CHARADE '04
A Tyranny of Symbols
Neither political party is serious about addressing
our major domestic problems.
Can the press move them off the dime?
Welcome to another presidential
campaign, that indispensable quadrennial moment when our leaders
debate real fixes for America's biggest problems. Or so runs democratic
theory. The reality, especially when it comes to our domestic
woes, is that we're mostly in for another year of bipartisan charades
and pseudo-solutions, which the press tacitly enables and which
make voters turn away in disgust.
Need proof that domestic debate isn't serious? Nearly 20 million
people live in or near poverty despite their being in families
headed by full-time workers, mocking the notion that work should
make possible a decent life. President Bush seems not to have
noticed this fact, and offers no plan to address it. His Democratic
foes say only that it's time to raise the minimum wage a bit,
so that after adjusting for inflation that wage might almost equal
what it was worth in the late 1970s.
Or take the teacher crisis plaguing America's toughest schools,
where millions of poor children are systematically warehoused
with the nation's least qualified teachers. President Bush says
he's solved that problem by decreeing that every class shall have
a qualified teacher by 2006 — while offering very little
of the cash that poor districts would need in order to pay enough
to attract them. Democrats know they need to do better. Richard
Gephardt and John Edwards, for example, talk about helping to
pay college tuition for students who say they'll teach for five
years, but it doesn't add up to anything that would tempt many
top grads to work for $30,000 at the local urban school.
Why do our leaders offer symbolic proposals to show that they
"care" about an issue and to signal which "side"
they're on, rather than ideas that might actually fix things?
And what do we do when neither major party has a political strategy
— that is, a strategy for winning power — that involves
solving our biggest domestic problems?
These are the predicaments we face today, and if you haven't been encouraged to think of it in those terms, there's a reason. The illusion of action is Washington's oldest con. Barely a day goes by without a dozen new "plans" being unveiled to Save Something Good (the schools, the Everglades, Social Security) or Stop Something Evil (HMOs, trial lawyers, tobacco makers). The reality is different. Make-believe responses to national problems vie in a competition for votes that has little to do with solving the problem in question. The media end up in cahoots with politicians in creating this illusion of meaningful action, both because 1) media norms don't allow reporters to say "this is a charade" even when they know it is (reporters are supposed to be "objective"), or 2) because it cuts too close to the bone for reporters to admit they are often tacit conspirators in such hoaxes.
Yet as the examples above illustrate — and there are parallel
examples in health care, the budget, campaign finance reform,
and other areas — few honest debates are to be found. And
if the press doesn't create the unseriousness that pervades public
life today, it doesn't do nearly enough to challenge it.
What we have today is a tyranny of charades, in which symbolic
appeals and images are ubiquitous, voters tune out, and a "solutions
gap" reigns. Why? There are several interlocking reasons:
- Parity between the political parties breeds an unambitious
"game of inches," in which both sides jockey and pander
for the few extra votes that can turn elections.
- Democrats, in the nine years since the Clinton health-care
fiasco cost the party control of Congress, have been too terrified
to think big again, and fear being cast as "tax and spend"
and "weak on defense."
- Republicans display a complex yet enduring indifference to the disadvantaged, at least when it comes to solutions longer on cash than "compassion."
- Campaigns are financed in ways that put certain policies and
candidates out of bounds.
But beyond these forces is another that ratifies and multiplies their impact, helping produce a debate so remote from real answers and so infected with doubletalk that citizens tune out. That force is the national press, which mirrors and reinforces the constricted boundaries of debate offered by the two major parties.
It's The Stenography
Conservatives say mainstream media are liberal, and they're partly
right. But that's not what's interesting. The interesting question
is this: If the media are so liberal, why has America's political
center of gravity shifted so dramatically to the right in the
last two decades? The answer is that the news coverage of influential
national media outlets is shaped more by stenography than by ideology.
Some journalists will object to the word "stenography,"
but I mean it to be descriptive, not critical. "News"
is largely defined as what public officials say and do. The poles
of debate on major issues are thus set by the mainstream Republican
position (today the Bush administration) and the mainstream Democratic
position. The national press faithfully reflects these two poles,
and the fifty-yard line in American politics is between them.
While stenography as a news value may seem preferable to a situation
in which top national news outlets pursue their own untethered
agendas, it also brings a clear downside: in times when neither
party is serious about addressing major problems, stenography
assures that public debate remains impoverished.
