The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

Given this, Mark Hanis shares his feelings that when Biden says he’s going to only select from a very qualified pool of women candidates, you could argue that it’s tokenism or affirmative action or you could say it’s almost impossible for a woman to make it to the very end. Hillary Clinton got the closest and she was one of the most highly qualified, well known candidates ever and didn’t have to pay for a lot of ads to get her name out there. Someone like Kamala Harris, however, needs to spend LOTS of money on ads. There are some countries like Rwanda where 50% of the Parliament needs to be female, and many of the countries in Scandinavia have quotas. What Inclusive America is saying let’s look at the data and if there are problems, let’s tackle them

Mark Hanis notes that Inclusive America looks at the feeders for positions and notice there are strong “tracks” to getting jobs in government. A really troubling thing about the 5000 appointments the Executive Branch makes is that they violate all hiring practices. Very few have formal job descriptions, very few are publicly posted. A lot of them are acquired through who you know, which perpetuates biases. If a lot of white men from Yale Law School hold these positions, they often will hire other white men from Yale to be their colleagues. So Inclusive America works a lot with existing feeders and encourage them to do better in terms of engaging a more representative base.

Mark Hanis shared troubling trends about demographic makeup in the Executive Branch. We’ve never had a woman ambassador in the US for many countries like Germany, Israel, Spain, Russia, China, and Turkey although there have always been very talented women to serve in these positions. We’ve never had an African American serve as Under Secretary of State, which is third highest position in the State Dept. We’ve never had an openly gay person serve on the Federal Reserve Board. The theory of Inclusive America is if we have more diversity at the table, the policies that come out of these positions will be more sensitive and inclusive to better serve our public

As a White House Fellow working for the National Security Council as part of Vice President Biden’s team, Mark Hanis couldn’t help but notice that most of the people around him were white men. He inquired about who was trying to make government representative of our populace. There were some great examples— but they were almost all focused on Congress. There weren’t as many efforts or resources focused on the Executive Branch but that is actually the largest employer in our country, and hires more than 2 million people! The President can appoint almost 5,000 of those—every ambassador, every cabinet member, and many levels below. Yet no one seems to know how many of those are women, people of color, older or younger, people with disabilities, veterans. That’s what Inclusive America is trying to do—first to diagnose and then to figure out whether we’re giving the best people in our country a fair shot to serve our people.

Sarah Hurwitz underscores how much wisdom there is to be mined in our religious traditions, especially about dealing with hard times. So she wanted to write a book that both covered the basics of Judaism and unearthed Judaism’s deepest, most transformative, most helpful wisdom for dealing with the daily challenges of our lives—how we treat each other, how we lead moving, spiritual lives—and that did it in a way that was fun and conversational.

Sarah Hurwitz shared how the Obamas riffed and wrote for weeks in advance of giving a speech out of respect to the audience, so that by the time they were in front of an audience it was well structured and presented coherently. There’s a myth that the greatest speeches happen when you get up to the podium and abandon your script to speak spontaneously from the heart, yet that is only true maybe 5-10% of the time if you’re an MLK kind of orator.

Revisiting Judaism as an adult, Sarah Hurwitz found that it had thousands of years of wisdom for millions of humans on what it means to be human: what it means to be a good person, what it means to lead a truly worthy life, and how to find spiritual connection.

Sarah Hurwitz shared the degree to which authenticity resonates with audiences, from Michelle Obama to Donald Trump. With Trump, people feel that nothing about him is hidden, which appeals to many people, even those who don’t like him. Sarah thinks it’s a response to the kind of speaking and speechwriting that has been overly polished and scripted, which is very insulting to the American people. Trump is the counterbalance to that, which works for a lot of Americans.

Sarah Hurwitz underscores how much context matters in remembering a great line—and the degree to which there’s an element of randomness. Michelle Obama had used the line “when they go low, you go high” in previous speeches but it was in the context of the 2016 convention—that moment in time, that magical speech—that the phrase struck and stuck.