legitimacy to buoy up occupy wall street. i guess we're all populists now. president obama's speech in osawatomie invites compare with roosevelt's address. roosevelt's address on a quick reading -- i know you were all required to read it so i did as well -- seems to me more compelling than president obama's. it certainly in teddy roosevelt's style is more energetic. given the advantage to, in this judgment that i suppose teddy roosevelt is almost fixed in the card. for who in this situation is copying whom? by coming to osawatomie obama was paying homage to the originator. even as i'm sure that he hoped to be seen as outdoing him. i doubt, in that case, that he succeeded. and for good reason. teddy roosevelt had more time to prepare his address. he was, perhaps, the deeper thinker. and, of course, he had sought counsel from the lights of

herbert crowley, as succinct from david plouffe. question of style, teddy roosevelt defined what he thought was the central issue of his time and he sought to address it. historians tell us that the concentration of power and wealth was, in fact, the central issue of his time. whatever president obama is thinking, no one, of course, can know. but his osawatomie address clearly evades the central issue of our time, and thus fails the test of real statesmanship. the massive imbalance between what government now promises and the resources allocated to pay for these promises. call it, if you will, the sovereign debt crisis. on this depends the fate of our national security, the soundness of our entire economic system, and justice for the generations to come. for every act of indebtedness is an attack on the next

generation. yes, therefore, one can speak of the justice. for the real crime taking place today is the redistribution of wealth to the majority of the current older generations as the expense of the wealth of the generations coming along. i sympathize somewhat with those young folks evicted from zuccotti park. but they have identified the wrong target. whatever redistribution these crusaders clamor for from the 1% of the rich pales in significance -- in comparison to the massive and unjust distribution now going on among the generation. the sovereign debt crisis is a crisis not only of the united states, but of current liberal democracy as such under the welfare state model. it's almost universal as events in europe are making clear. just think of how many progressives, only three years ago, were touting europe and the european welfare state as the model for america.

now you never hear a progressive invoke europe in a positive vein unless it's to describe a lovely dinner enjoyed in paris on some ngo's dime. and yet in president obama's blueprint for the future, the great challenge of our time barely makes an appearance, being mentioned in a couple of lines that tout, of all things, a paltry savings of $1 trillion, which is, of course, mostly fictitious anyhow. the debt crisis is not central to obama's platform now. it was never central to him in the past. and it will not likely be central to him in the future. in fact, while obama's speech was covered in the press mostly for its analysis of the issue of growing income inequality and diminishing economic mobility, the real news as i see it in this speech should have been

something else. the speech is a call, again, for massive new domestic spending. for education, mostly higher education. for infrastructure, mostly high-speed train. and for technological research, mostly, i suppose, for solar and wind energy. if this new program is to be paid for, and i assume it would be, it will come from new revenues drawn from the upper 1%. but this program will do nothing at all to address the existing trends towards mounting deficit. we are broke. going broker. but we can at least take solace that we will pay for our next spending binge by new taxation. for this reason, it appears appropriate today to speak of the real division in this country as being that between the party of reality and the party of evasion. the party of reality faces the main crisis of our time even if it's different wings. some democrats and some republican, differ on how to

address it. the party of evasion minimizes or denies this crisis and in a flight from reality, tilts it windmill. it keeps insisting on more spending and on creating more rights. it plays the old magical trick of focusing the audience's attention on things that do not count, leading them to ignore the things that really do matter. president obama's osawatomie speech is the platform for the party of evasion. i hope the 2012 election will present a clear choice between the party of reality and the party of evasion. but this still remains to be seen. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you, bill and hudson for having me, and e.j. for the kind introduction.

