Talking About Values

Foreword

Most people across the political spectrum believe that values — good values — play an indispensable role in a just and prosperous society. Shared values define personal rights and responsibilities in a cultural context as surely as a constitution does in a political one.

Anyone who discusses this issue seriously, as Mitch Pearlstein does brilliantly in this Center of the American Experiment essay, understands the danger of being self-righteous and judgmental. From quite the opposite direction, they also understand the danger of not being judgmental enough; of mistakenly viewing all values as equal, neither good nor bad, only different. This latter outlook — which dominates in much of America today — makes it difficult to promote the type of values that strengthen families, schools and other institutions.

The relevant and pivotal question is not: Do people have a right to certain values, behaviors or lifestyles? But rather: Is there an objective and rational basis for preferring certain values over others in light of their respective consequences, both for individuals and the commonweal?

In many instances, I say yes, absolutely.

For instance, the constantly increasing message about smoking is that it’s dumb. We do not hesitate to condemn and stigmatize it, as research on the mortal effects of tobacco is overwhelming. No doubt, many who smoke feel judged and put down by such criticism. But also no doubt, such cultural intolerance saves lives.

As Mitch writes, when people do not follow certain clear (if not terribly restrictive) rules, they’re likely to hurt themselves, their children and, it’s not an exaggeration to say, their country. Yet many people, for reasons he describes in detail, are hesitant to acknowledge this truth in public. More accurately, they’re hesitant to the point of utter silence.

The best example is widespread resistance to acknowledging publicly the demonstrated fact that neither children nor communities are served by epidemic levels of single parenthood and out-of-wedlock births. Compassion and sensitivity are always essential, of course. But in this case, fear of speaking out and passing legitimate judgment is not compassionate or sensitive at all. In very human and tangible ways, it’s the reverse.

While freedom naturally demands that people have the right to make the great range of decisions about their lives, society is obliged, at minimum, to inform those decisions in keeping with the common good — especially when stakes are mountain high. It’s this idea, at root, which drives “Talking About Values: Emboldening Politicians and Other Leaders to Debate What Matters.” I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have.

American Experiment members receive free copies of all Center publications, including this one. Additional copies are $4 for members and $5 for non-members. Bulk discounts are available for schools, civic groups and other organizations. Please note our phone and address on the previous page for membership and other information.

As for Mitch Pearlstein, he is president and founder of American Experiment, which opened in downtown Minneapolis in March 1990. He has made his career in education, journalism and government, and among other assignments, has served in the U.S. Department of Education during the Reagan-Bush administrations; as an editorial writer and columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press; and as special assistant for policy and communications to Minnesota Governor Albert H. Quie.

Dr. Pearlstein, who is a regular columnist for Minneapolis/St. Paul CityBusiness, did his graduate work in educational administration and higher education at the University of Minnesota, and his undergraduate in political science at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

He and his wife Diane H. McGowan live in Minneapolis with their sons Christopher, Brian and David.

A final word. On behalf of Mitch and the rest of our colleagues, I would like to thank MSI Insurance Companies, in Arden Hills, for its exceptional generosity in printing this paper.

Peter Bell
Chairman of the Board
December 1992


Introduction

To understand the cynical and cranky soup in which Americans were said to be drowning during the 1992 elections, it’s helpful to think back to the riots in Los Angeles last spring, to two conversations, one very public and the other very private.

The public conversation (if it be called that) was led by politicians, academics and other specialists and took place in the mass media, particularly on news and talk shows on television and radio. This part-monologue, part-dialogue managed to touch all key aspects of the explosion following the Rodney King verdict, but it’s fair to say that it focused on questions of public policy (especially economics) and societal mores (especially assumptions about continuing racism in the United States). It accented societal responsibilities, particularly those of a supposedly delinquent government, especially Ronald Reagan’s government.

The private conversation — or, more precisely, conversations — involved the rest of the country and took place in millions of homes and other settings among families and friends. These exchanges also addressed the trial and aftermath broadly, taking account of economic distress in inner cities such as South Central Los Angeles and, in varying degrees, the lingering sin of American racism. But almost assuredly, more than the electronic conversations, they focused on the elusive and politically flammable subject of culture and character, meaning questions of values, attitudes and behavior. Rather than societal responsibilities, they stressed individual, very personal obligations, things such as taking school seriously, being married before fathering or bearing children, and working for a living if possible. And surely, these conversations repeatedly cited the “breakdown of the American family.”

Or think about American education and the two conversations it provokes.

Publicly, education is framed mostly as policies and budgets. A main difference between George Bush and Bill Clinton was that Mr. Bush favored expanding choice programs for low- and moderate-income children to attend all kinds of schools, while Mr. Clinton favored limiting parental choice programs to government schools. Such disagreements notwithstanding, both politicians declared perfect confidence that American education would flourish if their respective programs were implemented. All the while, in background drumbeat, superintendents, teacher unions and other advocates argued that American education would get better only if we got serious, only if we showed real commitment to our children. Only, in other words, if we spent more money.

Privately, across dinner tables and over phones, parents talk a lot less about “reforms” and a lot more about whether their children are studying hard and whether they are watching too much television. They take for granted that real learning is unlikely in classrooms where kids don’t mind their teachers and manners. They similarly doubt that schools — no matter how dedicated teachers may be, and no matter how large budgets may grow — can compensate for the extraordinary turmoil and perverse incentives in all the fractured families and communities across the nation, be they urban, suburban or rural. Most people hold these instinctive doubts no matter how earnestly policy-makers declare that American young people will
be prepared for the next millennium if only we adopt this or that innovation.

The two-conversation metaphor is borrowed from Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values, in New York. Whitehead, in a speech at Columbia University earlier this year, talked about family issues, and the two distinct debates about them under way: one a conference table debate, and the other a kitchen table debate.1

“The conference table conversation takes place among people like us — representatives of the media, the academic world, the policy community.” Its language is that of the “policy sciences — politics and economics.” In contrast, kitchen table conversation is among families themselves, and the language is that of “cultural norms and values.”

