Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on April 26, 1999:
Los Angeles Times Senior Editorial Staff
Michael Parks:
Good evening. This has become quite a tradition and we couldn’t be more pleased to be back because what we do every day in putting out The Times is for you. Michael [Tennenbaum] has done a fairly good job at leaving me without too much work, but just think a little bit. Kosovo, Colorado. What is the meaning there? What can we divine from those events? I’m not sure that we have solutions. I’m not sure we have answers. We do have some observations.
What I’ve asked my colleagues to do is look forward. Give us some tips. Where were the trends? What are the things to look for? Help us as we try to do the paper each day, frame the issues, help us understand how things are going to break. I wish we had happier news here today. You know, people will say "Well, you’ve got a lot of news breaking. You must be overjoyed." Well, I think I can speak for all of us and say that my greatest wish in covering wars, which I did for twenty-five years, was really to become a peace correspondent. Those are easy times for us. Covering Littleton: heart wrenching. Covering the outflow of refugees from Kosovo just brings tears to your eyes.
My job here tonight is what I do at the paper. I encourage very good people to do their best and then get out of the way. Here’s the lineup. We’re going to start with Jack Nelson. As Michael said, he’s a veteran Washington correspondent. I think he almost invented the beat. He built our Bureau, a Bureau of which we are immensely proud, a Bureau that works very hard every day at trying to give readers out here on the West Coast an understanding of what those people are doing there. So, Jack, let’s begin with you.
JACK NELSON
Thank you. Let me say I’m really glad to be back here, having been here over the years so many different times and to see so many faces out here, people that I’ve seen over the years and I’m awfully glad to see a capacity crowd. I’m not necessarily used to speaking to big crowds. One time when I was a reporter on the Atlanta Constitution I spoke to the Atlanta Thirteen Club and eight members were absent, so seeing a big audience like this is very gratifying.
Well, the election is still way off but the 2000 Campaign is already underway, and I’m going to talk a little bit about that. It will be the 9th presidential campaign I will have been involved in covering and, like Yogi Berra said, "It’s like deja vu all over again." Pat Buchanan, Lamar Alexander, Steve Forbes, Dan Quayle, Al Gore, maybe even Ross Perot. The most piercing commentary I saw about Ross Perot was in a little U.S. Today cartoon. It showed him with those jug-ears wearing a t-shirt that said "When the Going Gets Weird, the Weird Get Going." I was at a dinner recently in Washington and President Clinton noted that the field of presidential candidates was really large, eleven Republicans and two Democrats. He just shook his head and smiled, and said "You know, now who in the world could have looked at the presidency over the past year and thought ‘Whoa, that could be me.’" I think the early Dole strategy was captured in an editorial cartoon, too. It showed Bob Dole displaying a Liddy Dole photo and telling two voters "Vote for my wife or I’ll tell you more about erectile dyfunction."
Now, I know you’ve all heard plenty about impeachment, and in Washington that’s almost a tabooed word. The Republicans don’t want to be reminded of the House fiasco and the Democrats would just as soon it go away, and Michael Parks told me "Don’t talk too much about impeachment tonight. People are tired of it." And he’s right. But I have to tell you that impeachment still does influence politics. Clinton complains privately of "an unwelcome vapor trail following him." And you know what? It does and I think it’s going to impact the 2000 elections. The same thing happened in the wake of Watergate, and since I covered both Nixon and Clinton in the impeachment proceedings, I think the differences that I see explain why Republicans may suffer from their unsuccessful efforts to oust Clinton while Democrats didn’t suffer for their successful efforts to oust Nixon. A really important difference is that many Americans find it easy to draw a distinction between an elected official’s public actions and his private conduct, no matter how distasteful that private behavior may be. Nixon’s actions were universally seen as proper matters for public scrutiny, but many felt that Clinton’s actions were not, and I think that the public doubts about the basic legitimacy of the Clinton inquiry were reenforced by the partisanship that dominated the impeachment proceedings, and by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s report to Congress that bristled with accusations and conclusions instead of being confined to fact finding. If you remember the case of Leon Jaworski, the Special Independent Counsel in the Watergate case, he sent up a recommendation to the House of facts with no recommendation. And I think finally that when thirteen Republican white males served as prosecutors in that case, it was clear that Clinton was going to survive and that many would view him as a target of a lynch mob.
