An X-Ray of Dysfunction

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT

I still find it amazing that with all the climate, security, health and financial interests America has in reducing its dependence on oil, our Congress could not work out an energy bill over the past two years — especially when China, Japan and the European Union are all hurdling ahead on clean-tech. The fact that we failed to pass an energy bill — cap-and-trade, a carbon tax, efficiency standards, I don’t care which — is actually a reflection of a broader U.S. power failure. It is the failure of our political system to unite, even in a crisis, to produce the policy responses America needs to thrive in the 21st century. As the Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib once noted: “America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so. A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else.”

It is a shame because America, while often paralyzed from the top down, is alive from the bottom up. The more I travel around our country, the more I meet people who didn’t get the word — that we’re supposed to be depressed and on our backs — and they’re out experimenting with education, innovating with technology and using the Web for start-ups. But our political system is not empowering, enhancing and inspiring their efforts at the speed and scale that we need.

If you want to see in stark relief all the forces undermining our system’s ability to make smart, strategic, long-term decisions, read Ryan Lizza’s article in the Oct. 11 issue of The New Yorker, explaining just how the bipartisan effort by Senators John Kerry (D), Lindsey Graham (R), and Joseph Lieberman (I) to produce an energy-climate bill and enhance clean-tech innovation was killed this year. Entitled “As the World Burns,” Lizza’s piece is an X-ray of the dysfunctions eating away at our future: politicians who only know how to read polls, never change them; media outlets serving political parties; special interests buying senators; mindless partisanship; an epidemic of low expectations for our government. And us — we elected them all, and we tolerate them.

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