Blankenhorn, who is president of the Institute for American Values (Whitehead is a research associate) puts it this way: “You will learn more about the American family from 10 randomly chosen grandmothers than you will from 10 randomly chosen family experts.” This is so because grandmothers “tend to be less shy about value judgments,” as they “tend to say things such as: ‘People today care more about themselves and less about others.’ ‘They want everything now.’ ‘They are less willing to make sacrifices.’ ‘Children today are not taught a sense of right and wrong.'”2

What does it suggest about foul national moods when the gulf is so large between what politicians and other elites say, and what the rest of America says, about this country’s most difficult and heated problems? What does it suggest, more importantly, about our capacity to address those problems? Remember, at issue is not merely differing opinions about great puzzles. At issue are two, fundamentally different languages, and the refusal of leaders to speak and write in the words and ideas that most people see as basic if any sense is to be made of this world.3

For one, the descrepancy suggests that public figures need to learn a new public language, one that better fits with how everyone else speaks.

A case can be made that politicians and other leaders are edging in this direction, as witness much of the family-fuzzed rhetoric at 1992 Democratic and Republican conventions, the latter of which was encouraged by Dan Quayle’s “Murphy Brown” speech a few months earlier. Still, their performance continues to flunk, as it’s simultaneously tepid (as in weak-kneed) or scalding (as in scolding). Again, recall the two conventions. The Democrats were determined not to crack liberal eggs, and the two Pats, Buchanan and Robertson, sounded as if they wanted to crack liberal heads.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons why the gap between public and private language is wide. The best is that most people in public life have a decent understanding of America’s immense variety, and how rude and potentially dangerous it is to impose very personal beliefs and standards on others — never mind that showing proper respect for one’s neighbors is one thing; biting one’s tongue to the point of irrelevance quite another.

Most people, moreover, don’t want to appear “judgmental.” OK. But passing judgment does not necessarily mean sticking one’s moralizing nose where it doesn’t belong. It means discerning what is empirically true, for example, about raising children and caring enough to talk about it openly, despite the risks.

In a similar vein, most leaders prefer not to needlessly hurt and offend, a caution which applies most clearly to questions of out-of-wedlock births and single-parenthood because of divorce. The enormous number of boys and girls growing up without fathers is undeniably the greatest social disaster facing the nation. But it’s also true that most people in positions of authority are deeply reluctant to say anything that might hurt women, who often are heroic, and children who are innocent and vulnerable. Not willing to say anything that might rattle, however, is usually synonymous with not saying much of anything at all.

Such inhibitions are compounded by a censoring rule, to which too many otherwise gritty people bow: Hardly ever say anything publicly which might lead foes to claim — fairly or not — that you are insensitive, or that you blame victims, or that you are sexist, or most painful and silencing of all, that you are racist.

Given this field of mines and trapdoors, how might politicians and other leaders be encouraged to talk about what matters? Posing the question in partisan terms, are Republican and conservative rebirths possible unless party and movement leaders learn to talk vigorously about values, morality, behavior and character without suggesting self-righteousness and cold hearts? Can candidates and other leaders, regardless of party and ideology, learn to meld religious conviction and politics without offending the Constitution and scaring away tens of millions? Is it possible to sound more like Bill Bennett than Pat Buchanan; more like Michael Novak than Pat Robertson? Five overarching thoughts to start:

First, it’s necessary to fully understand the extent to which our nastiest social problems are cultural and normative at root, rather than anything of the more pliable sort. This does not mean that governmental programs and the economy are but sideshows; only that they’re accompanied complexly on stage.

Second, it’s necessary to recognize that “talking about values” is not synonymous with talking about “family values,” as that term has come to be abused and turned into a cliche by partisans, first on the right, next on the left, and then big time by Republicans in convention. It’s important to talk about values because they are important; not because they can be bent into political weapons. Or, if you will, it’s important to talk about values even though hardball politics have rendered the term “family values” pejorative and, thereby, valueless and worse in many quarters.

Third, of similar cloth, speaking out on values — on social issues, as some might say — ought not presume any particular stance on abortion or homosexuality. Many leaders and others who apprehend the cultural sides of things, and who might be disposed to addressing them, simply do not want to be associated — or seen to be associated — with foes of abortion or gay and lesbian rights. Fine. But such mum culturalists, who most commonly are liberal or moderate, need to muster conviction and not be so squeamish about what others might think of the company they’re not necessarily keeping. They, too, need to speak their mind and heart.

Fourth, it’s essential to grasp the power and subtlety of language and the need to avoid dumb mistakes — as Ross Perot didn’t at the NAACP convention during his presidential campaign, with his talk of “you people.”

And fifth, one need not be perfect, free of all skeletons and baggage, to talk credibly about right and wrong, smart and dumb. The silence really would be deafening if the opposite were true and I, for one, would be soundless, as would most everyone I know.

Understanding what really matters

A very good way to understand what matters is to review a number of studies which confirm what millions of Americans instinctively know about social problems, but whose lessons are consistently ignored in official circles.

Starting with a 1985 essay, “The Declining Well-being of American Adolescents,” social scientists Peter Uhlenberg and David Eggebeen found that various measures traditionally used to gauge how young people are doing moved decidedly, between 1960 and 1980, in presumably correct and healthy directions.4 For example, in constant 1980 dollars, school expenditures per pupil in the United States increased by 99.6 percent, literally doubling over the two decades. Average high school class size dropped from 28 to 23. Even more impressively, total social welfare expenditures by the federal government increased from $40 billion in 1960 to $244 billion in 1980, more than a six-fold increase, again in constant 1980 dollars.

In addition, Uhlenberg and Eggebeen found that the percentage of 16 and 17 year-old white youngsters living in poverty dropped from 24.7 percent to 9.9 percent over the 20 years.5 Likewise, the percentage of 16 and 17 year-old white kids in families of four or more siblings dropped from 21.1 percent to 13.6 percent. And the percentage of 16 and 17 year-old white boys and girls in homes in which mothers were not high school graduates fell from 57 percent to 24.4 percent.

Summing all this good news, the percentage of white 16 and 17 year-olds living in homes without poverty, not in large families, and not with low-educated parents just about doubled, from 31.6 percent to 62.5 percent from 1960 to 1980.

However, during this same period, delinquency rates for 10-17 white children increased by 130.8 percent. Birth rates for unmarried white females, age 15-19, increased by 140.9 percent. And as for mortality rates among whites, they went down over those 20 years for every age group in the country except one: young Americans between 15-24. Their death rate increased by 16.2 percent, with suicide rates increasing by 139.5 percent and homicide rates by 231.8 percent.

