Event

Election Results in Illinois 5th Congressional District Represent Another Win for Comprehensive Immigration Reform - Cook County commissioner, Mike Quigley will travel to Washington as early as Thursday to prepare to take over the 5th Congressional District seat formerly held by Rahm Emanuel.  He obtained a major victory yesterday, defeating Republican Rosanna Pulido and Green Party candidate Matt Reichel by taking 70 percent of the vote with 94 percent of precincts reporting.  Pulido is not only extremely anti-immigrant in an incredibly diverse district, she was the state director of the Illinois Minutemen Project.  By contrast, Mr. Quigley is a staunch supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, and has stated:

He'll stand up to the extremists in Congress who try to use immigrants as scapegoats and whose harsh policies would divide spouses, parents and children. Mike will fight for the rights of families to stay united here in America.

Voters clearly favor solution-oriented reformers over mass-deportation hardliners, and they send one more vote for comprehensive immigration reform to the House of Representatives. 

There is coverage today of a new study indicating that Hispanics made up nearly half of the more than 1 million people who became U.S. citizens in 2008 - almost 1 of 2 new Americans are Latino.  Additionally, the number of Latinos who became American citizens in FY 2008 more than doubled from the previous year.  It stands to reason the sucess of ethnic media that reflects this growing multicultural reality. A piece by Mandalit de Barco today on NPR's morning edition focuses precisely on the growing market share of "ethnic media," happening for various reasons: 

Many of these newspapers and broadcast stations are doing well because they've tapped into an expanding audience - the sons and daughters of immigrants.  In Los Angeles, the No. 1 TV station isn't NBC, CBS, ABC or Fox - it's Spanish-language KMEX, the flagship of Univision. And it isn't just Los Angeles' top station - Nielsen says it's No. 1 in the U.S. with viewers aged 18-49. KMEX built big numbers with immigrant audiences, but is now drawing their sons and daughters - and even their grandchildren.

University of Southern California journalism professor Felix Gutierrez says it's more than just language that's attracting those younger viewers.  "I was watching last night, and they were talking about the border wars - drug smuggling and all that. But they were covering it from the Mexican side. They had the same kind of footage, but it was a different perspective, a different angle that I don't see on CBS, NBC, CNN and the other networks," Gutierrez says.

Largely in response to the ties of many immigrants, one will undoubtedly find that these multicultural outlets have a great deal more international news than local, and thus a wider breadth of stories.  They must cover the local school, storm, or kindapping, in addition to the elections in El Salvador, violence on the border, and new constitution in Bolivia.

Not only is the content more diverse than traditional media, these outlets are forced to be more dynamic and market to a more diverse, multigenerational, audience: 

Previously, these stations used to rely on ethnic audiences that had few other options because they weren't comfortable in English. But that's not necessarily true of immigrants' children.

"We know that the first generation watches us," [Eric Olander] says. "The second generation's much more difficult to capture, in part because they have language skills, which allow them to watch MTV, to go listen to NPR. They have a much wider array of choices. Not to mention, the second generation, which are younger, is watching less TV - they're on the Web, they're not reading the newspapers in the numbers they were. Their media patterns are changing."

That's why in addition to its broadcasts, KSCI now offers podcasts, blogs and video online in various Asian languages and in English.

The biggest Spanish language daily newspaper in the country, La Opinion, is also reaching out online. The Los Angeles paper's circulation has dipped, but it still has half a million readers.

Publisher Monica Lozano says the newspaper, which was started in 1926 by her grandfather, survived the Great Depression, battles over immigration and world wars, and it's now adapting to the recession and new media appetites. Lozano says Latino households tend to be multigenerational, multilingual and multimedia.

I caught some of his townhall from Strasbourg this morning - carried live on CNN and MSNBC but not Fox of course - and our President was simply amazing.  He was good as I've ever seen him, connecting with the audience, offering complex thoughtful answers to tough challenges.   And Barack seemed to be happy to be in front of people rather than as he said stuck in hotel rooms.  The crowd was wildly excited, applauding him in ways few politicians ever hear.  In many ways this event is how our President best demonstrates his power, and the power of the American ideal.  For any European watching and wondering whether it is a new day, they can only have concluded that is a new day indeed. 

