About This Blog

Remember President (George W.) Bush's references to "compassionate conservatism"? Although he did not coin the term, he adopted it to describe his political philosophy. In an October 2006 Wall Street Journal article (http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009135) by Naomi Schaefer Riley, one of his speechwriters, Michael Gerson, defined it as

"...the theory that the government should encourage the effective provision of social services without providing the service itself."

I got the quote and source from a Wikipedia article that discusses the term and its history more fully: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassionate_conservatism#cite_note-9. Note that the philosophy starts not at whether we should provide social services, but how, i.e., public/government vs. private/nonprofit solutions.

I decided to try to develop a blog based on the notion that we're way past whether we need to be progressive in changing our public policies and instead should be focusing on how we can convince enough of our country of the need to do so. The thought pieces presented here are a result of the evolution of my thoughts and education in this area as well as the level of my conviction that it can be done.