How and why? How was it possible for kids to be getting into so much trouble at the very time that school budgets, easily measured family characteristics and other, supposedly key measures were improving? What was missing from governmental calculations and political conversations as countless programs were created and dollars allocated? Uhlenberg and Eggebeen put it this way: “It is time to question one of the most fundamental arguments made in recent years” by child advocates and social scientists: “the argument that families and individuals are not responsible for the problems experienced by children.”

“We believe,” they continue, “that this preoccupation with removing responsibility for negative outcomes from individuals has diverted attention from the more important determinants of child and youth well-being. In particular, it has diverted attention from what may be the most critical determinant of all: the bond between child and parent. . . . [W]e suggest that there has been a declining commitment of parents to their children over the past several decades.”

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Uhlenberg and Eggebeen that the “quantity and quality of parent-child relationships” deteriorated between 1960 and 1980, at the very least, they point to issues which usually are off-limits in public, conference table conversations, but which are prime topics in private, kitchen table conversations. Yet such normative topics, as the two scholars persuasively argue, are central to understanding what’s wrong.

Continuing with children, Eric A. Hanushek of the University of Rochester, after reviewing 187 studies, wrote in 1989 that, “There is no strong or systematic relationship between school expenditures and student performance.” And that, “School reform discussions that begin with the premise that constraints on expenditures are the most serious roadblocks to improved student performance are, at best, misguided.”6

Keep Hanushek’s findings in mind while considering the academic performance of many Asian-American children; kids who are doing stellar work in the very same schools that are supposedly failing everybody else.

Asian-American students certainly are saluted publicly. But the core, empirically demonstrable reason for their success — strong families which take education seriously in belief and deed — is publicly downplayed for fear of slighting other families which are not so strong or conscientious. Few politicians are likely to declare openly that American education would improve dramatically if more families simply embraced the same devotion to learning as that held by many Asian-American families.

It’s doubtful, however, if these very same politicians are equally reticent in private in recognizing the importance of family cohesion and hard work; in recognizing, in other words, the cultural — rather than economic or bureaucratic — barriers blocking American education.

In private again, politicians and other leaders doubtless would find fascinating the seminal comparisons of education in the United States, Japan and the two Chinas by University of Michigan psychologist Harold W. Stevenson and his international team.7 Americans, for example, according to Stevenson, generally do not understand the inescapable connection between hard work and learning as well as Asians do.

Publicly, though, leaders are much less likely to comment on sensitive and embarrassing findings like these, as they think it safer to talk jargon and dollars than to risk passing judgment on what families do or don’t do — the kinds of things, again, that matter.

Understandable as it may be, public debate is unusually evasive and feckless when race is at issue, in and out of education. The fact that it’s nearly impossible to find any consequential problem which does not touch on race somehow, often full bore, scares most leaders into into platitudes and mumbling.

For instance, Black boys who do well in school often risk being accused of “acting white” or being gay by their peers. Black girls who do well risk being called a bitch.8 Disincentives such as these, one might safely argue, are virtually immune to governmental remedies. When added to the fact that extraordinary numbers of African-American (and other) children are born out of wedlock and do not grow up in stable-two parent homes, it’s all the more obvious that millions of youngsters will not do well academically until cultural environments, not just public policies, change. Most people know this automatically; few confront it publicly.

Take Minneapolis, where more than 40 percent of all children (including almost 75 percent of African-American children, and more than 80 percent of American Indian babies) were born out of wedlock in 1990. On the chance that trends remain constant, straight-line projections suggest that the overall rate for the city will climb to approximately 65 percent by the end of the decade.9 I am hard pressed to recall more than a few people disagreeing with me over the last several years when I have argued that Minneapolis schools simply will not get adequately better as long as numbers like this persist. This promises to be so no matter how high taxes are raised and how imaginatively teachers teach. Most everyone knows this, but hardly anyone of rank says so openly, meaning that nothing much will get better.

Chester E. Finn, Jr., the nation’s best education critic, writes to the general point.10

“We know that a well-functioning society must condemn behavior that results in people having children who are not prepared to be good parents. I find it astonishing that, in the face of that knowledge, today we seem to attach more opprobrium to dropping out of school, experimenting on a cat, or uttering nasty remarks on campus than we do to giving birth to what, not so many years ago, were called ‘illegitimate’ children.”

He goes on: “I am making a point about morality, yes, but the larger point is about honesty: Children fare better in some circumstances than others, and no decent society will remain silent when it comes to pointing out which circumstances are which.”

As for exactly which circumstances are which, research again confirms common sense — which doesn’t necessarily correspond to what one might hear in political campaigns or read in newspaper editorials. Richard Gill, formerly of Harvard, has it right: “One must begin by noting the mass of simple, direct evidence strongly suggesting that children who are brought up by their biological parents in intact families are better off economically, emotionally, and developmentally than are children in any other family structure.”11 Nicholas Davidson likewise writes that fathers play “crucial, gender-specific roles in the intellectual and emotional development of their children.”12

In fairness to political campaigns and editorials, they generally do address the economic effects of father absence, but unlike Gill and Davidson, they discount the emotional and developmental effects. In keeping, they consistently frame the problem largely as the product of powerful economic, not cultural or spiritual changes which rack and dismember families, particularly poor ones. When they do acknowledge questions of culture, it’s mostly to argue that “cultures change,” that such transformations are futile to resist, and that stabs at doing so bespeak dated affection for Ozzie, Harriet and the boys.

Now, several things are understood, the first of which is that many women wind up single mothers, and many men find themselves single fathers, through no welcome choice or failing of their own. Life is terrifically messy and not nearly fair, and many single parents deserve medals for heroism, not ridicule for irresponsibility. (To the extent that irresponsibility cannot be denied, it’s incumbent that men not be allowed to wiggle off hooks as they usually do. There’s more than a little to be said for Michael Novak’s dislike of the term “feminization of poverty,” and his preference for the “masculinization of irresponsibility.”)

It’s also understood that while children in the aggregate are hurt by broken families, not all are. Some kids unquestionably fare better living with one parent and away from another, or away from loveless, bitter marriages. And some kids are just remarkable survivors, determined and equipped to flourish whatever stands in their way.