Now, the extent to which the impeachment effort will play at the ballot box may not be clear at this time, but polling and political experts in Washington say that they believe it could be crucial in close Congressional races and could tip the House majority back to the Democrats. It certainly emboldens Democratic strategists. They believe that their party in 2000 could win enough seats in California alone to wrest away the Republicans’ 5-member control of the House. Democrats see the Republican House members as vulnerable in districts where Clinton is strong, where the Republicans were elected by margins of less than 55%. There are fourteen such Congressional districts, and five of them are in California, where the Republican Party has been in disarray. The situation in California serves as a paradox of how impeachment has played out so far in the campaign area.
Some GOP strategists justify the uncompromising stance of House Republicans as necessary to energize the Party’s conservative base, especially in last year’s elections. But to the Republicans’ surprise, the Democrats seemed energized in those elections. What happened in 1998 was not that the Democrats were so enamored of Clinton that they rallied to protect him. Clinton never had strong support among organized Democrats. What energized Democrats and may well energize them again in next year’s election were Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s overzealousness and the specter of right-wing Republicans attacking things that Democrats hold dear. Many Democrats reasoned that if conservatives could topple Clinton, nothing the Democrats valued would be safe. This feeling seems to have been especially strong among minority voters and organized labor.
I think the Democrats’ hopes of recapturing Congress were boosted by a resurgent labor movement. Labor played a key role, as you know, in the Democrats unprecedented victories last year in the House races, and the AFL-CIO plans to spend $43 million dollars on the Congressional and presidential races next year. Meanwhile, there are leading Republicans, like Bob Dole and former Senator Warren Rudman, who worry aloud that their party’s right-wingers, including some members of Congress, would cost the party dearly in 2000. In fact, Rudman worries that in the end the far right will wreck his party’s future. A group of 150 Republican lawmakers, business leaders and others with some of the same worries banded together recently and urged that the party’s Congressional members, in what they called "the rhetoric of partisan hostility" in a letter to Congressional Republicans, the group declared [that] "our language too often has been heard as mean, judgmental and partisan." Well, I think that the Senate picture is different from the House. The Democrats’ hopes for regaining control of the Senate were diminished after three Democratic Senators announced they wouldn’t run for reelection.
Most of the talk in Washington these days is about the Senate and whether Hillary will run for the New York seat that Pat Moynihan is vacating. Then, of course, Hillary-watching is a national sport. Your guess of whether she’ll run is as good as mine, but when Mayor Giuliani’s supporters put up a web site [called] "Hillaryno.com" it shows they take it seriously, and when Mrs. Clinton’s supporters countered by putting up a web site[called] "Hillaryrun.com," I knew she was taking it seriously. But I think Mrs. Clinton is so fenced in and so untested as a candidate she faces an extremely difficult challenge regardless of the polls that now show her in the lead. I think several factors may undermine a Hillary candidacy: her hostile relationship with the press, her involvement in Whitewater, Travelgate, and other matters that Starr will still address in the final report to Congress.
In the presidential race, the conventional wisdom that I’ve been talking about with the people at the table here is that George W. Bush will face Al Gore in the general election. And we know conventional wisdom is often wrong--until you recall that the Republicans were supposed to be the big winners in November. They weren’t. When Democrats made big gains, then impeachment was supposed to be dead. It wasn’t. When Monica surfaced--it’s my first mention of Monica tonight and my only mention of her tonight--but when Monica surfaced, Clinton was supposed to be a goner. He rebounded. Sam Donaldson said he’d be gone in a week. He’s still here. So I think you have to beware of conventional wisdom. However, Gore does have an overwhelming lead for the Democratic nomination and I think that Bush is almost as overwhelmingly in front for the Republican nomination.
Gore has developed a huge following among Democratic fundraisers, contributors and other activists, and he’s traveled to California and New York so often, 56 times to California alone, that in both states they joke about making him an honorary citizen. He’s cultivated a broad constituency among minorities, environmentalists, union members, and even business leaders. He’s built up a tremendous number of political IOUs around the country, and he’ll be calling them in. Gore’s only opponent, Bill Bradley, has no national constituency, he lags far behind [in] the fundraising and in building a campaign organization, he’s as wooden as Gore, he hasn’t articulated an alternative agenda or rationale for Democrats to support him over Gore, and the main thing going for him is that he’s Gore’s only opponent. But Gore has negatives. He has a fallout from the Clinton scandals, he hasn’t yet established his own identity separate from Clinton, and he’s a wooden performer in public. So a big mistake by him is that something, some unforeseen development, could derail him.
