The Plan by Rahm Emanuel, Bruce Reed

From the Publisher

The Plan offers a bold vision of what America can be. It shows the way for both parties to move beyond the old political arguments and make progress for the American people. And it offers an innovative agenda for America – with ideas that address the nation's most pressing challenges by doing more for Americans and asking Americans to do more for their country in return. Each of these ideas offers a clean break with the status quo, yet all are positive, practical, and can be put into action right away. Built on the authors' firm beliefs that politicians owe the people real answers, that citizenship is a responsibility, not an entitlement program, and that the Democratic Party succeeds when America succeeds, the highly anticipated Plan delivers, challenges, and inspires.

Foreign Affairs

Washington, write Emanuel and Reed, is divided between Hacks andWonks. Wonks focus on policy; Hacks want to win. What the country, and especially the Democratic Party, now need, they claim, is a synthesis of both: people with good policy ideas who know how to win elections. This insight does not exactly dazzle with its originality, nor will readers be surprised that the authors modestly suggest that this wondrous synthesis is precisely what they themselves embody — but let all that pass. The book's real importance is as a guide to the thinking of two bright, centrist Democrats whose views will be carefully reviewed as the party prepares for 2008. The most important big idea in the book is that Democrats should stop defending the New Deal and instead concentrate on recasting it for a more mobile society. Portable pensions and health care are two of the cornerstones of this vision. Less hopeful is an idea that the authors appear to set great store by: a compulsory period of three months of national service and training for all Americans under 25. Wonks will observe that the time is too short to teach anything useful and that while the cost would be high, the real benefits would be few. Hacks will wonder whether even a short-term, nonmilitary draft is really the proposal best calculated to build widespread support among younger voters.

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Republicans find themselves trapped in the limbo of Bush's "compassionate conservatism," unsure at any given moment whether government should expand or contract. Democrats are the party of second opinions, wandering from one pathologist to the next. Consultants tell Democrats to talk more about God; bloggers tell them to talk trash about Bush; self-help books urge them to use their words, rediscover their values, and stand and fight for what they used to believe in.

We've spent much of our careers telling Democrats how to win. But in our view, that is the right answer to the wrong question. The politics of the Bush era, on both sides of the aisle, is based on a mistaken premise. America is not a partisan prize or a political project. Without a map to the challenges of the new era, all political roads lead to ruin.

The Plan is a draft of the new conditions, new requirements, and new terms that this new era will demand. We offer Americans a new bargain: more of the opportunity and security we remember, in return for more responsibilities that for too long we forgot. This new bargain includes a whole new approach to education, a radically different kind of tax code, a new stake in the economy and a dynamic new set of opportunities and guarantees, and a new set of individual, civic, and public responsibilities.

To secure this new bargain, we will need a new politics. A public debate that continues to duck the nation's hardest questions is just wasting time America no longer has. We invite Republicans and Democrats alike to steal our formula: There is nothing wrong with America--or either party--that can't be set right by finding the courage and ideas to solve our country's greatest problems.