Still, and overwhelmingly, no one is served by dancing around the calamity of widespread out-of-wedlock births and divorce, and the values and behaviors — as well as economic pincers — which fuel them. Consider, for example, infant mortality, as does Nicholas Eberstadt of Harvard and the American Enterprise Institute.13

American babies die at a higher rate than do infants in many other, less-advanced nations. Blame for this invariably focuses on this country’s health care system, which critics argue is unfair. Without suggesting for a moment that all Americans enjoy equal access to care, Eberstadt cites stunning statistics about the connection between out-of-wedlock births and infant deaths. For example, in 1987, Black babies born outside of marriage were nearly four times as likely to have received no prenatal care as black Babies born in marriage. For white babies, the ratio was five to one: White infants born outside of marriage were five times as likely to have received no prenatal care as white babies born in marriage, Good prenatal care, of course, is tied to healthy birth weights, which are tied to healthy infants.

Data such as these in the hands of most politicians and other leaders are prods for renewing calls for more accessible health care — which isn’t a bad idea. It’s a good one. But chances are they will be silent on key questions of values and behavior which are begged: Most pivotally, why are unmarried mothers less likely to seek prenatal care, particularly given that their failure to do so (as Eberstadt argues persuasively) cannot be attributed to low incomes alone?

What these non-economic and non-access factors might be are not wholly known, but as with all the illustrations over the last few pages, this nation’s most serious social problems are incomprehensible and unsolvable unless their cultural dimensions are grasped. In the matter of crime, picking another issue, sociologist David Rubinstein of the University of Illinois at Chicago reinforces the point this way: ” . . . policy planners would rather speak of factors that are within the reach of government programs than those, like weak families and a culture that fails to restrain, that are truly related to crime.” As he makes clear, the relationship between unemployment rates and crime rates is “nearly invisible.”14 But this does not stop leaders from looking mainly to job programs and other stabs at policy peripherals instead of dealing, somehow, with what really counts in reducing lawlessness.

Education, poverty, infant mortality, and crime are not the only issues calling for a cultural grasp and the unwrapping of tied tongues. Questions raised by contemporary art, music and the mass media do, too.

Suffice it to say that Tipper Gore has been right for a long time: That raising serious and proportionate questions about popular music — which often is hideously vulgar, racist and misogynistic — does not have anything to do with censorship. It has to do with protecting children, among other civilizing aims.

Likewise, arguing against federal subsidies for visual art that no decent newspaper in the nation would ever reprint, or that no television network would ever air, has nothing to do with abridging free expression or ganging up on the National Endowment for the Arts. It has to do with distinguishing between censorship and sponsorship, and recognizing that it’s one thing for an artist to dump a crucifix in a jar of urine on his own, if that’s his strange muse, but quite another to expect American taxpayers to underwrite such a spiritual insult.

And as for movies and other types of entertainment, Marilyn Geewax of the Atlanta Constitution is on target: “While I certainly am not arguing for a return to the era of Gidget and Elvis movies, I do think it’s time viewers start demanding film makers and other ‘entertainers’ show some genuine restraint. . . . The media are overflowing with visual and verbal assaults on our senses, hardening us and wearing down our sense of decency. Government censorship is no answer in a free society, but is a return to some self-restraint really too much to ask.”15 Good point, not that it’s made by leaders (as opposed to other citizens) frequently or forcefully enough.

A few stories

Enough research, hard data and suchlike for a while. We need to add texture and fortify several points with some stories, most in the first person, starting with fatherless children.

Almost a year ago, I co-keynoted a League of Women Voters conference in St. Paul on political alienation. As one might expect, I argued that a large reason why people are mad is that they have a better idea about what afflicts our nation than politicians do — or more specifically, rank-and-file citizens have a better idea about what’s wrong than politicians usually let on publicly. I fleshed out the point, in part, by talking once again about the refusal of leaders to deal forthrightly with single parenthood and its damaging effects on education, crime and so on.

This led to one unhappy respondent accusing me of mistakenly talking about cause and effect when, she claimed, all that could be assumed from the data I presented was mere correlation between father absence and various pathologies. With all due respect, I thought hers was a far longer stretch than the one she was accusing me of. I also thought she sounded less like the academic she is, and more like a flak for the tobacco industry, whose parallel argument would have been that smoking doesn’t cause wheezing and dying, it only puffs up in their vicinity.

But she was only one of seven respondents on the panel. Another one, also someone who could not be described as conservative, was much more encouraging. He said he was impressed that I was still talking publicly on the subject given the heat I had taken for being outspoken. (Really, it had not been that much.) He went on to say — and this was key — that he had been working closely with Minneapolis schools for several years, and that unless the percentage of fatherless children dropped significantly, that the city would be in big trouble.

There is little question that this panelist had understood this to be true for longer than that morning. The same presumably holds for most of the men and (mostly) women in the audience. But I have little doubt that he would have remained publicly quiet on the matter of missing fathers, at least that day, unless someone else (me, in this instance) went first. We need more people to go first, providing a combination of spur and cover to tackle what needs to be tackled.

But then there was the time two years ago, in Duluth, when a woman, perhaps in her 30s and clearly pregnant, began to cry as I talked about fatherless children. I saw what was coming, as did I suspect most everyone else in the room. She took the floor and said she had been raised to believe it was wrong to bring babies into the world out of wedlock, and that she didn’t necessarily disagree with what I was saying. But she also said she desperately wanted a child, that she was not married, that prospects for a right relationship anytime soon were slim, and that her time was running out.

I don’t remember precisely what I said, but it was along the lines that I was truly sorry I had hurt her, but added I was afraid we had no choice but to engage in this community and national discussion, though we were obliged to do so with as much grace and feeling as we cold find courage. In the same way we need leaders to go first, we need them to risk such hard and uncomfortable moments.

Third story. Don Fraser is the long-time mayor of Minneapolis. Before that, he was a long-time member of the U.S. House of Representatives. A Democrat, it’s fair to say he has done more serious thinking about families and communities than most. In fact, he has been nothing short of brave in talking about father absence. And while we may disagree about root causes of the problem (he focuses more on economic and less on cultural forces than I do), I have said more good things about him in the last few years than any other Minnesota politician, never mind that I run a conservative think tank and he’s a good liberal. Actually, I recounted this personal habit last spring at a meeting of religious and other leaders on low-income housing, at which point he jumped in, and with a smile, said it was a burden he was forced to bear.

