the mainstream Republican conservatives whose support we needed to ultimately pass the bill.
I also feared that civil disobedience could provoke violence against some demonstrators that both would hurt the demonstrators and detract focus from the minimum wage efforts. I wanted people visiting legislators, not fellow activists in hospitals. I wanted people talking about raising the minimum wage, not raising bail money or money for legal fees. The debate over tactics ended when a very reasonable compromise was negotiated with legislative minimum wage skeptics who accepted the inevitability of our victory.
I am hardly alone in understanding the risks of activism. It is this understanding of risks that contributes to leading various progressive organizations to engage in the distancing from activism that Dr. Fisher describes. Yet she is absolutely right that the distancing from activism--and any maltreatment of activists by any responsible person--hurts the goal of building up a better more progressive society by limiting the pool of future activists and leaders of activists.
The truth is that there is not a heck of a lot of money for most people to make by political or social activism. Money is often especially important to those who are short of it or without it entirely. Civil service jobs generally pay more--and have far greater job security--than political ones do. Business and professional careeers have far greater economic potential than do careers in social or political activism.
There is no substitute for honesty in dealing with prospective political activists. They should be asked to volunteer and contribute time and money only to an extent that it does not interfere with their pursuing a successful life. They should not be asked to do unnecessary or unwise things or things that unnecessarily expose them to great personal risk.
Their dignity and worth as people should be recognized at all times. Neither their labor nor their bodies nor their enthusiasm should be exploited against their interests.
Working for progressive causes should be an ennobling, inspiring, and enthusiasm-building experience. That is a statement of an ideal, and we as a broad national progressive community need to figure out many practical steps to achieve this ideal despite all the difficulties inherently involved in doing so.

September 20, 2006

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/21/15831/8156

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WHEN BOSSES RULED PHILADELPHIA: THE EMERGENCE OF THE REPUBLICAN MACHINE, 1867-1933

By Peter McCaffery

Peter McCaffery takes a thorough and judicious look at how Republican political bosses hurt the city of Philadelphia from the end of the Civil War, when the Republican Party first gained favor (Lincoln's 1864 opponent George McClellan had strong Philadelphia roots) to the beginning of the New Deal, when the Republican Party precipitously began a long slow but seemingly irreversible decline that continues today. McCaffery finds some of the anti-bossism literature to be hyperbolic and short on perspective. But after weighing the evidence, he strongly comes out against the revisionist literature by Robert Merton and others suggesting that the political bosses were really good guys, just misunderstood urban liberals. "All the various leaders had something in common that has tended to be underrated or overlooked in the past: their ability and competence as professional politicians," McCaffery writes. State Republican Boss Matt Quay "was a classical scholar and son of a Presbyterian minister. He was also, in the opinion of Rudyard Kipling, the best literary critic in America. And Quay's most famous successor as Boss, U.S.Senator Boies Penrose, was in the words of this reviewer's late college sociology professor E. Digby Baltzell "Proper Philadelphia's most interesting and gifted politician in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." But McCaffery's indictments overwhelm his pleasantries toward his subjects. His first five chapters are somewhat even-handed, discussing the different means various bosses used to get political power with a guarded voice that, while somewhat critical, also seems to be somewhat admiring of the skill they showed in creating and grasping ever more levers of power. But Chapter 6, "Electoral Foundation and Functions of the Republican Machine," ends any doubt as to where McCaffery stands. He approving quotes an obituary for Boss Iz Durham, who died at the age of 53. "Of all the qualities of statesmanship he had none, " the North American wrote. "He had no ideals. His ambitions were all selfish. He leaves no monument in the shape of a good statute or ordinance or any piece of constructive legislation...no civic improvement or betterment." And he quotes Sam Bass Warner as saying the "failure of the industrial metropolis was political." Local and state professional political leaders: utterly avoided dealing with the mounting social welfare and economic and physical development issues which constituted both the disorders and the potential of the metropolis....The whole negative attitude toward government which characterized the Republican.... leadership encouraged a least-cost, low-quality orientation toward all public institutions and programs whether they were police departments, or schools, hospitals, or highways. Whether state or local Republican professional political leaders did more damage to Philadelphia, Warner says, would require "the most conscientious research" to determine. The low-cost low quality strategy was also ringing up debt. In dollars worth many times more than our current ones, city expenditures in the 1870's were exceeding income by over $1 million per year, and yearly expenditures in the city's floating debt (short term debt) exceeded four million a year, while the city's debt for permanent improvements had passed $58 million by 1874. Good things were done for the purpose of private profit, raising costs. Philadelphia's City Hall, an architectural marvel that today is a tourist attraction as well as the seat of city government, took 30 years to be built from time of inception, and provided a patronage empire for the boss of the Public Buildings Commission William Stokely, who used the power he gained from to become Mayor of Philadelphia. Stokely's arch-rival was gas trust boss James McManes, who also dominated Philadelphia politics for a period time because of the jobs he could give out at taxpayers expense. A subplot of this book is the gradual elimination of patronage and organizational arrangements under pressure from reformers and rival power holders. Politically potent but crime-ridden and violence-prone volunteer fire companies were abolished in 1871. The gas trust was abolished in 1887. The Public Buildings Commission was abolished in 1901. McCaffery does not dwell on it, but the whole array of elected ward officers in existence when Philadelphia took its current boundaries in 1854--school directors, tax collectors and assessors, guardians of the poor, aldermen, and representatives on the Board of Health--were all abolished as elective officials and replaced by appointive officials over time. And the number of Philadelphia City Councilmen--which peaked at an incredible 146 with the reform charter of 1887--was cut to 21 in 1919 and 17 in 1951. After the period of time covered by this book, magistrates--the Philadelphia equaivalent of Justices of the Peace--would be replaced by Municipal Court judges and constables elected by ward would be replaced by appointed writ servers. Step by step, year after year, century after century, the domain of the political machine would generally contract, although resourceful politicians would seek to expand the domains over which they had influence. The thrust of reformers with motivations from the pure to the cynical was to centralize, professionalize, and depoliticize. A long-term result of that has been a far lesser degree of opportunity for political involvement than exists in suburban and rural communities, with consequences that deserve intense scholarly examination. Bosses Quay and Penrose were often eager to wade into Philadelphia politics to legislatively expose and/or destroy a factional rival's political power bases. Penrose, considered by some to among the most corrupt politicians in American history, was often ready to play the reformer. His 1905 state legislative special session--called to counter growing Independent Republican strength which had cost the Republican Party seats in the 1905 elections-- produced personal registration of voters, a stricter civil service able to prohibit political activity by city employees, a civil service bill to establish a bona fide merit system, a corrupt practices act requiring candidates to file reports of campaign receipts and expenditures, and, most importantly, a uniform system of primary elections for all candidates for city and county offices. Poor enforcement, however, limited whatever reformist intent there was to the legislative package. Reading this book is valuable for participants in current Philadelphia politics as well as for scholars of political science and urban history and sociology. One sees tactics still in use today, from Republican efforts to try to control the financially weaker Democratic Party, to the creation of new patronage bases, to attempts to gain influence or control of public utilities and the distribution and enforcement of public contracts. One also gains insights into the development of Northeast Philadelphia, where today's odd and irregular road routes were caused by what landowner supported what candidate in long-forgotten elections over a century ago. McCaffery makes clear his belief that party machines were not mere agents of big business; they were an independent force that sought to control those businesses they had power over and often fought or ignored other business interests. Corporations and machines developed over the same time period independently of each other. Machines made some corporations their clients, but others became active enemies because of the threat that political machines represented to both their wealth and the quality of life in their city. The Philadelphia Republican machine was a narrow insular force as well: it discriminated against people with Jewish and Italian surnames and African-American ancestry in terms of both ward committee slots and City Hall jobs. This would play out fully in the mayoral elections from 1971 through 2003, when the Democrats would win nine mayoral elections, eight of them with candidates of Black, Jewish, or Italian ancestry. McCaffery clearly identifies with the non-partisan reform movement, which, with fits and starts, often offered a progressive vision that transcended the narrow economic interests of its advocates. Only the Committee of Seventy--which sought to be a permanent organization from its inception--survives today as a Philadelphia organization. Two of the heroes of the non-partisan reform movement he mentions have intersected with my family. Morris Llewellyn Cooke, Reform Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg's Director of Public Works, was a key advocate of rural electrification before and during the New Deal period, and he helped make the University of Pennsylvania Law School a major provider of attorneys for the fledgling Rural Electrification Administration. My father was one of the REA recruits from the Penn Law School, and it led him to a lifetime of both governmental service and civic activism. Franklin Spence Edmonds represented much of my legislative district in the state house after teaching at my alma maters Central High School and the University of Pennsylvania. He then moved to Montgomery County, won election to the State Senate from there, and helped found and serve as President of the Council of State Governments, an excellent research and networking organization that does much to advance state governmental information sharing and professionalism, and from which I and other state legislators have gained much. McCaffery's painstaking and original analysis covers a lot of ground in 257 pages, approximately 100 of which are charts, lists, appendices,cartoons, and footnotes. If one wants to begin to wade into the voluminous literature on urban reform movements and the outrageous shenanigans of political bosses that made them necessary, this book is a good place to start or finish, as it is excellent as either an introduction or a summary. It is an economical book in length worthy of intense study.

