Memorandum to President Obama - 4/14/09

Tue Apr 14 14:11:27 EDT 2009

Memorandum
March 16, 2009

To:       President Obama
From:   David Blankenhorn

Mr. President:

I¹m sure that the last thing you feel deprived of, in your new job, is
advice. And you certainly know that unsolicited advice usually has all of
awkwardness, but none of the thrill, of an unsolicited kiss.

But in these challenging days, and even coming from a stranger like me,
perhaps you might find a bit of solace or use in this simple reminder:

Be who you are.

Urge as important to us as a society the same things that are important to
you as a man.

Fathers and Marriage

You wrote your first book about your father, and about fatherhood, and by
all accounts you are a loving father and good husband. Our nation
desperately needs more such men. There are plenty of worrisome statistics
about the current state of our civil society, but to me here is by far the
most worrisome: More than half of all U.S. children today are likely to
spend at least a significant portion of their childhoods living apart from
their fathers. For African American children, tragically, that figure is at
least 80 percent.

This is our worst contemporary problem because  as your immediate
Democratic predecessor as president, Bill Clinton, put it in a speech at the
University of Texas about ten years ago  it¹s the problem that is driving
so many of our other problems, from unconscionable rates of child poverty,
to bad educational outcomes, to juvenile delinquency and crime, to teen
pregnancy, to high and probably rising rates of mental problems and
emotional distress among U.S. children and adolescents, and many others.

My sense is, you know this in your bones. So my advice is, show us who you
are. Talk about this issue. Challenge us to do better. Specifically, as a
part of a major address in 2009, say that a main goal of your
Administration, and you hope a main goal for our society as a whole in the
coming years, is to increase the proportion of U.S. children living with
their own two married parents. The reason why is simple. If that number gets
better, so many other things will get better, starting with the basic living
conditions of our most vulnerable children.

Permit me, however, to point out a potential problem, which concerns your
use or non-use of the ³m² word. I mean, of course, the word ³marriage.² For
there is one thing of which we can be sure. Among your advisors, very few 
I would even venture to guess, not a single one  will want you ever to
utter the word ³marriage² in a serious context. Yes, many of them will be
happy enough for you to put in an occasional good word for fathers and for
fatherhood, as you did so movingly last Fathers Day at the Apostolic Church
of God in Chicago. But they will let you know in no uncertain terms that
marriage should and must remain an idea that you dare not mention.

Why? They can tell you their reasons. I have heard these reasons many times,
dating back at least to the Clinton Administration, and while I recognize
that they are well-intentioned and often based in genuine political
expediency, here is my reply to all of them. Today, whatever else its
merits, praising fatherhood without concretely supporting marriage is an act
of cowardice. It is cowardice because it is widely known  the scholars who
study this issue know full well  that in our society the institution of
marriage is the essential precondition for, and therefore the most accurate
predictor of, exactly the kind of effective, hands-on, nurturing fatherhood
that you called for with such passion in Chicago last year. If you¹ll permit
me to borrow from the eloquence of W. E. B. Dubois, we can say with great
confidence that professing to want fatherhood while ignoring marriage is
like wanting the crops without plowing the ground, or wanting the ocean
without the roar of its waters. Such a profession is cowardly precisely
because it is professing to want something in the very way that almost
certainly means, and is widely known to mean, that you are unlikely ever to
get it.

So please, as a fellow fatherhood advocate (I too wrote my first book about
fatherhood), let me importune you on what may at first seem like only a
small rhetorical point, but is in fact a large substantive point: The next
time you talk about the importance of fatherhood, talk also about the
importance of marriage. Begin with your own story, which is so inspiring to
so many, and conclude with a call for a broad national conversation on how
to strengthen marriage in our society.

If it helps, think of using the word ³marriage² in public in the same way as
using your Blackberry in the Oval Office. You have always liked your
Blackberry, but as soon as you got elected, everyone told you that you had
to stop using it. But you insisted. You struggled with them. You gave your
reasons, and they were good reasons. And today, you are using your
Blackberry. Good for you!

It¹s like that regarding speaking the word ³marriage.² My sense is, you know
that this issue is important. Yet many of those around you will view saying
so as a serious violation of etiquette, and they will offer many reasons why
you should not, must not, cannot, ever say this word. But might you decide,
based on your values, that it¹s important enough to give your reasons and
say it anyway? I sincerely hope and pray that the answer is yes.

Today, you probably have more power to influence the values and attitudes of
young Americans on this issue than any other person in the country. Are you
in any doubt about the centrality and urgency of this matter? Think about
your legacy. If your words and deeds as president could help to create a
society in which, four years or more from now, a greater (rather than
lesser) proportion of our nation¹s children were living in homes with loving
fathers and good husbands  more good family men  do you believe that any
other words or deeds of yours as president, no matter how consequential, are
likely to have been more important?

