Opinion
Lawrence Journal-World l LJWorld.com l Thursday, September 29, 2016
EDITORIALS
More notice The school district should have been more forthcoming about its new policy on condoms.
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or a moment, forget whether providing free access to condoms to students in Lawrence’s two public high schools is a good idea. Yes, that is a hard topic to forget, especially if you are a parent of a high school student. That is why it would been have nice if school district officials would have done much more to notify school district residents that such a policy was being considered. A policy has been approved to provide free condoms to students who seek them, and the Lawrence school board all but forgot to let the public know about it beforehand. School board members — without even taking a formal vote — allowed the policy to move forward at their Monday board meeting. The agenda for that Monday evening meeting was posted online on Thursday morning. As is standard practice, the Journal-World assigned a reporter to review that agenda for any news items. The item about having free condoms available for students in the office of each high school was not on that Thursday morning agenda. A school district spokeswoman has since confirmed that not all the background material for that item was ready when the agenda was first posted to the school district’s website. The information became ready later in the day, and the item was added to the agenda around noon on Thursday. However, the school district did nothing to notify the media or the public that the agenda had been updated with that item. This is different from how the city of Lawrence, for example, manages its agenda. When an item is added, removed or significantly modified on the city’s agenda, notification is sent to the media and anybody else who has requested it. School district officials at approximately 6 p.m. on Friday did send an email to parents notifying them that a condom policy would be considered by the school board. However, there was a significant omission from that letter: It never stated when the school board would consider the item. Parents who wanted to comment before the decision was made likely didn’t know they would have to make those comments so quickly. This issue of introducing family planning into Lawrence high schools clearly could have benefited from some better district planning. District officials owe the community an explanation about the timing and notification involved with this issue. Did district officials think this wasn’t a topic that would produce some disagreement in the community? Did school board members sense any red flag at all when no one from the public came to the meeting to speak against it? Informal conversations with district officials suggest that a system in the future will be created to notify people of changes to the district’s agenda. That would be a good step toward better government. Unfortunately, one new system won’t fix all the issues the district has in communicating with the public. The Lawrence school board does much less to communicate its business to the public than the Lawrence City Commission or the Douglas County Commission. For example, the school board receives many important reports during the course of a year. A formal presentation — usually a PowerPoint — is provided to the board. At Lawrence City Hall, for example, any written report or PowerPoint presentation is posted as part of the agenda for the public to see. It allows media organizations to write more complete stories alerting the public about what is on an upcoming agenda. It allows interested members of the public to read the documents beforehand and come to the meeting better informed. It is good government at work. The Lawrence school board does not follow that model. Such reports are rarely provided to the public beforehand. Generally, they only become available at the start of the meeting or after the meeting. This easily can be changed. School board members simply need to direct staff members to have their reports completed in time to be attached to the board’s agenda. As this idea has been brought up informally, there already have been concerns raised about the impact this will have on the time of staff members. It will require an adjustment, but should not require extra work on the part of staff members. Staff members will have to start their work earlier in order to finish it earlier. Granted, that’s not a trivial adjustment. But as so many governments already have determined, it is an adjustment worth making to provide greater transparency to the public’s business.
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‘Just listen to what you heard’ In some ways, it was the most memorable line of Monday’s presidential debate. It came after Donald Trump had stumbled through a nonresponsive response to a simple question: Why did it take him so long to concede President Obama was born in the USA? In reply, Trump congratulated himself for getting Obama to produce his long-form birth certificate, falsely blamed Hillary Clinton for start-
Leonard Pitts Jr. lpitts@miamiherald.com
“
For them, America was ‘great’ when they were the only ones who had a say in it.”
ing the racist campaign and touted his great relationship with black people. And Clinton, smiling, said, “Just listen to what you heard.” They ought to put that on a billboard; it could encompass Trump’s whole campaign. It certainly encompasses his debate performance. Granted, Trump spent the first minutes doing his best impression of a statesman, but that was all he could manage. Then, like your favorite band on a reunion tour, he pulled out the old hits. He blustered, filibustered and interrupted, insisted (dishonestly) that he opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, suggested (deceptively) that he never said Clinton doesn’t have “a presidential look,” declared
(mendaciously) that he never called climate change a Chinese “hoax.” At one point, he answered a question about cybersecurity by noting that his 10-year-old son “is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable.” Which is lovely for little Barron Trump, but tells us nothing about how his dad would secure the American computer grid against statesponsored hackers. Perhaps most incredibly, at the end of a testy rant, the notoriously thin-skinned entertainer said, “I … have a much better temperament than she has.” Reality itself lurched sideways on that one. “Just listen to what you heard,” she said, i.e., take it at face value. If we were all doing that, this election wouldn’t be close. But we aren’t, so it is. It’s important to understand that, at its core, Trump’s appeal is neither about issues nor policy positions. Nor is it primarily, as
some would argue, grounded in economic dislocation. Yes, the Rust Belt is hurting. But it’s been hurting for years; the era when a high school education got you a lifetime job on the loading dock or factory floor has been gone for a long time. By contrast, the era of political incoherence that has produced Trump is a relatively new phenomenon. So perhaps the dislocation we’re talking about is less economic than demographic, i.e., the rancor of those who resent pressing one for English, transgender bathrooms, two men atop a wedding cake and a brownskinned president with a funny name singing Al Green at a campaign rally. Some of us feel steamrolled by change. They say they want to “make America great again.” For them, America was “great” when they were the only ones who had a say in it. Abraham Lincoln famously said that no foreign power
could, by force, “take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. … If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” This was 23 years before the Civil War. Almost 200 years later, we face another civil war, only it’s a civil war of ideas and ideals, a secession from objective reality and the greater us. But Lincoln is still right — if destruction is our fate, it will come from within. And with the arguable exception of the 2008 recession, Donald Trump represents this country’s gravest existential threat since the end of the Soviet Union. “Just listen to what you heard,” advises Hillary Clinton. And it’s a marker of what we’ve become that for some of us, that will be entirely too much to ask. — Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald.