50 AMERICAN REVOLUTIONS YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW: RECLAIMING AMERICAN PATRIOTISM

BY Mickey Z

Mickey Z is a dissenting American radical who deeply admires diverse forms of passionate dissent. He is mainstream enough to cite legislation passed as a result of radical protest as a vindication of that protest, but his general vision of government is that of a passive agent, awaiting the next protest demonstration to get a sense of direction. The theme of this book is best stated in a quotation from Barbra Ehreneich. "Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots," she says. This a book for the age of soundbites and hyperlinks. It provides an introduction to many diverse individuals and social movements, so that virtually everyone will learn something from it. And it deals with Bob Dylan's complaint about history: "I've never seen a history book that tells me how anybody feels," he said. One of the few Presidents in this book to earn a mention--and perhaps the only President to be praised for an action taken--is Chester A. Arthur who--it turns out--at age 24 was a pioneering civil rights attorney representing Lizzie Jennings, the Rosa Parks of 1854, who sued and won after being denied admission to a New York City horse drawn carriage. Arthur's representation of Jennings is called a "classic 'who knew' situation. " It certainly justifies taking another look at Arthur. Another surprising fact--for me, at least--was the deep passion and antagonisms resulting from Jack Johnson, an African-American, being named heavywieght champion of the world in 1908: an uproar that perhaps slowed down black admission to other professional sports. And then, in a section on Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers, there is this cogent political analysis from key Richard Nixon Presidential aide H.R. Haldeman on June 14, 1969: To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of all the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgement. And the implicit infallibility of Presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it is wrong, and the President can be wrong. I also like Martin Luther King's telegram to farmworker's leader Cesar Chavez,after a United Farmworker organizing victory, which puts King's eloquence, profundity, and coalition building on display all at once: The fight for equality must be fought on many fronts--in urban slums, in the sweatshops of the factories and fields. Our separate struggles are really one--a struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity. You and your valiant fellow workers have demonstrated your commitment to righting grievous wrongs froced upon exploited people. We are together with you in spirit and it determination that our dreams for a better tomorrow will be realized. In summary, this is a provocative and stimulating little book which should encourage interest in American history, provide new insights to many readers, and provide no shortage of inspirational material. Because of ideological biases, which give violent protests a stature they do not deserve, it is less than the sum of its parts. But many of the parts are very, very good. Politicians seeking to keep the attention of audiences, columnists seeking to say memorable things, and teachers seeking to counter student apathy all can find useful material here.

VITO MARCANTONIO
By Gerald Meyer

Congressman Vito Marcantonio was once one of the most famous and most infamous political figures in America. Richard Nixon won a Senate seat in 1950 by linking his Democratic opponent's record to that of Marcantonio, and Marcantonio was harassed by fellow members of Congress and the media alike. He is likely the only member of Congress who ever served as a lawyer for the Communist Party, and the only member of Congress who relied on the Communist Party as a key component of his political machine. Yet the Communist Party was only one element of his electoral coalition. The Republican Party was the party that got him started (he was a protege of Republican Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who set an example for Marcantonio by once winning election to Congress on the Socialist Party ticket when the Republicans would not back him), and the Republican Party nominated Marcantonio in 1934, 1936, 1938, 1940, 1942, and 1944. Marcantonio only lost the Republican Party nomination narrowly in 1946 at the beginning of the Cold War when he was elected to Congress on the Democratic and American Labor Party tickets. By 1948, the law had been changed to make it impossible for him to seek the Republican and Democratic nominations while serving as the leader of the American Labor Party, but he won a plurality on the American Labor Party ticket standing alone. In 1950, the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal parties all nominated the same candidate, James Donovan, who defeated Marcantonio by a 4 to 3 margin, 49,448 to 36,095. As the statewide leader of the American Labor Party from 1941 on, and as an active leader of the American Labor Party from 1937 on, Marcantonio gained the power to cross-endorse Democratic and Republican candidates. He used this power to get Republicans elected in otherwise unfriendly districts, giving the Republican Party extra state legislative power in return for giving his own American Labor Party--and the Communists who somewhat influenced it--a national spokesman. The author presents exhaustive evidence of Marcantonio's deep passion for the welfare of his poverty stricken Italian-American, Puerto Rican, and African American constituents, a concern which made his office a model of constituent service and advocacy for the poor and discriminated against. Income from Marcantonio's law practice went to both supplementing his constituent service and his political campaigns. He died at age 52 in 1954 with less than $10,000 in assets. The author discusses at length the symbiotic relationship between Marcantonio and the Republican Party--and to a lesser degree, Marcantonio and the Democratic Party--but does not fully investigate the full implications of that alliance. We do not learn for instance how American Labor Party Republicans elected to the New York legislature used their power to advance or to thwart the public policy goals that Marcantonio pushed in Washington. This is a book that should be read for historical perspective by anyone pondering the past and potential future role of the Green Party in American politics, or third party politics in general. This book also sheds valuable light on the generally underreported story of the rise of Americans of Italian descent from poverty to solid middle class status, the early and since abandoned efforts to classify them as a racial minority analagous to African Americans, the development of bilingual education and other educational innovations of Marcantonio's friend, neighbor, and mentor Leonard Covello, the struggles for civil rights before Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Montgomery Bus Boycott a year and a few months after Marcantonio's death, and the role and limitations of political machines as social and political forces in New York City history. At a time in which Joe Lieberman has won election to the Senate as a third-party Republican-backed candidate, when former New York Mayor Rudolph Giulani--Marcantonio's polar opposite in many ways-- appears appears poised to be the first major American Presidential candidate of Italian descent, when the Green Party struggles against constant allegations that it's operational goals are to elect Republicans, the story of Vito Marcantonio and his long-dead allies and opponents has a surprising and growing continuing relevance.