Undeterred, I suggested that the issue of fatherless children (or unsupported parents, as he might put it) needed to be framed more in moral terms than was his preference, fully recognizing the great sensibilities involved. Mr. Fraser disagreed, arguing that such a course by politicians would be more off-putting than useful. At which point a politically liberal rabbi agreed with the mayor — but added that while such an approach might be wrong for a politician, it would not be wrong for religious leaders, whom he said had not spoken about the moral dimensions of dismembered families with sufficient voice. It’s easy to see why first-rate political leaders like Don Fraser are reluctant to couch their analyses and admonitions in spiritual, certainly religious terms. It’s much harder to understand why so many religious leaders have whispered so on this paramount family issue.

Finally on this theme, let me share a perfect example of political correctness in American higher education.

I was asked to speak earlier this year to an undergraduate ethics class at the University of Minnesota. I was specifically asked to talk about families, and even better, I was asked to be provocative. I did my best, raising many of the issues raised in this essay. At no time over the first 90 minutes did any of the approximately 25 juniors and seniors agree in any substantial way with anything I said. Quite the opposite was true, as those who spoke suggested that I was harking back to sexist yesteryears, that I was insufficiently multicultural, and so on.

It occurred to me to ask for a show of hands: Who in class was of the mind that the American family had changed beneficially over the previous quarter-century? And who thought that changes– especially the great increase in the number of children growing up without fathers because of out-of-wedlock births and divorce — had been a bad thing? Even though every single student who had the gumption to offer an opinion over the prior hour and a-half had disagreed with me, not a single hand was raised in support of the idea that families had changed for the better. In fact, about half the hands in the room went up in support of the second notion — that families and children had suffered. Remaining hands stayed in laps and under rumps, either confused or frightened to move.

Why, I asked, had no one agreed with me during the discussion when it was clear that half the class did concur, at least in part, as demonstrated by the relative anonymity and safety of their show of hands? No one answered. The point being, of all American institutions, colleges and universities ought to be the first place in which to talk about these things. But fact is, they frequently are the last, as feverish multiculturalists and cowardly educators hold silencing sway. Other, bolder institutions and leaders need to fill the gap.

A sign of how starved people are for frankness is the excessively complimentary things often said when such words are written or spoken. Center of the American Experiment, for instance, was accused during our inaugural conference, in 1990, of trying to “impose middle-class values on poor people.” This led me to write a newspaper column several weeks later in which I pleaded guilty, but argued that the following, and only the following, were what I meant by middle-class values: Go to high school, work modestly hard, and graduate. If you father or bear children, be married. If you’re married, try to stay that way unless conditions are abusive. Work at a job, unless extenuating circumstances are legitimate. Don’t abuse drugs. Don’t drink too much. And don’t break the law.

I viewed these rules as quite undemanding and their recitation quite unexceptional. But starting with several members of the United States Senate, any number of people said inflated things about the piece. To which I said thanks, but wondered how far we had fallen when salutes to simple responsibility and restraint were now considered cutting-edge stuff.16

Speaking of senators, Bill Bradley spoke on the Senate floor about “Race in the American City,” in March 1992, a month before the Los Angeles riots. It was an excellent speech, no question, and the accolades it generated were largely deserved. Nonetheless, in many respects, the New Jersey Democrat simply gave eloquent voice to views that are widely shared but rarely announced in open chambers. He talked about racism, of course, but also about the high barriers to progress and conciliation posed by inner-city crime. He talked about society’s obligations as well as those of the African-American community. The formality aside, he talked as if he were delving honestly with family and friends, not as if he were making one more, ever-circumspect pronouncement. Sure it was a very good speech, but the degree to which journalists and others fell over themselves was a measure of the rarity of candor and courage in such matters.

Continuing with race (and crime), as Minnesotans might remember, former St. Paul police chief Bill McCutheon was quoted in the St. Paul Pioneer Press in February 1991 as saying that people should be unusually alert — their antennae should activate — when coming upon black kids in that city’s skyways. The next few weeks worked themselves out in the Twin Cities as if by formula.

First, Mr. McCutheon denied ever saying any such thing. I don’t know where this truth lies.

Next, every single civic leader quoted in the media condemned the alleged sentiments.

Best I can remember, it wasn’t until a week later that anyone was quoted in the major media as saying something like: “Look folks, sad fact is that African-American young people are causing a disproportionate amount of trouble. We have a problem.” Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t the city’s leadership who said this, but skyway shopkeepers.

I followed shortly thereafter with a op-ed in the St. Paul Pioneer Press in which I said, in part:

“I feel deeply for people of color who unfairly suffer stares, slights and much worse because race and crime have grown so distastefully, but inescapably entwined. . . . Nonetheless, many good people, be they Black or white, and whether or not they know the statistics exactly, know that Blacks are more likely than whites to commit crimes of violence. And many good people react accordingly, sometimes by instinctively clutching purses more tightly, or currently, by dismissing much that has been spoken and written [about the McCutheon affair] as less than brave and complete.”17

This led to a number of people congratulating me — privately. One old friend, a quite senior and politically progressive administrator at the University of Minnesota, called and said that I had surely provoked useful conversations at breakfast tables that morning, and urged me to keep it up.

But as is regularly the case in such matters, people with good things to say do so sotto voce. People with nasty things to say write letters to the editor or otherwise make noise. The Pioneer Press ran three letters, all in the spirit of: “A recent column by Mitchell B. Pearlstein . . . bespoke insensitivity, gall and bigotry.”

