Excellent column by Thomas Friedman

It's Still Half-time in America
Thomas Friedman, NY Times

I sat through three days of speeches at the Republican convention here, but I confess that my mind often drifted off to thinking about Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon.

Armstrong’s passing really touched me, especially coinciding as it did with this election. Why? Because the America that launched Armstrong was an America that was embarked on a great and inspiring journey — one that spawned breakthroughs in science, medicine, computing and physics that made our country, and the world, a better place. What journey are we on today? Balancing the budget? Expanding health insurance? These are vital tools, but healthy to go where and balanced to do what?

I came to the G.O.P. convention hoping to hear the Republican answer. Or, more specifically, I came to Tampa looking for Mitt Romney’s Etch A Sketch, and all I got was a lousy T-shirt.

Sitting through all the speeches, it was clear to me that people who think Romney, having accepted the nomination, is now going to pivot to the center are fooling themselves. There is no organic connection between Romney and the G.O.P. base. You could feel it in the hall. He is renting the party to fulfill his dream of becoming president, and they’re renting him to get rid of President Obama. But this is not Romney’s party. I don’t see him taking it back to his moderate past.

Ann Romney promised, in her speech, that her husband “will not fail.” But she never said at doing what. That’s not an accident. As Paul Ryan demonstrated, he and his band of Ayn Randians will employ any lies needed to disguise their true agenda of dismantling the New Deal. Ryan implied that Obama had failed to save a General Motors plant that was actually closed under George W. Bush; he blasted Obama for not taking responsibility for our job and fiscal deficits, while not acknowledging a whit of G.O.P. responsibility for the Bush-era spending recklessness that dug these holes; Mitt Romney lashed out at Obama for leading from behind on foreign policy and then virtually ignored foreign policy in his speech. Almost every G.O.P. speaker boasted of their immigrant roots, while the party remains the biggest opponent of immigration reform. It was a festival of hypocrisy — without shame. “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” Neil Newhouse, the lead Romney pollster, told critics. Say what?

But I bet one line in Ryan’s speech hit home with some undecided voters — when he said of Obama: “Now all that’s left is a presidency adrift, surviving on slogans that already seem tired.” Unlike Ryan, Obama is not giving speeches built on lies, but the truths that he’s telling are very small. He is neither running on his own record nor the promise of a new journey. As I’ve said, this is the first election ever where both men are running as “I’m not Mitt Romney.”

Dov Seidman, a business philosopher and C.E.O. of LRN, points out that when President Kennedy launched America in 1962 “on a journey to the Moon, he made a point of saying it would be done within the decade,” and “it was such a powerful, inspiring and big vision that it lived on, even though the president himself died before it was completed.” It’s been a long time since any U.S. politician “launched the country on a journey of progress so inspiring that realizing it would have to extend beyond his term in office.”

This election, notes Seidman, has largely been about “how to shift a tiny sliver of swing-state voters from one camp to the other, but no one is trying to elevate us, by taking us all, as a nation, on some daring new journey.” And a journey is not just a speech. It has to come with a strategy to rally people behind it and generate the legislation and policies needed to implement it.

What goals could merit such a journey? Now that we have put a man on the Moon, let’s commit to keeping everyone in school. Let’s commit that, within a decade, every American will have the tools for, and financial access to, some kind of postsecondary education — whether it is vocational school, community college or a four-year university. Because without some higher education that makes you “work ready” for one of today’s good jobs and a lifelong-learner for one of tomorrow’s, you’ll never secure a decent job or realize your full potential here on Earth.

Or let’s make America for the world what Cape Canaveral was to America — the world’s greatest launching pad for new companies. Let’s commit that, in the next decade, we’ll create the dynamics to double the number of new companies started in America each year — from 500,000 to 1 million. That means combining immigration reform, new investments in research to push out the boundaries of science, vastly increasing the speed of our Internet, rebuilding our infrastructure and reforming the tax code. Whatever it costs, we will make it back times 10.

 Romney and Ryan denounced Obama for not touting “American exceptionalism.” That’s actually how a great country becomes unexceptional. You give up the great journeys and just assert your exceptionalism louder. Exceptionalism has to be earned by each generation, and, when that happens, it speaks for itself.

If only this election were a choice, not between two parties or two candidates, but between two exceptional journeys — with maps included.