It was an inspiring way to start the day, and I was, for the entire time I watched, as deeply proud of being an American as I have been in many many years.

And it feels like on this trip our young, new President has begun the transformation from President of the United States to the paramount leader of the world's peoples.   His ability to find common ground, to talk of our common aspirations, to make it clear that we are all in this together, is a message, delivered by this particular messenger, which the people of the world are very ready to hear.

If as Fareed Zakaria has argued, the defining geopolitical event of this era is the "rise of the rest," and as Brzezinski has argued rising standards of living throughout the world are creating a "global political awakening," what we may have seen today is the first global leader of this new rising era to emerge; one who can speak in universal themes; one who can through modern media speak directly to these aspiring people - more numerous and in more nations than any time in all of human history - of the world, transcending faction, race and nation, speaking of our universal common aspirations as people no matter where they live.  The ability for this particular man, at this particular moment in history, to lay out such a convincing case for the universal dignity and common aspiration of all men and women across the world is allowing to speak directly to this global political awakening, and emerge as the leader not of the nations of the world, but much more importantly, its people. 

The politics of the bottom-up go global. 

Note: Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, NDN Fellows, are co-authors of the critically acclaimed Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, & the Future of American Politics. Winograd and Hais also have a long history with Detroit and Michigan. Winograd lived there for 50 years and was Chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party from 1973 to 1979. Winograd later served in Washington, DC, as Senior Policy Advisor to Vice President Gore, during which time he witnessed the events described in the essay below. Prior to joining Frank N. Magid Associates in 1983, Hais was a political pollster for Democrats in Michigan and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Detroit.

With President Barack Obama's expected annoucement later this morning, the current debate over whether to save our domestic auto industry has revealed some starkly different views about the future of manufacturing in America among economists, elected officials and corporate executives. There are many disagreements about solutions to the Big Three’s current financial difficulties, but the more fundamental debate is whether the industry  should bend to the will of the government’s and taxpayers' priorities or serve only the needs of the companies’ customers and their shareholders. 

Detroit had an opportunity -- nearly 10 years ago to the date -- to change. To understand the globalizing world around it, to understand that consumers' priorities and values -- especially those of the rising Millennial Generation -- were changing drastically. While some may think it's a leap to compare an overhaul of Detroit with an overhaul of the discredited Republican Party, the similarities are there:  

But when the government becomes a major stockholder in private enterprises, the brand becomes political. And as General Motors learned to its regret, when a company’s brand is as damaged as badly as the Republican Party’s is now, the chances of it prevailing in any debate about the automotive industry’s future is greatly diminished. Very aware of the public tsunami of anger over AIG bonuses, Wall Street excesses and public perception of corruption and lack of accountability, President Obama is not in a forgiving mood. He has made clear the domestic automobile industry has to be seen as a contributor in ending America’s dependence on foreign oil and improving our environment to secure his support. Almost exactly ten years since the debate at the Detroit airport, as a price for its financial support, the federal government will in fact be telling at least General Motors which vehicles to produce for its customers.  Given that arrangement, both parties to this newest partnership need to find “win-win” solutions for the industry’s future that match the optimism and civic spirit of the Millennial generation who will have to pay for the results of their decisions.

The last time the industry seriously engaged in such a debate was during the Clinton Administration and the companies’ failure to effectively respond to Vice President Al Gore’s offer to partner with them in producing more environmentally sensitive products gives substance to President Obama’s charge last week that their current difficulties were caused by executive “mismanagement” in the past.

Attempts to nudge Detroit into producing more fuel-efficient vehicles have been going on since the 1973-4 Arab Oil embargo, which led Congress to establish Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFÉ) standards for cars and light trucks. The original fuel efficiency target was for cars to meet an average of 27.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 1985. On Earth Day, 1992, candidate Bill Clinton proposed to raise that standard even further to 45 mpg if he were elected President.

