Leadership dialogues: Leaders galvanize, mobilize

In his high-rise office in downtown Seattle, with its spectacular view of the city’s defining characteristics — water, mountains and traffic — Ron Sims, King County executive since 1996, talked leadership and the guts it takes to do it well. Sims, 58, grew up in Spokane. His role models fought for civil rights and challenged the status quo in 1960s Spokane. Here’s the entire transcript of Sims’ conversation with editorial board members Doug Floyd and Rebecca Nappi and videographer Colin Mulvany

Q: Let’s start with your father, the Rev. James Sims, a Baptist minister in Spokane, a state employee and one of the early leaders in civil rights awareness in Spokane. What did you learn about leadership from watching your father?

A: My father was able to marry intellect and courage and passion in a marvelous way. He’s the greatest man I’ve ever known or seen. When I read history books, I say, “Wow, a lot like my father.” He was just a marvelous talent. Born at the wrong time, but the right time for Spokane and the right time for me. My father was a graduate of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. In those times, there was a quota system at Princeton University, so when you were not admitted to Princeton under the quota — which was two African Americans or one per year — you went to Lincoln University where he graduated with honors. He came to Spokane during World War II at a time when it was difficult for African Americans to move through the social framework of Spokane because they weren’t used to highly educated African Americans. He was a soldier and he decided to stay here.

It was all that intellect that was very formidable. He had passion, vision and a strong sense of morality that allowed him to move forward. It was a wonderful tutelage. He was very forgiving and that amazes me to this day — his capacity to forgive people. He endured a lot of insults and yet he never manifested any hate or dislike and years later he’d see those same people at dinner or at church and they’d chat as if nothing had happened. They were products of their time, as was he, and he was far more interested in whether people changed than in visiting who they were in the past.

Q: Can you think of one example of your father’s leadership?

A: My father was the pack master of Pack 33 Cub Scouts. It was a pack needing leadership, and my father went to a meeting and I have no idea to this day how he became the Pack master. I remember his first meeting. I don’t know why he even did this, but he decided to create a chant for the pack. “Boomalacka boomalacka, boom, boom, boom. Bingalacka, bingalacka, bing, bing, bing. Boomalacka, bingalacka, who are we? Cub Scouts Pack 33!” And the room erupted and there was all this fervor. I was waiting for this loquacious speech and my dad said chants and music can be very energizing. He decided to galvanize them in a cheer. It’s years later and I still remember “Boomalacka boomalacka, boom, boom, boom.”

It worked. It changed the whole nature of that Cub Scout pack. My mother became a den mother. I look back at it and see how my dad was able to survey a scene and ask, how do you energize a Cub Scout pack? And my father realized the role chant or music would play. That’s leadership. Leaders can identify their audience, and motivate their audience, and galvanize their audience.

I also remember my father leading a demonstration in downtown Spokane when the NAACP decided to march on the Bon Marche because the Bon Marche said their clients did not want to take change from the hands of African Americans. The issue was do you work in the warehouse or will you have the opportunity to be a cashier? So the march was to open up cashier and sales jobs.

I’ll never forget my father marching and a person came and spit on me. So I took my sign and hit him, which is the reaction you have when you are 12 years old and someone spits on you. My father told me afterward, “Never, ever adopt the behavior of the people who insult you. Never be as low as they are. I expected you to control yourself and you disappointed me.”

And that ended it. Since that time, I’ve always tried to avoid adopting the behaviors of those who most dislike me. My father said they should be welcomed with respect, which is really hard to do.

Q: Your mother, Lydia Sims — a woman of “firsts” in Spokane — what did you learn about leadership from your mother?

A: That leadership is not confined to gender. My mother was a feminist before the word was coined. She was every bit my father’s equal. My father was such an immense figure, but we realized that mom ran the house. Mom set the tone. People didn’t realize that they alternated every year as NAACP presidents. Even to this day in Seattle, people remember my mom for her forcefulness as president of the NAACP. Different style than my father. My mother was the person who dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s. My mother used to say the key is goals, focus on goals. Listen to other people, make adjustments, but always focus on goals. A leader never ever is the person who says here is the map how we are going to get there. A leader mobilizes people so they can actually form the map to reach the goal.

