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Doris Kearns Goodwin: Lays out how the next president can transform America (Interview)

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of several distinguished works on the great progressive presidents, including Team of Rivals, on Lincoln and his Cabinet; No Ordinary Time, on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and World War II; Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner talked with Goodwin about presidential leadership. They spoke at her home in Concord, Massachusetts, near the spot where the American Revolution began.

Robert Kuttner: You've written extensively about the great transformative presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, and the promise of John Kennedy. Considering all the damage that has been done to the very idea of a collective good, the task facing the next president will go far beyond the normal challenge of finding the votes to legislate. For progress to be made, this would have to be one of those periods of transformation in how public opinion views America. How should the next president think about this enterprise of leadership?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: History suggests that unless a progressive president is able to mobilize widespread support for significant change in the country at large, it's not enough to have a congressional majority. For example, Bill Clinton had a Democratic majority when he failed to get health reform. When you look at the periods of social change, in each instance the president used leadership not only to get the public involved in understanding what the problems were but to create a fervent desire to address those problems in a meaningful way.

I'm working on a new book on Teddy Roosevelt and the muckrakers. He faced a conservative Congress. But the muckrakers created, in the middle class especially, an understanding of what had to be done in conservation, in food and drug legislation, in the regulation of the railroads. They revealed in long, factual, investigative pieces the way in which Standard Oil and the trusts were constricting opportunity for smaller, independent businesses. Then, with an aroused public, TR was able to pressure the Congress to do something. Similarly, in the early days of the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt used the power of the bully pulpit in his famous fireside chats to drive home to the country at large the need for significant federal legislation in a wide range of areas to ease the problems of the Great Depression.

RK: The public has been trained for 30 years to think that there's really nothing great the government can do, except perhaps to prevent attacks. Where do you start? How do you change public opinion so that you can then change legislative direction?

DKG: The next president has to be able to express a sense of what America can be, what America has been in the past, and what it is not now. It has to be overarching; it cannot be just "we need this program and this program and this program." He or she has to remind us what made people come to this country in the first place -- the belief that here, as Lincoln famously said, we had formed a government "whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men -- to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life." The first and the most difficult task for the new president will be to remind people what made America so special in the first place, to create an emotional desire on their part to bring our performance closer to that ideal, to make clear the wide array of artificial weights that still prevent far too many people from having a fair chance in the race of life, and then and only then to propose the legislative programs or executive actions that will address these shortcomings....
Read entire article at American Prospect