THE AIRWAY TO EVERYWHERE: A HISTORY OF ALL AMERICAN AVIATION, 1937-1953
By Walter David Lewis

Lytle S. Adams, a descendant of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, clearly saw that smaller communiities were at a substantial disadvantage in the emerging field of airmail. The process of landing and take-off of airplanes was so time-consuming that it limited the number of stops an airplane could make to the larger communities with larger airports. So he developed a plan to solve the problem, a problem which was similar to the difficulty of bringing electricity to rural areas (solved by the Rural Electric Administration and the cooperatives it spawned), bringing transportation to rural areas (solved by the U.S. Interstate Highway network), bringing television to rural areas (solved by the laying of cable to them). His plan involved tecnnical ingenuity: the development of a device to hook on to an overhead cable where containers of mail would be be placed, so that mail could be picked up on regularly defined roots without a plane taking the trouble to land to take-off. His idea gained political backing in the Roosevelt Administration and from the New Deal Democrats in Congress, because it fit in with their strategies to integrate isolated communities into the mainstream of American life. Through Roosevelt's daughter who had married into the DuPont family, he met Richard C. DuPont, an aviation enthusiast, who had the money and the skill to develop Adams' idea into a functioning company called All American Aviation. The Adams-DuPont relationship had tragic personal overtones, although it was extremely productive in the long run. DuPont did not give Adams the financial rewards he hoped for,added insult to injury by reworking Adams' technology to make it more effective, and ultimately bought him out as the relationship became increasingly bitter and mutually distrustful. And DuPont's dynamic corporate leadership--he had become head of the corporation at the age of 28-- led him to be offered to take over the U.S. Army's glider program as a special assistant to Army Air Forces Chief Henry H. "Hap" Arnold. In this position, DuPont was testing one of the new motorless airships, when the craft fell into a spin, his parachute malfunctioned, and he fell to his death at the age of 33. During World War II, the company's no-landing pickup system hit its peak in utilization, but it failed to make money and relied on governmental subsidies. After World War II, it faced the additional problem of steadily improving highways, which allowed mail to be picked up faster and cheaper without the no-landing pickup system. With its back to the wall, All-American Aviation was offered a chance to become a passenger airline serving new or under-utilized routes. It leaped at this chance for financial salvation, and evolved over time into Alleheny Airlines and then U.S. Air. The strengths of this book are many: detailed explanations of technology and technological changes, clear explanations of business strategy and the regulatory system, and concise explanations of both the internal politics of the company and the politics of Congress and the executive branch. This book is a great introduction to the field of airline regulation, a valuable addition to anyone's understanding of Pennsylvania business history, and a compelling case study of the importance and the limits of technological innovation. The concise nature of the book--and its technological orientation--means that some intriguing political angles go uncovered. The irony of a descendant of rivals of two of 19th Century America's leading Democrats--party founder Thomas Jefferson and and party definer Andrew Jackson--relying on New Deal regulation and Democratic Party allies to start his business goes unmentioned. And the political analysis of the company's large base of Congressional support is matter of fact and unquestioning of motives and rationales. Virtually no one who reads this book will ever look at the history of American air travel the same way again. This book is an inspiring example for those who seek to solve societal problems through business, and those who seek to grow new businesses from scratch. It offers a clear warning of the dangers--as well as the opportunities--posed by the search for venture capital.

A CALL TO SERVE
By John Kerry

"I don't consider myself a policy wonk," John Kerry writes, "but I was brought up to care about big issues and think for myself, not hire others to do the thinking for me." While preparing a detailed statement of his views in the middle of a Presidential campaign "is obviously a task in which I relied on the generous help of many talented and trustworthy advisors," it is clear that Kerry has attempted with a large degree of success to integrate their recommendations, his record and his life into a coherent whole. A book that relied more heavily on autobiography would have been more compelling. But Kerry, in what might have been his Achilles Heel in the 2004 general election, takes the idealistic position that "For my part, I intend to run a presidential campaign organized around a contest of ideas, values, and policies, rather than a clash of personalities or a war between political tribes." This approach clearly helped him get the Democratic nomination when major rivals Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt, and Joseph Lieberman became mired in controversies, other rivals were not able to develop a broad enough appeal to become serious contenders, and serious contender John Edwards failed to match Kerry's breadth of appeal. The fundamental theme of this book, as one could guess from the title, is that John Kerry feels called to public service by a combination of life experiences and family backround (he is the son of a diplomat father and a civic activist mother), and that he wishes to call others to public service as well. It was my thought in 2003-2004 that Howard Dean was the best of an excellent field of candidates. I filed for Delegate to the Democratic National Convention from Pennsylvania on behalf of Howard Dean the day he lost his make or break Wisconsin primary and stopped actively campaigning, and I became the only Dean delegate candidate in the Mid-Atlantic States to actually get elected. After Dean's formal withdrawal and release of his delegates, I made Pennsylvania's convention vote for Kerry unanimous and contributed his campaign. Kerry grew on me as a candidate in 2004, and he grows on me again in carefully reading this book. Kerry clearly conveys that he is a serious man with serious ideas for leading our country. He has written a book of continuing relevance for the years ahead, whether or not he seeks a future Presidential nomination. This is a book that can be utilized by anyone with a deep interest in Presidential politics, the future choices our country faces, and the differences between the Democratic and Republican parties. Because it covers a lot of subjects briefly, it is a book that can usefully be read sitting near a computer, so that one can use a search engine to learn more about whatever issues one finds intriguing. Kerry's first chapter--Why I am Running for President--sets out his general philosophy and an outline of his goals. "Democrats and Republicans must also take a long look at our recent tendency to compete in a politics of personal self-interest," he writes. "One of our central goals is to convince people to think beyond their own selfish interests and accept the responsibilities of citizenship and the mission of spreading freedom and democracy." Perhaps offering a counterpoint to Richard Nixon--who famously wrote a book entitled Six Crises--Kerry offers six challenges. These are The Challenge of Protecting America and Promoting Its Values and Interests, The Challenge of Expanding Our Common Wealth, The Challenge of Creating World-Class Schools, The Challenge of Creating a Modern Health-Care System, The Challenge of Defending the Environment and Achieving Energy Independence, and The Challenge of Reviving Democracy and Citizenship. His proposals are less than a detailed blueprint--the sheer number of them and the book's 200 pages would not allow for that--but much, much more than a general expression of concern. His chapter on health care, a perennial concern of mine in 33 years of service in the Pennsylvania legislature, for instance, recommends "a proposal that breaks new ground in the health-insurance debate by simultaneously addressing three challengess that are central to modernizing our health care system: first and foremost, bringing costs under control; offering access to affordable coverage, with plenty of choices, to every American; and guaranteeing that every child in America will have health care insurance." His goals have subgoals. For instance, he favors health insurance cost-reduction strategies such as having the federal government pay for 3/4 of catastrophic health insurance claims (those claims of $50,000 and over), "preventive care and programs to promote better overall health," public disclosure of incentives for benefit managers and doctors to prescribe individual drugs, expansion of generic drug offerings by plugging loopholes in patent law, letting states negotiate better prices for consumers by bargaining for bulk rates for their citizens, screening out frivolous medical malpractice claims, encouraging the use of new information technologies, expanding the use of patient record computerization, and reducing medical errors. This is certainly a useful place to begin for anyone who, like myself, is interested in having my state seek to comprehensively reform health care. In this book, he is not content to issue laundry lists. We see some of his persuasive power. He is an advocate--generally understated--for the positions he seeks. I cannot say I am unmoved by his advocacy. His strong passion for national service, for instance, has convinced me that the service learning requirements for students in Maryland--and the service learning options in many other states--is probably worth emulating in Pennsylvania. Kerry looks to help build America as a place "where everybody does serve, because there is work for all to do, a place for all to serve, and no reason at all to stay on the sidelines." "I see an America where, in a seamless web of service and concern," Kerry says, "we offer Americans the challenge and the chance to do their duty--and an America were Americans, in turn, step forward and give something back." In a Presidential campaign, voters are encouraged to engage in comparison shopping. Whether one favored Kerry or not in 2004, his book is an articulate and detailed exposition of his views, and is well worth reading by concerned people throughout the political spectrum who want a better country and are looking for specific directions in which to travel.