Stenography gave us a 1988 presidential campaign, for example,
without a peep about the burgeoning savings and loan crisis. Since
both parties were knee-deep in blame, neither wanted to discuss
it. Without candidates bringing it up, the national media didn't
pursue the story either. Yet George H.W. Bush (to his credit)
made it his first priority upon taking office — and so the
biggest financial meltdown in U.S. history hit the front pages
and national consciousness like a bolt from the blue. Stenography
explains why Ross Perot had to show up with his charts to provoke
any meaningful discussion of the budget deficit in the 1992 campaign.
In 2000, when no candidates or sitting officials ran with it,
stenography meant that former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman
couldn't get much play for the prescient report from the national
commission they headed, which stressed how vulnerable the country
was to major terrorist attacks (see "Warning Given . . .
Story Missed," cjr, November/December 2001).
To be sure, smaller print outlets — from The Nation and The
American Prospect on the left to The Weekly Standard and National
Review on the right — challenge the official debate every
week, as do online bloggers of all stripes. The rise of conservative
voices on talk radio and cable television has also had some impact
on the tilt and tenor of public life. But these outlets have much
less influence on what is considered to be "news" than
the judgments made by the editors and producers of The New York
Times, The Washington Post, and the major television networks.
These outlets do wonderful work, but they do not generally believe
it is their proper role to truly challenge the official boundaries
of policy discussion. "Newsgathering is essentially a reactive
process. It's not an initiative process," says Bill Keller,
now the editor of The New York Times. Campaign coverage, in particular,
is "largely driven by the candidates," said NBC's Washington
bureau chief, Tim Russert.
Their rare crusades aside, the editors running the most influential
news outlets do not see their job as systematically setting some
broad public agenda. Yet they are aware that on many individual
issues they end up defining that agenda as a byproduct of just
putting out the paper, particularly via stories they choose to
place on page one. "I don't think that if you sat in on page-one
meetings over the course of six months," says Steve Coll,
managing editor of The Washington Post, "you would hear any
discussion about 'We ought to do this because we want to put it
on the map.' You have to see the media as chronicling the public
square. When nobody shows up in the public square to talk about
what you would wish them to talk about, is the person standing
in the back with an open notebook the structural cause of that?"
The national press, despite its power and occasional hobbyhorses,
sees its role as "witnessing," as serving up a "daily
diary of debate," as offering "a platform for independent
inquiry and investigation" — but not as setting the
terms of public discussion.
There's a related reality to press coverage when it comes to campaigns:
if candidates do put forward ambitious ideas, the top news outlets
generally aren't equipped or inclined to assess them. "Asking
the political press in the middle of a political campaign to judge
the public-policy implications of an idea or proposal is very,
very difficult," says CNN's Jeff Greenfield. "For one
thing, it requires you to have the time to check it out and look
at it . . . . And it gets so caught up in the welter of 'What's
the latest hourly poll out of Iowa?' and 'What's the new ad that's
running?'" Political professionals assume the press is unwilling
or unable to explain where truth lies on public policy when they
plot campaign strategy. "They're all about process, and not
about policy at all," says Ed Gillespie, the new chairman
of the Republican Party. Carter Eskew, an adviser to Al Gore during
the 2000 presidential campaign, agrees: "The daily press
doesn't really have much time to evaluate whether or not the proposals
are any good or what they mean."
As a result of all this, the press succumbs to a "he said, she said" form of journalism in campaign reporting. It happened in 2000, says John Podesta, the former Clinton chief of staff:
So it's Bush says "X," Gore says "Y." You decide. But people don't have any capacity to decide . . . . They [the media] either said "they're both full of it" or they say "we're not going to decide who's full of it," but they never come down hard one way or the other when one guy's numbers are based on sand and the other guy's may be fudged a little bit but make more sense. It becomes very difficult for the public to make informed and intelligent choices. How do you make a decision? They both say they're balancing the budget. They both say they're not going to spend Social Security [funds]. One guy says we're going to cut taxes. The other guy says he's going to cut taxes but in a sort of different way. One guy's going to spend a little bit more on one thing or another, but there's no crystallization that these are two very different paths that are going to lead to very different social outcomes . . . . The press is pretty terrible at explaining those paths.
