The Times asked a variety of people to leave what the pundits say aside and focus on what they think needs to be done.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (an astrophysicist) has a good, solid response in line with the thinking of many, including this writer: it's up to us. Stupid people get lousy leaders. So smarten up, America.
Science provides a particular way of questioning what you see and hear. When empowered by this state of mind, objective realities matter. These are the truths on which good governance should be based and which exist outside of particular belief systems.
Our government doesn’t work — not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, wouldn’t be to lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to bring an objective reality to the electorate so it could choose the right leaders in the first place.
Definitely not Patricia Ryan Madson's prescription. OMG!
This guy, James Dyson, spots a big problem. Our education system doesn't produce life-long learners, which is another way of say it doesn't produce educated people.
Experimentation is learning. Only through making mistakes do we find out what works, what to do differently and how to get better. Box-ticking does not correlate with world winning. ... By fostering an environment where learning through failure is celebrated, the United States can get back to ongoing success — making mistakes, making things.
But a couple of good answers out of a dozen who were asked to contribute their ideas.... There's the problem right there: an awful lot of embarrassing tripe.
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There is something to be said about who you surround yourself with, whether you're a voter or whether you're a leader, says a good deal about you. If you're a voter who surrounds him/herself with TV, please don't vote. If you're a leader who, during your first couple of years in offices, keeps the bad advisors and fires the good ones, please don't run again. But America is saddled with both -- media-driven voters and a walking compromise for a president.
David Bromwich tells us about the people Obama appointed and then dropped as well as the people he brought on later. There is a troubling pattern. The good guys didn't last long, thanks to Obama's belief that he's being a moral guy who knows how to operate in an evil world. Sounds good, but when the operator consistently represses the good guy, what we get is only a little less evil.
Indeed, Obama’s understanding of international morality seems to be largely expressed by the proposition that "there's serious evil in the world" -- a truth he confided in 2007 to the New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks, and attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr -- combined with the assertion that he is ready to "face the world as it is." The world we seek is, of course, the better world of high morality. But morality, properly understood, is nothing but a framework for ideals. Once you have discharged your duty, by saying the right words for the right policies, you have to accommodate the world.
This has become the ethic of the Bush-Obama administration in a new phase. It explains, as nothing else does, Obama’s enormous appetite for compromise, the growing conventionality of his choices of policy and person, and the legitimacy he has conferred on many radical innovations of the early Bush years by assenting to their logic and often widening their scope. They are, after all, the world as it is.
Obama’s pragmatism comes down to a series of maxims that can be relied on to ratify the existing order -- any order, however recent its advent and however repulsive its effects. You must stay in power in order to go on “seeking.” Therefore, in “the world as it is,” you must requite evil with lesser evil. You do so to prevent your replacement by fanatics: people, for example, like those who invented the means you began by deploring but ended up adopting. Their difference from you is that they lack the vision of the seeker. Finally, in the world as it is, to retain your hold on power you must keep in place the sort of people who are normally found in places of power.
Ouch. And ouch again:
The position of a moderate who aspires to shake the world into a new shape presents a continuous contradiction. For the moderate feels constrained not to say anything startling, and not to do anything very fast. But just as there is trouble with doing things on the old lines, there is trouble, too, with letting people understand things on the old lines. At least, there is if you have your sights set on changing the nature of the game. Obama is caught in this contradiction, and keeps getting deeper in it, like a man who sinks in quicksand both the more he struggles and the more he stays still. Bromwich, NYRB, 7/14/11
