2006 Audio: Emanuel Describes Mandatory Civil Service

Remember during the 2004 presidential election when John Kerry was running around telling everybody he had a plan for everything? He never bothered to state the details of the given plan. It was supposed to be reassuring enough just to know that he had a plan.

Unlike these vague plans touted by Kerry, Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's Chief of Staff, and Bruce Reed really do have a plan. They spell it out in their book, The Plan.

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.

In a 2006 New York Daily News podcast interview, Rahm Emanuel takes questions from Ben Smith about an aspect of "the plan," mandatory civil service.



Transcript, from NewsBusters:

BEN SMITH: I meant to ask you about the universal service piece of the plan. Can you tell me about it? Like, how is this going to work? Are people going to live in barracks?

RAHM EMANUEL: Universal Civil Defense Training…I think he had it at 18, but we were saying somewhere between the ages of 18 and 25, you will do three months of training. You can do it in your(inaudible). Some point in college you can do just that. There can be nothing wrong with all Americans having a joint similar experience of civil ...what we call civil defense training or civil service...some sense of service to country in preparation, which will give people a sense of what it means to be an American. We propose three months. At the end of the day someone says it should be four more. I’m not going to sit here and hold it up.

SMITH: I mean it's a lot more than the U.S. government asks of anybody right now.

EMANUEL: Guess what? We have a lot more challenges, so we are going to need a lot to do it.

SMITH: I mean I don't mean to get hung up on the aesthetics of it, but like uniforms...is it like Europe...people go absent

EMANUEL: If you're worried about going to have to do 50 jumping jacks, the answer is "yes."

SMITH: Are you kinda shifting the "country-esque" Army bases in the Summers? I mean... I wonder how it's going work. This is people's experiences. It's so abstract. Do you go nine to five in some course in a Red Cross building?

EMANUEL: The whole idea there is it will be worked on you can do it through your State-National guard could be the vehicle for that. The goal here (inaudible) to work on piece of legislation for ya' and all that, but that's one venue of doing it.

Obama is on the same page as Emanuel.

OBAMA: We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

This civil defense training is weird. The mandatory part puts a damper on the "Kumbaya" vibe of this proposed civil service. It seems like a punishment, doing hard time.

How does this mandatory service fit in with Obama's promise to give everyone a college education?

NewsBusters examines Obama's "plan."

Change.gov is the source, but as you know, it's undergoing a transformation.



"Required 100 Hours of Service in College"

Is this how Obama plans to fix our broken souls?

Not everyone wants to attend college. What about them? Do they have to serve? Will they get cash?

And what about current college graduates? Are they free from the mandatory public service?

Lots of questions.

I think the plan creates more problems than it solves.
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Ben Shapiro has some relevant thoughts on the subject.