John F. Kennedy Forum
at Harvard's Kennedy School of Goverment
October 2, 2003
We the people have only been playing with half our team. We are now bringing in the full-rested half that have not been voting &endash;not voting because they thought there was no point. There is now a point. This time no one will be saying that a few votes don't matter. No one will be saying that there is no difference between candidates. Not this time, my friends.
Thank you.
It is a great honor to be here at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. I thank you for inviting me and for coming this evening to hear me.
I have spoken to Harvard students before. The circumstances were different. Young men--for they were all men--of the Harvard Business School came for their lunch and dinner and a young girl in a booth at the door would ask to see their meal card. It was 1927. Several of the students would bring me books to read, as I seemed intent on learning things. Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West," which had come out in 1922 and was a pessimistic prediction of World War II to come, was still what everyone seemed to be reading. The pay for that job was not much, but I saved it up and enrolled the next year at Emerson, after working the summer at a Nantucket inn. I am glad to be back at Harvard, and particularly glad that it is not the Business School.
I am deeply honored to be speaking from the podium where last week a true hero of democracy spoke to you--Polish president Lech Walesa. I wish I could have been here for that, although I do know some of what he said. In speaking of the Polish shipyards in the 1970s and 80s, he said, "there are special places where you can feel the future."
Quite so. There are places and times when the future of the world seems hanging like a chad, waiting for a butterfly's wings to move the world this way or that. We are poised on such a moment, and I think most of you can feel it--can feel the future. The world is waiting to go this way or that, and our individual efforts in the next year are those butterfly wings. Our glaciers are melting, our democracies and our basic human rights are poised for advancement or destruction. Our American economy and our role in the world &endash;so many things now poised to go this way or that. It is almost too much to contemplate, too much to worry about. We can feel the future, though we don't yet know which future it will be.
So much of my own energy lately has been devoted to campaign finance reform. The bill that we finally got though Congress is now waiting for the Supreme Court's decision. Like so much else, it is poised on a delicate balance. It will probably come down to one vote, and that may be the vote of Justice O'Connor once again.
I am no lawyer and I had no ability to file arguments before the court when they were submitted in August. I can only pray for a good outcome.
The McCain-Feingold bill that became the law now before the Supreme Court does chase corporate money out of our federal elections, which is a good but imperfect accomplishment, if the Court will let us keep it. The very high political price paid for that victory was a doubling of the limit of personal money that can be donated to a campaign, sending it to $2,000 per person, per election. The primary and general election count separately. That's a lot of money, and I suppose the most heartbreaking scenario would be if the Court struck down the prohibition on corporate money but left in the doubling of the personal money limit. We are praying for the Court's wisdom and lately that is a hard prayer.
The issue is this: Can we keep our democracy human-scaled, or is it to be a playing field only for financial giants? Have we the people lost our government? And if we have, what alternatives for action do we have that are worthy of our peaceful hearts?
If I were a lawyer, and if I were allowed to speak before that Court, I would have told them about so many people I met on my long walk who came to actual tears when they described their frustration at the loss of their America. "Beyond our control now," they said. "Bought right out from under us" they said. "All in the hands of fatcats and scoundrels"--that is what so many people said and think, and they have so much evidence to support their opinions.
The law that is now before the Supreme Court provides that corporations cannot finance federal candidates for office. It further provides that ads that look and smell like campaign ads, when run during a campaign, should be financed by individuals, not by corporations, and that those people should file disclosures like any other campaign committee.
No human being, acting individually or in a group, is deprived of speech by the new law. The law in fact allows the speech of the individual to again be heard. It is a modest patching-up of the old campaign laws, as the first prohibition of corporate money in our elections was put in place by Republican Teddy Roosevelt.
Some of the Justices seem quite without a clue regarding the fact that American democracy is in crisis and that Congress acted only in response to that crisis, and did so quite modestly and begrudgingly. Indeed, listening to the Justices ask their questions during the presentations, I pictured them with powdered wigs, monocles and snuff boxes &endash;they might have as well been in the 18th Century and from another continent, and the "let them eat cake" comments were sadly numerous.