THE TWILIGHT OF EQUALITY?: NEOLIBERALISM, CULTURAL POLITICS, AND THE ATTACK ON DEMOCRACY
By Lisa Duggan

Lisa Duggan is intensely interested in American politics, and has found political life in the United States to have been "such a wild ride, offering moments of of dizzying hope along with long stretches of political depression." She is grateful for "many ideas about political depression, and how to survive it," and she has written a excellent short book that helps make sense of many widely divergent political trends. Her book is well-summarized by its concluding paragraph, which I am breaking up into additional paragraphs for greater clarity: "Now at this moment of danger and opportunity, the progressive left is mobilizing against neoliberalism and possible new or continuing wars. "These mobilizations might become sites for factional struggles over the discipling of troops, in the name of unity at a time of crisis and necessity. But such efforts will fail; the troops will not be disciplined, and the disciplinarians will be left to their bitterness. "Or, we might find ways of think, speaking, writing and acting that are engaged and curious about "other people's" struggles for social justice, that are respectfully affiliative and dialogic rather than pedagogical, that that look for the hopeful spots to expand upon, and that revel in the pleasure of political life. "For it is pleasure AND collective caretaking, love AND the egalitarian circulation of money--allied to clear and hard-headed political analysis offered generously--that will create the space for a progressive politics that might both imagine and create...something worth living for." The titles of her four chapters--Downsizing Democracy, The Incredible Shrinking Public, Equality, Inc., Love AND Money--summarize her argument. She expected upon her high school graduation in 1972, she writes, that "active and expanding social movements seemed capable of ameliorating conditions of injustice and inequality, poverty, war and imperialism....I had no idea I was not perched at a great beginning, but rather at a denouement, as the possibilities for progressive social change encountered daunting historical setbacks beginning in 1972...." Her target is neoliberalism, which she sees as a broadly controlling corporate agenda which seeks world domination, privatization of governmental decision-making, and marginalization of unions, low-income people, racial and sexual minorities while presenting to the public a benign and inclusive facade. Neo-liberalism seeks to upwardly distribute money, power, and status, she writes, while progressive movements seek to downwardly distribute money, power, and status. The unity of the downwardly distribution advocates should match the unity of the upwardly distribution advocates in order to be effective, she writes. Her belief is that all groups threatened by the neoliberal paradigm should unite against it, but such unity is threatened by endless differences of perspectives. By minutely analyzing many of the differences, and expanding understanding of diverse perspectives, she tries to remove them as obstacles towards people and organizations working together to achieve both unique and common aims. This is good book for those interested in the history and current significance of numerous progressive ideological arguments. It is a good book for organizers of umbrella organizations and elected officials who work with diverse social movements. By articulating points of difference, the author depersonalizes them and aids in overcoming them. Those who are interested in electoral strategies, however, will be disappointed. The interrelationship between neoliberalism as a governing ideology and neoliberalism as a political strategy is not discussed here. It is my view that greater and more focused and inclusive political organizing has the potential to win over a good number of the those who see support of neoliberalism's policy initiatives as a base-broadening tactic more than as a sacred cause. "There is nothing stable or inevitable in the alliances supporting neoliberal agendas in the U.S. and globally," she writes. "The alliances linking neoliberal global economics, and conservative and right-wing domestic politics, and the culture wars are provisional--and fading...." Reading this book adds to one's understanding of labels, and political and intellectual distinctions. It has too much jargon for my taste, but not so much as to be impenetrable. It is an excellent summarization and synthesis of the goals, ideologies, and histories of numerous social movements, both famous and obscure.

MY DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
By James M. Jeffords

As a Pennsylvania state legislative leader, I have suffered a demotion from Majority Whip to Minority Caucus Chairman for the past twelve years because several Democrats switched to the Republican Party in 1993 and 1994 and turned the Pennsylvania House over to the Republicans. Two of those converts were then defeated by Democratic nominees, but two others were not, and having the majority helped the Pennsylvania Republicans gain other seats. So I read the story of Jeffords' abandonment of the party that elected him, and his turning control of the U.S. Senate over to the Democrats, with a sense of having seen this before. Policy differences lead to personal confrontations and personal slights which, in turn, raise new questions about partisan commitments. The chance to play a starring role in the new party seems preferable to being an outcast in the old party. The change is made, and old alliances and friendships are sundered, while new ones are made. Running for re-election after a party switch can be tricky, but Jeffords, with four years left on his Senate term, "doubted" that he would be running again in 2006. In fact, he did not run again this year. With re-election clearly not a top priority for him--"it was the furthest thing from my thoughts at that point," he says--a major obstacle to swictching parties was removed. The Jeffords switch came in May, 200l. George Bush had been elected President in key respects by a 5 to 4 U.S. Supreme Court decision stopping the counting of votes in Florida where Bush held a lead of only a little more than 500 votes. The Democrats had gained four seats in the U.S. Senate in the 2000 elections, and the parties were now evenly divided in the Senate. It seemed quite possible that the Democrats had a future of surging ahead. Further, although he does not mention it, his home state clearly was trending Democratic, with Howard Dean as Governor, Patrick Leahy as the other U.S. Senator, and Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist who often sided with the Democrats, repeatedly elected with Democratic support as an Independent. For some reason, Sanders' name is never mentioned in this book; in 2006, he is the Democratic-backed candidate to succeed Jefords. Jeffords had leverage in the budget negotiations, and was determined to use it. He decided his top priority, as chair of the Senate committee dealing with education, was giving new life to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) by increasing special education funding by removing $200 billion a year from President Bush's tax cut and paying "40 percent of the national average per public expenditure for each disabled child's education." This formulation comes out to about 20% of total national special education expenses. Jeffords was motivated by personal values and constituent accountability in pushing his educational program. He did not share the belief that tax cuts for the wealthy were the highest Republican priority. "But how our children lag behind their international peers strikes me as a bigger long-term threat to our national security and stability than the rate of taxation paid on multimillion dollar estates," he writes. "In my mind, the education we give to all our children is far more important than the size of the fortunes left to a fortunate few...." "But tax cuts had not been what animated the people of Vermont I talked to on the campaign trail in the fall," he says. "They seemed to be far more concerned with meeeting human needs." Ultimately, the Senate Republicans were able to regain the Senate control in the 2002 and 2004 elections, returning Jeffords to minority status and reducing the significance of his action. This book makes clear Jefford's enjoyment of being in the limelight, even though he was somewhat uncomfortable at times there. I cannot help but believe that the "Who Lost Jeffords?" question was likely a contributing factor in Trent Lott's being removed as Senate majority leader after the 2004 elections. This is a good short book for anyone interested in the differences between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate, the history of Vermont Senators, or the personal dynamics of the U.S. Senate, to read carefully. Jeffords clearly identifies with the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Vermont Senators George Aiken and Ralph Flanders, critics of the War in Vietnam and Sen. Joseph McCarthy repsectively. It is the modern Republicans he has difficulty with. "There was an admixture of religion, a sense of stewardship, and plain common sense," he writes. "....(T)he issues that gave birth to the Republican Party are still among our most important challenges. Will we strenghten public education and the ladder of opportunity it provides? Or will be decide through our funding decisions that this is not a very high federal priority? Will we leave the land better than we found it for our descendants a hundred and fifty years hence? Or will we be blinded by the ensuing crises and leave it despoiled? Will we accord full rights to all Americans? Or will we continue to condone the denial of the protections of our laws to those who are gay? "It is clear what I hope for. This is the kind of Washington I hope to forge with what little influence is available to me. We have crying needs in our society that we must tackle rather than ignore. And we can never even begin if we are consumed by trying to take petty partisan advantage at every opportunity. The American people will not stand for it." When the Republican Party lost Jeffords, they lost a lot. He is typical of some voters. And I believe listening intently to his views would add a great deal to the Bush Administration and any successor administration. The negative, petty, and personal attacks on Jeffords that helped motivate him to leave the Republican Party are a case of a the quest for power overwhelming more lasting and important factors.

ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA
By Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty is a prominent philosopher and academic with deep family roots in the anti-communist efforts of Norman Thomas' Socialist Party, the societal amelioration of the New Deal, and the Social Gospel movement. He is appalled by the failure of advocates of continued governmental involvement in societal problem-solving to win enough elections to keep political progress moving ahead during a time of ever-increasing globalization and general income stagnation. He sees a vibrant Academic Left--which he admits has valid critiques of the reformist Left with which he most identifies--but he is appalled that its members have little interest in developing workable programs for societal betterment or engaging in active campaigns for change or the inner workings of government. He is not David Horowitz. His attacks on the Academic Left are meant to persuade its members, not to rally support of others against them. He praises academic teachings against sadism, bullying, racism, sexism, and homophobia--but feels that merely dealing with how people relate to each other is an inadaquate response to the many institutional failings of American society. He describes the Academic Left's abstention from wider political conflict as to the economic direction of our country as "an inability to do two things at once." "Sometime in the Seventies, " he writes, "American middle-class idealism went into a stall. Under Presidents Carter and Clinton, the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from unions and any mention of redistribution, and moving into a sterile vacuum called the "center."....So the choice between the two major parties has come down to a choice between cynical lies and terrified silence." In the Pennsylvania legislature, I have long been a leader of efforts to improve the economic welfare of struggling citizens: from repealing laws raising consumer prices and the law establishing welfare liens, to raising the minimum wage and establishing and increasing subsidized senior citizen prescriptions and property tax rebates. So I am in complete agreement with Rorty's argument for greater involvement to reduce economic injustices. He writes with a scathing eloquence and a deep political understanding that the only way to arouse public support on a national level for new policies is to be able to place them in a context of both patriotism and attention to the genuine needs of the American people. Because he is largely addressing the Academic Left, he spends too much time for my taste enmeshing himself in leftist sectarian discussions. I hope he persuades some of his intended audience, but his book is also useful for the more general audience of people who, in Robert Kennedy's words, "see suffering and want to stop it." "I have been arguing that...we Americans should not take the view of a detached cosmopolitan spectator," he writes. "We should face unpleasant truths about ourselves, but we should not take these truths to be the last word about our chances for happiness, or about our national character. Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women's Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress. "(Walt)Whitman and (John) Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams--dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society--in the place of knowledge of God's Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science. Their party, the party of hope, made twentieth-century America more than just an economic and military giant...." I don't think any one group is responsible for the failure of the public to adaquately organize to protect its common interests. I feel we need active organizing everywhere across ideological, geographical, generational,racial, religious, sexual, and other lines. So I do not attribute nearly the significance to the Academic Left that he does. But I think he has written a book well worth reading by those who very much want a more empowered public, as well as those who want university studies and faculty research to include a greater focus on how the vast knowledge of the universities and their faculties can be better employed for social good.

WE THE MEDIA
By Dan Gillmore

Many people blame the Internet for accelerating the long-term decline of newspaper circulation, and think that the Internet is crippling the future of American journalism. Don Gillmor believes that the Internet has the potential to dramatically improve American journalism and widen its appeal. Gillmor is no naive innocent. He demonstrates that he has an extraordinarily detailed command of the interrelationships and applications of the many internet and software technologies and journalism. I met Gillmor in April, 2004, at the BloggerconII conference organized by Dave Winer and held at Harvard Law School. He held the attention of his audience of bloggers through his mixture of detailed knowledge and passionate advocacy for the worth of blogging and the value of it becoming an income-generating activity. No journalist should fail to read this book. Nor should any citizen consumer of journalism who participates online. Only a small part manifesto, this book is a detailed roadmap of the future of journalism for those informed enough and bold enough to take it. Those in business and government who are the subjects of journalism would also do well to read it. The future of journalism, Gillmor says, will be much more participatory in the future than it has been in the past. The many to many communications style of the Internet will become the style of successful journalism. Journalism will less about lecturing and more about leading a discussion. The "eat your spinach" school of civic advocacy will be replaced by a greater connection between readers and journalists in which readers will influence both the definition of news and the content of individual news stories. The proliferation of tens of millions of blogs means that the separation of news producers and news consumers is far less than it used to be. Everyone can produce news in the blogosphere. One duty of journalists is to sift the through the blogosphere and find out what is relevant. Another duty of journalists is to actively engage the public in the news gathering process. The definition of what professionalism in journalism is will be rapidly changing. What is now at the edges, Gillmour says, will and should be moved to the center. Public concerns that once were marginal now will become mainstream. As a Pennsylvania state legislator, I believe that this will have significant public policy effects--especially the areas of taxation and public welfare expenditures. For the first time, those with average and below average incomes are able to communicate their concerns to a mass audience. The more the digital divide in Internet access erodes, as the divide in telephone and television access has eroded, the greater the erosion will be of the upper middle class dominance of the political process. The stakes for putting the brakes on the trends Gillmor describes will get increasingly large in the years ahead. This is not just a book for journalists and the subjects of journalism, or even just a book for currently active internet participants. The detailed accounts of the consumer applications of various technologies of what he calls the "the read-write web" or "technology that makes we the media possible" are alone worth the effort to get through this book. Others may understand individual technologies better than Gillmor, but it is unlikely that anyone has a better understanding of how they all--HTML,mail lists and forums,weblogs, wikis, SMS, mobile connected cameras, internet "broadcasting," peer to peer, RSS,Technorati, API, and many others--come to together to create a radically different architecture of information, news, personal reach, and circle of potential friends and allies for many millions of Americans. This is not a book to be read and put aside. Gillmor clearly struggled to get his text into 241 pages, plus 36 pages of acknowledgements, websites, and detailed notes. While there is occasional redundancy, on the whole a longer book would have been clearer in some respects. This is a book to be carefully studied and used as a springboard to continued learning about new applications, new technologies, and new interrelationships as they emerge. The idea of the public as part of the media is not totally new. Going back at least to the 1940's, public opinion research focused on the stages of influence: the mass media first influenced the opinion leaders in a community, who then influenced others by word of mouth. What is new is the dramatically improved publishing capacity for the individual citizen, regardless of whether he or she had the community stature and web of influence to have been a community leader--formal or informal--in the past. The media had been steadily eroding the influence of opinion leaders, by influencing more and more people directly, but now the opinion leaders are back in record-high numbers and with greatly expanded spheres of influence. "I hope I've helped you understand how this media shift--this explosion of conversations--is taking place and where it is headed," Gllmour says on the last page of his book. "Most of all, I hope I've persuaded you to take up the challenge yourself. "Your voice matters. Now, if you have something to say, you can be heard. "You can make your own news. We all can. "Let's get started."

THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE
By Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) never conceived of the Internet. But the great communications theorist understood where communications was going, and the revolutionary effects of its direction. This book takes his sometimes impenetrable prose and places it in a context of compelling photographs, advertisements, and cartoons in order to dramatically illustrate the meaning of his words, and the radical effect that changes in communications technology have on the lives of all the world's citizens. "It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of the media," he writes. The Medium is the Massage begins and ends with quotes from Albert North Whitehead. The first is that "The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur." The last is that "It is the business of the future to be dangerous." There always are jeremiads against the new by those who are accustomed to the old. McLuhan quotes Socrates: "The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves...You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing." The effects of the media on individuals are profound. "All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, pyschological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty--psychic or physical." Media affect you, the individual citizen. "Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community's need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions--the patterns of mechanistic technologies--are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank--that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early 'mistakes.' We have already reached a point where remedial control, born of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted...." Media affect your family. "The family circle has widened. The whirlpool of information fathered by the electic media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage." Media affect your neighborhood. "Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of 'time' and 'space' and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstitued dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. The old civic, state, and national groupings have become unworkable. Nothing can be further from the spirit of the the new technology than 'a place for everything and everything in its place.' You can't GO home again." Media affect your education. "Today's television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute 'adult' news--inflation, rioting, war, taxes, crime, bathing beauties--and is bewildered when he enters the nineteenth century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally an environment much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines." Media affect your job. "From the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work that constitute 'mechanization' and 'specialism.' These procedures cannot serve for survival or sanity in this new time. Under conditions of electric cicuitry, all the fragmented job patterns tend to blend once more into involving and demanding roles or forms of work that more and more resemble teaching, learning, and 'human' service, in the older sense of dedicated loyalty." Media affect your government. "Nose-counting, a cherished part of the eighteenth century fragmentation process, has rapidly become a cumbersome and ineffectual form of social assessment in an envrionment of instant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished. Today, the mass audience (the successor to the 'public') can be used as a creative, participating force. It is instead merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions. A new form of 'politics' is emerging, and in ways we haven't yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing EVERYTHING." Media affect our relationships with groups of other citizens. "The shock of recognition. In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained, ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other. There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." This book is, in short, a superb introduction to McLuhan's thinking. Ideally, it would be read before any of McLuhan's other books. Understanding McLuhan takes some time and thought, but the effort is well worth it to understand today's media and today's world. "Only the hand that erases can write the true thing," McLuhan quotes Meister Eckhardt as saying. McLuhan erases preconceptions of media being relatively insignificant, and demonstrates how the media affect the way each of us sees the world in which we live. A memorable photo in the book is one of a middle-aged man dressed in a business suit and carrying a briefcase standing upon a surfboard, riding the waves. "In his amusement born of rational detachment of his own situation, Poe's mariner in 'The Descent Into the Maelstrom' staved off disaster by understanding the action of the whirlpool," says McLuhan's accompanying prose. "His insight offers a possible strategem for understanding our predicament, our electrically-configured whirl." The last cartoon in the book--from the New Yorker in 1966--summarizes McLuhan's essential theme. A young man with a guitar discusses McLuhan with his father in a well-appointed library. "You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says the enviroment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential, thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?" We all should get McLuhan. The development of Internet--likely even more transformative than television--has greatly revived interest in McLuhan's view of technological changes as changing us as people, and of creating a global village for all of us to live in. "We impose the form of the old on the content of the new. The malady lingers on," McLuhan warns. We should heed his warnings and recognize, embrace, and work for constructive improvements in the ever-changing world in which we live.