It’s no fun to be called a bigot in the morning paper. Nor was it fun for my colleague, Peter Bell, to open up the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune one summer morning in 1991 and see himself likened to a “house nigger “good nigger” and “super nigger” by a local guest columnist for having the temerity to praise the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas.18 Both Mr. Bell, who is chairman of Center of the American Experiment, and his critic are Black. Again it was no fun when another columnist in another publication likened American Experiment to a crew of “liars, heathens and immoral creatures” because he didn’t like what conservatives such as Linda Chavez, Charles Murray, Bob Woodson, Peter and myself said at the Center’s inaugural conference, on poverty, in April 1990 (though we did consider the source).19

Language lessons

But the lesson that needs repeating is central, and it applies not just to racially stained fights. As painful as all these and similar epithets may be, if they are groundless, hell with them. Public debate and policy are contorted immeasurably because too many fair people are intimidated by too many unfair people who are fast to charge bigotries and insensitivities where none exist. It’s stunning and elevating that “racist” has come to be the most painful thing anyone in American public life can be called, with “sexist” and “insensitive fool” close behind. But the flip side is that public speech is further tamed and fixed as a schnauzer might be by such touchy triggers.

The corollary lesson is that such slings and shots, for all the psychic blood they may draw, tend not to kill. And the bleeding and sleepness nights usually dwindle over time, as even the harshest curses, if baselessly repeated often enough, lose bite.

Don Fraser’s compassion and wisdom were questioned frequently, with vigor, when he began reframing questions about single-parent families in the mid-1980s. Even his own wife took shots for all the world to hear. But the mayor not only survived, he was easily re-elected, and he easily would win again in 1993 if he hadn’t chosen to retire at the end of his current term. Better than that, he is held in higher respect today, both locally and nationally, because of his leadership on this issue.

Perhaps no public figure had his virtue more fraudulently and viciously attacked a generation ago than Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote brilliantly but prematurely about African-American families. But is not Mr. Moynihan, a New York Democrat, now in his 15th year as a distinguished member of the U.S. Senate?

Ross Perot deservedly carried not a single state in 1992, but is anyone willing to make the case that he was hurt more than minutely by his blind-spotted reference to “you people” at a NAACP convention?

Of course anyone who ventures into the rhetorical dangers of public life ought to be smart enough not to make such stupid, if overblown mistakes. If, for example, you’re Jewish or Episcopalian, imagine your visceral reaction everytime you heard the term “Jewish problem” or “Episcopal problem.” Now, think of how Black Americans take to “Black problem.” For that matter, recognize that many prefer being called African-American rather than Black, and that it’s a good idea to use both terms.

Know what words and constructions are loaded, as Jimmy Carter didn’t in the 1976 campaign with “ethnic purity” (not that it hurt him that November).

Stay away from needlessly offensive terms, such as “illegitimacy” where “out-of-wedlock” will do. Make it explicitly clear that you know that women do not make babies alone.

If a young female in the audience asks a question and you’re doubtful about her age, err on the side of prudence and good manners and refer to her as a woman instead of as a girl. Without excising the English language of every masculine prefix or root as extremist feminists are inclined, take account of the good and fair ways that American language has changed in the last quarter century.

If the subject is poverty, show that while millions of Americans are poor because of what they destructively do to themselves, that millions of others, mostly children, are poor for no fault of their own and they deserve help.

If you’re waxing on our nation’s spiritual heritage don’t suggest that this is a “Christian nation,” even though the overwhelming majority of Americans may be Christian. Show respect for all who believe, as well as those who don’t.

Language is powerfully nuanced and personal, and serious people are serious about it. But honorable flubs are trivial and combustible sensitivities don’t matter much in the end.

Who’s got it right?

Who among political and other leaders best get to the real heart of matters? Which elected officials, writers and other players warrant emulation, at least in tone and courage? People who may crunch policy with the best of wonks, but who understand the importance of that which is not readily measured or comfortably debated in national squares? A few bipartisan names jump out, in capsule.

The list must begin with Bill Bennett, who was so good at the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston, that PBS commentators found themselves saying glowing things about his speech nominating Dan Quayle for a second term as vice president.

The former Secretary of Education and drug czar talks about the animating assumptions of American culture, and the great battles above and below its surface, better than anyone else in the upper reaches of public life. Certainly better than anyone considering a run for the presidency. He talks, for example, about character and virtue when most others in education think it somehow rude, elitist or worse to do so. He emphasizes what binds us as a people, not what divides us, as do doctrinaire multiculturalists. He recognizes America’s Judeo-Christian traditions — and the lessons of Western civilization more generally — for what they are: Great gifts that we dismiss and belittle at our own immense peril.

He talks about how American education has come to distort this nation’s role in history and its place in the world. And he isn’t demure in saying what most Americans know to be true: That for all our many shortcomings, this is still a remarkable nation of opportunity and second and third chances.

In 1986, while I was still an editorial writer at the Pioneer Press in St. Paul, and about a year before I had any idea that I would wind up working in the U.S. Department of Education from 1987 to 1990, I interviewed then-Secretary Bennett in Washington. I remember asking him how one goes about changing a culture, when it is the culture itself, not just legislation or budgets that need changing, if American education is to get adequately better. He said it was a question he had given a lot of thought to, and that the best answer he had was that leaders need to say what they believe in their hearts to be true, and they need to say it over and over again. I know of no better answer.

Some might argue, particularly on the left, that while he may often be right on the merits he’s usually wrong in the music; that if the idea is to make passionate issues palatable, that Mr. Bennett is too crisp a partisan to pull it off. There was something to be said for this stricture a half-dozen years ago, but far less now. Or as a liberal guest said of his keynote at American Experiment’s First Annual Dinner in January 1992, “That’s not conservative, that’s common sense.”

As well as any syndicated columnist, left or right, George Will understands the tie between proper government and good character, and the obligation of the former to help shape the latter. He wrote a very good book on it almost a decade ago, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does, in which he said:20

“It is generally considered obvious that government should not, indeed cannot legislate morality. But in fact it does so, frequently; it should do so more often; and it never does anything more important. By the legislation of morality I mean the enactment of laws and implementation of policies that proscribe, mandate, regulate, or subsidize behavior that will, over time, have the predictable effect of nurturing, bolstering or altering habits, dispositions and values on a broad scale.”

Following the Los Angeles riots, the eminent political scientist, James Q. Wilson, made clear that values matter, and that government must take account.

“The problems of our inner cities,” he wrote, ” are of two sorts. The first consists of scarce jobs, too little capital formation, badly managed public-housing projects, a perverse welfare program, and an overburdened criminal justice system. These are tangible problems that can be addressed by altering incentives and resources available to people and agencies. Most public debate is about how to do these things in a cost-effective way.