I don't think that a 93-year-old former shoe factory worker should know more about the situation than they do, but that was the sinking feeling that came over me as I listened to them. I wished that I could drag them by their frilly collars to the living rooms where real Americans shared with me their disgust for the &endash;excuse me--whorehouse that Washington has sadly become--tragically become, indeed, as so many of our sons and daughters have given life itself for our freedoms and, chief among them is our freedom to govern ourselves through the election of representatives who will represent us and not just the rich and not just the powerful, and who will be our champions against the corruptions of big banking, big medicine, big energy and all the rest.
If the new law's modest sandbags against a flood of corruption cannot be allowed by the Court, then we must rethink our country in fundamental ways, although that rethinking may be unsettling and dangerous. But here it is: The great masses cannot be left thinking that they are powerless under this system, or they will in their own way chose other systems. The people are the seat of power itself and they are not likely to stand by while the air they breathe and the water they drink and the milk of human kindness itself is poisoned by the greed of a powerful elite, and while their own ability to provide for themselves and their families and communities is eroded toward poverty and treadmill enslavement. No, the presumptions of the elite, unchecked by a government of the people, are spiraling toward a collapse, and if the Supreme Court Justices cannot stand apart from the elite long enough to see the emergency, then change will come in unregulated ways that must make us tremble.
While we work--and we must continue to work--to weaken the unfair influence of the rich and the powerful in our elections, we must also look for ways to strengthen the ability of ordinary people to have a meaningful voice. I think we are seeing that in the Internet and its fundraising capacity. It is opening a new era in our politics, both in terms of communicating information and fund raising, and it looks a lot more like democracy than does the $2,000 a plate chicken dinner and the $200,000 corporate donation. I hope you all will give a little bit of money and other energy to your favorite candidates, and the Internet offers easy ways for you to do so. If we all give a little to the champions of our values, then a people-powered democracy--the only real kind of democracy--can have a fighting chance against the chicken eaters.
It is interesting that today's New York Times reports that Chinese President Hu is calling for more democracy in China as an antidote to corruption. Large political systems have corruption. The opposite of corruption in large political systems is not sainthood--not in this life. The opposite of corruption is democracy. People tend to not choose to be oppressed and exploited and starved when they have a voice in the matter. Look at the great tax giveaway to America's richest of the rich and see it as a failure of representative democracy, which it is. See it as a profound crisis, which it is. Might our Supreme Court learn something from China about democracy? I think they could. And to Sandra Day O'Connor, who gave us the Florida decision and all that came from it, here is your chance to square your account with heaven and history.
Now, isn't it too bad the public doesn't own the airwaves so we could really have some inexpensive campaigns? We do own our airwaves? We do issue cable franchises to our cities? Well, too bad then that we don't act the proper part of the owner. Why should we pay through the nose for our own air during campaign season? It is like having to pay to sing in our own showers--though I have known some for whom a high tax on that would be a good idea.
Because so many new forces are in play, I will not be overly discouraged if the imperfect campaign reform bill is rendered even more imperfect by our imperfect Supreme Court. I will not call them by the names I may be thinking.
Indeed, if human-scaled politics is to prosper, it requires a civil tone, and we are in control of what we say, and it does take the cooperation of both sides to have a shouting match. I wish the same were true of execution squads. I do not mean that talking nicely will stop the rise of fascism, but I do mean that we can fight with the words and values of our higher civic sensibilities when we do battle. Shouting and name-calling don't make one a better swordsman.
The harsh divide between the political right and left, and indeed between the political right and the old middle, is now becoming dangerous. Points of view, often fueled by misinformation, unthinking xenophobia and racism, are pushing us into a time of domestic as well as international confrontation. The far right now equates honorable dissent with treason and terrorism. The angry voices on talk radio and in the newspapers and websites do not fully understand what they do. They do not grasp what happens when civil temperaments and good humor and respected differences of opinion are eroded by the acid of insult, interruption and shout, and when, little by little, the lower potentials of human nature are let off their leashes and instances of violence begin to rise, as they have done at other times and places in the history of our species.