One of my mother’s and father’s best friends was Miss Merrill. She was almost 100 years old before she died. We used to go to her house. She was part of a United Nations group and an American Friends Service Committee. My mother would insist we’d go to Miss Merrill’s house. In the wintertime, we’d eat creamed corn. Miss Merrill had a roomful of books and music. My father was a pianist and she was pianist. My father would play classical music.

But they would debate all the time — international issues. Here was my father and mother and Miss Merrill, and you just listened to them, as kids do, while we were playing with the toys that she had. We’d just listen to them talk about this world I didn’t know about. I didn’t know about China. I didn’t know about Russia. I didn’t know about Germany and France and Italy. And they just talked about it so easily, who the leaders were and the growth of fascism. I used to love going to Miss Merrill’s house. I didn’t want my parents to know that, because I wasn’t wild about creamed corn. But it was just a wonderful occasion, insisted on by my mother.

Today we’re in a global world and I appreciate that foundation being laid. Miss Merrill was elderly even when we knew her. She lived to almost 100. She was involved in everything. She walked everywhere. We’d say, “Dad, why does Miss Merrill walk.” He’d say, “It’s good for her health.” Now we know.

Q: In 1978, after you’d left Spokane, there was a newspaper article that quoted your parents and it was about how few black people were visible in public life in Spokane. In that environment, how and where did you find your role models?

A: Calvary Baptist Church was an African American church — still there. The minister was Rev. Reed followed by Rev. Daw. Many of the African American leadership was there. Mr. and Mrs. Curtley. Mr. and Mrs. Lake. My parents. Mr. and Mrs. Mapps. Mrs. Green. There was a real strong presence there. I’ll give you an example. When I was hit by a car crossing the street, Mrs. Lake came to my home to make sure I had instruction every day I was out of school. Orlando Fletcher who was a teacher at Lewis and Clark High School. I was in third grade and he visited out home and he was insistent that I not pull back from the books I was reading. I had a fractured skull.

I can remember when I was at Lewis and Clark, I had a teacher who said, “African Americans do not have a history worth recording.” I will never forget that teacher. Very prominent teacher, everyone loved him. But that was a pretty searing comment. I told my father. So my father took the Baptist Training Unit of Calvary Baptist and turned it into a black history class. And so Mona Lake — who is now here (in Seattle), Mona Lake Jones, a wonderful poet — and her sister Sylvia Lake, all of us were required to go to this BTU class and learn black history. It was intense. We were given lessons.

And I remember having to do a book report for the teacher who said that African Americans did not have a history worth recording. And I said I would like to recite a passage from James Baldwin, an expatriate author of European fame and renown called “The Fire Next Time.” And so I did the book report. What James Baldwin was writing about was the cumulative frustration of African Americans and how it would explode.

I remember the last passage was a poem on the back of this book and I looked at my teacher and said, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time!”

The teacher just bolted back. I’ve never forgotten that. I was telling him that now I was very confident that as a black American that I had a history worth recording. A history of great expression, great foundation. So that BTU at Calvary Baptist Church proved to be very, very good.

There were some wonderful people. Rev. Antisdale was the minister at Fourth Memorial Church, used to be Fourth Presbyterian Church and then it became independent. Rev. Underhill at the same church. Dale Sperling who was my Sunday school teacher for years and the church league baseball and basketball coach for years. All of them managed to mold and shape certain type of values. They complemented my father’s insistence that I have a moral upbringing and a religious foundation. And though we may differ in outcomes, there would be a consistency of approach, a sense of right and wrong and duty and responsibility to family and other people in the community.

Q: Are any of your role models still alive in Spokane?

