Blog
American Innovation
We’re at no loss for confidence from presidential candidates about how good things will be if they win. But I’ll tell you in a moment why they’ve all got it wrong.
First, the Republicans, the ones who’ve managed to stay in the race? They promise us that if elected, they will trash whatever Barack Obama has done and put America back on the path to prosperity.
For his part, President Obama has the same playbook but a different strategy: he will build on what he already has done to keep America on the path back to prosperity.
Good luck to both sides. If there’s one thing on which we all can agree, it is that we like prosperity, and want as much as we can get. But you know what? No matter who wins in November, it won’t primarily be his policies that get us there. And here’s the proof: while our economy went south under the policies of the last Republican president, we didn’t see an eye-popping U-turn to the north under the policies of the incumbent Democrat. Some would translate that to read, a pox on both their houses.
Yet America will recover, or continue its recovery (depending on who you talk to). But it won’t be because of our ability to manufacture hard goods any more; sure, what we do build we now build well and if you include petroleum, we are still the biggest producer of goods and services in the world. Otherwise though, although a little more manufacturing is coming back to our shores from overseas, by and large, it’s still cheaper to build things elsewhere.
Rather, we will find prosperity because of an intangible quality I’ve always had trouble getting my head around…until now. It’s called innovation. Inventiveness. Entrepreneurial brainpower. But what I’ve never gotten my head around was, how do those uniquely superior American qualities translate to prosperity? What good does it do us to imagine great things if we aren’t actually turning them into something solid?
And then I read this headline: “App Economy has created 466,000 jobs.” That’s the “app economy” as in “Angry Birds,” “Facebook,” “CNN.com,” apps that give you the world via the smartphone, the tablet, and the social media. The online piece under the headline— reporting a study by TechNet, a think tank for high-tech corporations— likened the “App Economy” to “a 21st Century construction sector.” That’s when the little light went off in my head: we still build things, but we don’t buy them off the shelf any more at the mall and, standing alone, we don’t even hold them in our hands.
No, what we do today to stay at the apex of global commerce is innovate, then turn those innovations, however physically intangible, into something that people can actually use. And if you doubt that, consider this: today there are something like a million apps out there in the marketplace, and every day the number grows. Lest you think they’re mostly games that fling birds into buildings, think again: according to TechNet’s report, “Every major consumer-facing company… discovered that they need an app to be the public face of the business.” In other words, “app” employment is the construction sector for the 21st Century because apps have become the front door we walk through to do business.
Oh, our next president— and all the politicians down the pyramid— will claim credit for our prosperous future. But truth be known, they don’t have nearly so much to do with it as they used to. And that’s a good thing. We don’t have to depend on dysfunctional elected officials to find prosperity; we only have to depend on ourselves.
My Congressman
Republican Representative Mike Coffman, of Colorado, is my Congressman. It was never my choice, because he and I don’t sit on the same side of the political aisle. But that doesn’t have to mean I can’t respect him. I always have. Not only has he been one of the harder-working public officials representing me— both during his days in Colorado state government and now in Washington— but more than once he put his political career aside and put on a uniform to do his duty in Iraq.
But the other day, I heard Coffman on the radio, and my respect went down the drain. He was talking about President Obama’s stated wish to take more time to evaluate the proposed Keystone pipeline, which would carry Canadian crude oil to U.S. refineries by running across several American states. Coffman supports the pipeline. But some of America’s leading environmentalists don’t. It scares them.
Now, let me make something clear: like Coffman, I’m for Keystone. I’ve been several times on Alaska’s North Slope, where the decades-old, 800-mile long Trans Alaska Pipeline begins. Seeing its success, I have confidence that a Keystone pipeline— especially by being built in this day and age— would be not only in our oil-dependent nation’s best interest, but safe.
But apparently, according to Congressman Coffman, anyone who doesn’t see it that way isn’t a patriot. He was talking about Obama and the pipeline, and the political implications of the President’s hesitation about it, and said, “The problem is, he loves being in office much more than he loves this country.”
So apparently if you don’t agree with Coffman’s policy on the Keystone pipeline— or, by extension, with his take on tax policy, abortion policy, education policy, foreign policy, or any other policy— you don’t love America. At least not if you’re President Obama, who simply has different policy priorities than Coffman. Of course this censures every other American who isn’t on Coffman’s side too. Including me, and pretty much every constituent who ever voted against him. Congressman, you can go do you-know-what to yourself.
How dare this elected representative impugn the patriotism of Americans simply because they aren’t in sync with his ideology! Like the ones who generated this controversy over Keystone. Although I’m not on their side, environmentalists who oppose the pipeline oppose it precisely because they do love their country, and fear it will be fouled by a pipeline stretching from the Canadian border almost to Mexico.
