One last point we want to try to cover while we're together today, has to do with themes. I'm a great believer that with some of the extraordinary speakers we're going to be exposing you to, there's a danger that you don't get a synthesis. What are the takeaways? One of the key themes of this course is number 2, Process shapes outcomes. You want to fig, know how a decision is going to come out? Figure out who is going to be in the room. When the decision is going to be made. A second key theme of this course is at the heart of our reading for next week. I'm going to telegraph the bottom line for you right now. because I believe it is such an essential point. U.S. politics moves in cycles. It's essential for policy advocates to determine where we are in a given cycle before you propose a particular solution. Yes, an individual woman or man can shape the moment. But the moment shapes the individual as well. Let me give a quick illustration. Is now a good time to be considering major military intervention by the United States in Syria, or God forbid Iran? I don't think so. Not when we're in the midst of an isolationist phase where the majority of American voters would much prefer to invest in American infrastructure. Then spending more money building bridges in the Middle East or Southwest Asia. What was the heyday of the imperial presidency? Conventional wisdom is that it peaked under LBJ and Richard Nixon. The presidency was also much weaker under Ford and Carter. Bush the first and, and even Bill Clinton who remember never got 50%. In two different elections. Even the garrulous President Reagan faced a Democratic House, low popularity in his first two years, and discussion of penalties as serious as impeachment during his last two years due to the criminal activity in his own National Security Council. But in the wake of 9-11, many extra-constitutional powers are drifting back to the presidency. This occurred under George W Bush, it's occurring now under Barack Obama. And an administration run by folks who used to be in the legislative branch. So, we will be asking throughout the semester. Is the strong presidency the new normal? Or is this just the way it's going to be in the Nuclear Age, in the post 9-11 War on Terror. As I say, presidential powers were checked somewhat by Watergate-era reforms, but also by changes after the end of the cold war. But you should question whether this is the new normal for American politics. To have such a strong Presidency that even the opposition-controlled Congress is forfeiting more powers to the White House. Now before we leave the top ten themes, I just want to underscore once more the importance of cycles when you think about winning or losing. When you look at something like cap and trade cratering in 2010 in the United States because the President was pushing yet one more big government solution. At a time when the scales were tipping towards less government amongst the voters. In the wake of fights over Wall Street reform and health care reform, President Obama was pushing amidst a great recession, yet another big government solution for climate change. That at a time when voter desires for smaller government were apparent. And when the pendulum was swinging back, and as I said, that pendulum swings faster and faster and faster, so your moments of opportunity, within a given cycle, are more narrow. It was not good timing to impo, propose major new taxes on energy, a basic commodity of society. So what is the new normal? The US is now increasingly isolationist, non-interventionist. So it should not have surprised when Congress did not embrace President Obama's plan to undertake a military strike against Syria for their dastardly use of WMD against their own citizens. The same challenges occurs to people who want to say reform foreign aid, when a majority of American voters think we should cut foreign aid and cut it dramatically. Policy entrepreneurs must develop their strategies accordingly. They must know what cycle they're in. And they must know which direction we're headed. We'll talk more about these themes next week, and we'll talk more about readings. But let me just underscore one key point of the day. Sometimes when change occurs, it seems very hard to make. And an unsatisfactory status quo lingers for a generation. And once thinks maybe this is just the way things are going to be. From my generation of baby boomers, we saw profound change in our lifetime. And we saw profound change when I was a teenager. We saw the transformation and change in civil rights. That had not occurred in 100 years in, in our country due to a citizen led movement. But we also took as a given an immutable fact of my lifetime that we would be engaged in a Cold War, a long twilight struggle with the communist Soviet Union. The Soviet Union and the United States were implacable foes. We were destined to fight proxy wars all over the Third World. Whereas to which some of my high school friends were sent and died fighting in southeast Asia in Vietnam. And we took as a given that we'd have 60,000 nuclear warheads pointed at each other. And that the East and the West were going to be divided by that great obscenity, the concrete Berlin Wall. And the point I want to leave you with today, is that some givens are not immutable. The day after the Wall fell, my cousin, a gentleman by the name of Peter Moss who was working for the New York Times, walked right up to it. He took out of his backpack a hammer and a chisel, and he brought me a chunk. Here it is. I keep it on my desk everyday because it's a reminder that while change may be hard, change is inevitable. And change you can shape in your lifetime if you're enlightened public policy makers. Thank you very much, and we'll see you next week.