A: No, they are all gone. Well, one of my role models is (still alive.) Ronald Miller is. He was my fifth grade teacher. He was once assistant superintendent of the Spokane School District. He was marvelous. He did two things. One, he was Jewish. I did not know that. He got married in the synagogue and that was my first synagogue. Two, Ronald Miller believed in me when no one else did. In fifth grade, he believed in me. He saw something in me I didn’t see in myself. I just didn’t see it. He knew it was there and he really wanted to search and find it and he did. All of a sudden, things bubbled up.

He was followed up by two other teachers. Mrs. Peck, my speech teacher, who I hated all the way through my high school but loved all my adult life. And Spokane Hutchinson who taught me the power of words and expression and for whatever reason, sometimes you find a teacher you can just listen to all day long and you wish you had that person in every single class and to this day, I look to those things that are imprinted on you that say you can achieve. She gave me those.

Another was Carlos Flores who used to say to me I spoke Spanish better than English, which was probably true at the time. He was one of my references to college. He left teaching and went to Gonzaga Law School and he may be practicing in Spokane. The one thing he did that was good for me was that he came to me and said he didn’t want me to see what he wrote as a reference until I graduated from high school. I got accepted (to college) within six days, but then I read it.

He said my grades would never reflect my potential nor were they a good indicator. When I got to college, my adviser at the time put me in 17 hours of P.E. and said I had to go back and prepare myself for college. I went honors my freshman year. I always think about Mr. Flores and what he said. My grades never reflected what he saw and what Ronald Miller saw.

My last year of high school, my grades were really, really good. My last six quarters of high school, I panicked because I was worried about being sent to Spokane Community College and at that time, you were sent there for carpentry, plumbing and to be an electrician, everything I couldn’t do. So I saw myself without a future. Those were highly skilled jobs, they paid well, and I respect them to this day, but you would never ask me to fix anything. Ask my whole family. No one would ever say to me fix the sink or do anything electrical.

My last six quarters were very, very good. But you look at my teachers — Spokane Hutchinson, Mrs. Peck, Carlos Flores — they were the people molding me those last six quarters.

Q: We saw you in action with a group of young people in 1993, from the LINKS program in Spokane. It was real early morning, and they were kind of slouching. You looked at them and said you sit up straight, brighten up, get some life in you. You will be judged on that. How important is it to act the part of a leader?

A: People don’t follow someone who looks like a failure. It’s that simple. We get verbal clues and non-verbal clues. If you look like a person who has doubts, then you convey that with far more strength than you think. You have to look like a person who is going to lead. A person who leads has a certain confident walk, a certain carriage, a certain look, a certain feel. We call it charisma, but it’s more than charisma. They walk like winners.

I coach and when I coached, I told my players that if they thought they were going to lose, they would. If they had any questions about winning, they would lose. They had to believe they were going to win from the first time they hiked the ball. I stressed that in practice. I said, “When we go on the field, we will not engage in bravado, thumping chests, we will look like a machine. And we will act like champions and they did. But it was embedding in them that they must look and act like winners.

Leaders will do the same thing. They will look and act like leaders. It doesn’t mean they look down on anybody. It means a confident carriage. When I asked the students to ask questions —leaders ask questions. And leaders listen to answers. Remember I told you that my mother told me that a leader never draws the roadmap, they allow others to create it. A good leader will go to a group of people and say, “We are going to reach the summit. Now how do you want to get there?” They convey the opportunities and then they mobilize other people and develop the belief they will achieve that victory.

Q: Where did your confidence come from?

A: I don’t know how else to act.

Q: You’ve run for office a few times. You’ve had two big runs and two big losses – the U.S. Senate and the governor’s primary race. What did you learn about leadership by running?