Note the depressing cycle we've sketched. First, our leaders
generally feel it's too risky to be a genuine leader during campaigns.
Next, many in the press feel you can't really look to them during
campaigns to make sense of what rival policy agendas might mean
for the country. So you can be forgiven for asking, then what
are campaigns for? The honest answer, which flies in the face
of your sixth-grade civics class, is that campaigns are a dueling
series of pseudo-events, misleading arguments, and symbols manipulated
by candidates to gain power by attracting the support of 50 percent-plus-one
of those citizens who bother to vote. Just as the standard disclaimer
at the front of novels informs us that "any resemblance to
persons living or dead is coincidental," so do political
campaigns deserve the disclaimer, "any edification you may
receive on the collective choices facing the nation is purely
accidental." Sometimes it happens, but it's not the main
mission.
The upshot of the forces we've discussed — electoral parity,
Democratic timidity, Republican indifference, and the warping
effect of campaign cash, all amplified by media stenography —
is a debased political culture in which potential solutions to
our major domestic problems cannot find expression. Even if some
factors shaping our leaders' calculations seem understandable
in isolation, when you add them up we're left trapped in an elaborate
charade. Since our leaders can't or won't talk about what it would
take to make serious progress on health or schools or wages or
campaign reform, they pretend they're serious as a way of communicating
their good intentions and letting us know which "side"
they're on, via symbols and images. Every player in the system
knows this is what is taking place, but no one lets on. The press
knows it, too, but feels obliged to report it straight.
Mysterious Process
On a hot summer afternoon, I went to see Leonard Downie Jr., who has served as The Washington Post's metropolitan editor, London correspondent, national editor, and managing editor before taking the helm as executive editor in 1991. An easygoing man whose appearance has been compared to Clark Kent, he has a reputation as a purist.
I went to see him because, as I've said, I believe that the stenographic norms of journalism mean that influential news outlets largely cede an agenda-setting role to public officials, a practice that leaves debate impoverished at times when neither political party finds it convenient to address major problems. Is there a way to change this dynamic? And can such efforts be squared with traditional values that govern the responsible exercise of the press's power?
I began by asking Downie what the Post's role was in situations
when neither political party wants to address an issue that is
obviously a big deal. By way of example, I mentioned the savings
and loan crisis in the 1980s.
"Our role is to continue to cover important situations like
the S and L crisis, the health-care crisis, et cetera," Downie
said. "But it is not our role to tell the politicians what
it is they're supposed to discuss during a campaign."
Why? I asked. This notion of "whose agenda is it, anyway?"
seemed central to me.
"Because that's not our role. Our role is to provide all the information we can to the American body politic and let them do with it what they wish. It's not our role to set the agenda."
I asked Downie how that works when it comes to page-one decisions — those seven stories each day that the Post is telling the country are the most important in the world. As other top editors at the Post and The New York Times had explained to me, page one is usually a hybrid. There are big "hard news" events that are no-brainers for page one — an airplane crashes, a suicide bomb goes off in Tel Aviv, the president gives the State of the Union address. On the softer side are stories that help enliven the page as part of the overall mix — an in-depth look at the offbeat, an exclusive that other papers won't have, a fabulously told yarn. But after that, editors agreed, on most days there still remain stories that are entirely discretionary, with editors choosing what belongs on the most visible and powerful bulletin boards in our political culture. These stories sometimes involve months of reporting. The results immediately ricochet through the media and become top-of-mind for the nation's elites. How do you decide, I asked Downie, what issues get that treatment?
"We think it's important informationally. We are not allowing
ourselves to think politically."
Then an impact on the public agenda is a byproduct of this work?
"It definitely is."
OK, I thought. "If reluctant or accidental agenda setters
are destined to be agenda setters nonetheless," I asked,
"what is the framework through which you think about how
to exercise that power responsibly. Is that a fair question?"
"Yes, that is a fair question," Downie said. "What
I don't want to do is what Louis Seltzer at the Cleveland Press
did." Downie said that when he was growing up in Cleveland,
Seltzer, the local editor, decided that a man was guilty of murdering
his wife and set about using his newspaper to convince the entire
community.