George W. Bush, or "W," as they call him in Texas, built a big following with the Republicans with very little effort. Republicans, hungry to retake the White House, have been beating a path to his door, numerous Republican officials, governors, members of Congress, local and state officials have endorsed his candidacy, but, you know, he still has to go through that meat grinder that we call a presidential campaign. Unlike Gore, W has never done that. It’s not out of the realm of possibility he could self-destruct or be chewed up. Republicans worry that he lacks charisma to stir voters on a national stage. At a recent dinner party, a Congressman spent over an hour with W and found him so serious as to be boring, much like Gore. You know, they say you could have had two cigar store Indians facing each other in the general election.
Bush talks a lot about "youthful indiscretions," trying to preempt that as a campaign issue. I have a source who is a Bush friend who says W is talking a lot about youthful indiscretions because there are so many of them, while reporters, pressing him on this, on drugs, on sex, and so forth, and Bush has volunteered only that he’s faithful to his wife. He insists he won’t catalogue his indiscretions. Whether he can get by with that in today’s anything-goes news environment remains to be seen. Depending on the circumstances, the press may pursue these indiscretions or may choose to ignore them. My guess is that the press will pursue them.
Elizabeth Dole, second to Bush in the polls, has never run for any public office and she is, if there ever was one, a control freak. Some observers think that she could easily come apart on the campaign trail. Her relations with the press are not hostile, like Hillary’s, but she persists in remaining aloof from the press, and that’s a prescription for trouble. She insists she’s running for the top spot, not for second banana, but I have a source who’s close to both the Bushes and the Doles who says that there probably will be an early deal to try to come up with a dream ticket: Bush-Dole. The same source says that Bob Dole expects his wife to be the GOP’s vice presidential candidate, a role he filled in 1976. If that happens, the Bush-Dole ticket, I think the Democrats believe that Gore will look for a woman on his ticket and perhaps she would be Senator Feinstein. As you know, recent polls indicate that either W Bush or Liddy Dole would defeat Gore in a presidential race today, but Gore’s standing in the polls a reminiscent of former Vice President George Bush twelve years ago when he ran behind several potential candidates at this point, Democratic candidates. So it’s much too early, I think, to read anything in the polls, but it’s got to be disturbing for the Gore people to see that he has such tepid response or support among some of the Democrats and Independents that they’re considering voting for either George W. or Liddy Dole.
In closing, I’m going to say one thing because people usually ask me to predict what’s going to happen and politics are so unpredictable that you hesitate to say what you think is going to happen. It takes me back to when I was out here in California in the first year of the Carter presidency and I was speaking to a gruff group of businessmen. We had a Q-and-A session afterwards, and somebody got up and he said "Do you think Jimmy Carter is going to be reelected?" And I said "Well, I have no idea. It’s the first year of his presidency. I have no idea." And he pushed me right to the wall: "But if you had to guess right now, if you had to guess right now," and I said, "If I had to guess right now, he is the incumbent and that counts for something and he hasn’t made any real serious mistakes, so I would say that he’ll be reelected, barring something unforeseen, like a dollar-a-gallon gasoline and double-digit inflation."
Thank you very much.
Michael Parks:
Thanks very much, Jack. Robin Wright is a correspondent in our Washington Bureau. She covers foreign policy, national security and has developed a number of specialities, such as Islam, but we asked her to take on the whole range of global issues tonight and here she is.
ROBIN WRIGHT
I’m grateful for your welcome, particularly because my first experience in Los Angeles was almost thirty years ago when I was the first female sports editor at a university paper, the University of Michigan, and my team, Michigan, played USC in the Rose Bowl. I had a column at the time with a politically incorrect title, Broadside. I showed up at the press box with my press pass because I used to travel with the team, at which point the people at the Rose Bowl said "We allow women food distributors and women teletype operators, but no women journalists." Well, the coach of my university team had had a heart attack that morning and I was the only one who knew it, so I sent in a little note to my colleagues and said "I’ve got this story of the day, guys, but I can’t get in to share it with you," and bless their altruistic souls, they came out and shared my scoop. Anyway, it’s nice to get such a nice reception for a change here.