it's great to be on a panel with you all. i've enjoyed all your work on the progressive era over the past few years. i'll try and be brief so we can get to interesting back and forth on great ideas we've already heard. one of the things i want to focus on is how boring the election of 2012 is likely to be in comparison to the election of 1912. now, maybe it's easy to do when you're reading history books and things like that. what's most fascinating and you get this in sid's book about the 1912 election was how much of a serious challenge there was to the two-party system. we haven't really talked about that. you have this fight for the soul of the republican party between la follette, teddy roosevelt and taft. it ends up being taft. you have the creation of a new party which has its own divisions that people don't acknowledge as much. about the progressive era. you had a serious fight about issues of monopoly, regulation, the wisdom of an administrative state. progressives are always being accused of supporting this big, domineering state. but if you look at the origins of the progressive movement, there are real serious discrepancies in ideas about how

these things would play out. progressives were concerned about an overwhelming state undermining the sort of direct democracy that they wanted. you then have this fight between the new nationalism, the new freedom, and you actually had a socialist movement. i mean, you had -- deb scored it quite well in 1912. you had constitutional fights about whether we would be the masters of constitution or continue in the tradition that basically put property rights above human rights. basically at the time everybody's trying to figure out how to deal with the issues of industrialization. compare that with today, the challenge to the two-party system is bubbling, but it's not anywhere near boiling. that's what i mean when i say 2012 is likely to be kind of boring. if we had a proportional system like europe, the democratic party would likely break into three parts. you would have a populist left, environmentalists, intellectualists, something akin to the green movement. you have the traditional african-american, latino labor base. and you have a central probusiness wing. they're held together uncomfortably under the umbrella of the democratic party.

on the republican side, my friends can talk more about this if i get this wrong, but you have an essential division between more traditional libertarians, social conservatives and traditional business chamber types. these things are held together within a two-party system that hasn't been challenged the way it was challenged in 1912. now, what do we have that is trying to challenge these? the tea party and occupy wall street. and what's most interesting about these outside movements challenging the two-party system is that in many ways -- i'm not saying they're similar -- they're arguing the same concern that the original la follette progressives had which is we are most concerned about the joining of federal power with corporate power. that was one of the big issues. if we're going to create a big administrative authority, how do we keep corporate interests out of it? what happens is, this is talked about by the tea party more as crony capitalism. so you have a tea party argument saying we want to free the

american people and the economy from the oppressive state that's a crony capitalist state. you have occupy wall street and the folks down the street here at mcpherson square saying we want to free the people in our government from the influence of corporations and money. they are trying to challenge the two-party duopoly in some ways but it's not likely to engage in any kind of refashioning of american politics that we saw in 1912. so that's why just a little bit of context, about how reading about 1912 is probably infinitely more interesting than talking about 2012. that said, what about president obama's speech is useful and interesting to talk about? i think it's pretty clear that he's -- you know, he made a fairly shrewd move by embracing teddy roosevelt's new nationalism here. i'm going to talk in a minute about how it doesn't reach the levels of t.r.'s original address in many ways. but obama has decided to run as a popular, you know, incomplete steward of the middle class.

his theme which is not the new nationalism, it was roosevelt's presidency, the square deal. he's going to be for fair play, a fair shot and a fair share. these are pretty common themes in u.s. politics. the party that can embrace these typically does well. you certainly want to be on the side of the middle class and the side of fairness. i think, you know, this fight over the payroll tax cut, the house republicans are just stepping in the middle of this theme that he set up pretty cleanly. it's also obvious to me that he wasn't putting out a radical transformation of american politics. he's running against the tea party. he's essentially saying, this is what's quite interesting about the new osawatomie address is how uncontroversial the agenda of teddy roosevelt is. all the things that he basically outlined, there aren't too many people who would go against this. so the success of conservatism over the past three decades that we'll say was going after the excesses of post-world liberalism, not progressivism. they went after the big state that was doing too much, that spent too much money, that was interfering in people's lives. with the rise of the tea party

and the house republicans, and you heard this all over fox news with glen beck in the lead-up to 2010, they were actually going after the progressive era. now, if you read the agenda in the new nationalism, none of it's that controversial today. conservatives like the initiative referendum recall process in some ways. they've used it well to limit the size of government. they used, as sid mentioned, the administrative power of government to do a lot of things they want. the actual social and industrial justice agenda, most people aren't going to challenge the minimum wage. they're not going to challenge a lot of the social protections that were set up there. so i think obama's quite wisely setting himself up as a defender of the most popular aspects of government against what he sees as a much more radical assault on the progressive era in some way. so if it's obama protecting a vision of government post-1910 and somebody defending it pre-1910, obama's going to win that fight. and i think that's why he set it