"I don't want to do that," Downie said. "He turned
out to be wrong. You can see easily that that's an abuse of his
power. But I would argue it would be a similar abuse of my power
to say, 'this guy Miller's got a great idea. This Two Percent
thing,'" he said, referring to the policy ideas in my book,
"'this really makes sense to me. We are now going to make
certain we focus on those aspects of the public debate. We're
going to ask politicians, why aren't you talking about the Two
Percent Solution? We're going to run a series on the Two Percent
Solution.' That would be equally distorting. What Kate Boo's series
was about" — the Post's 1999 Pulitzer-winning investigation
of group homes for the mentally retarded that Downie had hailed
as an example of the paper's finest work — "is intrinsically
important. Lives were at stake, lives were lost, governments were
not carrying out their responsibilities. That is information people
should have. What the people then do with that information is
for them to decide. We should not be thinking in terms of setting
a public-policy agenda, we should be thinking in terms of setting
an informational agenda."
"But the size of the box of things that are 'informationally important' is quite large," I said. "You — like anybody who has to budget resources and time and talent and energy and space — have to decide what subset of that box you're going to pursue. How do you decide?"
"It is very difficult to talk about that, to give you a good conclusionary speech about that, because it is so organic," Downie said. "I don't sit here and set the agenda for The Washington Post. It's an organic process of responding to the information we're finding, and responding to events in society."
Downie's counterparts described a similar, if also mysterious, process of "news judgment." Bill Keller of the Times compares the process to what a candidate has to go through to get on a ballot. "You have to go out on a street corner and gather signatures. An issue has to go out on the street corner and gather some signatures before it becomes a front-page news story."
I asked Downie, "Should the news side of an organization
like yours have a perspective on what are the most important challenges
facing the country?"
"No," Downie said instantly. This was interesting. Gerald
Boyd, the former managing editor of the Times, had said yes. So
had Allan Siegel, one of the Times's assistant managing editors.
So had Bill Keller.
"No," Downie said, "we should have a perspective
on what the important informational needs of the country are,
and fill those needs."
"How is that different?" I asked.
"It's different because 'challenges' is subjective," Downie said. "You can disagree over whether or not health care or something else is the most important challenge facing the country, and you can then disagree over how health-care needs should be met. Those are not things we should be thinking about in deciding how to cover the health-care story."
I asked Downie if he would agree that — except for the "hard news" that makes page one — the decision about what else got front-page play was an exercise of power.
"Yes, it is . . . . So we are creating an agenda," Downie added, "but not one that we're seeking to create for a particular reason," because the Post isn't looking to shape any particular outcome. "So, yes, we've written about the uninsured, and if we don't have new information to write about the uninsured, we're probably not going to write about it. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't look to see if there isn't more information about the uninsured because it's an important situation, it's not going away, it's continuing. So we do have a responsibility to keep trying to find ways to present people information about it, whether or not the politicians take it up in public debate."
Still True Today
A perfect segué: I had an idea I wanted Downie to consider,
a way to deal with the systemic problem he had just raised: the
fact that what's new isn't the same as what's important. We obviously
need our top news outlets to give us the latest. But it would
transform public life if they could also keep us focused on the
big things that matter.
Wasn't there some way that the most important daily bulletin boards
in our public life could institutionalize regular attention for
things that are important — even though there isn't "news"
on them? Some device that would be consistent with these editors'
sense that they should not be directing an agenda, but which would
nonetheless perform a public service by mitigating the gap left
when officials prefer not to address important issues?
To illustrate my idea, I put on the table in front of Downie
a mockup of the front page of the Post I had prepared with a new
feature called "Still True Today." I explained that
this would be a small but visible line or two across the bottom
of the front page; a kind of tickertape, nothing that would interfere
with 98 percent of the usual front page, where the big news of
the day would always appear. But, in addition, in this small daily
feature, you'd highlight facts that were, well, still true today.
My own list would include things like forty-four million americans uninsured — 70 percent of them in families with a full-time worker; two million teachers need to be recruited in the next decade, while average teacher salary is $44,000, and so on. You might go with a different subject each day, I suggested — say, Health on Monday, Education on Tuesday, the Working Poor on Wednesdays. Obviously there are countless permutations. The exercise would require our papers and broadcast outlets to put forward what they think are among the most important things citizens need to remain aware of even as the news changes each day. It might help set the agenda for the papers' in-depth reporting projects. The art department could make sure this recurring feature was fun and lively. Who knows? If the Times or the Post started such a feature, the ripple effect might be big. After all, the Times invented the op-ed page thirty years ago; today it's a national staple.