I though I’d talk about three different hot spots, the first one, obviously, being Kosovo. Washington has just been host to 42 heads of state, the largest gathering of leaders in Washington ever. It was a momentous weekend for a number of reasons. Three bottom lines came out of it. The first is that President Clinton convinced the 19 members of NATO not to talk about ground troops. They really want to focus for the time being on the air war. There was quite a dramatic moment at the White House on Wednesday when Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister came in trying to convince Clinton, since he has been at the forefront of the leadership within NATO, to put the issue on the table. Clinton told him that it wasn’t time and that there were too many divisions, too many challenges, that there were simple problems even in getting unity on an oil blockade of Yugoslavia, and so it was not time to put that issue on the table. So I think that after the build up of last week we are not going to see a lot of discussion of ground troops. That does not mean that it isn’t down the road, but for the time being you’re not going to see the kind of escalation we’ve seen over the last ten days or so.
The second and perhaps the most important thing to come out of the summit was an agreement about what NATO is going to amount to in the next decade, perhaps the next half century, if it survives that long. That [agreement] is that it has a humanitarian mission, and I’m not talking just about saving people who are refugees who flee just because of ethnic cleansing, but because of something that really is a culmination of events of the 20th century. The singular thing of the 20th century really is empowerment. At the end of a century of fighting World War I, World War II and the Cold War, we are now fighting the last war in Europe, and that is with a very important message that the issue of sovereignty is no longer sacrosant. If a government violates the rights of its citizens, then other powers will challenge it and take it on in a variety of ways. This sends a very important message of the post-Cold War which arguably has very little to do with Kosovo itself and is, arguably, as important as the first principle of the post-Cold War world established during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm when the United States led a coalition to stand up to Saddam Hussein. [We] laid down the principle that aggression against a neighbor is no longer acceptable.
I think also the NATO summit underscored why Kosovo has become a test case. So many people have said, "Why not Rwanda? Why not Sudan? Why not places where there is so much more egregious ethnic cleansing and killing?" And the answer to the big question is very simple. It is because Europe is again sending another message of the 20th century: [that] fighting for the unity of Europe really is what it’s been all about, and Europe is the model for what the United States would like to see in a relationship with other countries. If the unity of Europe, the political and economic stability of Europe, is achieved then the United States can look beyond to other pockets of democratizing regions of the world.
So what’s going to happen [in Kosovo]? At the moment there are three scenarios that the administration offers. The first is that Milosevic succumbs. That he recognizes the price is too high for his country to face, and that the Russians, as the United States hopes, will be the ones to find some face-saving formula. Over the last two weeks the United States has offered something that it hopes will be a compromise on one of the five principles, which is the deployment of an international force in Yugoslavia or in Kosovo. The United States has said [that] we won’t insist that it is purely NATO. We would like to see Russians and Ukrainians and other Slavs be part of the peace-keeping force. It will still be a NATO chore, but they’re hoping that this is the kind of face-saving device that will allow Milosevic to say, "Well, I got something out of this." That is why Strobe Talbott is, in fact, today in Moscow--and I think his mother-in-law is here tonight among us.
The second scenario is that the army turns on Milosevic as they recognize [that] the cost-benefit ratio of continued warfare is not worth it. I call this the Saddam Hussein solution, and I’ve argued with many people in the administration about how realistic that is in light of the fact that’s what we counted on happening immediately after the Gulf War. Eight years later, Saddam Hussein is not only still there, [but is] arguably stronger than he’s been in a long time. My counterparts in the administration argue with me, and they say there are two things that are really very different this time around. One is the fact that Serbia is in a democratic continent or a democratizing continent. The environment, everything around it, and the forces of history are moving in a direction [where] Serbia is the odd party out--in stark contrast to Iraq, which lives in a part of the world that has held out against democracy the longest. Iraq’s neighbors are not exactly models or good influences: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Syria and so forth, so there’s not the kind of environment, the pressure, the media nearby beaming across borders suggesting that change is inevitable.
The second difference is that the generals in Yugoslavia when they are removed from office actually are still breathing. In Iraq they usually are not. There are forces, in other words, who can move behind the scenes, encourage building a bloc to challenge [Milosevic]. Some interesting argument. I’m glad that’s not the only scenario on the table. The third one is a military victory, or a situation where Serbian miliary and paramilitary forces are weakened to the point they can’t resist the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army, much less NATO. This is the one the administration argues is the most likely. Unfortunately, it is also the messiest, because Milosevic is still in power and you have the same problem you did in Iraq at the end of the day. You may get Kosovo back, but you still have in power one of the world’s last tyrants who has been aggressive elsewhere, who has not kept his word. To what degree do you feel that the international presence has to stay in order to create the kind of conditions for security of the ethnic Albanians?
