Fighting For Common Ground

Download or read book Fighting for Common Ground written by Olympia Snowe and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An outspoken centrist, Senator Snowe stunned Washington in February 2012 when she announced she would not seek a fourth term and offered a sharp rebuke to the Senate, citing the dispiriting gridlock and polarization. After serving in the legislative branch at the state and federal levels for 40 years, including 18 years in the U.S. Senate, she explained that Washington wasn’t solving the big problems anymore.In this timely call to action, she explores the roots of her belief in principled policy-making and bipartisan compromise. A leading moderate with a reputation for crossing the aisle, Senator Snowe will propose solutions for bridging the partisan divide in Washington, most notably through a citizens’ movement to hold elected officials accountable. Senator Snowe recounts how the tragedies and triumphs of her personal story helped shape her political approach. Born in Augusta, Maine, Senator Snowe was orphaned at nine, and raised by an aunt and uncle. When she was twenty-six, her husband, a Maine state representative, was killed in an auto accident. Already dedicated to public service, she ran for and won her husband’s seat.The book will include anecdotes from throughout her career, and address her working relationships with Presidents Reagan through Obama, Senator Ted Kennedy, Majority Leader Bob Dole, and many others. As a senior member of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, the high-profile Commerce and Intelligence Committees, and the Senate Small Business Committee, Senator Snowe has been directly involved with the most talked-about legislative challenges of recent decades: the country’s response to 9/11; the 2008 financial crisis; the Affordable Healthcare Act; the debt ceiling debacle, and much more.Her new book will draw on the lessons she's learned as a policymaker, and the frustration she shares with the American people about the government’s dwindling productivity. Senator Snowe passionately argues that the government has now lost its way, shows how this happened, and proposes ways for the world’s greatest deliberative body to, once again, fulfill its mission.

Download or read book No Common Ground written by Karen L. Cox and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.

Download or read book Searching for the Uncommon Common Ground written by Angela Glover Blackwell and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging and in-depth discussion of the persistently divisive issues surrounding race in this country.

Download or read book Common Ground written by Cal Thomas and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by their popular USA Today column, conservative Cal Thomas and liberal Bob Beckel unmask the hypocrisy of the issues, organizations, and individuals that have created and deepened the partisan divide at the center of American politics, and make a strategic case for why this bickering must stop. Thomas and Beckel explain how bipartisanship and consensus politics are not only good for the day-to-day democratic process but also essential for our nation's future well-being. Entertaining and informative, funny and healing, Common Ground is a must-read for all concerned citizens.

Download or read book Our Common Ground: Insights from Four Years of Listening to American Voters written by Diane Hessan and published by Realclear Publishing. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For four years, Diane Hessan has been in weekly conversation with voters across the United States. What she has learned will surprise you, enlighten you, give you hope, and change the way you think about your fellow Americans. Our inability to hear each other, our suspicion, and our impatience is stressing us out and tearing us apart. It's a sickness that permeates the American culture, erodes our collective mental health, and makes us hate each other. To gain insight into how we can move forward, Hessan undertook a massive listening project, conducting an ongoing series of weekly interviews with 500 voters from every state, of every age and ethnicity, and along different points of the political spectrum. The topics ranged from race to guns, from character to party politics, from masks to rallies, from the Supreme Court to the pandemic to immigration and climate change. After more than a million individual communications, two things became clear: We have more common ground than we realize. And we are, sadly, failing at understanding each other. On issue after issue, our "divided" nation isn't nearly as polarized as we imagine. An overwhelming majority of voters believe in commonsense gun licensing and regulation. They are pro-immigration. They believe climate change is real and the coronavirus is deadly. They care deeply about their families and are willing to work hard to make ends meet. And, they believe that Washington is slow, bureaucratic, and not working in their best interests. In dozens of columns on these topics published in The Boston Globe, Hessan has upended common political wisdom. Presented together for the first time as part of this book, they reveal a unique perspective on how Americans actually think, what they value, and how we can move forward. The path to healing our divided nation is both simple and profound. We must turn down the heat. We must begin to listen, to stop presuming, to try to understand, to treat each other with dignity, and to know that most Americans are not crazy radicals. We truly share common ground. If we can pull together, we can have a much better America.

Download or read book Common Ground written by Justin Trudeau and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The national bestseller Justin Trudeau has spent his life in the public eye. From the moment he was born, the first son of an iconic prime minister and his young wife, Canadians have witnessed the highs and the lows, sharing in his successes and mourning with him during tragic times. But few beyond Justin’s closest circle have heard his side of his unique journey. Now, in Common Ground, Justin Trudeau reveals how the events of his life have influenced him and formed the ideals that drive him today. He explores, with candour and empathy, the difficulties of his parents’ marriage and the effect it had on a small boy and the close relationship with a father whose exacting standards were second only to his love for his sons. He explores his political coming of age during the tumultuous years of the Charlottetown Accord and the Quebec Referendum, and reflects on his time as a teacher, which was interrupted by the devastating losses of his brother and father. We hear how a connection was forged with a beautiful young woman, Sophie Gregoire, who had known the Trudeaus in earlier days. Through it all, we come to understand how Justin found his own voice as a young man and began to solidify his understanding of Canada’s strengths and potential as a nation. We hear what drew Justin toward politics and what led to his decision to run for office. Through Justin’s eyes, we see what it was like in those first days of seeking the Liberal nomination for Papineau, when it was just he and Sophie and a clipboard in a grocery store parking lot, and how hard work and determination won him not only the nomination but two hard-fought elections. We learn of his reaction to the considerable Liberal defeat in 2011 and how it clarified his belief that the Liberal Party had lost touch with Canadians—and how that summer he was far from considering a run for the Liberal leadership but contemplating whether to leave politics altogether. And we learn why, in the end, he decided to help rejuvenate the Liberal Party and to run for the leadership and for prime minister. But mostly, Justin shares with readers his belief that Canada is a country made strong by its diversity, not in spite of it, and how our greatest potential lies in finding what unites us, in building on a sense of shared purpose—our common hopes and dreams—and in coming together on common ground.

Download or read book Common Ground written by Donald V. Gaffney and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2019-02-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every time a shooting makes national headlines, the same debates erupt: Is the problem guns or mental health? Why is the United States unique in its gun violence problem? Can we reduce this violence while protecting the right to bear arms? Newtown, Connecticut, native and Disciples of Christ minister Donald V. Gaffney brings a calm and compassionate voice to these complex questions, offering a guide for individuals and groups to reflect on and discuss guns and gun violence. Common Ground explores the place of guns in our individual and national histories, violence in Scripture, the legal issues surrounding gun rights, and ways in which we as moral, life-valuing people can bridge the divide to help solve the problem of gun violence in the United States. To move beyond the talking points and rhetoric dominating gun violence discussions, Gaffney concludes chapters with questions for reflection and discussion to encourage self-examination, exploration, and evaluation of potential solutions to gun violence.