A: One, you have to be confident of your ability to express your opinions. A leader should never worry about failing. There’s two things you try not to do when you are a leader. You never gloat over your success. I’m in my third term as county executive. That’s a rarity, nationally, let alone here. Only John Spellman has been a three-term executive. I ran successfully for three terms as a county council member. Once with my opponent campaigning for me, the other one unopposed. You never gloat over your successes and you never are disappointed in your defeats. Life is short and you move on. And you realize that when you reflect back, everything is a building block. Your defeats are building blocks for your successes and your successes are building blocks. You never know what the end of the road will look like, but all these things are woven in for your betterment.

Q: What did you learn about leadership by losing?

A: It made me fearless. I don’t worry about defeat.

Q: How does that help you do your job now?

A: The job is far more complex today. We have far more issues. Global warming issues. Financial issues. Huge societal issues. Global trend issues in economics. We’re in an area growing rapidly in constrained land. There’s health care, public health, mental health, drugs and alcohol, the criminal justice system. The pressures for solutions are enormous now. The status quo doesn’t work anymore. The status quo is indicting. This world is moving rapidly and changing with extraordinary speed. The status quo only means you are falling further behind. The key is to be more effective with the resources you have and be able to move with agility. That requires risk- taking. The communities in the world that are going to win are going to be the risk-takers. There will be no mercy shown in the 21st century to the status quo. There will be no mercy shown to the communities that remain stagnant. They will be inconsequential to the schemes of global economic growth.

Q: Have you had to grow a thick skin? Or is that something you had naturally?

A: You always grow a thick skin in politics. Someone asked, being in the positions I had, what was the one thing you had to get used to? I said loss of privacy and people expressing themselves about whether I was doing a good job or a bad job. People now are more likely to say nice job, but I went through a period of time in a cycle of politics where the only people who had anything to say were the people who didn’t like what you were doing. So you develop a very thick skin. You don’t take anything personally. Remember I told you about my father and the people who disdained him and what he stood for and then later on, they liked him and he liked them, because the past was inconsequential. All of us are products of our time.

So you develop a thick skin. Not for the purpose of insulating yourself from criticism but trying not to take things personally. People who opposed me different times over different issues and have done so with vigor and relish, who have gloated over my defeats, are people who now I talk to, go out to dinner with them, and they are very good friends. I never let where they were affect me and I never let where I was affect them. Thick thin is not designed to shove people away and ignore them — but to heal.

Q: In 1997, you said at a Leadership Spokane luncheon that a “leader knows you treasure every day.” Can you elaborate?

A: Every day is a gift. I’m very religious. I believe, whatever faith you have, that every day of life is a gift. I lost my father, who I think about every day. Shortly I will lose my brother, who I think about every day. I realize the preciousness of life. I still have my mom. I still have my own family. Every day is an absolute gift. The question is when you receive a gift, do you hide it? Or do you open it and enjoy it? And if you open and enjoy life, then you live it to its fullest. You are not so busy living that you forget about life. You’re busy. You want to see change. You welcome it and you relish it. It’s like a big menu for you that’s yours to dine on.

Q: When you were talking about risk-taking as an inherent part of leadership that implies that when you stand up and ask people to follow in your path, there is a chance it won’t work out as you had in mind. It seems there’s an implicit question on a lot of people’s mind — what gives you the right to stand up and ask others to follow you? How do you have the confidence to do that?

A: I don’t care whether you’re in a small work setting in an office, or whether you are running a government or corporation or community group or Cub Scout pack, we’re all expected to have a vision if you’re going to lead. Where are we going? What are we going to do? How are we going to get there? Any of us can ask. The issue is whether people will follow. But my right to ask is no different than any other citizen’s right to say “I’m going to try this.” In my job, I’m elected as the executive of this county, one of the largest in this country, very large budget — $4 billion. I’m not expected to hold the status quo. I’m expected to run a government very efficiently. At the same time, this community elected me because they wanted to know what we were going to do next.

The opportunity I have now is no different than when I taught Sunday School at Zion Baptist Church and I said we’re going to go out and instead of just reading Bibles in class, we are going to do prison ministries, downtown ministries, and next thing I know, people are going to prison with me, jails with me, downtown with me. I said our faith is something we will practice. All of us have the capacity and opportunity to lead and the question is whether we are willing to do that.