There is, of course, the fourth option as I mentioned earlier--ground troops. There are two things, as you think about this and come up with your own feelings about it, and one is that weather is a huge factor and there are actually time constraints on what we can do. The general feeling has been until very recently that we’re talking anywhere up to three and four months to deploy. Now the thinking is that it may actually take much longer. The fact is there are two options for ground troops. One is moving into the north, through Hungary, which has an infrastructure where we could basically drive from Germany, where the environment, the circumstances for deployment, are actually quite easy. The problem with that option is that you would basically be threatening Belgrade, and that’s not what our mandate is. If the liberation of Kosovo is what we’re after, the one way to do that is through Macedonia and Albania and that’s by sea. You’re talking about two countries where you would literally have to build road and airports and bridges and almost start from scratch, and that’s an enormous undertaking. It’s costly, time-consuming, and, again, you have to deal with very difficult terrain. I think that’s another reason that the administration feels very reluctant, one of many reasons but perhaps the most [important] when it gets down to the actual logistics of a deployment. Again, we have the same problem. Our mandate in Iraq was to liberate Kuwait, not to deal with Iraq, and we’re still dealing with that problem long-term. It’s a mirror image in the Balkans. Our mandate is to liberate Kosovo, but we still have the problem of Yugoslavia and a tyrant in place.
I’ll talk very briefly about one other issue, and that is the peaceful side, the good side. And that is, next week is the May 4th date for the Oslo Peace Accord between Israel and the Arabs. It’s not going to happen, but after a lot of behind-the-scenes diplomacy the United States has won an agreement from Yassar Arafat not to declare unilaterally a Palestinian state. In a real reflection of the changing times, I had lunch with a top White House official last week who said that, with the death of King Hussein of Jordan, the Arab leader who had the closest relationship with the United States was Yassar Arafat. I lived in Beirut for five years during the Israeli invasion and other tense moments when Arafat was still the terrorist leader and it shows you the changes in geopolitics when Arafat has more access than President Mubarak of Egypt, who hasn’t been to Washington in three years. Arafat was there about six weeks ago and it’s now become so pro forma that no one really covers it. Arafat is likely to give a speech on May 3 or 4th in which he will announce a six-month or year-long delay. I don’t think the time has been concluded yet, but in exchange he feels that he has something that is going to pacify or calm the majority of the Palestinian people because from every country besides the United States that is critical in this peace process, he’s won agreement that the Palestinians will get an official state. He’s been trying to get that from the United States and the United States has said no, but there is now great optimism that there will be movement on the peace process within the next year and the President hopes that will be his crowning glory if Kosovo is not, in terms of his legacy as a foreign policy leader.
Thank you.
Michael Parks:
Thank you very much, Robin. I saw those cards being written. I think you’re going to get some questions. Next is Jim Flanigan, our Senior Economics Editor, and just a word, a commercial here. The Times has been trying to really improve our economic coverage and Jim’s appointment a couple of years ago as our Senior Economics Editor was our first step toward that. I think all of you know him from his columns, and we’re delighted to have him at the Times. Jim.
JIM FLANIGAN
I’m going to speak for under eight minutes, or eight minutes, and I’m going to speak about the international economy, the national U.S. economy and about the stock market, those Internet stocks. That’s less than three minutes per subject, so let us go.
The international economy, amazing in a time of war, is improving. It’s now agreed, some expert called me the other week and said "We no longer have an Asian financial crisis. We have an Asian financial problem." This is progress, I suppose. But seriously, folks, Japan is changing and its economy is improving. South Korea is improving. China is improving. What do I mean by "improving?" Latin America, Brazil, Mexico. These economies are improving. Europe’s economies are changing and improving. What do I mean? I mean that the economies there are changing their accounting, changing their approach to costs, becoming more like us in a sense. Greater respect for return on investments. Restructuring industry the way the United States restructured industry in the 1980s. Trying to adapt to the post-Cold War world where there are not two great powers and one protector for much of their lands, trying to adapt to changing technology.
But I think at bottom there is one basic trend in the world that doesn’t get as much attention as information technology. Everybody talks about the Internet, but the deeper change is, call it bio-technology, call it medicine, call it health. People are living longer. Societies are aging in the United States, in Europe. Japan is aging very rapidly. Around the world people are living longer because of good medical care or some medical care where there was none before. This means the populations aren’t growing that rapidly but they’re aging, and there are a lot of people and a lot of people to be taken care of. This means the need for retirement savings, pension funds, the things that we are familiar with and how the pension funds earn a return on investment. Well, we invest in businesses and those businesses have to produce a return. Now it was envisioned for several years, decades even, especially in Europe and in Japan, that the government will pay all the pensions where they had vast social security systems, but now they’re running out of money or they haven’t earned the returns. They’re coming into problems and they’re facing the problems and they’re saving "By golly, we have to reform this economy." It’s just a basic kind of underlying trend, underlying theme, to all of the changes you see going on.
