Arianna on Bush's Campaign Plea

President Bush Asks NOT What You Can Do For Your Country

By Arianna Huffington

During his final, frantic -- and ultimately wildly successful --
15-states-in-five-days campaign spree, President Bush repeatedly
exhorted Americans to be "willing to serve something greater than
ourselves."

But, in truth, it's pretty obvious he didn't really expect us to
listen.

As Bill Maher writes in his just released book "When You Ride
Alone, You Ride with bin Laden": "We were asked to do very little
and we responded. That's the bargain we tacitly make with our
presidents: We won't ask too much of you, if you don't ask too
much of us."

And true to form, in speech after speech, the president has been
asking very little of us. At one stop he recommended we "be a Boy
Scout leader or a Girl Scout leader." At another he suggested
that Americans "put their arm around somebody who hurts and say
'I love you. What can I do to help you? How can I make your life
better?'" Unfortunately, he failed to mention what to do when the
answer to that question is: "Take you damn arm off of me and get
me some affordable health insurance!"

Now I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with being a Boy
Scout leader or telling people that you love them (even when you
don't -- by the way, Mr. President, I love you.) Indeed, I'm all
in favor of these things. But there is a world of difference
between urging mild, spare-time charity and championing a cause
that will transform our society. It's the difference between
flaccid, patronizing stump speech rhetoric and invoking
patriotism to rally us as a nation to a common mission.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy stood in front of a joint session of
Congress and laid out a vision for the future: "I believe this
nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the
decade is out, of landing a man on the moon." He used his bully
pulpit to gather the political will to meet a monumental
challenge -- and backed it up with financial muscle. Eight years
later after a mobilization of resources, exceptionally talented
people, and that extremely American can-do quality, we achieved
the science fiction goal when Neil Armstrong bounced across the
lunar surface. People, no doubt, still told each other "I love
you," but love doesn't get you to the moon.

So what if President Bush were to use his newly-won political
power to do the same -- to call on the American people to commit
themselves to a large, collective purpose? There's no shortage of
needs. I have two that immediately come to mind.

He could borrow President Kennedy's language and call on the
nation to "commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade
is out, of becoming completely independent of foreign oil." Or
he can call on the nation to "commit itself to achieving the
goal, before the decade is out, of closing the ever-widening gap
between the children growing up with hope for the future and
those growing up in despair."

Okay, I realize that, given the president's oily background,
there is probably very little chance of his choosing the first
cause even though the cause of energy independence seems to offer
plenty of opportunity for an oil industry willing to harken, no
pun intended, back to its energetic wildcatting roots. But what
about the second goal? After all, he and his wife have already
shown an interest in the subject.

Last week, over 1,000 people gathered in Washington to celebrate
25 years of Communities In Schools (CIS), a remarkable
organization that has turned around the lives of hundreds of
thousands of at-risk children throughout the country.

Among the group's high-profile supporters is First Lady Laura
Bush, who has praised CIS as "a terrific model for people who
want to make a difference. It's an organization that has proven
for 25 years that they can turn kids on to learning by turning
them on to life."

Bill Milliken, CIS's founder, was himself a troubled kid growing
up in Pittsburgh in the 50s. He's now putting into practice the
national exhortation Bush has yet to make. "Our communities have
been blown apart," Milliken told me, "and we have kids running
around looking for help. We're responding to this by bringing
caring adults into one central location -- the schools -- to meet
the children's unmet needs. Our work is based on the belief that
programs don't change kids -- relationships do."

Communities In Schools currently has over 45,000 volunteers
working in 2,550 schools -- putting in 1.8 million hours a year.
Those are impressive numbers -- until you consider the magnitude
of the problem: There are over 96,000 public schools and roughly
13 million at-risk children.

And that's where the power of the presidency comes in. We cannot
go from where we are to where we need to be with individual acts
of charity and touchy-feely speeches alone. To create the critical
mass that will truly transform the lives of a generation of
children, we need to make a Manhattan Project-level commitment
of resources and resolve.

So let's strike a new bargain with our leaders: We will expect a
lot more of them and we're ready for them to ask a lot more of
us. President Bush claims to believe in the country. So why
doesn't he believe in us?