ABCDE OUTLOOK sunday, september 26, 2010 INSIDE
Double jeopardy The executives hate him, and the working class is losing patience. What’s Obama’s next move? B5
The wisdom of Gekko Greed may not be good, but envy is worse. B4
BOOK WORLD, B6-8 Dirty little secrets Polluters and the long-standing lies that led to smoggy skies. B6
Your to-don’t list Forget “101 Places to See Before You Die.” These are the ones to skip. B7 Mad men and women Three new books explore the tea party’s anger. B7
5 A former president had the Worst Week in Washington. B2
Does the GOP’s ‘Pledge’ top its ‘Contract’?
by Frank I. Luntz T
he men and women were so angry that they were actually spitting on me as they barked out their complaints — “sick- ening government spending”
and “lobbyist legislation” and “repulsive corruption” and the “whole stinking mess.” At one point, I wondered whether one guy was going to take a swing at me. I had come to Denver that Saturday in early September to talk to 31 undecided voters, hoping to figure out exactly what Republicans needed to say and do to win the support of the Angry American. I tried everything — “promises,” “pledges,” “platforms,” “agendas” — but nothing worked. These people were mad as hell, and I almost gave up. “Okay, you’ve told me clearly what you don’t want,” I said in my last attempt. “Now please tell me, in your own words, exactly what you do want.” The dam broke. “I want specifics” . . .
“Make them write it down on paper” . . . “They have to sign it” . . . “Make it a real contract. Make it enforceable.” As quick- ly as their tempers had risen, the thought of a policy manifesto listing spe- cific legislative proposals, with a genu-
ine commitment to get it all done, soothed their scorned souls. This was in 1994, and the anti-Wash-
ington language so common today was just as virulent then. For months, the Clinton White House had labeled Newt Gingrich and his House GOP colleagues as the party of “no,” and Democrats were claiming that voters could see how ex- treme the Republican Party really was. (Sound familiar?) Yet, under Gingrich’s tutelage, House Republicans offered vot- ers 10 specific proposals to prove that they were unlike the politicians the pub- lic so reviled. I didn’t write the “Contract With America.” I didn’t even name it. But I was the pollster who “messaged” it, test- ing how voters responded to the lan- guage. And I have always been proud of how that document contributed to the Republican landslide in 1994 and how it served as an organizing plan for con- gressional Republicans in 1995. This past Thursday, House Repub- licans unveiled their own “Pledge to America,” which, according to GOP House Whip Eric Cantor, is meant to “change the culture of Washington, re- turning power, control and money back
pledge continued on B4
Frank I. Luntz, a pollster and communications consultant, is the author of “Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear” and “What Americans Really Want . . . Really.”
B DC MD VA B
myths about Facebook. B2
BOOK REVIEW
Leaving Dixie, in search of the American dream
by Paula J. Giddings DAN PAGE
How the future will judge us
Which actions today will seem appalling tomorrow? by Kwame Anthony Appiah
of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics. Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today. Is there a way to guess which ones? After all, not every disputed institution or practice is destined to be discred- ited. And it can be hard to distinguish in real time between movements, such as abolition, that will come to represent moral common sense and those, such as prohibition, that
O
on
washingtonpost.com What do you think?
nce, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father’s duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved — in fact, invented — by the Catholic Church. Through the mid- dle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Amer- icas condoned plantation slavery. Many
will come to seem quaint or misguided. Recall the book- burners of Boston’s old Watch and Ward Society or the or- ganizations for the suppression of vice, with their cru- sades against claret, contraceptives and sexually candid novels.
Still, a look at the past suggests three signs that a partic-
ular practice is destined for future condemnation. First, people have already heard the arguments against
the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries. Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, “We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?”) And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them
regret continued on B4
Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University, is the author of “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.”
Go to washingtonpost. com/outlook to give us your own take on which practices future generations will condemn. We’ll publish the most interesting ideas in next week’s Outlook.
Southern blacks to the North between 1915 and 1970 was, as Isabel Wilkerson writes in “The Warmth of Other Suns,” “the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free.” Much has been written about the push and pull of oppression and opportunity that drove blacks north and how this mass movement changed the political, economic and social landscape of Amer- ican cities. Blacks not only brought their muscle and creative talents to the North but also, as some highly touted studies contend, distinct and dysfunctional be- haviors that created the intractable pov- erty and crime that turned cities into ghettoes.
F
or African Americans, restric- tion of movement has long had profound meaning — and never more so than after the end of slavery. The flight of 6 million
THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration By Isabel Wilkerson Random House 622 pp. $30
Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose own family made the trek north, puts a different face on what is known as the Great Migration. Those who made the momentous decision to leave the “Old Country,” as writer James Baldwin called the South, were as di- verse and determined as those who passed through the way stations of Ellis Island. “They took work the people already there considered beneath them,” Wilker- son writes. “They tried to instill in their children the values of the Old Country while pressing them to succeed by the standards of the New World they were
migration continued on B2
Paula J. Giddings is the Elizabeth A. Woodson Professor of Afro-American Studies at Smith College and the author of “Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching.”
Life after detention: Crashing the Breakfast Club’s 25th reunion. B3
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