up this way. as mr. rove outlined in his article today in "the wall street journal," republicans aren't dumb and they're not going to fall for this. they're not going to argue, i would imagine they won't, against the wisdom of teddy roosevelt's new nationalism. they're going to argue about obama's stewardship of the economy. and they're going to go after his agenda, whether it's on health care, stimulus or other things like that. the other thing that's interesting about the speech obama gave as sid also mentioned, there wasn't any big policy change in what he outlined. he has now taken his new foundation ideas which is an investment in education, science, research, technology, energy, tax reform, financial regulation. he also talked about the wisdom of financial reform and stimulus at georgetown in 2009. he's now taken that same agenda and put the rhetoric of fairness around it. he's taken the square deal rhetoric. that's how he's defending it. this is not a radical agenda. the biggest problem i think for obama is not the charges of

class warfare which he will surely face. it's the bigger problem that people just tune out presidential rhetoric these days. it's not at all clear to me that people really care what the president says, whether he's a democrat or republican in any way. it's very hard to communicate long term the themes that are outlined in any of these speeches. and i think the rhetoric has to match actions. and it has to be seen as authentic. i'm not sure most americans will be aware of some of the themes that were outlined in the speech. we'll see if he continues to push the fair play, fair shot, fair share which sounds good on many different levels and will probably work, but i don't think it will define a whole new era of politics the way the new nationalism really did. so let me get some more differences between the two speeches. the most glaring one is that the crux of the new nationalism in all of the fights over the constitution in the original progressive era was about the political reform agenda. the whole progressive movement

was about political reform to establish social industrial justice. that's what it was. it was the wedding of political and economic reforms. obama is really, in his speech, trying to restore faith in the post-war order. and even more contemporaneously, '90s era prosperity. this isn't arguing for a whole new system of government in some ways, a whole radical rethinking of how we do things. he's trying to get back to the american dream of the post-war era and some of the prosperity of the clinton era. there really is no fundamental challenge in obama's address to the political order. there's no real talk about the reforms on the level that teddy roosevelt talked about. and there was really no concrete way to break this federal power, corporate power nexus that is animating both the tea party and occupy wall street. the bigger challenge for progressives is to, you know, if we're going to have a new new

nationalism in some ways, let's also accept that times have changed very dramatically. as i said, teddy roosevelt's address is fairly uncontroversial now. we're not trying to restore, we're trying to protect any of those things, but the biggest problem is that most of that has been accomplished, and we have this toxic distrust of government today. which is not unfounded. it's completely different than the days of teddy roosevelt in some ways. we didn't have the national state that we have now, and we didn't have all this toxic distrust of government. this is a big challenge for people who call themselves progressives and liberals that we have to take seriously. they agree with the architecture of the state that teddy roosevelt put out. what they don't like about the modern state is one, it's corrupt, and two, it's potentially incompetent. these two things reduce people's faith and trust in government. and i think this is a long-term challenge for progressives that just recalling or protecting the great ideas of the new nationalism won't achieve. the second biggest one is the economic context. and i think both conservatives and progressives suffer from an inability to sort of see or put forth a number of solutions to

deal with the globalized economy. so we either get a perception of more government or more markets which the american people now at this point, they don't buy either one of those arguments completely. it's fairly obvious that you're not going to have complete sort of libertarian laissez faire. you're not going to have a very strong central state. americans are distrustful of both of those methods in some ways. and most of the problems we're now facing particularly on the economy transcend our own capacity to address them in our own national borders. and so, you know, something that would address the economic conditions today would have to be looking towards more global solutions in some ways. and that didn't come into play at all here. but i think ultimately, this was a fantastic address to rally obama's base in many ways. i think he did that. he's wrapped up his policy in fairness, and the bipartisan at one point belief in progressive ideas. but the idea of a new new nationalism or what's next, i

think, is a long way off. and i don't think this address that obama gave was in any way intended to do that. i think that's the work of social reformers on the left to actually convince people that either stronger government action can enhance their own life opportunities, produce national prosperity, protect individual freedom or it can't. i don't think we've made that case yet. we're working on it. in the meantime, if the other side wants to have a fight about the wisdom of the progressive era, president obama who's a pretty cautious guy, is willing to take that on. and my guess is he'll probably succeed. i enjoy hearing all of your thoughts and look forward to getting some questions in. and thanks again to bill. [ applause ] >> thank you to all my panel. it's a great panel. some of my best progressive friends. >> that's a severe quality.

