Robert Reich is the Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis University. He served as the 22nd Secretary of Labor during President Clintons first term. Before heading the Department of Labor, he was on the faculty of Harvard Universitys Kennedy School of Government. Reich served as an assistant to the solicitor general in the Ford administration, where he represented the United States before the Supreme Court, and he headed the policy planning staff of the Federal Trade Commission in the Carter administration. He has written seven books, including (translated into 17 languages) and the recent , and more than 200 articles on the global economy, the changing nature of work, and the centrality of human capital. [ full biography ]

Robert Reich

former U.S. Secretary of Labor

Boston Workshop
March 30, 2000

My heart goes out to all of you in terms of dealing with the next seven months, to the extent that you are going to try to make the Bush and Gore contest interesting. I think its going to be one of the worst, most boring, negative kinds of contests weve had in this country for a very long time.

     Having seen it a little bit from the inside, that is, I did support Bill Bradley and I was out in Iowa when the allegations were made that Bill Bradley had not supported flood relief for Iowa. I was one of the so-called surrogates. I hate that term, but I was out there surrogating for Bill Bradley. When the allegation was made that he did not support flood relief for Iowa I just didnt know what to say, I didnt know the facts, the campaign wasnt terribly good at getting me the facts and I do blame, to a large extent, the campaign itself. Its not just the media. If the campaign cannot respond quickly, even to the surrogates, let alone the media, then the campaign doesnt deserve to be much of a campaign.

     You cant run a campaign like that. You do have to have a constant, and I know this from the Clinton campaign that I was involved with in 1992 and 1996. A war room must maintain a vigilance over what the other side is saying so you can get out your story immediately in the same news cycle.

This is certainly not solely the responsibility of the press. Last year I did a PBS show that brought me to the Ohio Valley and I walked and rode up and down the Ohio Valley talking to voters about their feelings about national and even local politics. Are you engaged, if you are not engaged, why are you not engaged? To what extent can you articulate your sense of disconnection and alienation from American politics? We talked to a whole variety of people, beginning in Louisville, going all the way up through Cincinnati. We chose that as the battleground because that, in 1998 and then coming up to 2000, was likely to be a key battleground: Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, a lot of Republicans, a lot of Conservatives, a lot of Democrats, a lot of union people.

     I learned some things that I did not even know as Labor Secretary. As Labor Secretary I did try to conduct a little bit of a free-floating focus group around the country as I went around talking to people about their jobs. Politics almost necessarily came up because there were always issues like child care and family medical leave and other things that did intersect with politics, but as I went up the Ohio Valley a year and a half ago, I heard things that provided a broader context for some of the things that I heard during the time I was Labor Secretary.

Let me share them with you because I think in this respect, also, although you have a critically important job, the context in which you are working is profoundly different from the context in which people like you (journalists, broadcast journalists, print journalists, others) were working 20 or 30 years ago in terms of peoples feelings, attitudes, sense of connection with and toward politics. To say that people are cynical and disconnected and alienated is, I think, an understatement.

     John McCain brought a little bit of the party of nonvoters back into the fold. Exit polls revealed that 10 to 15% of the people who voted for McCain had not voted before. In a normal election you are going to get a few people who havent voted before because you have some young people coming into a race, but this was unusually large. And, as you know, the party of nonvoters is the largest political or absolutely apolitical party in the United States.

     Why did John McCain bring them in? Well, I think he did two things. Bill Bradley did only one of the two and Bill Bradley did not succeed. John McCain did the two and succeeded in bringing in some of the party of nonvoters.

Number one: tell it like it is. That is, the bullshit index in the American public now is extraordinarily high. Their capacity to detect crap is remarkable. I really mean it. Now, I am speaking as somebody who spent most of his life as a normal citizen, but did spend a fair degree of my adult life in different administrations starting with the Ford administration, and also had been in political campaigns. I am amazed at the degree to which the public can sort out what is authentic from what is not and the degree to which they are sensitive to inauthenticity.

     This word authenticity we throw around a tremendous amount particularly with Bradley and McCain every other word was authenticity but I think telling it like it is is an extremely important aspect of selling yourself as a political candidate. Bush and Gore may be constitutionally incapable of doing this, but maybe the level of public mistrust, distrust of establishment candidates is so great that it is almost impossible for an establishment candidate to tell it like it is. Jesse Ventura had some of this, that was the appeal. Go back further, to Ross Perot.