When Al Gore was asked to join the ticket, auto industry executives, terrified at the prospect that the man who had called for the abolition of the internal combustion engine might become Vice President, implored the leadership of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) to meet with the candidates and bring them to their senses. The lobbying effort worked.  Clinton agreed to delay the adoption of higher CAFÉ standards until it could be proven that such goals were attainable. 

This formulation opened the door for what came to be known as the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles or PNGV.  Reluctantly supported by the Big Three, PNGV provided approximately a quarter of a billion dollars in government research funds to demonstrate the feasibility of producing a midsize sedan that could get 80 mpg. Often called “the moon shot of the 90s,” each car company was to make a prototype of such a vehicle by the politically convenient year of 2000 and begin mass production by 2004.  

After a few years of technological research, the partnership settled on the combination of a hybrid gasoline and electric powered propulsion system as the most promising approach. But by 1997, the car companies began to resist expending their resources to develop even a prototype for such a vehicle. Vice President Gore, who had been in charge of the  PNGV program since its inception, decided to meet with the Big Three CEOs to make sure they did not forget their  past commitments. The answer from Detroit was emphatic: profits were coming from SUVs and heavy-duty trucks, not cars. Gore countered that argument by offering to trade the administration’s support for tougher regulations on the permissible amount of sulfur content in the diesel fuels that would power some of the new hybrid SUVs, if the car companies would join in expanding the scope of the PNGV plan to include SUVs, the very product they said the marketplace was asking for. Gore suggested each company produce a concept SUV by 2002 and three production prototypes by 2006, capable of getting 80 mpg. He also suggested they advance the mass production goal for cars to 2002 by deploying a 60 mpg five passenger sedan in 2002 rather than waiting for an 80 mpg version in 2004. 

Ford’s Peter Pestillo and his UAW ally, Steve Yokich, quickly replied, “no way.” Pestillo maintained, “We need much more time than that to make them cost competitive.”  Not all of the auto executives were blind to the challenge. General Motors’ Vice-Chairman, Harry Pearce had been the driving force behind GM’s ill-fated EV1 electric car experiment. And William Clay “Bill” Ford, Jr., great grandson of the company’s founder and Chairman of its Board of Directors envisioned building  a 21st century version of the Model T that would be environmentally friendly as well as inexpensive. Gore asked the companies to respond to his suggestions by September 1998, the fifth anniversary of PNGV.  

But it wasn’t until May of 1999, that the auto company CEOs joined the Vice President to settle the issue of SUVs and PNGV.  Gore began the meeting, held in a back room at the Detroit airport, by suggesting that developing these products could enhance the industry’s image as well as each company’s individual brands.  Ford's Pestillo asked for still more time to consider the idea: “While we love the progress we are making in PNGV as it’s currently constituted, it’s not yet clear to us that the technologies we have been working on apply to the design of an SUV.”  But Pearce used the platform (basic body design) issue raised by Ford to make Gore’s point. He sketched a future auto industry where the line between cars and trucks would not be as clear, describing what we know today as “crossovers”.  It might therefore be wrong, he suggested, for PNGV to be limited to just one platform. 

Gore took the opening and suggested the companies think about what such an announcement might mean to the industry’s image and their individual brands. “It’s not just the substance of the issue you need to consider. You also need to think about the symbolism of the decision. Putting SUVs into the PNGV project would change the public’s perception of where you are going in the future.”  When Pestillo attempted to return to his original arguments, he was overridden on the spot.  GM said, “If you will include lean burn technology (for diesel SUV’s) into the project that might work.” Gore responded, “Let’s work on this as a package.”

Recognizing the breakthrough they had just achieved, the participants began to think about what the future might look like if they formed a true partnership -- not too dissimilar from what is being contemplated now under the terms of the automotive industry loan. Gore said he would put his personal reputation behind such an agreement, which the press would think of as a “Nixon goes to China” event, garnering the auto industry a great deal of positive press. 

But when it came time for the true test of their commitment to this new partnership, the autos blinked. The Vice President suggested they sign off on a press release, conveniently drawn up before the meeting started, announcing the inclusion of SUVs in an expanded PNGV project. The CEOs argued for a less definitive announcement stating that they would address the issue of highly fuel efficient SUVs within the context of the PNGV partnership, but not commit to any specific goals for their production. This less-than-definitive agreement barely made it to page B4 of the Wall Street Journal the next day and was generally ignored by the public the participants were hoping to impress.