This isn’t the first time in recent memory that the patriotism of well-meaning Americans has been questioned. Remember the run-up to the ill-fated war in Iraq? Many Americans didn’t buy into the connection President Bush claimed between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, to which the President basically said, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Bush was playing the game Coffman’s playing now, labeling citizens who don’t believe in his policy as traitors. As if only one side on the political spectrum has a clue about what’s best for America. As if only one side has a hammerlock on patriotism.
Patriotism is about respect, love, and support for our nation. What myopic political animals like Mike Coffman don’t get is that some of us can respect, love, and support our nation without respecting, loving, or supporting him!
Putin and Russia
If you weren’t in awe when you read about the anti-Putin demonstrations all across Russia, let me tell you a story.
Last time I shot a television program about politics in Russia, only a couple of years ago, the camera crew and I happened upon a public demonstration across the street from the Moscow headquarters of United Russia, Vladimir Putin’s political party. There were about 20 men standing silently in a straight line along the sidewalk. They were holding signs protesting a decision in their town, not far from the capital, to build a United Russia office building on an empty plot of land where they had parked for years when they headed to their factory jobs next door.
To be sure, in the dark days of the Soviet Union, I saw KGB thugs assault and arrest dissenters for simply stepping across a chain to lay a flower at the foot of a statue. (They also pulled the camera off my cameraman’s shoulder and threw it on the ground. Thankfully, heavy snow cushioned the impact and the tape survived, airing across the U.S. that night on ABC.)
In contrast, the men I saw across from Putin’s party headquarters weren’t hauled away and arrested. Russia had come that far. But when the protest leader saw that one of his comrades had backed halfway off the sidewalk and had his heels on the grass, he shouted a stern warning to everyone to keep their feet strictly on the sidewalk. They were still burdened with memories when simply stepping on the grass could be called “destruction of public property” and used a pretext for imprisonment.
Now, tens of thousands are openly defying Mr. Putin. And no wonder. As one of his opponents put it to me in Moscow, Putin has “squeezed the life out of Russian democracy.” While roughly fifty political parties were born in the 1990’s when the Soviet Empire crumbled, Putin disqualified one after another and whittled them down to about half-a-dozen, all friendly to his government. While there were popular elections for governors and senators in the new Russia, Putin pulled off a u-turn and today they are appointed by the president. While free speech blossomed in those early days, news organizations that aired dissent were shut down. Basically, the liberties for which people had yearned for decades didn’t last for a single generation.
While it would be foolhardy to predict the outcome of these new nationwide protests— more are planned for Christmas Eve— here is a hint: Russia will not necessarily turn to American-style democracy. One reason is obvious. At a certain point Putin will have to decide: is he like Mubarak in Egypt, willing to throw himself on his sword to preserve the peace, or like Assad in Syria, willing to take off the gloves to preserve his power. That verdict isn’t in but never forget: Putin’s roots are in the KGB.
But a second reason is more revealing of Russian history and the Russian people. On my trip two years ago, I interviewed a member of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. He was in one of the last surviving opposition parties (although since we met, his party has been disqualified along with the others). One of my questions was, how has Putin gotten away with dispossessing people of the democracy they had craved for so long?
His answer was, “Russians in the ‘90s had major problems: the economy fell down, incomes fell down, corruption grew up, many things were terrible. And the name for that was ‘democracy’.” From their experience, their definition of democracy is different from ours.
The third reason we can’t predict Russia’s political future is the immediate past. Yes, Putin’s party showed up with the most votes. But whose horse came in second? The Communists.
For a variety of reasons, the United States needs to partner with Russia. But any future partnership may be no better than it’s been.
Herman Cain
• Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. — Thomas Jefferson
• If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. — George Orwell
• We report. You decide. –– Fox News
Apparently Herman Cain’s fall isn’t Herman Cain’s fault. It’s the media’s. That’s what one supporter meant after Cain “suspended” his presidential campaign, telling a reporter for Politico, “This is your fault;” it was Politico that first reported accusations of sexual harassment against the candidate. And it’s what another supporter meant when she angrily told reporters at Cain’s suddenly defunct Iowa headquarters, “You guys know what you’ve been doing,” and then defined the media the way so many Americans do: “The very good are often the target of the very evil.”
So, we— journalists— are “the very evil.” But it’s no surprise; I could have predicted it. In fact it’s been predictable ever since the Greek poet Sophocles wrote almost 2,500 years ago, “None love the messenger who brings bad tidings.”
Of course the media’s critics will cite news stories they like— analysis, polls, gossip— until they’re blue in the face. Just listen to Rush Limbaugh. But give them news they don’t like and they call it a lie.
Who knows? Maybe all four women who accused Cain— including the two who had worked for Cain and got a year’s severance after the alleged harassment— are lying through their teeth. And maybe Atlanta businesswoman Ginger White is lying about a 13-year extramarital affair with Mr. Cain. Maybe his documented middle-of-the-night calls and text messages are a lie too.
