Tom Friedman Needs to Get His Act Together, Says Imus

For a change, New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Thomas Friedman wowed us with his uncanny intelligence, catchy phrasing, and ability to home in on fairly obvious ideas that for some reason nobody else has picked up on yet. His work ethic, however, could use some improvement
 
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Imus said. “Why you need to take a four-month book leave from the Times.”
 
Along with his “intellectual soul mate” Michael Mandelbaum, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and expert on the history of American foreign policy, Friedman is working on a book tentatively called, “That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World it Invented, and How We Find Our Way Back.” It’s his first book about America, a curious topic for someone whose official title at the New York Times is foreign affairs columnist.
 
“I think America—its fate, its future, how we get our act together or don’t—is really the biggest foreign policy issue in the world, because we are so central to how the world runs, the globe’s stability,” he said. “I can’t think of anything more important to write about now than where my own country is going.”
 
How the story ends, Friedman believes, depends more on Americans than on their leaders. “We all look to the President, and obviously he’s central in all this, but ultimately we elect these people, we voted for the trend we’re on, time and time again, and we’re going to have to change the directions, and it’s going to come down to us,” he said. “It’s not a man on horseback we need, Don. It’s a different horse.”
 
What ails America most right now is its economy, and whether good manufacturing jobs will ever return to sustain the middle class, an institution that Friedman said has basically defined the United States as a country.
 
“If you’re an educated person, technology, whether it’s a laptop, or computer automation, a powerful cell phone, all of those things make you actually more productive,” he said. “But if you don’t have education, all of those things basically unemploy you.”
 
Fifty years ago, for example, a person without education could get a job at the meatpacking factory, and earn enough money to buy a home, have a dog, send their kids to school, and enjoy a good retirement. Not so much anymore. “Today, if you don’t have at least a BA, if not more, not only can you not get that job, you might not be able to get any job,” Friedman said. Jobs polarization has, therefore, “kind of wiped out the middle.”
 
The solution lies not in extending tax cuts or borrowing another $7 billion from China, but in finding higher ground. “President Obama has said, ‘The country that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow,’” Friedman said, and stressed the need for a change of course in America. “The only way we can get out of this hole is by growing out of this hole, ultimately, and the only way to grow out of it in today’s world is to educate our way out of it, to develop the skills so we make more stuff that other people want to buy.”
 
There is, in conclusion, no short-term solution to this county’s problems, which is tough news for a hurting populace to take. Almost as tough as it was for Imus to learn Friedman would be taking so much time off to work on a book that someone is helping him write.
 
“No more Pulitzer Prizes for you,” he informed his slacker guest. “This is ridiculous.”
 
-Julie Kanfer