Unfortunately for America, General Motors then decided to go in almost the opposite direction. Rick Wagoner, who became General Motors' CEO in June 2000, chose to pursue an SUV-centered strategy that won big profits for a brief period. Since then, however, GM stock has plunged 95%, from $60 per share to just under $4 today. General Motors, which has lost $70 billion since 2005, has seen its market share cut in half.  Seven years after the fateful auto summit with Al Gore, when asked what decision he most regretted, Wagoner told Motor Trend magazine, “ending the EV1 electric car program and not putting the right resources into PNGV. It didn’t affect profitability but it did affect image.” [emphasis added].

His lack of commitment to the type of automobile industry that PNGV envisioned ultimately led to his downfall with the Obama Administration now demanding his resignation as part their plan to save GM.

The importance of a company’s public image or brand value has never been greater than in this new civic era, where the lines between democratic decision-making and private sector planning are becoming increasingly blurred. The organizing cry of Boomer feminists was “the personal is political.”

The paragraph from above bears repeating: 

But when the government becomes a major stockholder in private enterprises, the brand becomes political. And as General Motors learned to its regret, when a company’s brand is as damaged as badly as the Republican Party’s is now, the chances of it prevailing in any debate about the automotive industry’s future is greatly diminished. Very aware of the public tsunami of anger over AIG bonuses, Wall Street excesses and public perception of corruption and lack of accountability, President Obama is not in a forgiving mood. He has made clear the domestic automobile industry has to be seen as a contributor in ending America’s dependence on foreign oil and improving our environment to secure his support. Almost exactly ten years since the debate at the Detroit airport, as a price for its financial support, the federal government will in fact be telling at least General Motors which vehicles to produce for its customers.  Given that arrangement, both parties to this newest partnership need to find “win-win” solutions for the industry’s future that match the optimism and civic spirit of the Millennial generation who will have to pay for the results of their decisions.

Miami - My trip to Chile for the Progressive Goverance Conference was my first trip outside the US since Barack Obama's Inaugration.  I was eager to assess the perception of America in these early days after the terrible Bush Presidency.   I offer some initial impressions from my layover in Miami on the way back to DC: 

The Rest Has Risen, and Want a Seat at the Table - From the end of World War II on America's principal export was our governing model, which I characterize as a committment to democracy, free markets,personal liberty and the rule of law.  With the exception of the Middle East, most regions, governments and people of the world are in the process of adapting some version of this model, of course with varying degrees of success.  The embrace of this model, and what might even be called modernity itself, has helped dozens of countries in eastern Europe and the developing world achieve remarkable growth and societal stability and progress.  To paraphrase Fareed Zakaria, we are witnessing a dramatic rise of the rest, something that FDR and Truman I'm sure dreamed of when they constructed the global architecture that has been so instrumental in ushering in this new era.  And for any American who has traveled to these rising regions in recent years it is an exciting thing to behold.  

But this also means-- and I'm not sure American policy elites have really come to terms with this-- that the management of this global architecture is going to have to change to accomodate these new rising powers.  This sentiment is often voiced in policy circles, but how we actually change organizations like the UN, the World Bank and the IMF - and even make meetings like the G20 less a photo-op and more an actual exchange of ideas among diverse peers - is going to be a true test of America and the Obama Administration.  The days of US-European global leadership are over, and the longer global institutions maintain these overt or implicit arrangements, the less relevant these institutions will be to the rising nations who want - and deserve - a seat at the global table.  

Exporting Chaos -The global financial and economic crisis will end up hastening this new  day in global relations.  What I heard in Chile again and again was that the crisis was an Anglo-American export.  That due to our own recklessness, economic hardship had been exported to a rapidly improving world.  For Americans, this sentiment coming on the heels of Bush's unilateralist foreign policy, leaving many to wonder why our great nation which had for so long exported stability, prosperity and modernity was now in the business of exporting chaos.