it's a small group. >> i say my friends, though, because it's not that we agree on everything, but i respect people who take ideas seriously. and these are discussions about the ideas of american political thought or the promise of american life as herbert crowley liked to put it. the fact that the center for american progress and the heritage foundation are both doing a series of papers about the meaning of progressivism. in 1912 and the debate between people like, you know, ruth and lodge and it tells you something about why these questions are important. which is in the end american politics less about policy debate and more about america. that's why every turning point election, every watershed, every realignment in american history, it always comes back to these questions about what america means. think of 1800, 1860, 1936. to a lesser extent, even 1980. and so here we are again making serious arguments about serious ideas.

and another president has turned to american political history to frame his understanding of america and the campaign ahead. so where does he turn? well, he began by invoking lincoln. more recently he's been campaigning as harry truman, running against a do-nothing congress. you might think in hard times, i think as someone had mentioned, that he would go as a good democrat and appeal to franklin roosevelt who famously criticized the money changers in the temple and promised us the new deal. and yet in a significant speech in the making, the president -- and believe me, no one goes to osawatomie for no good reason. so there he gives what i think will be a defining speech to his administration, or as e.j. says, the inaugural address obama never gave. invoking the old bull moose. now, i think this establishes that this president has given up on the center for american politics. and he's doubled down the

progressive model. and this tells us much about where he's coming from and where he is going. the last thing about this question imposed by the progressives. this is about 100 years ago. the original claim of the founders, the formalism the progressives revolted against was that america was different or in the context of the current way we talk about it, america is exceptional. because it's dedicated to universal natural rights. we're all equal. by nature we are endowed with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. this principle and the constitutional framework of law are the foundations of the american dream. the related principle that each has a right to the rewards of his own labor makes possible the dynamic social order in which every member of society can work hard, advance based on individual talent and ability.

the primary obligation of government is to secure property rights, break down artificial barriers for opportunity, uphold the rule of law. this is sound economic theory. when property is protected, there is an incentive to work, to earn, to save, to invest. and when one is guaranteed to reap what you sew, more people will sew and more people will reap. when economic reward is available to all and the protection of property extends to all, the amount of wealth drops and increases exponentially, and we can pursue our happiness. the basic safety net is provided by civil society and public assistance at the appropriate level of government. that can now protect those who cannot take care of themselves. what's truly revolutionary about this model, i would call it the madisonian model, is that the ladder of freedom and opportunity is available to everyone. the result, poverty not extinguished, has vastly diminished. even more important, it is no longer a permanent condition from which there is no escape.

now, about 100 years ago, there arose what i would describe as a different dream. that government could better engineer how society operates. progressive reformers were convinced that not only had the american founders been wrong about man and their assumptions of human nature and the necessity of limited government, but also the advances in science would allow government to reshape society, eradicate those inequalities of property and wealth that had been unleashed by the right. democratic capitalism and the resulting growth in commerce and business. a more activist government based on evolving right, living constitution would redistribute wealth and level out those differences through taxation, economic regulation and welfare programs. the clearest formulation is from herbert crowley. he allows that americans have an almost religious faith this their country. the traditional american confidence and individual freedom has resulted in a

morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth. the time has come to inject the ghosts and devote ourselves to a dominant and constructive national purpose. centered on a new theory of the state. in which expert government can regulate the economy to achieve progressive outcome. by becoming responsible for the subordination of the individual to that purpose, crowley writes, the american state will, in effect, be making itself responsible for a morally and socially desirable distribution of wealth. so teddy roosevelt is looking for a new and more comprehensive progressive philosophy. he finds it in crowley's book. somewhere out in the safaris of africa when he's reading it and gobbling it up. the material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens. both observed in his speech. the initial draft was printed if not written by crowley himself,