Thrift and Generosity

You seem to grasp intuitively that, in the great economic crisis now
confronting us, we face not simply a financial meltdown, but also an ethical
meltdown. You therefore seem to believe, as I do, and probably as many
Americans do, that our biggest challenge does not consist simply of bailing
out this or that company, or stimulating this or that sector of the economy,
or even relieving the current financial distress of this or that group of
suffering Americans. Those are certainly important current aims. But surely
our deeper and ultimately more important challenge is to reconsider and
substantially revise some of our most deeply entrenched attitudes regarding
the uses of money, such that we can once again commit ourselves as a
society, from Wall Street to Main Street, to the values of honestly,
fairness, wise use, economy, and giving back to society.

I particularly took note when, as one of your first decisions as
president-elect, you created a working group to explore ways to strengthen
the middle class. I am sure that you know, and that your working group
knows, that the challenge here is not simply to provide economically
vulnerable people with enough money to qualify them as ³middle class,² but
rather to find creative ways to strengthen those values, rules, and
institutions  or what might be called those ways of living  that are both
the preconditions and foundations of a strong and thriving middle class. How
can that be done?

For the past four years I have been studying the ups and downs of a
venerable American value that, I believe, provides the best philosophical
framework for answering this question. That value is thrift. Not ³thrift² as
penny-pinching or stinginess (which is how many people in recent decades
have understood the term). And not even thrift as belt-tightening, a kind of
necessary but bad-tasting medicine for hard times (which is how the term is
increasingly being used today).

No, I mean thrift as a means of thriving (the word thrift comes from
³thrive²); as a vision for attaining the good life; or as what Benjamin
Franklin, the great American apostle of thrift, called ³the way to wealth.²

A personal confession may be in order. I am a true-believing thrift nut.
I¹ve become a starry-eyed advocate. For so many of the problems now ailing
us  from shameful wastefulness, to growing economic inequality, to
independence-killing indebtedness, to runaway mindless consumerism  I
believe that the philosophy of thrift is the closest thing we have to a
miracle cure.

It seems to me that, over the past 30 or so years, we Americans have
energetically created and have lived at high speed in what might called a
debt culture  a way of living that is fueled by and premised on
interlocking and steadily expanding structures of debt (personal, corporate,
and societal). What we are learning now the hard way, of course, is that a
debt culture is not sustainable. It has crashed around us, and we are now
trying to rebuild Š something.

But what precisely is the something that we aim to rebuild? Is our goal only
to do some prudent stimulating, and some clever bailing out, so that we can
get back to maxing out our credit cards as soon as possible? Or do we  do
you  perhaps have something different in mind?

I hope the answer is, something different. My hope, my commitment, is to
replace the old debt culture with a culture of thrift.

So I¹m pushing a big idea. I want to testify about it. I want to shout from
the roof-tops. I want to convert people. I want to convert you  not to the
concept, which I believe is already quite intellectually congenial to you
and is in fact a deep part of who you are, but rather to the idea of
speaking out publicly as an advocate of the concept.

The Way to Wealth

I want to close with two ideas for integrating the two ideas  marriage and
thrift, the nest and the nest egg  that I am trying here to urge upon you.
The first idea is a piece of legislation. The second idea is a talk or
presentation aimed at young Americans, especially those of modest or
middling means, either in high school or in their 20s, who today are
concerned about their economic futures.

A Family and Thrift Act

The idea is for the Congress to create and help to fund a series of pilot
projects in five or so lower-income communities across the nation that
would:

    * Get rid of the marriage penalty currently facing many low-income
couples who choose to marry; and

    * Establish new incentives and opportunities for low-income individuals
and families to save.

Marriage and thrift. Building the nest and building the nest egg. Doing the
two things that are the pathways to, and the foundations of, the American
middle class.

My colleauges and I are currently working with a bipartisan group of members
of Congress to develop and introduce such a piece of legislation. Might you
consider supporting it?

The Way to Wealth

For young Americans struggling to enter the middle class, or struggling to
stay in it, what are the five most important things they can do to put money
in their pocket and succeed in America?

Drum roll, please  here are the five:

   1. Work hard and honestly.
   2. Spend less than you earn.
   3. Be as generous as you can.
   4. Marry for keeps before having children.
   5. Have a plan.

What attracts me most to these rules, besides their well-established
validity, is that nearly anyone can follow them. You don¹t need a college
degree, or some special permission slip, to spend less than you earn, say,
or to marry for keeps before you have children. You don¹t need to wait for
the economy to improve. You don¹t need to wait for Congress to pass a law,
or for society to change its ways, or for someone to let you into the lucky
group. All you need  what you need  is the knowledge and desire to live a
certain kind of life.

There is ample scholarship to back up each of these five rules, but in your
case, Mr. President, my guess is that the scholarship would be superfluous
and unsurprising. You know this stuff. You know it in part because you¹ve
lived it and in part because, if the perception of this outsider is at all
accurate, you¹ve learned it and stood for it over the course of your
lifetime.

Show it to us. Share it with young Americans. Let us know who you are.

Sincerely,
David Blankenhorn, president, Institute for American Values

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