THE QUOTABLE DAD
By Nick Lyons

I received this book yesterday as a Father's Day present. It is both brief and profound, with quotations from a wide range of leaders and writers on fatherhood from Jimmy Carter and Bill Cosby to John Wayne and William Carlos Williams. I would strongly recommend it as a Father's Day gift in the future. I would also recommend it to men on the verge of becoming fathers, men who have just become fathers, and fathers in need of some inspiration. The quotations also serve as a guide to contemporary books and authorities on fatherhood, such as Marcus Jacob Goldman's The Joy of Fatherhood, Peter Carey's The Granta Book of the Family, Kevin Osborn's The Complete Idiot's Guide to Fatherhood, Annie Pigeon's Dad's Little Instruction Book, John L. Hart's Becoming A Father, Peter Mayle's How to Be a Pregnant Father, William Plummer's Wishing My Father Well, Paul Riser's Couplehood, Bill Cosby's Fatherhood, and H. Jackson Browne's A Father's Book of Wisdom. The book has eight chapters, focusing on becoming a father, being a better father, fathers and daughters, fathers and sons, a father's wisdom,the difficulty of fatherhood, appreciating one's father, and grandfatherhood. All the quotations in the book are at at least stimulating and provocative, and many are vital and profound. Five of my favorites are as follows: "A baby is God's opinion that life should go on," Carl Sandburg "I hope when you grow up you will dedicate your life to working out plans to make people happy instead of making them miserable, as war does today," Joseph P. Kennedy to 8 year old Edward M. Kennedy "Children need models rather than critics, " Joseph Joubert "I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottom of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the eloquence of his example," Mario Cuomo "The lone father is not a strong father. Fathering is a difficult and perilous journey and is done well with the help of other men," John L. Hart The time it takes to get through the book is short, and it is time well spent. The Quotable Dad is an excellent source of inspiration and insight for fathers old and new, and for future fathers galore.

YOU HAVE THE POWER: HOW TO TAKE BACK OUR COUNTRY AND RESTORE DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
By Howard Dean

Howard Dean is proving himself to be one of the Democratic Party's more enduring leaders. Not yet 60, he has already served as Governor of Vermont, head of the Democratic Governors Association, a Democratic candidate for the party's 2004 presidential nomination, head of the political action committee Democracy for America, and since, February, 2005, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. With the Democrats poised to make big gains in 2006, Dean's future relevance is likely to continue for some time. I am not a neutral observer. I was a Dean delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2004--his only delegate from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, or the Mid-Atlantic states. And I have actively participated in Democracy for America and urged Pennsylvania's members of the Democratic National Committee to support his candidacy for this position. Dean's ascension to the Chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee from the ranks of unsuccessful Presidential candidates is unprecedented. Most Democratic National Committee chairs have been fundraisers and/or political technicians. Dean is the rare Democratic National Committee with a visible policy platform and a coherent set of ideas. This book is a summary and integration of Dean's views in a variety of areas: public policy platform; critiques of the Democratic Party (including Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council), the Republican Party (including George Bush, Newt Gingrich and the radical right), the media (including coverage of him and coverage of President Bush), a mix of moral exhortations to get actively involved in the political process, and pragmatic suggestions on how to strengthen the Democratic Party and why doing so is absolutely necessary. This book is also an excellent summary of how his two decades in Vermont's state government have shaped his worldview; he is a strong patriot for Vermont as well as for America. "Ours is a very nurturing state with a sense of neighborly obligation. You typically see this in rural states, where communities had to band together because they were relatively isolated and self-supporting. There's a strong ethic that says we're all in it together; and it translates into an almost ingrained sense of collective responsibility and a deep commitment to public programs that tie people together...." Dean's signature programs as Governor of Vermont were business tax cuts, an expansion of social welfare programs from the poor to the middle class by raising income eligibility requirments, parenting training programs for low-income families, offering home visits from social workers and nurses to mothers of newborns, annually balancing the budget, and saying no to undramatic traditional government spending in order to be able to finance some bold initiatives. "All because Vermonters believed that our community of like-minded, stable, middle-class citizens could be expanded to draw in people at risk. In other words, we really tried to help everyone enjoy the kind of security and stability that in much of America is now reserved for the upper reaches of the middle class and the wealthy. We rejected social Darwinism.... "We did what Republicans and Democrats in Washington have never been able to do: bring health care and child care supports and good public schools and help with higher education to those outside the upper middle class--without breaking the bank. "We made our ideals aout community and social responsibility into reality without getting caught up in overspending or spiraling debt." It is probably the best book ever written by a man on the cusp of becoming Democratic National Chairman. Written with the brevity, incisiveness and passion that has characterized Dean's public persona, it helps answer the questions of who Dean is, why he has a national constituency, what he stands for, and why both he and the Democratic Party are likely to have a long and successful future. The last chapter provides a good summary of his public policy beliefs: "We need to restore the balance between corporate power and the ballot box. "We need to restore the balance between corporate rights and citizen's rights. "We need to narrow the wealth gap to show people that capitalism works for them. "We need to always stand up against the politics of division and fear, whether we are progressive or conservative or in the middle. "We need political institutions that people can believe in. "And we need a media willing to perform their watchdog role and hold politicians accountable for telling the truth.... "We need campaign finance reform.... "We need more corporate accountability.... "We have to reempower labor.... "We need to increase voter turnout.... "Voting is not enough.... "Politicians can't solve our problems for us...." Dean makes clear that he is a genuine centrist who believes in balanced budgets and not a liberal in the 1960's free-spending sense of the word. He supported Jimmy Carter over Ted Kennedy for the 1980 Presidential nomination, and somewhat defines himself by that choice. In today's right-wing dominated climate, of course, the distinctions between Carter's centrism and Kennedy's liberalism have generally paled into insignificance. This is a great book for those seeking an introduction to Dean's beliefs, the Democratic Party's beliefs, and the public policy differences within the Democratic Party and between the Democratic and Republican parties. It is also a good book for those deeply enmeshed in the political process who would benefit from a good summary volume. There are far more detailed books, however, on all these subjects, as well as on the 2004 Presidential campaign and Dean's role as a leading opponent of the war in Iraq.