“The second consists of racism, fear, despair, defiance, poor work habits, inadequate skills and a preference for joining predatory gangs to accepting low-wage jobs. These are the intangible problems — problems of ‘values’ — that are hard to address by money alone because they make whites less likely to invest or extend opportunities and Blacks less likely to take advantage of opportunities.

“If public policy addresses only the tangible problems,” Wilson concludes, “we will be disappointed by the results.”21

Given the left-leaning intolerance of intellectual and various other communities, much of the bravest scholarship over the last two decades has been by African-Americans and Hispanics who either call themselves conservative, or who write things which please conservatives. Without exception, they write incisively and confidently about the kinds of issues Wilson and Will raise and which, recalling Barbara Dafoe Whithead, people talk about most frankly with family and friends.

This list includes economists such as Alan Keyes, Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams; humanists such as Richard Rodriguez and Shelby Steele; and major Washington players such as Linda Chavez and Bob Woodson. (Think back to the University of Minnesota ethics class with its interesting hands. I asked who among the 25 or so students had ever read any of these writers. No hands. I asked who had ever heard of any of them. Not a hand or soul again. So much for diversity in the academy.)

From the other side of the ideological aisle, add to the roster scholars such as William Galston, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Perhaps no single document has been more effective in recent years in persuading the skitterish that it’s necessary and proper to break with liberal and radical orthodoxy than William Galston’s “A Liberal-Democratic Case for the Two-Parent Family.” It played a large role, for instance, in convincing liberal members of the 1991 Rockefeller commission on children to endorse quite bold assertions (as bipartisan national panels go) about the importance of intact families. After listing several progressive disclaimers, Galston, who is a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, and was Walter Mondale’s issues coordinator during the 1984 presidential campaign, argued like this in his 1990 paper. It’s worth quoting at length.22

“I want to stress that my approach is frankly normative. The focus is on what must be a key objective of our society: Raising children who are prepared intellectually, physically, morally, and emotionally — to take their place as law-abiding and independent members of their community, able to sustain themselves and their families and to perform their duties as citizens. Available evidence supports the conclusion that on balance, the intact two-parent family is best suited to this task. We must then resist the easy relativism of the proposition that different family structures represent nothing more that ‘alternative life-styles’ — a belief that undermined the Carter administration’s efforts to develop a coherent family policy and that continues to cloud the debate even today (emphasis in the original).”

Galston also wrote: “In taking this position, I associate myself, not just with scholarly evidence, but also with the moral sentiments of most Americans.” Adding, “I suggest, we must reject the moral relativism characterizing much ‘official’ discussion of the family (emphasis in the original).”

If there ever was a scholar-politician who ran afoul of “official” discussions of families it was then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Pat Moynihan who, in a thoroughly liberal 1965 report, spoke of problems in African-American families. He and his research were attacked viciously, leading to two decades of silence on Black families which was even stricter than current evasions.

However, the now-senior Senator from New York does not relent easily on any subject, and in a superb 1989 essay, discussed what he now views as faulty assumptions (including his own) underlying the War on Poverty. Principally, he has come to the conclusion that the behavior of individuals and communities matter much more than was commonly thought (at least in government) a generation ago.23 Culture, in other words, matters. Values count. He also wrote:

“It is obvious that American society rewards traditional family patterns and punishes those that in the past would have been called deviant. What is less obvious is why this fact is so obscure to so many. The disjunction between our norms and our behavior is dysfunctional in the extreme.”

Arthur Schlesinger’s great contribution recently has been in beating back those who argue that the United States is so hopelessly racist and closed (“Eurocentric,” goes the jargon), that the goal of assimilation must give way, in effect, to the further fragmentation and tribalization of American life.24 This impetus is dangerous to our sense of nation, certainly, but it’s also threatening to vast numbers of individuals, particularly those who are young and not of European background.

There is no surer way to preordain sad life stories than to believe the worst about this nation, and to believe that Minnesota and other states are not places of real opportunity and second chances for all kids (recognizing, of course, that some children will be favored with more chances than others). Investing more confidence in American possibilities than in American sins and shortcomings is neither facile nor rah-rah, as there is no other escape for those at the bottom. This, too, is a matter of culture, values and belief, and Schlesinger braces it when he writes: “In practice, America has been more open to some than to others. But it is more open to all today than it was yesterday and is likely to be even more open tomorrow than today.”

Conclusion

I argued at the top that in order to understand the “cynical and cranky” funk Americans have been in, that it’s necessary to note the great cultural debate that political and other leaders have not waged regarding our nation’s most vexing problems. And unless you have jumped ahead, we each have committed almost 15 pages to the point.

Yet once more, I do not want to leave the suggestion that only culture matters; that in the dispute (in jargon, again) between culturalists and structuralists, that the latter lack pertinence and weight. Of course not. The gloriously quotable Moynihan struck it right when he wrote: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”25

The rub, rather, is that national discussions are so disproportionately loaded in favor of narrowly defined political, policy and economic considerations,and so blind to the cardinal, but less-tangible rest.

As structuralists go, no one is more interesting than Jack Kemp. He was quoted by columnist David Broder immediately after the November elections, in response to what Kemp correctly called the “mean-spirited, divisive and exlusionary messages of Pat Buchanan and other speakers at the Republican National Convention.26

“There’s nothing wrong with talking values,” the Housing secretary said,”but you can’t be perceived as leaving the single mother making heroic efforts to raise her kids out of the equation. You can speak up for what you believe, but you can’t change society’s values as quickly by preaching to people as you can change the economy by picking the right policies and giving people a sense of boundless optimism and real equality of opportunity.”

Fair to a valuable point. Kemp is acute, for instance, when he asks and answers his own questions: “What if you wanted to created poverty? What policies and principles would you use to destroy the economy of cities and make people dependent on government? How would you do it?”27

Well, he says, you would do things such as tax entrepreneurs who succeed in the legal, capitalist economy more than those who labor in the illicit underground economy. You would reward people who stay in public housing more than those who want to move up and out into private housing and home ownership. You would reward families that break up rather than those which stay together. And so on.