Prior to my trip to Chile I had assumed that the American people's utter repudiation of the Republican Party, and their choice of a young inspiring leader would help America regain its proper place as the indispensible nation, the moral, economic and political leader of the world.  But now I am not so sure.  First I'm not so sure the rising powers of the world want to return to a world with a paramount sole superpower.  Their goal is to create a much more multi-polar, distributed and arguably democratic set of power arrangements.  This line of thinking may believe that for America to strongly re-assert itself now could very well block the necessary changes which can result in giving these rising powers a bigger seat at the table, gaining the respect and recognition they want and deserve.  

Second, I think many countries, while admiring of our new President, have a right to wonder about what has happened to that old and virtuous America of previous eras.  The America of this past decade has been a blundering reckless superpower, launching a wildly aggressive invasion of another nation, condoning torture, borrowing and spending imprudently, blocking meaningful action on climate change and now exporting a global economic crisis that is doing significant harm to virtually every society in the world.   The performance of America in the Bush era has rightly given many in the world pause, and there simply is no interest in having that America return to power.  At the G20 and the Summit of the Americas, Barack Obama will confront this new global reality, rising powers deeply skeptical of what America has become, hopeful perhaps about this new President, but no longer content to simply blindly accept the Pax Americana that has governed the world for over 60 years.  

At the end of WWII the American government adopted a strategy to defeat totalitarianism and help the decimated and developing world prosper.  We are today seeing the triumph of that strategy, as an overwhelming majority of nations have chosen a modern path and have seen their people lift themselves up.  But now that they have, a great deal of imagination and hard work will be required to design the next series of strategies to help us manage the affairs of the world, building upon what has been a remarkable era of global progress.  That era will almost certainly see a decrease in American power, something that will be terribly difficult for this nation to accept.  Add this new set of daunting global realities to the already significant set of challenges inherited by our remarkable new President, Barack Obama.

I just completed my panel, Science and Innovation For Sustainable Growth, at the Progressive Governance down here in Chile and want to quickly report in on an inspirational presentation which helped kick off the panel.  Miguel Brechner, President of the Technology Laboratory of Uruguay, made a presentation about a wildly ambitious program in Uruguary to provide all school children, aged 6-12, with the Negroponte one laptop per child wireless computer.  As a co-author, with Alec Ross, of a paper calling for similar committment here in the US, I of course was thrilled. 

The results so far, a year into the program, have been amazing.  Here is a link to more dated powerpoint presentation Miguel gave last year.  I will be providing links to more when Miguel gets me them.  He is traveling to DC in June and I hope to build an event where he can talk of this program's early and very encouraging success.  

With President Obama's budget calling for a $100 billion new investment in education, I hope he and his team will see fit to at launch least a serious demonstration project of this idea. It would be tragic if countries like Libya and Uruguay put a laptop in the hands of all their kids before the United States.

More soon from this terrific conference.

I'm checking in from Vina Del Mar, Chile, where I am attending a terrific conference put on by the Policy Network, a British think tank. It is an impressive gathering of leaders and thinkers from Europe and the Americas. Today we will be hearing from Vice President Biden, Chilean President Bachelet, Brazilian President Lula, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and many, many others. I will be a respondent on an economic break out panel later today. 

For those interested, you will be able to watch some of the proceedings live today at the conference site. Be sure to check out their handbook of ideas, "Responses to the Global Crisis: Charting a Progressive Path," which contains a series of thoughtful essays from European, American and Latin American authors on where we go from here. 

First impressions: people here have great hopes for our young President. There is a powerful sense that we are entering a whole new era of politics, one unlike what has come before. There is fear that there are still very tough days ahead in the current economic crisis. And, as there is an ever greater sense that we, the people and the countries of the world, are all in this together as never before, we need to create more forums, more venues like this to connect current and future leaders of our nations to better able learn from one another, create friendships and partnerships, and to model the kind of global cooperation we all are advocating -- and believe is necessary -- to tackle the emerging global challenges of the early 21st century. 

Kudos to Policy Network for putting on a great event, and I hope to check in again a little later.