AFFECTIVE INTELLIGENCE AND POLITICAL JUDGMENT
By George E. Marcus

For many generations, both academia in various disciplines and journalism in the news and editorial departments have widely adhered to the idea that the ideal citizen is detached, disinterested, and well-informed. This ideal has persisted despite the generally observable phenomenon that people who are detached or disinterested very frequently lack the motivation to become well-informed. The authors of this book--two professors of political science and one professor of communications--seek to rehabilitate the reputation of those political actors who are motivated in significant part by an emotional commitment to one vision or another of significant societal improvement. They succeed admirably. No one who reads and studies this book will look at the politically passionate the same way again. "So when do we think about politics?" the authors ask. "When our emotions tell us to," they answer. "We posit that individuals monitor political affairs by responding habitually, and for the most part unthinkingly, to familiar and expected political symbols, that is, by relying on past thought, calculation, and evaluation. But the central claim of our theory is that when citizens encounter a novel or threatening actor, event or issue on the political horizon, a process of fresh evaluation and political judgment is required." The authors revise the traditional research paradigm. Political attentiveness, generally thought to be static in frequency, is seen as dynamic, along with affect, or feeling. Concepts of attitudes and party affiliation--traditionally thought of as having both thoughtful and habitual elements--are seen instead as being merely dominated by habitual behavior. Opposition between affect (feeling) and cognition is replaced by interaction between affect and cognition. The "intrumental orientation to political behavior" is replaced by a "mix of thoughtless reliance on habit and explicit calculation of interest." The "idealized notion of citizenship" is replaced by "political ideals and institutions informed by realism about psychological dynamics." Political issues, traditionally considered equivalent, are now considered a variable by issue type. Similarly, attentiveness and self-interest are no longer assumed to be considered contstansts but are considered variables. "Our research leads us to conceptualize affect and reason as two complementary mental states in a delicate, interactive, and highly functional dynamic balance," the authors state. "We...argue that affective systems manage both our response to novelty and our reliance on established habits. More importantly, our work suggests that in addition to managing our emotional reactions to things that are novel, threatening, and familiar, affect also influences when and how we think about such things." The authors invade the field of psychology and the neurosciences to present detailed findings. They discuss the brain's limbic region, which "governs behavior by monitoring primarily positive reinforcers and establishing dispositions." These dispositions are "attached to previous experiences (which) governs people's behavioral repertoires....The disposition system relies on emotional assignment to control the execution of habits: we sustain those habits about which we feel enthusiastic and we abandon those that cause us despair." The disposition system is contrasted with the surveillance system, "which acts to scan the environment for novelty and sudden intrusion of threat. It serves to warn us when we cannot rely on past learnings to handle what now confronts us and to warn us that some things and some people are powerful and dangerous. This system uses emotion to signal the consequences of its ongoing analyses. It generates moods of calmness, on the one hand, and anxiety, on the other...." After a detailed foray into the neurosciences to document these conclusions, the authors return to more traditional political science, analyzing in depth the detailed survey data in the 1980-1996 American National Election Studies, which focus on the attitudes of the American people towards the various Presidential candidates during this time period. They focus on the fluctuating levels of enthusiasm and anxiety towards various Presidential candidates, and find that as the level of anxiety towards a candidate that the voter would traditionally support on the basis of partisan affiliation rises, the voter searches the candidate's character and issue positions in far greater detail to see if the candidate is worthy of support. This provides a theoretical explanation for the power of negative campaigning, despite the fact that it is so widely widely detested. The affective intelligence theory is contrasted with the normal vote model and the rational choice model. Under the affective intelligence theory, the attentive voters are those who are either "habitually attentive" or those who are "anxious" about a candidate they would otherwise be inclined to support. "Those for whom new information generates anxiety" are "receptive to new information." In short, the decision on who to vote for is based on "either reliance on habituated cues or reasoned considerations when unfamiliar or threatening situations preclude routine reliance on habit." These conclusions are backed by statistical data from the ANES studies. Complacent voters place a 44% reliance on partisan cues, the find, while an anxious voter places only an 8% reliance on partisan cues. An anxious voter places almost twice as a great a share on reliance on candidate qualities than a complacent voter (35% to 19%), and almost twice as a great a share on policy preferences (57% to 35%). After their research was completed, I believe President Clinton helped prove that this intense focus on candidate qualities and policy preferences can ultimately work to benefit a candidate who makes voters anxious: the Democrats broke a long historical pattern and scored net gains of Congressional seats in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandals. This book is well worth reading and intensely studying by anyone who is active in political campaigns, by any journalist covering political campaigns, or by anyone studying political survey data. The authors seem to recognize the difficulties of penetrating the jargon they emply, and deal with the problem by frequent repetitions of the points they are making. A better written book would have been clearer and shorter. But the book is neither impenetrable or of excessive length, and the time it takes to master the points the authors are making is well worth the effort. The authors deserve credit for their success in both conceptualization and research design. Integrating the neurosciences with political science and communications is a useful innovation. The combing and combining of twenty years of Presidential polling data is also a useful and rather rare accomplishment. It will be difficult to find a more substantive and profound book on the creation and monitoring of public opinion than this one.

HOW TO LOSE EVERYTHING IN POLITICS EXCEPT MASSACHUSETTS
By Kristi Witker

Kristi Witker in 1972 was a journalist on a skiing vacation in Switzerland when she received an invitation to help with the McGovern campaign. It was the chance of lifetime. She took it. She later decided she had made the wrong choice, but she stuck it out and wrote about it. She received the offer because she traveled with Robert Kennedy's 1968 Presidential campaign,having been assigned to write a book on him for American Heritage Press. "Kennedy turned out to be an accessible candidate," she writes. "Traveling with the Kennedy campaign was a relaxing and enormously pleasureable experience." This book by a young woman who later became a successful television reporter is both hilarious and profound. Reading it provides a baseline for the political progress women have made. As Deputy Press Secretary, she was McGovern's highest ranking female staffer. Yet she was denied basic office furniture, and treated disrespectfully by other staff, who both withheld cooperation that she needed in order to do her job, and spread rumors about her sex life, which, she complains, was much more boring than she would have liked. A basic problem of the McGovern campaign was that it was led by the remnants of the Robert Kennedy campaign, who saw in McGovern's politics a chance to reclaim Kennedy's vision. But McGovern was not as well known, as charismatic, as politically skilled, and--perhaps most importantly--anywhere near as wealthy as Kennedy. "It looks like McGovern is nothing on his own, that he has to rely on the Kennedy ghost," Whitker fumes early in the campaign when a McGovern television commercial contains praise from RFK. Running as the Kennedy legacy candidate is hampered by Ted Kennedy's disinclination to campaign for McGovern in the primaries, and his refusal to accept McGovern's offer of the Vice-Presidential nomination. Ultimately, after various false starts (remember Tom Eagleton?), McGovern winds up with Kennedy borther-in-law Sargent Shriver as a runningmate, but it is too little, too late to secure the Kennedy constituency and unite the Democratic Party. She assails McGovern's lack of mastery of public policy mastery. "We have to do something on the economy," he tells a staff member." The staffer members asks what. "Something," McGovern repeats. McGovern's hatred of being committed to specific details led to a fatal lacks of clarity and inability to weed out bad ideas. His $1000 per person tax rebate was the quintessential bad idea. The limitations of McGovern's staff were also deadly. "His campaign was at first a minor effort appropriately run by minors, but as he came up, they felt they owned him and were determined not to share him. The candidate became their captive and they, in time, his limitation. These kids always had wildly impractical, rigid, theological notions about politics....(E)veryone had a title which suggested he was the boss. In fact, no one was." In the McGovern campaign, closeness to the center of the action was all. People wanted to be central staff, not field staff. Gary Hart did parlay his position as campaign manager (outranked by National Political Director Frank Mankiewcz though) into two terms in the U.S. Senate and two presidential candidacies. But a guy not mentioned in the book--Texas field staff director Bill Clinton--went a lot farther of course. So may his Texas co-worker Hillary Rodham, also not mentioned. What Clinton learned from McGovern was the importance of conducting a primary election campaign with the general election in mind. McGovern taught this lesson by failing to understand it. "Throughout the primaries," Witker writes,"McGovern and his staff had been running like a group of lemmings with blinders on, toward the sea, which, in their case, happened to be The Nomination. The Nomination was their only goal, a goal now out of all proportion because McGovern's longshot candidacy had made it seem unattainable. And because it had seemed unattainable, McGovern now credited it with mystical powers. If he won The Nomination, he would somehow become invincible and have anything he wanted." McGovern, a strong moral leader and an enduring political figure in the years since his 1972 campaign, could have been elected with a better campaign, Witker implies. That is difficult to say: in the 20th Century only Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton were able to defeat incumbent Republican presidents, and all had the benefit of deeply divided a Republican Party at the time. Both Witker's humor and political insights are still valuable today. No one should attempt to put together a large scale political operation without reading this book. And anyone grappling with the problems of how to run an extensive volunteer operation of any kind would also benefit. This is a great case study of the human resources issues involved in running a large volunteer operation. The campaign "was a once in a lifetime experience," Witker concludes. And, indeed, she never worked in a Presidential campaign again. Her summary of Republican appeal is an enduring one. "It was already a depressing year on top of a succession of depressing years: rising prices, falling stock market, scandals, the War, crime. Who wanted to think about goodness and justice and truth just now? It only reminded you of how little of it was around. Not many people trusted Nixon, but he wasn't taking away their money, or so they believed. No one knew whether to trust McGovern, but he was threatening to take away their money, so why bother to find out? Why listen?" Those who listen to Kristi Witker will benefit from the experience. If you are reading this review, you should read this book.