progress and wealth are required in not only the central government but also the nationalization of politics. a break from the american traditional limited government. the federal government should now play an interventionist role to advance progressive democracy, real democracy, as he says. for if we do not have the right kind of law and the right kind of administration, the law we cannot go forward as a nation. so in his own osawatomie speech, president obama dons t.r.'s progressive mantle. not nowhere near as high-minded as t.r. in the first place. i agree with the panelists. but he does it nonetheless. he does allude in the beginning to an america where hard work pays off. responsibly is rewarded. anyone could make it if they tried. but that was the argument of his parents and an earlier generation. the basic bargain has become so eroded by the marketplace that the defining issue of our tame, he says, is to restore growth and prosperity, balance and

fairness. there's that word. the choice we face as he frames it is that offered by the progressives 100 years ago. at least that aspect of economic choice. between the harshness of market capitalism which he defines in true straw man fashion, as you're on your own economics with a free license to pay whatever you want from whoever you can. social darwinism. on the one hand in the benign fairness of progressive nationalism, a view that we are greater together when everyone engages in fair play, everyone has a fair shot, everyone does their fair share. the word "fair" occurs throughout the speech. not opportunity. with reminders throughout that things must be made fair. and that means government. as a nation, we've always come together, he says, at one point, through our government. through progressive fashion. so he returns to his old mantra,

not a bold and new initiative but his old mantra, federal education programs, infrastructure, economic regulation. and, of course, raising taxes on the wealthy is the way to pay for those investments, and that's only fair. now, he denies the charge of class warfare, of course, and as class warfare is conventionally defined, he's correct. what he's actually doing, however, is abandoning the average middle-class voter and his middle-class values and coming together in an alliance of state independence, government payers on and political elite who claim the capacity to run things. his progress about the rise of a new governing class and insist on a ranging political and economic fairness. the managed quest for fairness however inevitably leads to bureaucratic favoritism and equalities based on special interest and undue political influence. the essence of crony capitalism. in every presidential campaign there's a speech that defines the candidate. by turning to t.r.'s new

nationalist model, imperfect as it is, obama's revealed that his antecedent actually goes back to the progressive model. following his party backed with roots. the implication would continue that transformation of america through its various waves and phases over the 20th century, let's call it now a fair society, as assuring not equal opportunity, but fair outcome. those of us who take the arguments of american political thoughts seriously like to look at politics by way of analysis. in the republican primary, for instance, we see newt gingrich challenging t.r.'s disdain for predatory wealth as well as his pub -- populist attacks on the judiciary, planning to abolish circuit courts. marshals round up judges refusing to testify before congress. just the kind of argument that brought republicans to break with t.r. and that caused him to

bolt his party and run as a progressive independent. then, of course, there is ron paul who has challenged the isolationist ghosts. which would explain why he's doing so well in iowa. but these are mere amateurs. president obama's government fairness program seems to be the central idea of administration and his authority. this is a risky strategy. it seems to me. for one thing, it's a hard sell to the american people. the gallup survey just a few days ago respondents were asked to categorize three economic objectives, extremely important, very important, somewhat important or not important. in the extremely very important category, grow an expanding economy, 82%. increase equality of opportunity for people to get ahead, 70%. reduce the income and wealth gap between rich and poor, 46%. if anything, americans have become more skeptical of government centered solutions rather than less.

and even less -- they're even less likely to embrace a new birth of progressive reformism that some, i think wrongly, thought they were endorsing in 2008. what's more, if this is president obama's re-election template, it opens a wide space for the republicans, admittedly usually articulate and as yet ununified, to make the broader case for economic opportunity. and the reforms better the conditions of the american people and solve the real problems we face as opposed to tired state centric policies that try to make everything equal. but end up lowering everyone's horizon. in drawing us ever more to national debt and bankruptcy. that pace case, the argument for opportunity, is already being made by folks like paul ryan. and more recently just this week in mitt romney's new stump