News Progress

•October 25, 2017•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

I worry a great deal about the polarization of what’s left of our two major parties. The Democrats are in thrall to African-American leadership plus party identity culture wars; all they seem to want from government is more.

Within the GOP a battle for dominance is underway among Establishment conservatives, the Tea Party, and the Trump program, spelled out to us in 144 characters every morning.

Nobody speaks for me anymore.

I think most Americans are somewhere in the middle, between the 30-yard lines of the field. We are not necessarily centrists, yet pragmatists who want to see big problems solved and provide order, harmony and prosperity. Read More

•October 11, 2017•

By Trudy Lieberman,
Rural Health News Service

What’s going to happen to healthcare now that Senate Republicans have failed to pass their bill, which would have replaced much of the Affordable Care Act? In particular, what’s going to happen to Medicaid, the government’s largest insurance program, which covers 74 million Americans? This is a good time to clarify what was at stake and may still be up for grabs in the months to come.

Despite its importance to so many people, Medicaid has always been the health system’s stepchild. Many doctors and dentists have avoided taking Medicaid patients saying the program didn’t pay enough. Until recently, editors haven’t been keen to feature stories about Medicaid believing that their audience was not interested in reading about people most likely to be on the program – the poor, the disabled, kids, and seniors who needed it to pay for their nursing home care.  Read More

•October 4, 2017•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

I worry that much of the world is in the process of passing America by, and that most of us are either unaware of same or are resigned to our fate.

Over recent years, I have taught American government for six-week periods at Fudan University in Shanghai, one of their top schools. This past week I hosted one of my former students in Chicago and rural Stark County, prior to his resuming graduate studies at Stanford.

Xudong Yang, 22, is bright as a new penny, outgoing and has a great sense of humor. He has been working his tail off to succeed since grammar school. He told me he worked morning through evening and had no time for outside, extracurricular activities. Many, many Chinese young people are doing the same, strongly encouraged, even pushed, by their parents. They are hungry for success, and the things we take for granted.

Xudong told me he attended an elite high school for seven classroom hours a day, 230 days a year (half days on Saturday). In Illinois and most states, students are in school about six hours a day for 175 or so days. I figure my former student spent the equivalent of 1.6 more years in high school, based on classroom time, than does the typical American student. Read More

•September 27, 2017•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

The Wall Street Journal has been relentless in its criticism of Illinois in recent years, largely because of our budget and political problems. To read its editorial pages, you would think we had contracted The Plague.

For a book I co-authored a couple of years on “Fixing Illinois” (University of Illinois Press, 2014), I was invited to visit Rochelle, in the central-northern part of our state. This small city belies the rap that business won’t come to Illinois.

Below is an op-ed I submitted recently to the WSJ. The short piece is an illustration of how I think we must change the narrative about Illinois and stop flailing ourselves with barbed whips: Read More

•September 13, 2017•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

Former Illinois governor Jim Edgar (1991-98) has developed a bipartisan program for up-and-coming leaders in our state. It has the potential to take our politics from the gutter up toward constructive, problem-solving give and take.

The recent concord on state school funding, for example, a topic riven for years by regional and partisan rancor, may have resulted, in good part anyway, from bonds forged earlier in the Edgar Fellows Program.

Every summer since 2012, Edgar has gathered a new crop of 40 young mayors, fresh-faced state lawmakers and others for an intensive week-long crash course on how to get along and think about how to make Illinois better.

Leadership programs, all valuable, are today so-everywhere. Yet, the Edgar Fellows Program is different, really different.

“I wanted something that was diverse, bipartisan and drew people who were already committed and successfully involved in government and politics,” the moderate, one-time GOP governor told me recently. “People who are likely to make it big in Illinois.” Read More