Look, I don’t know what Cain did or didn’t do in his private life. His behavior isn’t the point. The media’s behavior is. So what I wonder is, what exactly do the media’s critics want?
Cain’s supporter in Iowa, the one who thinks the media is “evil,” has an answer: “You’re supposed to have facts when you report something.” You’re right, lady, so here’s some news: four different women charged Cain with harassment; that’s a fact. Another charged him with an extramarital sexual relationship; that’s another fact.
I’ll bet she— and millions more of the media’s fuming critics— didn’t complain when the media reported the fact, presented by President George W. Bush, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Nor did they likely complain that to its lasting disgrace, the media subsequently failed to dig deep enough to discredit the President. That one cost us a lot more than the presidential candidacy of the former CEO of a pizza chain.
The media is far from perfect. In fact it is deeply flawed, particularly in this relatively new era of 24-hour access to the news, which in too many cases has pushed news organizations to place more value on being first than on being right. But personally I resent the implication that we’re not just flawed, but evil.
In my own career as a reporter around the world I have been kicked and beaten, shelled and shot at, and chased by gangs with machetes. I’ve slept on Saudi sands crawling with scorpions and in caves under attack in Lebanon. I’ve been arrested everywhere from Communist Poland to Afghanistan. And gotten the runs in countries many Americans couldn’t even find on a map. Why? To report the news… which the media’s critics gobble up just as fast as everyone else. If that’s someone’s idea of evil, they’ve gotta get a life.
My own response to critics of stories like Herman Cain’s has long been, “The media can’t make you look silly, or stupid, or corrupt, without your help.” But that wouldn’t dissuade those supporters who said after Cain’s departure from the presidential race that they still stand by him. Why? Because according to one, “I believe in him.” And from another: “It’s because he is a Christian.” Gosh, I can’t argue with those facts!
On Libya
Since I’ve covered news stories in Libya half-a-dozen times or more, and interviewed the late Colonel Moammar Gaddafi on several of those visits, I was asked by a television station to talk about him on the day he was caught and killed. And when the reporter asked, “What’s next for Libya?”, my answer was, “If I sit here and actually tell you what’s next for Libya, kick me out of the room.”
No doubt, plenty of experts will authoritatively tell us anyway. But here’s why they shouldn’t: no one knows. And if you don’t believe that, consider this: at the beginning of this year, you could have asked that question, “What’s next?”, to the leaders of the very nations where rebellions rose up— Gaddafi in Libya, Mubarak of Egypt, Assad in Syria, Ben Ali in Tunisia, Saleh of Yemen— and they themselves didn’t have a clue….even though each one had eyes and ears on every street corner of his country.
So we can only guess about what’s next, and we can only base those guesses on our experience. Mine, covering many nations rent by revolution, is that a whole spectrum of opinions and ideologies bands together to fight a common foe; the Arab adage is, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But that bond sometimes doesn’t last beyond the last rifle shot. One thing we know about Libya is, some of the rebels who fought shoulder-to-shoulder were guys who, before the revolution, wouldn’t have sat at the same table together.
History also shows that when so many have waited so long for a place at the table, they’ll push everyone else out of the way to get a chair. Such conflicts can torment a nation.
What’s more, those who speak now for Libya liberally use the word “democracy.” However, that means different things to different factions. For some, it means American-style freedoms of everything from speech to religion to opportunity. But for others, democracy means too much freedom— the freedom to upset moral and cultural norms that have stood them well for millennia.
But I also can cite encouraging signs that date back to my times in Libya. I never went there without meeting someone who told me, “Oh, I have a brother living in the United States,” or “My son is going to college in your country.” There is not the kind of intellectual vacuum in Libya that I’ve seen in less sophisticated countries like Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, a vacuum that can enable the radical forces of terror to gain a dominant hold on power. Quite simply, Libya has an educated and comfortable middle class— not by our standards, but a middle class of merchants and technicians— whose lives have gotten better these past few decades and they know it wasn’t thanks only to the force of Allah.
If I see a problem, now that the rebellious factions in Libya must actually govern, it is that Gaddafi gave them no foundation to start. That’s because for forty years, Libya was a one-man show with Gaddafi at the top of everything: government, military, business, oil. Under his leadership, there was no individual initiative. Not even individual sports; everything had to be a team endeavor, everything had to be in the collective.
That’s one reason he stayed in power so long: he didn’t permit the organization of any kind of civic group that might grow into organized opposition. Libyans didn’t have the equivalent of our chambers of commerce, or PTAs, or even Girl Scouts. Every decision about people’s lives emanated from the top. The new Libya is born without a skeleton to build on. That’s worrisome. On the other hand, the new Libya is born without a legacy anyone would dare to emulate. That’s encouraging.