Trump’s rise reflects America’s decay Washington — Looking on the bright side, perhaps this election can teach conservatives to look on the dark side. They need a talent for pessimism, recognizing the signs that whatever remains of American exceptionalism does not immunize this nation from decay, to which all regimes are susceptible. The world’s oldest political party is an exhausted volcano, the intellectual staleness of its recycled candidate unchallenged because a generation of younger Democratic leaders barely exists. The Republican Party’s candidate evidently disdains his credulous supporters who continue to swallow his mendacities. About 90 percent of presidential votes will be cast for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, refuting the theory that this is a center-right country. At the risk of taking Trump’s words more seriously than he does, on some matters he is to Clinton’s left regarding big government powered by an unbridled presidency. His trade policy is liberalism’s “industrial policy” repackaged for faux conservatives comfortable with presidents dictating what Americans can import and purchase at what prices, and where U.S. corporations can operate. Trump “wouldn’t approve” Ford manufacturing cars in Mexico. He would create a federal police force to deport 450,000 illegal immigrants a month, including 6.4 percent of America’s workforce in two years. Yet the 25 million jobs he promises to create would require more than doubling the current rate of legal immigration to fill them, according to economist Mark Zandi. Of the Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision diluting property rights by vastly expanding government’s powers of eminent domain, Trump says, “I happen to agree with it 100 percent.” Even Bernie Sanders rejects Kelo. When Trump says “people are not making it on Social Security,” he implies that people should be able to “make it” on Social Security for a third or more of their lives, and that he, like Clinton, is for enriching this entitlement’s benefits. He will “save” the system by eliminating — wait for it —
George Will
georgewill@washpost.com
“waste, fraud and abuse.” Trump is as parsimonious with specifics regarding health care (“Plans you don’t even know about will be devised because we’re going to come up with plans — health care plans — that will be so good”) as regarding foreign policy (“I would get China, and I would say, ‘Get in [North Korea], and straighten it out’”). “Charismatic authority,” wrote Max Weber in 1915, seven years before Mussolini’s march on Rome, causes the governed to submit “because of their belief in the extraordinary quality of the specific person. ... Charismatic rule thus rests upon the belief in magical powers, revelations and hero worship.” A demagogue’s success requires a receptive demos, and Trump’s ascendancy reflects progressivism’s success in changing America’s social norms and national character by destigmatizing dependency. Under his presidency, he says, government will have all the answers: “I am your voice. ... I alone can fix it.” The pronoun has unlimited antecedents: “I will give you everything. I will give you what you’ve been looking for for 50 years. I’m the only one.” Urban without a trace of urbanity, Trump has surrounded himself with star-struck acolytes (Mike Pence marvels at Trump’s anatomical — “broadshouldered” — foreign policy) and hysterics (Rudy Giuliani: “There is no next election! This is it!”). When Ferdinand VII regained Spain’s throne in 1813 he vowed to end “the disastrous mania of thinking.” Trump is America’s Ferdinand. The American project was to construct a constitutional regime whose institutional architecture would guarantee
the limited government implied by the Founders’ philosophy: Government is instituted to “secure” (the Declaration of Independence) pre-existing natural rights. Today, however, neither the executive nor legislative branches takes this seriously, the judiciary has forsworn enforcing it, and neither political party represents it because no substantial constituency supports it. The ease with which Trump has erased Republican conservatism matches the speed with which Republican leaders have normalized him. For the formerly conservative party, the Founders’ principles, although platitudes in the party’s catechism, have become, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “a kind of civic religion, avowed but not constraining.” The beginning of conservative wisdom is recognition that there is an end to everything: Nothing lasts. If Trump wins, the GOP ends as a vehicle for conservatism. And a political idea without a political party is an orphan in an indifferent world. Pessimism need not breed fatalism or passivity. It can define an agenda of regeneration, but only by being cleareyed about the extent of degeneration, which a charlatan’s successful selling of his fabulousness exemplifies. Conservatism’s recovery from his piratical capture of the conservative party will require facing unflattering facts about a country that currently is indifferent to its founding. — George Will is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.
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