The Real State Of The Union: From The Best Minds In America, Bold Solutions To The Problems Politicians Dare Not Address (New America Books) [Paperback]

Ted Halstead (Editor)

Book Description

Series: New America Books | Publication Date: March 2, 2004

Resulting from a collaboration between The Atlantic Monthly magazine and the New America Foundation, The Real State of the Union features 18 original essays on the most important facets of our national well-being. Written by many of our nation's most insightful observers, the essays provide an objective and penetrating analysis of the most critical challenges facing America as well as innovative solutions to many of them.The State of the Union Address is among the nation's oldest rituals, but one that has deviated from its original purpose: Rather than a candid assessment of the country or a meaningful self-evaluation by the current administration, it has become a political spectacle marked by self-congratulation and spin. The Real State of the Union seeks to turn an empty exercise into a more meaningful national dialogue about the social, political, and economic health of our country. Rejecting the political correctness of both parties, this volume tells the American public what it needs to know about the real problems that plague the country and why the political solutions that are offered too often fail to address the real nature of those problems.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

A wordy title for a wordy volume, and a title that broaches the difficulty of the book itself: that is, that many of the solutions found in these essays, though thoughtful, would never be deemed politic in our current political discourse. This book stems from the Atlantic Monthly's now seemingly annual January "State of the Union" issue, with a few original essays thrown in on the impending 2004 presidential election. Essayists includes James Fallows, Michael Lind, Fareed Zakaria, Jedediah Purdy, and Margaret Talbot, who, together with others, tackle such issues as reform of public education, a system of fairer taxation, and improving health care. Other essays look into America's "mestizo future," as intermarriage among members of ethnic and racial groups increases; reforming prisons to rehabilitate and not just punish criminals; and the creating^B a "post-agrarian heartland" peopled by technocrats and service-economy workers to counter the deterioration of the interior of the nation into a vast poverty belt. In sum, this is a volume that offers original solutions for tough times. Allen Weakland
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Ted Halstead is President of the New America Foundation and is the author (with Michael Lind) of the Radical Center: The Future of American Politics. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Product Details

• Paperback: 287 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (March 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465050522
• ISBN-13: 978-0465050529
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,001,548 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Shoddy scholarship, January 10, 2005

By 

Jonathan Wren (Norman, OK United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Real State Of The Union: From The Best Minds In America, Bold Solutions To The Problems Politicians Dare Not Address (New America Books) (Paperback)

The title enticed me and I had high expectations to glean some insight into modern economic problems - or at least hear some different perspectives. The book is not a bad read, but it suffers from two continual errors that, as a scholar, I find really annoying. First, in many of the graphs presented, they are not numbered, cited in the text, associated with legends NOR are the axes labelled. The trends are obvious, of course, but I had no idea what the heck I was looking at. There is also a lot of jargon thrown at the reader without explanation.

Second, there are no references for many of the statements made in the book. It would be nice to know where they got their data or even IF they are making a claim based on real data (I assume they are, but without references, who knows?). You may like this book and, again, it's not a bad read, but I got so frustrated with the shoddy scholarship that I just set it down halfway through and gave up. I really don't care to listen to opinions as much as I enjoy examining positions and arguments... and those require some scholarship whereas anyone can throw out an opinion.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First Class Thinking, Morally Sound, Offer Hope, September 5, 2006

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Real State Of The Union: From The Best Minds In America, Bold Solutions To The Problems Politicians Dare Not Address (New America Books) (Paperback)

The contributing editors, Ted Halstead and Michael Lind, again shine as "hubs" for blending diverse thinkers, including James Pinkerton of the right, and I believe they are completely correct when they say that the State of the Union address has become shallow, partisan, and trivialized. More substantively, they might have offered a piece on the ten reasons to impeach Bush-Cheney, and another on the failure of Congress, which has struck out with the American people: strike one is incumbents shaking down lobbyists for cash; strike two is the extremist leaderships (Democratic as well as Republican) forcing "party line" votes that are totally against the Constitutional intent of having Representatives represent their CONSTITUENCIES; and strike three is the extremist Republicans serving as foot soldiers to a mendacious White House, instead of, as the Constitution intended with Article 1, being the FIRST branch of government. The extremist Republicans (I am a moderate Republican) are nothing less than Constitutional perverts, and I use the term advisedly. (See my reviews on books about these two topics in last two months).