GRANDPA’S STORIES: MEMOIRS OF R. CHASE WHITAKER
By R. Chase Whitaker

In 1921, Princeton University junior R. Chase Whitaker was called home to what was then considered the rural part of Philadelphia (now it is known as Olney) from Princeton University to help save Whitaker's Mill, a business owned by the same family at same complex continuously since 1813. The family roots went back to England in the 1700's, where another branch of the family also had a Whitaker's Mill, which is now a museum. Chase Whitaker and his brother Howard succeeded in gradually modernizing plant operations that had failed to keep up with the times under the leadership of their brilliant but eccentric father James, who had turned down a faculty position at Princeton Univsity shortly after graduating there to continue the family tradition of working for Whitaker Mills. He was the sixth generation to do; Chase and Howard would be the seventh and final generation to lead the firm. It was "like a feudal village," one of Chase Whitaker's daughters told me on May 27, 2006, when a state commemorative plaque was placed on the parkland the family had donated to Philadelphia's Fairmount Park Commisssion after the company had been sold and transferred to Massachusetts in 1974. One of the themes of Whitaker's book is the gradual transition from a totally self-contained entity--which paid its employees in cash, which outside of family members had no college educated employees until the 1950's, which rented employees housing it owned, which had its own fleet of trucks, which produced its own power, which kept out unions until World War II pressure from the War Department gave it the choice of losing defense contracts or accepting unionization, which had a nearby farm, which did its own extensive construction, which had luxury executive housing for its CEO nearby--to a modern firm kept in business by sales, cost management, and technological innovation. The most famous character in the book is labor leader Solomon Stetin, who went on to lead the Textile Workers of America after his successful pressuring of Whitaker to recognize his union. Stetin was the real life leader who was to lead the union organizing drive on which the movie Norma Rae was based. Grandpa's Stories would be of greater relevance as a business book if more of the book dealt with Whitaker Mills. Instead, we are given a portrait of the Whitaker family in World War I, Princeton, dating, relating to his difficult parents and to his children, and coming to grips with his role as a relatively wealthy man basically submerged in a heavily blue collar world. His workday starts with his workers at 6:00 a.m., and he is frequently working with them doing difficult and sometimes dangerous skilled labor as well as attending to traditional management tasks. Whitaker comes off as a charming, conscientous, humane and decent man, who struggles with the demands of changing times and tries to do right with his suppliers, his customers, his workforce, and his country. This is a good book to give to anyone involved in running a struggling family business,or to one interested in the history of the textile industry, or the history of industrial Philadelphia.

WARRIOR POLITICS: WHY LEADERSHIP DEMANGS A PAGAN ETHOS
By Robert D. Kaplan

Every day, much is new in the world. The author argues that newness can be a mere distraction. In reality, he argues,foreign policy statecraft is essentially what it was in ancient times, before the rise of Christianity, mass communications, and widespread democracy.This is a bold assertion. It is one thing for a religious leader to plumb the depths of the Old Testament or the New Testament to provide insights to modern moral dilemmas. It is something else to assert that in important respects we still live in ancient times. One would hope that that thousands of years of experience, learning, and prayer would have fundamentally changed the way countries relate to each other.It is an assertion that leads to the discovery of unlikely heroes. For the last 14 years of his reign, from 23 A.D. to 37 A.D., the Roman Emperor Tiberius built a series of dungeons and torture chambers, and engaged in "obscene" cruelty. But, in the first nine years of his reign,he added military bases to the territories that Rome already possessed, and "combined diplomacy with the threat of force to preserve a peace that was favorable to Rome."The Han dynasty of China lasted over 400 years and "represented a grand harmony of peoples and systems," beginning in 206 B.C. The "wise delaying tactics" (the words of the great historian Livy) of Roman consul Quintus Fabius Maximus broke "the terrible continuity of Roman defeats." Said Fabius,"Never mind if they call your caution timidity, your wisdom sloth,your generalship weakness; it is better that a wise enemy should fear you than foolish friends should praise."The study of these and other ancients by governmental decision-makers is nothing new, Kaplan reminds us. Winston Churchill's early historical writings evoked memories of ancient historians that Churchill had presumably studied. Churchill writes of "civilization" versus "barbarism," fills his work with evocative battle scenes, great drama, and heroism. For Churchill, Kaplan writes, "glory is rooted in a morality of consequence, of actual results rather than good intentions."Niccolo Machiaevelli (1469-1527), the author of The Prince, also popularized ancient thinking: " he preferred a pagan ethic that elevated self-preservation over the Christian ethic of sacrifice, which he considered hypocritical."Machiavelli believed that ruthless tactics can be central to a statesman's virtue. "(V)irtue has little to do with individual perfection and everything to do with political result. Thus, for Machiavelli, a policy is defined not by its excellence but by its outcome; if it isn't effective, it can't be virtuous."The philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)is also an intellectual heir of the ancients. "The sum of virtue," Hobbes writes, "is to be sociable with them that will be sociable, and formidable to them that will not."The ancient sources, and the great philosphers of modern or premodern times, are cited in service of an aggressive foreign policy. This book was very popular with intellectuals in the orbit of the Bush White House, for it is a series of skillful rhetorical arguments for interventionism, occasionally modified with warnings of dire consequences of failure.It is best suited for speechwriters, who can savor and appropriate eloquent sentence after eloquent sentence. It is also a good book for college classrooms, where its bold assertions provide grist for thousands of analytical term papers and theses.It is, though, not the best guide to actual foreign-policy making. In his numerous other works, Kaplan deals with reality in penetrating detail. Here, he marches across history with dazzling speed, uniting diverse historical subjects with present day events. This method spreads both insights and confusion. Mere mortals do not have the gift of prophecy. Alas, we do know which historical precedent is the most relevant until after a pending crisis is over. The inspirational words and deeds of the ancients are usually less relevant than detailed knowledge of the history of the conflict and the peoples involved.By all means, policymakers should read this book. They should be somewhat careful, however, about living it. The public virtue of successful ends cannot be totally separated from the individual private virtue of seeking morally desirable and appropriate means.

THE ALMANAC OF AMERICAN POLITICS, 2004
By Michael Barone

Before The Almanac of American Politics came along in the late 1960's, Congress was widely seen as either an impenetrable series of arcane rules, procedures, rituals, and conflicts which only experts could understand in detail--the prevailing view of political scientists--or a bunch of oddball characters who occasionally hindered or unjustly attracted attention from the great men serving as President--the prevailing view of journalists.The Alamanac of American Politics created a new and more accurate paradigm. The workings of Congress, it said, were comprehensible to informed and intelligent people. The personalities of Members of Congress, while occasionally idiosyncratic, were generally integrated with the purposeful actions members of Congress were taking on behalf of their geographical constituencies, their supporters, and their visions of local and national interests.In short, Members of Congress were rational actors acting within both a geographic and national context. Tip O'Neill's famous saying--"All politics are local"--was only partly true. All politics was also national. Citizens with national goals only had to find citizens with local sensitivites who shared their national goals to oppose incumbent Members of Congress.Congress is a far more competitive and short-tenured organization than it was before this series was written.Without The Almanac of American Politics, there would have been far fewer anti-war and pro-enviroment challenges in the early 1970's. The Democratic gains of 1974 and 1976 would have been far less sweeping. So would the Republican gains of 1980, 1994, and 2002. Had this series never been written, you never would have heard of Newt Gingrich.The compilation of information can be a profoundly political act. If you are at all interested in politics, you should read this book. You should not read it as a compilation of interesting trivia. You should read it knowing that people who count see it a guide to action.

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