RUNNING ON EMPTY: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do about It - Softcover

When the towers fell, I was out of town attending a corporate board meeting (which promptly adjourned) and spent the rest of the day watching cable news and trying to call my wife and family in Manhattan. Four days later, when I finally managed to get a plane home, I saw a New York--and an America--transformed. I saw parents doting on their kids and neighbors helping neighbors and college students lining up to donate blood and cars and streets in a sea of flags. Out of tears and tragedy there came a new sense of community purpose and determination. Like many Americans, I asked myself, Why can't citizenship in a great nation always be like this?

But within a few months our leaders had reverted to their old habits. The nastiness returned. It was business as usual--the same politicians leaping at each other's throats while saying nothing sensible about what America can do or be.

This brought home for me why a growing number of Americans are so disaffected with politics and parties. There seems such a vast gap between what our democracy ought tobe and what it is, between the decency of ordinary citizens and the horrible warping of their votes and desires once they get translated into partisan politics. It's gotten so bad that millions of Americans who once worked, led, and campaigned for our major political parties have severed--or are at least rethinking--their attachment to them. These Americans once served as full-fledged "Republicans" and "Democrats." But a growing number now doubt their affiliation. They no longer want to belong to either camp--or at least want to remove the insignia from their old uniforms.

My own example is instructive. As a Republican, I have served as a cabinet member (once), as a presidential commission member (three times), as an all-purpose political ombudsman (many times), and as a relentless crusader for fiscal responsibility whom some would call a crank (throughout). During most of my service, I have been careful not to subscribe to party dogma that violated my common sense, nor assume that a constituency is sacrosanct just because the party says so, nor believe that the other party is automatically the enemy. Yet that's just the problem. Increasingly, those who serve my party are subject to all of these pressures. And I know many Democrats who feel just as I do about their own party.

I believe this political dysfunction poses a clear danger to our nation. It does so by paralyzing our capacity to make elementary fiscal choices--the kind of choices, which, if left unmade by a person or family, would quickly lead to ruining their career or their life. First we had the ideologues of tax and spend. Then we had the ideologues of don't-tax and spend. Today, both have triumphed, with the result that the United States is committed to spending literally trillions of dollars more in personal benefits and collective security over the coming decades than citizens either expect or can afford to pay. The Democrats and the Republicans, with their lopsided and mutually irreconcilable worldviews, have found only one important way to compromise, and this is for both sides to takewhat they want (low taxing and high spending) and send the bill to our kids. These two parties have launched America into the new century on a course of vast and mounting budget deficits which, if left unaltered, can only end in an economy-shattering crisis or crushing burdens on America's younger generations--or both.

Steered by bankrupt parties, in short, we will soon become a bankrupt nation. That is what this book is about.