I once went to Lake Coeur d’Alene with my father and we walked upon the beach. My father stopped and said, “See that sandy beach? That’s life. You have the opportunity to be a wave that doesn’t affect the shore at all, or the opportunity to be a wave that jumps and caresses the shore. or you have the opportunity to be a wave that would rearrange the shore.” And the question is, what path would you take? All of us have that opportunity.

Q: We live in a time when politics can be brutal and extreme. We have elections about people and whether they want to win and hold office. And sometimes there are elections about people who have visions they’d like to see become manifest. How do you refrain from the polarization and the meanness of politics and cling to a vision when so many things around you are moving in another direction?

A: You can’t hold onto your office tightly. When I lost the race for the United States Senate, I realized I could lose and still there’d be a next day. What happens in politics, and it drives me nuts, is that people are wedded to power, not purpose. They don’t love policy. They love power and position. What happens too often in politics is that people see the office they hold as “them.” And that office not being any good without “them.”

In a Democracy, people have a right to change their leaders. And they will change their leaders. And you have to be willing to step aside and move on. Politics have become money-driven. The ends justify the means. That’s immoral to me. You can’t justify that under any standard anywhere in a moral framework. We’ve adopted that in politics today. It’s appalling that people are getting away with it. And nobody is demanding we work out of moral framework of right and wrong.

We realize that immorality, that ends justifying the means, only brings the fruits of more immorality. We’ve got to stop it because history has shown that nations are undermined, that nations can’t sustain themselves on that premise. History is both a refined teacher and a good one that lays out the consequences of our behavior. I worry about our country. We’re a young Democracy. A young superpower. If you look at sustainability of a culture, you see that they had a very defined sense of who they were and where they were going. We did have that, in World War I, World War II, that post-war period, the Dwight Eisenhower period, the Kennedy-Nixon period, we had it. We’ve lost our markers.

We had it when Dan Evans was governor here. He changed the state. He marked a sense of purpose. Dan Evans made a decision to open up the public education system in ways people thought couldn’t occur. I was a product of the public education system and the opportunities.

Then we went into power politics and do-nothing politics and status-quo politics and hopefully, we’ll move away from that. The next generation will probably do that. Looking at the last cast of leaders, they’ll say that style didn’t work, and they’ll look for leaders who will take them far more aggressively and firmly through the 21st century. We need an enduring leadership. People who understand strength and backbone and values. It’s missing. I thought maybe over the last couple of years that it might get better and I think it incrementally is getting better, but wow, we went through a long period of time where power was more important, position was more important and perks were more important than performance. I’m so glad that period has exhausted itself.

I worry about America. I have three sons and a grandchild. I worry about America. I worry about its stamina and its strength. America is the world’s grand experiment. Never before has a nation been created without a common gene pool. We all got here by a boat — voluntarily or involuntarily — or by a land bridge. No common gene pool. The world’s first grand experiment. And I want this experiment to endure. When we lose our sense of who we are, if we operate outside of moral frameworks, if we don’t make good decisions and invest in every person, we’ll lose this grand experiment. There’s never been a country like us before. But I hope all countries become like us in the future.

Q: Patience or impatience? Which is the most important trait for a leader to have?

A: You must be impatient about the status quo. And very patient about the ability for people to change.

Q: What traits do you share with other effective leaders?

A: Other effective leaders have had a presence, a charisma, a sense of direction where they wanted to go. They have been willing to succeed or fail. I’m not afraid to fail. I’m not afraid of success. I’m a risk-taker. Staff here will tell you that they walk on edge here everyday. Not in terms of the tension, but they are taking issues to the forefront that are not being taken to the forefront anywhere else. We were in a meeting in New York City and we were talking to a group of international organizations who were soliciting our assistance to help them. A person sitting next to me said, “We did a search on a whole series of issues and it kept coming up King County. We deal with nations and large global corporations, but we’ve never dealt with a local entity. You are a class in your own.”