Now, there are many other reasons for Europe to adopt a common currency. You can measure a business in Europe. I heard the head of Nestle’s, among other firms, say "Uh, the costs are all different. We can do business in all countries and measure the costs accurately and supply from one country to all the countries of Europe. The equations are changing, and with the change of equations you’re getting this progress of the economy. You’re getting the growth, you’re getting growth of investment markets, you’re getting merger movements now in Europe that we used to see in the United States, and we would say "What the heck is going on here?" I imagine they’re saying that in Europe now, but it is not going to cease. This progress will go on, and this is not merely an economy where you change societies when you restructure, especially some societies that were never as adaptable and as changeable as ours.
The Ambassador of South Korea, Lee Hong Koo, was into the Times the other day, an eloquent man, and he said "You’ve changed society. All of society has to change, all patterns, class systems perhaps, they have to change". This is going on in the world. It is profound. It will keep going and the societies somehow, especially in our pattern, we say they are improved and it is the improvement that comes to pig iron when it’s put in the fire and becomes steel.
Now, the U.S. economy is moving right along. The U.S. economy has been growing, gosh, for maybe seven years, I think, it came out of recession and grew back in l992. Here in Southern California especially, the improvement began perhaps in 1995. We had a terrible depression in the early ‘90s, as we all know, but it has been happening and it keeps going, it keeps going not only the stock market but the economy. Unemployment is down to 4.3%, low inflation, jobs everywhere, a greater prosperity, real estate prices rising, housing starts rising and this keeps going and people ask, they especially ask me, they say "Jim, when is the bubble going to burst? Really? Come on." And it isn’t a bubble and gradually, at first, we didn’t believe it and then we perceived it, that we’re getting increases in productivity.
This is where information technology comes in. This is the computer. This is the new way of doing business. You can say the computer brings efficiency, you can say it changes production systems, you can say U.S. business largely has changed the way it does business these days. Forty billion dollars of commerce on the Internet among businesses, businesses dealing with suppliers having their customers and their suppliers all hooked in. Everything seamless, everything working at a faster pace, at a lower-cost pace, more and more available. There’s supposed to be a surplus of everything. There’s suppose to be so many things occurring, and yet they are not occurring. People think there may be a bubble, but there isn’t a bubble. It keeps going on. Now, this has not yet reached the consumer, although it is reaching them. We know about the Internet. I can tell you that we at least hear about the Internet but probably some of you use it. You may have ordered a book through Amazon.com. Or you may realize that "gee, I can go on the Internet if I want to send flowers."
Let me give you a statistic. You think "That’s nice. How much business can be done?" I know a woman in San Diego. She used to be a newspaper reporter and she’s that smart that she got out of the business and she’s made herself a millionaire. She is the head of a company she founded called ProFlowers and it hasn’t been in business one year and it’s on the Internet. How many bouquets of flowers do you think an Internet company is going to sell in less than year? How about ten million dollars? Ten million dollars in less than year. 1-800-Flowers does 40 million dollars, I’m told.
Now, there is another side to this Internet phenomena, if ProFlowers and 1-800-Flowers and Flowers.com, if there is such a thing, and I think there is, if they’re supplying flowers from the wholesalers or from some wholesale market direct to the consumer, what happens to the store? And if something is happening to the store, and the flower shop is being bypassed, what about all the equipment, all those refrigerators with the roses in them? Somebody is making them, but there are no more stores to put the refrigerators in, and if there are no more stores, what happens to the real estate values of the strip mall?. Where’s the rent? This is a tremendous change in an economy.
We are getting the benefits of innovation and the changes are changing every industry. Every industry is going to be changed by this phenomena and it’s going to continue, and so the time to think about history--you can think forward, you know it’s going to go on and bring on a certain amount of prosperity, and certainly there’s a high stock market--you might think about the period from the end of the Civil War to about 1900. It was a time of many, many years of great economic growth in our country, and tremendous innovation. Railroads, electricity, sound, oil, John D. Rockefeller came into his own, oil for the lamps of China, oil for the lamps of Cleveland, the refineries, tremendous industrial growth and panics and crashes and disruptions and a change in society. We changed society in the late 19th century, we are in a changing society today.