Downie's first reaction was that the Post did such stuff all
the time, at least inside the paper. The foreign staff, for example,
did a weekly feature for a time on countries of the world, with
facts on everything from consumption of sugar to infant mortality.
"I'm not saying I would rule it out on some sort of ideological
or professional grounds, but it strikes me as just an odd use
of front-page space." Downie said. "We don't usually
just put isolated facts on the front page. Usually it's part of
a story, part of a purpose. The notion of 'Still True Today,'
to me, verges on the editorial. It says, 'we want you to pay attention
to this in particular even though there's no 'news' reason, there's
no way in which journalistically we have redone this information,
but we just want you to pay attention to the fact that there are,
say, unwed mothers in this country, and we're going to tell you
often there are unwed mothers in this country whether you like
it or not.' That to me then becomes an editorial purpose, something
that shouldn't happen in the news pages."
"How does it feel editorial," I asked, "as compared to the Kate Boo series?"
"Yeah, but that's original reporting of new information
that people haven't had before," Downie said. "By definition,
this is information people already know but you want to keep repeating
until they do something about it, right? Isn't that your motivation?"
I nodded, though I didn't agree with his "people already
know it" point; polls regularly show Americans have a poor
understanding of many basic facts of public life.
In any event, Downie added, the Post has probably had the fact
that there are roughly 44 million uninsured Americans in the paper
fifty times in the last year. I later learned that between January
20, 2001, the day President Bush took office, and September 10,
2001 — my cut-off for obvious reasons — this fact never
appeared on page one. It appeared ten times during that period
on inside pages. (By contrast, during the same period in 2001,
the Chandra Levy story was discussed in 199 pieces in the Post,
including fourteen front-page pieces.)
I told Downie that when I shopped the idea to other media leaders, they made the fair point that if I were merely pushing for my facts in this feature, I was just another lobbyist. So, I said to Downie, What if I frame my request not as, "put my issues in there," but simply urge the Post and the Times to have such a feature? You decide what ought to be highlighted as "still true today."
Getting Action
Imagine what might happen were this feature adopted. Say the
Post and Times started running Still True Today or its equivalent
at the bottom of page one every day. Conservative outlets, like
The New York Post and The Washington Times, might note it and
slam the effort. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page would
see the innovation as being highly revelatory about "the
liberal mind." Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing radio hosts
would attack it as proof of the media's liberal "bias."
The Post and Times would reply that they had merely decided to
keep readers regularly informed about some basic facts on our
biggest problems. The cable news networks would find the controversy
wonderful grist, and before you know it the political culture
would be filled with two debates — one over the "legitimacy"
of what the Post and Times were doing, another about what are,
in fact, the nation's biggest problems. Conservative papers might
start running their own similar features, stressing facts on such
things as marginal tax rates, government spending increases, or
the number of annual abortions. But when the dust settled from
this initial wave of controversy, the notion that top news outlets
would regularly and prominently hammer home facts about the big
problems they saw would take hold. Network news divisions might
then find it easy to do something similar. Once the morning shows
and evening newscasts started billboarding (say, in a brief Still
True Today graphic while cutting to a commercial break) how many
full-time workers live in poverty and how many poor children are
taught by people who don't know the subjects they're teaching,
these facts would become topics for kitchen-table conversation.
And once public attention to these facts becomes routine, the
battle to start a serious debate about addressing them is half
won.
I'm happy to report that a mini-controversy has already erupted
about the idea. Jack Shafer took a look at my book and slammed
the Still True idea in Slate ("Only the intellectually sheltered
could think of readers as passive serfs awaiting the prodding
of the philosopher-kings on the bottom of page one"). Jay
Rosen of New York University, a founder of the public (or civic)
journalism movement, which Shafer also stomps on, stomped him
back, rather effectively, on his PressThink Web site, and the
debate continued in Romenesko's letters section. Meanwhile, at
The Sacramento Bee, editors are considering a Still True-like
feature for the editorial page. David Holwerk, the editorial page
editor, says he believes heartily in the power of repetition.