We deal with issues, such as reducing crime, major health care reforms, global warming, transportation. We have complemented corporations’ efforts to grow the economy out. We went from a Double A plus county in credit rating to a Triple A county and at the same time we reduced our costs by over $135-140 million.

Q: Why did it happen?

A: It takes guts. You walk on the edge. It takes guts. Just guts. You either have them or you don’t. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s not intellectually driven. There’s a lot of intellect out there with no guts. It’s just guts. How do you define guts? I don’t know. You just got to do it everyday.

Q: Is that what a leader is, somebody with guts?

A: Yeah. Just guts.

Q: What must be changed to get others with leadership potential to use it in the political arena?

A: We’re going to have to ask people who have the capacity and skills to lead — well-read, a sense of history and have a vision to improve their communities and the country — we’re going to have to ask them to forgo money, privacy and adoration. But they are going to have to do it because they love this country and their communities more than personal adoration and personal wealth. The reason I really like Bill Gates and admire him is that this is a person who acquired great wealth and has been busy trying to figure out how to get rid of it, same way with Warren Buffet. And now what are both of them doing? They have moved into that age where they have decided not to run companies anymore, but they are using their money to try to make change on the world’s most intractable problems. That stuff is going to be really difficult.

I am glad Bill Gates made his money. I am also glad that Bill Gates is going to head the Gates Foundation. I am glad that Warren Buffet made his money, and I am glad he decided that making more money is not life’s purpose. It is basically making the world better. We are going to have to communicate to people who have wealth or thinking about making it, that public service is more noble and more important to this country than ever before. We are going to have to ask them to love this country, even if the country won’t love them as much, they are going to have to love it so much that they are willing to forgo what they would be capable of and give earnestly back to the country their skills and abilities.

Q: What will be the legacy of Ron Sims?

A: I want my grandchildren to say their life is better because of what I did. And that I didn’t leave anything on the field of play. I didn’t come off rested. I left it all — perspiration, blood, sweat and soul — I left it all on the field of play. There was no more to give. And because of that, their world is better.

Q: Are their two or three specific books that are sources of wisdom that you would recommend to others aspiring to leadership?

A: I think the Bible, whether you read it as literature or part of your faith, is an amazing series of texts that provide great tutelage. I’ll give you two books that I say if I were a teacher I would use. “The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver. I’d use that. Good intentions gone astray and the emergence of good intentions that actually bore fruit. The other one is Isaac Asimov’s Trilogy Foundation. He wrote three books and combined them into a foundation. It starts small and ends so eloquently. You see a passage of time and history in this science fiction book. These are teaching books.

Are there other books I’ve just been amazed with? Yes. My father used to take me to libraries and ask, “What do you see?” I said, “I see a lot of books.” He’d say, “You see the level of what you do not know.”

A leader has got to be a leader. You’ve got to read. The people who talk about Martin Luther King’s speeches. You can see the intellect force behind what he stood for. When I go out to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ceremonies, I tell people, “Here’s a person who graduated from high school at 15 to go to Morehouse University where he graduated with honors, he went to Crozer Seminary where he graduated with honors and then went to Boston University where he graduated with honors — in philosophy. He wasn’t a leader by luck. He wasn’t a leader who just was a mediocre talent. He was an absolutely superb intellect who could speak.

I tell kids, “Do not recite to me one more speech from the Lincoln Memorial. I don’t want to hear it. What I want you to do is to tell me how many books you’ve read in a given year, what those books meant to you in a given year and what they mean to you.”

The first book that ever opened me up was “The Sea for Sam” and “Moby Dick.” I read them back to back. I can’t tell you why my father saw the need for me to read “Sea for Sam” which wasn’t the most exciting book and you don’t even hear about it anymore. My father made me read “Moby Dick” and asked me all kind of questions, “What does it mean? Why were those passages written the way they were?”

