I’ve been wondering lately whether America is ready to embrace public service again. These last several months, two developments have crashed together across our collective consciousness that give reason to hope. The first, of course, is the election – and also the campaign – of Barack Obama. Our president-elect placed a call for each of us to serve and sacrifice for the common good at the center of his campaign like no successful candidate since JFK. He built his campaign around the lessons learned from his formative years as a community organizer, and did not waiver when his opponents belittled that selfless work. He not only inspired a new generation to believe that the government can help bring fundamental change, but built the broadest coalition of any Democratic candidate in decades.
The second development is the crashing down upon us of our financial system under the weight of avarice and greed unfettered by the kind of sensible regulation that allowed capitalism to flourish and a middle class to blossom in this country in the decades after the Great Depression. In the last quarter century, Democratic and Republican administrations alike participated in the mechanistic “less government is better” trend, to the point where banks and investment houses and insurance companies could engage in virtually any scheme to make money, leverage dollars one hundred times or more, sell and resell and combine mortgages to the point that no one is responsible for making sure decisions are soundly made; and companies could pay their executives outrageous sums where reward bears no relationship to performance.
Still, one has to admit that public attitudes towards the federal government and those who serve in it could hardly be lower. Approval ratings for the federal government sank to 37% this year, from a high of 73% six years earlier, according to the Pew Center. While much of this has to do with attitudes towards the Bush administration and the gathering economic crisis, distrust towards “Washington bureaucrats” is a hearty feature of the American polity.
But this moment of political opening in reaction to economic crisis may change all that. The public may be realizing that the goal is not more or less regulation per se but avoiding unnecessary regulation and ensuring smart regulation that achieves our public policy goals. We need public servants, people whose goal is promoting and protecting the common good, to build a new financial system that encourages investment, the building of real things and the provision of useful services, and that holds financial decision makers accountable for their actions – the essence of capitalism.
I come from a family of public servants. Harry Truman appointed my Great Uncle Theodore Levin to the federal bench in Detroit in 1946. Uncle Ted’s son, Charles, was a distinguished Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court for over 20 years. My dad, Congressman Sandy Levin and my uncle, Senator Carl Levin, have quietly become the longest serving brothers in the history of the U.S. Congress.
But it’s none of these men who set me to wondering whether we’re about to see a public service renaissance. No, it’s my mom, Vicki Levin, who is not famous and was never elected to office. But for almost 30 years, until she was forced to retire in the spring for health reasons, Mom worked hard as a federal employee.
We kids thought we knew a lot about Mom’s career. She ran a committee of scientists and professors who decided which research proposals to fund in the area of infant and children’s mental health. We watched her read through mountains of papers and proposals, often bringing work home. We watched her sweat in preparation for the thrice-yearly meetings of her committee, making sure all the details were just right.
But I don’t think I ever appreciated what her work meant to her and to others, not fully. Back when I lived in the Washington, DC area, I used to try to convince Mom that she should retire – so she could spend more time with my four kids and her other grandchildren. After all, she was in her early 70s. Why not kick back?
Mom bristled at the idea, saying her work and her relationships with colleagues were central to her life.
When her battle with breast cancer forced her to retire in April, we all learned just what Mom was talking about – and just how much public service can mean. Letters of tribute poured in from colleagues, dozens and dozens of research scientists at universities from coast to coast. Soon some people organized the letters, which can be viewed at http://eskoink.com/VL/Vickilevin.pdf. Many colleagues wanted to do more, so they commissioned an original painting as a retirement gift. Next April, there will be a symposium in Mom’s honor at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development.
More than anything, it was the content of the tribute letters that overwhelmed our family. Dozens of scientists, many now the chairs of departments or professors with fancy titles, told detailed stories about how they got their research start with Mom’s help, or how she co-authored a paper with one scientist that is still her most cited work, or how her committee was the intellectual salon of their field.
Some credited her with helping create the emerging field of developmental psychopathology. More than one said she has made the lives of children everywhere better by helping spawn and nourish path breaking research on the biological and environmental factors necessary for a healthy childhood. Many of them told personal stories about how Mom had counseled them through a divorce or an adoption or a rocky situation in their office.
OK, this is my mom, so you can imagine how reading all this felt. But if you step back, Vicki Levin was like so many others among the twenty-one million federal, state and local public servants who make sure we have clean water to drink, who try to figure out how to keep our roads safe in winter while minimizing environmental damage, who protect our park lands, who try to save us from things like tainted Chinese milk without setting up crippling barriers to international movement of goods and services.
Thanksgiving will be hard for my family this year. Mom died on September 4, just a few weeks shy of my parents’ fifty-first wedding anniversary. But as we all get ready to eat our turkey and each family works through its private losses and gratitudes, I wonder whether our nation is ready to move on from the simplistic notion that “government is the problem.” Perhaps, with the consequences of unregulated greed staring us in the face in the vanishing balances of our IRA and 401k accounts, we are ready to give thanks for the humble public servants, who forego the greater monetary rewards available in the private sector to toil for the good of us all.