When he was in Kentucky, at the Lexington Herald-Leader, Holwerk
says, the paper once ran the same basic editorial daily until
state and city authorities quit bickering about who was responsible
for an asbestos-spewing construction site and cleaned it up. Getting
action took forty-three days — and forty-three editorials.
More to the point are the large and complicated problems that
communities and governments can be slow to address. During the
late eighties and early nineties, "we must have run a hundred
and fifty editorials," Holwerk says, on Kentucky's dire problems
with public education. At some point a statewide consensus emerged
and the state began to take measures to improve the system. The
newspaper can't take all the credit, Holwerk says, but the editorials
didn't hurt.
I'm told others are considering the idea as well, and I remain hopeful that the nation's major newspapers will give it a look as they study ways to improve coverage as the election season unfolds.
The Alternative
Despite its political ring, a feature like Still True does not represent a call for a return to the partisan newspaper wars of the early nineteenth century, when each political party had outlets that purely parroted its party line. Indeed, the idea is inspired by the fact that neither party is addressing these issues seriously, so the task of at least raising their dimensions has to fall to someone independent, with the power to bring them up.
Downie, for his part, felt that no matter what facts were included
in such a feature, it represented advocacy, even if only in two
lines at the bottom of the page. But was it really not advocacy,
I thought, when The New York Times ran on its front page a series
by David Cay Johnston on how the Internal Revenue Service spends
more time and energy auditing poor people than it does auditing
the well-to-do? Was it not advocacy when the Post ran its front-page
series on mistreated children? Downie and his colleagues were
implicitly advocating an angle of vision for their readers by
the way they assigned reporters to particular stories. Yes, news
organizations should reserve opinions on public questions for
the editorial page, but this standard incantation obscures the
reality that decisions about what to cover by their very nature
reflect an opinion about what's important in the world.
But Downie protested. These decisions "come organically out
of the coverage of the news," he said. Now there's a line,
I thought, that journalism seminars could chew on for years —
it all depends, as the Clintonesque cliché now runs, on
what you mean by "organically," "coverage,"
and "news."
"I love chocolate," Downie said, tongue in cheek. "This
could be devoted every day to the latest news about chocolate."
This is where many of the news executives ended up. "I can
give you five hundred things that are still true today,"
said Jeff Greenfield. What I was up against, I realized, was a
sensibility gap. Michael McCurry, the former press secretary to
Bill Clinton, explained it well. "Political communication,"
he said, "depends on repetition and driving your message
home. That's why your politicians, when they're running for office,
put their advertisements on night after night after night."
Journalism is the opposite. Once we've told you something it's
no longer "news" and so we're not going to revisit the
subject. Once we've done our five-part series on the nature of
the federal budget deficit, we've told you what you need to know,
and maybe you'll go out and act on it. There's no sense at all
in the media that we have to keep reminding our viewers or readers
what the basic facts are. There's not this sustained conversation
that draws people back to the things they need to know to make
decisions.
Maybe, in more precise terms, I was up against editors' reluctance to make the ways they exercise power more transparent. Maybe I was touching a nerve by questioning the "organic" view of how news priorities should be defined, asking why the random or "natural" array of even the most talented staff's interests was sufficient to assure that a top paper met its duty to inform readers on major issues. Maybe editors were uncomfortable choosing these items more explicitly, and therefore more accountably, without the cloak of "news judgment."
Downie and other top editors at both papers had been more than generous in engaging on my idea. But I was left to wonder: Is the press's exercise of discretionary agenda-setting power via original reporting different in any meaningful way from the press's exercise of discretionary agenda-setting power via the prominent repetition of selected facts? Is it even supportable to make such a distinction in the face of the massive information gaps citizens face in understanding the nation's biggest problems?
The Still True notion is only one way of coming at this problem. There are surely others; maybe new beats, to steadily cover such dilemmas as the traps that inner-city schools find themselves in, the rough existence of the working poor and the economics behind their shameful wages, the tales of the forty-four million Americans without medical coverage and the reasons for that. Or maybe a "policy truth-telling watch," a more sophisticated version of the "political ad watch" that comes around every election season. Or maybe journalists can come up with other ideas.
It's worth remembering that the alternative is to allow America's political agenda to be defined almost solely by those aiming to win elections. As we've seen, this is usually a very different exercise than trying to solve public problems.
This article is adapted from Miller's book, The 2% Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love, by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of Perseus Book Group.
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