     Telling it like it is is number one, combined with a second quality that Bill Bradley did not have Bill Bradley did try to tell it like it is. The second quality that John McCain had was Give em hell. A little bit of Harry Truman mixed in there. Telling it like it is and giving them hell: telling it like it is with regard to the special interests, the religious right, corporate welfare, money in politics, the iron triangle and also doing it in such a way that you are expressing a fair degree of outrage, not to the extent that you are out of control. I think that John McCains problem was that when he started using the word evil he started looking scary to a lot of people, but if you can express indignation and tell it like it is and have that quality of giving them hell, the American public is, I think, very, very ready to start being engaged once again.

We dont have a national candidate and I dont even think there are, as I glance across the horizon, many state candidates that have these qualities (there probably are some local candidates). I would watch for those qualities because I think that is the growing and increasing underbelly of the great party of nonvoters. Thats where we are going to see a great deal of potential excitement, resentment some of the ugly aspects of American politics could come out as well as the good aspects.

     You have right under the surface in the United States right now a degree of anger, not only with politics, but with the establishment that I have not seen before in my political adult lifetime. Its surprising to me because unemployment is down at about 4.1% and the economy is doing very well. You would expect this degree of cynicism and anger if people were not doing well, if the stock market was not doing well, if people felt that they didnt have jobs. Thats usually when you have these great populist upsurges on the right or on the left in this country if you look at history.

     But right now we have a lot of it even in good times and you can see the tip of the iceberg with regard to Seattle marches, or the difficulty the President gets in trying to get agreement on China and trade, or before that an agreement on Fast Track Trade Authority. There is this populist underpinning. Watch it, watch it carefully.

     Now there are some other things going on as well that I think explain American cynicism toward politics. One very obvious one to me, looking back on it, is that the framers of our system, our Constitution, built a government that was founded in distrust and dislike of government. We suspend our dislike, our disbelief, our antagonistic fundamental feelings toward government in periods of national crisis: the Civil War, the First World War, the Second World War, a Depression, a Cold War. In fact there was a period from 1929 (or 1932 if you want to start with the Roosevelt administration) all the way through 1989, the beginning of the fall of the Soviet Empire, when you did have at least a willingness to respect the authority of central government as necessary for accomplishing a necessary for accomplishing a legitimate and important public purpose. Prior to 1929 you didnt have that and also after 1989 it started to go back, I think, almost to the default position that we have through most of our history.

One of Bill Clintons saddest realities, like Teddy Roosevelt, is here you had a young, vigorous president wanting to do big things, but there was no national crisis, mainly it was peace and prosperity. He came to office when unemployment was at 7.6% yes, that was a national crisis and there was a great deal of energy around that for a few years, but then the economy got better. How can you galvanize public outrage or public opinion or public interest if things are going pretty well? Stories about rot at the top, corruption, indecency, malfeasance, nonfeasance, going back to the publics fundamental distrust with government.

     Other things that are going on over which you dont have much control: Dick Morris in 1995 said to the president what most political consultants are saying to every political candidate and that is the forty-twenty-forty rule. What is the forty-twenty-forty rule? Forty percent of the public is with you that is the voting public, not the party of nonvoters, forget them 40% is against you, this election turns on the 20% swing in the middle. You need to get as many of them as possible. That means youre going to talk about things that are right in the middle and youre going to talk about trivial things like V-chips and school uniforms, things over which the federal government doesnt have much power.

     As long as the political consultants and the pollsters are saying to all candidates basically the same thing and taking the same polls and looking at the same issues, there is a fundamental convergence. Now in a way thats good because it means that there is more agreement than disagreement over some potentially important issues like education. You look at where Bush is going and where Gore is going on education and it is very difficult to see the differences. I read the New York Times this morning, I know Gores education policy, I helped him initially before I got involved with Bradley. I work with and I know the people who are developing the Bush education policy. Yes, there are some differences, but the public is going to be hard-pressed to find the differences between those two sets of policies over an issue that is vitally important.

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