I was going to call attention to a book named The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton and a film by Martin Scorsese, The Age of Innocence. Rent the video. It’s about that time and how it changed from a society that was kind of fixed to one that was fluid. That’s what happened then. What does this mean for the stock market? Well, everybody talks about the Internet stocks and learned people are writing and saying every day "it can’t go on. It doesn’t make any sense, that Amazon.com. It’s just ridiculous. It’s going to fall apart. These stocks, Yahoo, what can that be? Should I pay this much money for them or, if I don’t, will I feel sorry or will my neighbor do it and say "Well, you didn’t make money the way I did?" The intelligent thing to do is not to think long about the Internet stocks. It is a phenomenon. You can do it, you cannot do it. But think about companies affected and think about industries affected and see how they are affected and how they are responding. How will the automobile industry respond? The automobile industry is changing profoundly. There’s a man now at the head of Ford Motor Company named Jack Nasser and he is saying, he said right here in Los Angeles in a forum, he said "Ford Motor Company is a consumer products company. Our consumer product happens to be automotive, but that’s what we are". He’s changing the thinking of that company.
A lot of other companies are changing thinking. You saw American Telephone & Telegraph Company from the last century, from that earlier period of change and development. They developed the telephone network. I’m not sure how many telephone lines they own any more, but they’re now buying cable and they think they’re going to bring you Internet through the cable. There are no guarantees in any of this. Is it going to succeed? Is it not going to succeed? Its a matter of adaptation.
One final trend in all of this, a great trend in the world, is more leisure time. We are all of us in the great city that is Hollywood, that is the entertainment industry, all around the world people have more leisure time. More leisure time equals an audience for television, for the films, for recorded music, for Internet music or whatever kind of thing, and right here, in this town, we supply the contents to that whole world of more leisure time. It’s an improving world, it can be an improving world economy if we don’t mess it up and that’s always the question.
Thank you.
Michael Parks
I’m going to ask Janet Clayton to give us the state-of-the-state, the state of Los Angeles.
JANET CLAYTON
Thank you, Michael. This is just where you want to be. The last speaker after three dynamic speakers, speaking to the World Affairs Council about what? State and local affairs? But, you know, there was a local story last week that turned national, that turned global. The local really does become global and the global becomes local, some of what Jim was just talking about.
And what happened last week in Littleton, Colorado, has had us thinking about children a lot and what we’re doing to our children. We’ve editorialized many times, those of you who follow our pages, you know that we’ve editorialized vehemently for control of weapons of mass destruction, not only the type that we find overseas, but the type that we find here. Certainly we think that there is no place for a weapon whose only purpose is to kill as many people as it can as quickly as it can.
With that said, when I was thinking about the two kids, possibly three that had something to do with it, but the two kids that we know committed those murders last week, we’ve got to think about what we’re doing to children and what messages they are getting from us. When we talk about leisure time, and Jim was talking about leisure time, well, these kids had a lot of leisure time, they had a lot of creature comforts, they were from well-educated families, there was just no reason for that to happen. Yet something is missing with our kids, and when something is missing with our kids we have to sort of look in the mirror and ask what’s missing with us. When you think about children and what we’re giving or not giving them it takes us usually to education. I’m going to talk a little bit now about what’s happening in our educational system. It’s a topic that I hope touches the hearts of everybody here because most of us here have been the beneficiaries of public school education and would like to see that available for our kids.
What happened last week, certainly you can’t put it on the education system necessarily, but the reality is that a lot of adults failed in that situation. It’s easy to look at Littleton and say "Well, gee, how could that happen there?" Well, it could happen anywhere, and I’m hoping that when we talk about the education system that we think about it in a broader way and think about what it is that our kids are needing nowadays, in the ‘90s, and with the Internet and with the BMWs and with all the creature comforts that we’re all working so hard to give them. I hope that we remember what they need the most--our attention.
Let’s talk a little bit about the state of public education here in California. We boasted the best higher education system in the nation, it’s been the model for everybody. The three-tier system that was created many years ago, that’s got the UC, the State University system, and the community colleges. That system is envied throughout the nation and is now threatened because the K-12 system has been terribly neglected. The quality of students is actually, in a small way, increasing, the quality is getting better, but in the broad sense the quality is getting worse. In other words, you have a small group of kids who are doing better and better but the broad group of children are actually doing worse. It’s not hard to see why California, unfortunately, among its fourth graders, ranked next to last in the national assessment test--and that’s an improvement if you consider that in 1994 California ranked dead last. Now this is the state that, again, was once the leader for the nation.