But still, in the same way Chester E. Finn, Jr. does not see expansions of the earned-income tax credit (another conservative policy favorite) “making people significantly less apt to shoot one another with assault rifles,”28 it’s hard to see Kemp’s prescriptions more than marginally neutralizing the overwhelming and insidious power of self-destructive behaviors. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine any welfare reform in which incentives and disincentives are so sychronized that it achieves its full purpose. I say these things even though there isn’t a Kemp proposal to empower poor people I don’t support. Such initiatives may be all necessary, but they are not nearly sufficient.

And that’s the point. Shades of habit and heart color American life at least as much as policy-making and manipulating. And while most policy-makers and other leaders likely know this to be true (in the same way most people do), they need to say so, aloud with feeling.


1 Richard Louv, “Two Debates are Raging on Family,” San Diego Union Tribune, February 22, 1992.
2 William Raspberry, “Grandma Knows Best,” The Washington Post, September 25, 1990.
3 Rhetorical reasons, of course, aren’t the only reasons why Americans have been in a foul mood politically. Given that we are a quarter billion, diverse people, who look ever-increasingly to government to soothe and rectify everything, it would be miraculous if citizens weren’t crabby. Also, without putting too fine a point on it, we’ve turned into world-class whiners.
4 Peter Uhlenberg and David Eggebeen, “The Declining Well-being of American Adolescents,” The Public Interest, Winter 1985. One of the virtues of this seminal essay is that it covers the 20 years before Ronald Reagan arrived in Washington. Nothing in their findings can be blamed on him; a charming change of pace.
5 Uhlenberg and Eggebeen deal only with white adolescents in the following data in order to “avoid the complications of interpretation raised by the divergent experiences of different racial groups.”
6 Eric A. Hanushek, “The Impact of Differential Expenditures on School Performance,” Educational Researcher, May 1989.
7 Harold W. Stevenson and James W. Stigler, The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools are Failing and What We Can Learn From Japanese and Chinese Education (New York: Summit Books, 1992). Also, Harold W. Stevenson et al., Contexts of Achievement: A Study of American, Chinese and Japanese Children (Society of Child Development, 1990).
8 Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu, “Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the “Burden of ‘Acting White,'”” Urban Review, Vol. 18, No. 3.
9 The corresponding number for white children born out of wedlock in Minneapolis in 1990 was 24.3 percent. It was 21.5 percent for Asians. Conversation with Phil Meininger, Minneapolis Planning Department, December 14, 1992. Nationally, in 1988, 61 percent of all Black children were not living with two parents. It was 21 percent for all white children. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census Population: 1990 (Washington, DC, 1990); and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, series P-20 (Washington, DC, 1990).
10 Chester E. Finn, Jr., “Ten Tenative Truths,” Center of the American Experiment, Minneapolis, MN, June 1990.
11 Richard T. Gill, “For the Sake of the Children,” The Public Interest, Summer 1992.
12 Nicholas Davidson, “Life Without Father: America’s Greatest Social Catastrophe,” Policy Review, Winter 1990.
13 Nicholas Eberstadt, “America’s Infant-Mortality Puzzle,” The Public Interest, Fall 1991.
14 David Rubinstein, “Don’t Blame Crime on Joblessness The Wall Street Journal, November 11, 1992.
15 Marilyn Geewax, “It’s Time for Some Self-restraint on Media Images of Violence,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, February 26, 1991.
16 American Experiment held a Luncheon Forum on middle-class values and poverty in May 1992 at which liberal panelists found reason to largely dismiss my seven rules as oblivious to racism and economic reality. This led the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune to editorialize that an “America unclear about the values that sustain it cannot articulate social policies that work.” The editorial also pointed to the “remarkable success of many recent immigrant populations, from Haitians in Florida to Koreans in Los Angeles” who are demonstrably making it despite racial and economic barriers which supposedly render hard work, sobriety and similar values nearly futile.

In a letter to me a few days later, a major anti-poverty activist in the Twin Cities who had attended the Forum put it this way, wonderfully:

“You know, I never thought I’d be saying this, but I really agree with you. Poor people need to get ‘middle class’ if they are ever to get out of poverty. . . . People gotta get an education, work, get married, stay married, raise their kids. Just as you said and just as anybody would have said through the ’50s.

“But somehow we can’t talk about that, we liberals, that is, We talk about other cultural values, about slavery and racism, about how we’re doing it already, which means some poor people must value those things even if liberals can’t talk about it.

“Makes no sense. Everybody on that stage with you was probably educated, a workaholic, and a decent parent if they’ve got kids, but they won’t universalize their values as a way for folks in poverty to get ahead. God forbid we might pass on some values to somebody.”

In fairness, my letter-writing friend also said the loss of manufacturing jobs for low-skilled workers is “why we’re in the mess we’re in.”

17 Mitchell B. Pearlstein, “Reality of Black Crime Lies Behind the Stares,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, March 1, 1991.
18 Syl Jones, “Black Conservatives Willing to Sell Out Race,” Star Tribune (Minneapolis), July 18, 1991.
19 Randolph W. Staten, “American Experiment: Lies and Bigotry Draped in the Flag of Morality,” Insight: The Journal for Business & the Arts (St. Paul), April 18, 1990. The pagan paragraph in full: “Many of us understand full well the need to return to our God and the religious values and principles that are part of our history, salvation and existence. We honestly doubt the sincerity of the Center of the American Experiment when it discusses morality and acts as liars, heathens and immoral creatures peddling fear and bigotry and trampling on those least able to defend themselves . . . the poor.”
20 George Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). Then again, as Charles Murray — and Will himself — might add here, while many welfare policies have aimed to “nurture” and “bolster” moral character and behavior, things frequently haven’t worked out that way.
21 James Q. Wilson, “How to Teach Better Values in Inner Cities,” The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 1982.
22 William A. Galston, “A Liberal-Democratic Case for the Two-Parent Family,” The Responsive Community, Winter 1990-91.
23 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Toward a Post-Industrial Social Policy,” The Public Interest, Summer 1989. (Given that this is the fourth Endnote mention of The Public Interest, suffice it to say it’s a wonderful source for the kind of analysis and argument I’ve been urging.)
24 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992).
25 Moynihan, The New Republic, July 7, 1986.
26 David Broder, “Kemp a GOP Face of the Future,” (Minneapolis) Star Tribune (Minneapolis), November 8, 1992.
27 Jack Kemp, “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of Poverty in America and How to Combat It,” The Heritage Foundation, June 6, 1990.
28 Finn.