Forget the divide: It’s time for leadership and innovation

Many folks would like to blame polarized partisan politics or the new partisan media for today’s heated politics in our country. The harsh reality is that it is our obsession with “interest-group politics,” combined with scare-tactic rhetoric on both sides of the aisle, that has led to the makings of a divided country well on the way to a financial day of reckoning.

This “Great American Divide” in our country is breeding public leaders who are more concerned about clinging onto their own political power than stepping out front and leading on the merit of the issues. Today’s public leader is a professionally trained politician well-engrained in the tactics of “foolproof” political management, which is to string along voters through a series of entitlement offerings and play up wedge issues that have conditioned our new interest-group mindset.

Very rarely in public debate do we exercise the fundamental American principle of judging our leaders on the content of their ideas. As such, very few of today’s public leaders have the courage to offer any original or innovative public-policy ideas to reinvent government and put the brakes on the big public spending in America today.

Divide and manage

The beginnings of the Great American Divide can be traced back to the days of FDR’s New Deal of politics, in which he strategically separated American values through class warfare combined with the implementation of politically appealing public programs. This political management tactic proved to be smart politics, and ultimately this strategy has become the go-to political playbook for both parties.

Democrats use divisive interest-group words such as the “middle-class,” “racists,” “bigots,” “the rich,” “big oil,” “wall street fat cats,” and the infamous “la tejana.” Republicans tend to use social wedge issues to control the primary process with interest-group words such as “amnesty,” “gay marriage,” “gun rights,” “pro-life,” and “religion.” Both approaches net the same effect – divide and manage through high-dollar media campaigns aimed at playing on the fears of everyday voters.

One boneheaded argument that I am fed up with is the idea of the “middle-class.” Who doesn’t think they are part of middle-class America? I can remember growing up in a poor public housing complex where most families received food stamps or some other form of government assistance. Despite our circumstances most in our neighborhood felt we were part of middle-class America.

In fact most in the ole’ barrio just considered ourselves to be patriotic Americans with little to no excuses about our future opportunities. My mother, who has scrubbed toilets all of her life, would proudly say, “There are no excuses for failure in this country; success is a direct result of hard work.”

In hindsight, this statement is the very essence of the American dream. This fundamental old-school belief in the opportunity to “earn the dream” is what unites us all as Americans.

Time to get back to fundamentals

Somewhere along our path, we as Americans have begun to lose that hard-nosed patriotic mindset that has made us exceptionally great. We are becoming an interest-group nation of squabbling weaklings. We have turned upside down our founding principles of limited government and low taxes in favor of becoming a nation with a dependence on big government and hidden high taxes.

If we are to recapture that hard-nosed American spirit and bridge the Great American Divide, we must get back to the basic fundamentals of public leadership, or what I call “leadership 101.” Just cutting government spending is not the end-all solution; we must begin to elect leaders who understand the realities of government execution with the substantive know-how to reinvent our government in the innovative image of 21st Century technology.

The days of the Charlie Brown “wonk wonk”* politician are over, and the day has come for us to begin electing officials on the substantive basis of leadership and innovative ideas. The key for us regular folks is to recognize the interest-group pandering politics and demand that all candidates for elected office offer solutions to problems rather than merely complaining.

The key to good leadership is to identify problems and to provide solutions most folks can understand.

*Luéva-nition: Charlie Brown “Wonk Wonk” – Smooth politicians who can speak for an hour while saying nothing at all and never directly answering one question.

Luévano, a Renewed Republican, is a lifelong New Mexico resident and an Artesia native who will be moving back to Albuquerque this August. He graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2001 with a bachelor’s in political science and economics and from the University of Kansas in 2008 with a master’s in public administration. You can reach Luévano at johnnyluevano.com or find him on Facebook.