We’ve got here in Los Angeles a situation, and throughout the state actually, where two-thirds of our third-graders can’t read at the grade school level. In other words, third-graders are not reading at third grade level. They’re reading at second or first grade level. While that happens, we [are] on a fool’s errand here in Los Angeles in building the nation’s most expensive high school. Two hundred million dollars for Belmont High. Some Times reporters recently uncovered some memos that showed that there have long been concerned about this particular high school. For one thing, it’s built on the site of a lot of toxic dumps and so on. But it was pushed through anyway, without even a competitive bid. So we can’t find the money, people or the materials to ensure the kids can read but we do find the money for adult boondoggles.
But there’s hope on the horizon. A reform package put together by Governor Gray Davis with, shall we say, the active encouragement of the Los Angeles Times Editorial pages, is refocusing proper attention on the basics. The importance of good teachers and principals and proper training for those teachers and principals, setting of standards for educators and for students and the willingness to enforce those standards. This week in school districts throughout California, students are being tested. Those scores in the future will actually mean something. They will help the state and local districts assess just how good a school is doing in teaching children, and if they consistently do a poor job, there will finally be some consequences. Children who can’t do the work will no longer be immediately promoted as they typically are, and teachers and principals who aren’t doing their jobs well will find career advancement a more rocky road.
It’s easy enough to get everyone to agree that the public education system needs improvement. The real difference begins in the second step. How well the reforms are implemented. One of our jobs will be to let you know how well things are working, what is working and what is not. For instance, will the teachers in California react the way the teacher in Texas did? Some of the teachers in Texas who were also feeling the pressure of making sure that tests scores rise quickly actually cheated to make sure that some of the kids had higher scores. We have to make sure that doesn’t happen here. We have to keep our eyes open to the pressure points and to all the unintended consequences of trying to quickly turn around the state’s mammoth education bureaucracy. If we don’t get it right this time, look for renewed calls for school vouchers. Just last week, four thousand African American and Latino families lined up to receive private four-year scholarships to attend private schools. Former governor, now mayor of Oakland, Jerry Brown, is making a move to yank control of the schools there away from the local school board and Mayor Richard Riordan here in Los Angeles is looking to big cities, like Chicago, that have done the same. The good news here is that the public schools now have tremendous incentive to reform and deliver because if they don’t there simply won’t be a constituency for schools that don’t teach.
To disconnect and talk a little bit about local things: to disconnect between expectations and results resonates with those who say that the San Fernando Valley is out to secede from the city of Los Angeles. Much of the Valley’s frustrations with City Hall’s literal and psychic distance is justified, but if you ask people on the Westside, if you ask people in San Pedro or Central City, you’ll hear the same complaints. That City Hall is not relevant to me, it doesn’t respond to my neighborhood problems. All of these legitimate concerns make a fine case for charter reform which is going to be on the City’s June 8th ballot. Now, while charter reform is not the most exciting topic in the world, and therefore, I won’t spend a long time speaking about it, it’s important to know that we actually have an option here beyond secession. We’re endorsing, at the Times, better representation for neighborhoods by calling for smaller council districts which currently have about a quarter of a million people. Charter reform would also give greater executive authority to the mayor’s office and clearer lines of accountability within the city’s bureaucracy. That way, if you can’t get your potholes fixed, for instance, you don’t have to wonder about who to blame and how to get a response. A streamlined and more logical governing document for the city would begin to address a lot of the beefs you hear from pro-secession activists. What would make more sense to do rather than break off one part of the city from the other is to try to address the legitimate representation and quality of life issues that concern all of us and work together to make it better.
In closing, whether it’s public education state-wide and its reform or local charter reform or secession, these movements are an expression of deep dissatisfaction within the status quo. People are now willing to put some radical ideas into action. Our challenge, as citizens, is to take some reasonable risks as investment in the city’s future and in the state’s future. When thirty years ago Pat Brown and Clark Kerr come up with what was called the Master Plan for Higher Education, it was tremendously ambitious, and it anticipated California’s future growth amazingly well for about thirty years. Given that California now has within its borders people from virtually every nation and culture, we should appreciate that what we are trying to do here, live, learn and work together in the most diverse place on earth, what we’re trying to do here has not been done before on this scale. Not anywhere. Not any place in time. So when you put that in perspective, we can spend a brief moment, I think, at least patting ourselves on the back before we take up our challenge for the next century.
Thank you.