“The Animal Farm” was another book. You’ve just go to read, read, read. Ignorance has no place in the 21st century and ignorance has no place in leaders. Africa is filled with ignorant leaders. They are despots. They are driving nations into the ground and creating poverty where we thought it couldn’t be created. Africa has both the brilliance of intellect and it has what happens when you don’t.

Intellect, reading, trying to learn new things. Read what you don’t know. I say to my kids, “Why do I want to read what I know? I need to read what I don’t know.” I remember giving a talk at the University of Washington where I said I saw no need for computers because you can hire people to do that work. Then I read a book talking about how computers would revolutionize the future. I’d wish I had read it before I gave such an ignorant speech. Now I carry my computer in my pocket.

So read, read, read. When you are sick of reading, read some more. I read newspapers every single day because newspapers define current events. Dr. Smith, my favorite college teacher, made me read the Ellensburg Daily Record prior to World War II and said, “What did you find?” I said, “I didn’t see anything about Germany or Japan.” He said, “That’s right. You got crop reports and who got married.” He said, “The value of papers today is to have a sense of where the community is and where the world is changing. The world changes by small nuances you don’t pick up.”

My oldest son who was allergic to books works in a library and he attracts kids into the library because the power is in what you read. My second son, a Washington State University graduate, is also a reader. My youngest son is at Arizona State, an honors student, and he said that what he got out of high school that got him into honors was that he read and he wrote. “We were told to read, read, read all through high school and then develop our own ways of expression.” He knows how to organize and express his thoughts because he’s been reading other people’s thoughts.

People will ask, “What is the last book you read?” To me, that’s never the question. It’s “How often do you read and what do you read?” We’ve all been taught as politicians to have the last book we read memorized, even if we are lying through our teeth. I always ask, “Do you have a library card?” A household interested in the intellectual advancement of their children, and their own, will have a library card. A library tells you what you don’t know. Amazon.com tells you what pleases you. There’s a big difference. What you don’t know you can learn freely. What you want to entertain yourself with, you buy.

As a nation, this is our big challenge. When a child enters first grade, they should be issued a library card. When a child enters middle school, they should get them again. When entering high school, they should get them again. And they should be told at 18, here’s your voter registration card, and here’s your library card, because the key to a good democracy is one that’s smart. Democracies require educated people, otherwise democracies can turn into the most despotic one, the strongest looking one.

I was in Kenya. I gave a speech there last fall. Afterward we were talking with a group of students. They said, “How can Kenya overcome its tribalism?” I said, “Your history should tell you tribalism has been ineffective for history. Has anyone been reading your history?” This one student raised his hand and said, “I wish I could clone you for my classes.” That student read and realized that tribalism is interfering with Kenya’s nationalism and its ability to merge and be stable. Kenya’s dominated by tribalism and whichever tribe is bigger, wins. In the end, you can’t have one tribe win and the other lose without huge social disruption. An educated public that reads will be the survivor of this 21st century.

Q: What’s your personal opinion about the move to all mail-in balloting?

A: All-mail balloting increases Democratic participation. More people vote under it than without it. What I want as a public official is to have people engaged in civic affairs. Do I scratch my head and wonder why you guys wouldn’t walk to a poll site?

I was in Zambia when President Carter asked us to be on an elections team to provide people the opportunity to have free and fair elections for the first time ever. Kenneth Kaunda, the founder of Zambia, used to be called Northern Rhodesia, was voted out of office. People were dancing in the street and celebrating, because it was the first time they had choice. They had to walk to their provinces. Some of them walked seven days to their province, because Kenneth Kaunda erected every barrier they could to keep them from voting. Every barrier.

They would sit outside these polling sites in long lines in the hot sun. They voted at numbers that America would just be in awe of. They went through things that none of us would believe would be what you have to do to vote. I wish we had that same fervor here in this country. All-mail ballots get us close.