Will we have to worry every time a young person walks into a restaurant or assembly wearing a backpack? Will every airplane in the sky be a symbol of fear? Can a society of hateful disrespect and hate's injustices also be an open society? Those things do not go together.
Are you worried for America and the world? Well, only allow yourself as much worry as will motivate you to action, not so much as will depress you into a deathly despair. If you need some confidence that we can win this epic battle between light and darkness, love and fear, hope and despair, let me give you some encouraging facts.
We the people have only been playing with half our team. We are now bringing in the full-rested half that have not been voting &endash;not voting because they thought there was no point. There is now a point. This time no one will be saying that a few votes don't matter. No one will be saying that there is no difference between candidates. Not this time, my friends.
And for those of you who are worried that corporations friendly to the present administration are rigging the voting machines they manufacture, you must all insist that the news organizations get back into the business of exit polling as a check against crooked machines. The news organizations said they were getting out of the exit polling business because they got it wrong in Florida. In fact, they got it right in Florida and they must get back on the job if we are to have confidence in our election--confidence that is critical to the very peace of our society in the years ahead. In my own loyalties as a consumer of news, I will certainly give preference to those news organizations that commit to provide independent exit poling.
Now, let us think about the fresh voters we are bringing in &endash;men and women, young and old. There are 64 million working women in this country, most of whom are eligible to vote and only half of whom are in fact registered. They have busy schedules and many demands upon their every hour. That is why I have decided to take voter registration to them &endash;to as many as I can get to, and as many as my friends will help me get to. America's working women are overworked and underpaid. They only have time for life's essentials. This time, voting is one of life's essentials and I mean to help them come off the bench and into the game.
Unmarried women, working and otherwise, are a group of great importance in the coming election. Some 46% of American women over 18 are single, according to the census. In 2000, only 52% of them voted. By contrast, 68% of married women voted. The difference, I think, has to do with their harried schedules fending for themselves in a tough urban culture.
I hope we can make it easier for them to register and to vote, and I hope we can encourage them to examine the issues and the candidates to see where their own interests lie.
Along the way I expect to have a few "senior moments." This is not when I forget why I came into a town. Not that at all. It is when I talk to the senior class of high schools along my way, for they are our newest voters and I am going to sign them up, all four million of them if I can.
The fact is, we need ourselves a little revolution in America--a peaceful one, a thoughtful one, and an effective one. We the people are doubling our team, because the old reasons for not voting do not apply.
And so I am off to register some people to vote. Perhaps you can volunteer to help me. You may know people back home who can help register workers in your hometown, and you may be able to open the door for me in your old high school. Go to GrannyD.com and let's start a conversation to see what we can cook up together.
On the road, I will not suggest how people should vote, only that they should vote. They should study the issues and the candidates for themselves, and we will be all right if they get enough good information. I am not endorsing candidates because everyone is as capable as I am to decide for themselves. All I ask is that they consider the blood and sweat that have been spent on this government of the people, by the people, and God help us, for the people, and that each of us will understand that it is a great offense to those sacrifices if we do not do the one thing asked of us in return--to study the issues and to vote.
Let me say a word to each of you personally. If you will be here in Massachusetts for the election next year and you haven't registered in Massachusetts to vote yet, I have brought along some voter registration forms and we have them at a table in the back. You might as well get ready for this great year coming.
I'm going home this evening to New Hampshire to rest up. Then, next week, we begin. We will go through Connecticut and New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida--oh, Florida!--,and then up through the Midwest and then out West--some 36 states if all goes well.
Ask your relatives and friends to be voter registrars in their workplaces and schools, and if they need help with supplies and posters and forms, send them to me at GrannyD.com and we'll send them what they need.
Al of us must exert ourselves in the coming months, I think. America and the world will be dramatically influenced by the coming election. This is a special place, this is a special time in America when we can feel the future. It is frightening, but it is exciting. It is your future more than mine. I wish you luck, and I ask you to wish me luck and lend a hand where you can.
Thank you and goodbye.