The book is ably summed up in the Preface, which states that neither party has proven capable of offering a coherent, honest, or forward-looking agenda to guide America. Peter Peterson, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It would certainly agree, as do I. It is my hope that this group might coalesce around someone like Senator Collins (R-MA) running with Governor Warner (D-VA), and announcing a coalition cabinet and one commitment: to electoral reform. Karl Rove knows how to steal close elections, the only way to beat him is to field a multi-party TEAM that can win by a LANDSLIDE. America is ready for that, and the ideas in this book are all implement able by such a team approach to what might be called "networked governance."

While I have six pages of notes on this excellent volume, still relevant to the future, I will touch on just a few highlights:

1) Mass middle class is vital, and Washington has destroyed that base for democracy.

2) American people are not as polarized as their extremist political leaders

3) Our humans are productive but our processes are not. I am reminded of the book in the 1980's on "Human Scale." The federal government has indeed become dysfunctional, running at 3-5 mph while the rest of us are going 100 mph.

4) Need a new social contract. Authors identify the first one as building a nation, the second as healing from the civil war, and the third as building a middle class. We need to re-build the middle class with governance that again represents the citizens and their communities rather than predatory corporations.

5) Private sector, not just government, needs reform.

6) Health care can shift from business to government, and in the process we can find $60 billion a year in savings by using information to create metrics to reduce waste and over-treatment. The author discussing this suggests that 20-30% of what we spend on health care is waste. They do not discuss medical tourism, which I find quite interesting as a trend.

7) We need a nation-wide industrial policy that restores the relationship between business, community, and family, while also restricting the mobility of capital unless it restores the social contract with labor.

8) Radical tax reform could yield $200 billion a year (the author's say this is a low estimate, I agree, import-export tax fraud alone is $50 billion a year, I think the number is closer to $500 billion a year).

9) Take back the airwaves in the public interest.

10) James Pinkerton is brilliant in explaining the three eras of education as agricultural (nine-month school year), industrial (rote learning) and experimental (nostrums at expense of basics). See also Derek Bok's piece on "Reinventing Education at Forbes.com. James missed the opportunity to discuss how free universal access to all knowledge, and using serious games to educate on a just enough, just in time basis, in all languages, could reconfigure education world-wide.

11) Matthew Miller (see my review of his superb book, The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love) outlines what $30 billion could buy in terms of moving teachers up the food chain. Just in passing, if we cut our grotesquely ineffective intelligence community back from $60 billion a year to $30 billion a year, we can create a truly smart nation (see my book coming out on 11 September, THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest and in passing get better secret intelligence in the context of a national Open Source (Intelligence) Network that feeds not only the spies and diplomats, but also the schoolhouses, statehouses, and social clubs.

12) A thread that I found interesting throughout the book is how we lack the information needed to make smart choices. We lack statistical information on medical treatments and results that might allow "evidence-based medicine." As I have pointed out elsewhere (Google for <ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers>), the U.S. Government is remarkably ignorant and uninformed across all these areas.

13) The rest of the book on aging productively, incentivizing exercise and penalizing fast food, on rebuilding the heartland with information infrastructure, on mixed races where third generations inter-marry at a 55% rate, on conflicted Muslims, on "opportunity lost" in foreign affairs and national security, all top notch.

The book ends brilliantly, as it began, with a commentary on the dysfunctional duopology of the extremist Republicans where dogma trumps honesty, and the divided Democrats trapped in the past. As the founder of a small non-rival party blog, Citizens-Party.org, I consider this book, and the New America Foundation, to be the people's voice at a time when the Congress and the White House most certainly are not.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great. Still relevant after the election., March 8, 2006

By 

M.T. Da "matt" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Real State of the Union: From the Best Minds in America, Bold Solutions to the Problems Politicians Dare Not Address (New America Books (Paperback)) (Paperback)

This book is great at presenting problems and, perhaps more importantly, solutions facing our country today. Although it appears to be focused mainly on the last presidential election, the issues are still relevant today. It has been over a year since the 2004 presidential election and many of the concerns in this book have not been addressed by either side of the aisle. Each article is managable to the average fan of politics and yet it is detailed enough to make the most involved citizen think in different ways. Of particular note are the chapters on education. They are well written and offer very insightful solutions. This is an excellent book for you to read to get in touch with some of the real problems in America.