A Bold Promise. Security and Opportunity for the Next American Centry

Using Their Strength Against them

In judo, you don’t oppose your opponent’s force—you redirect it. You use their momentum to throw them off balance. This is the strategy we need now: take the Republican Party’s most powerful themes—security and opportunity—and redirect them toward policies that actually deliver on those promises.

So let me paraphrase Ronald Reagan’s question from the 1980 Presidential Debate: “Are you better off today than you were when this administration took office?”

Before you answer, let’s consider what “better off” really means.

The State of Our Security

Our children are less safe:

- 53 school shootings with 19 fatalities through September 2025

- Measles cases surged from 55 in 2012 to 1,500 in 2025, following the dismissal of all 17 CDC Vaccine Advisory Board members

- 2025 losses attributed to weather related already exceed $130 billion

Our national defense has been weakened:

- The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was replaced with a less qualified officer who never served as a unified combatant commander

- The Secretary of Defense is grossly unqualified to lead the military and has shown remarkable lapses of judgement in his handling of sensitive information directly related to classified military operations

- Political loyalty now trumps military expertise in critical national security positions

Our children’s futures have been compromised:

- $4.5 billion cut from K-12 education

- $1.65 billion slashed from vocational training programs

- All while the deficit increased by $3.4 trillion through tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy

Our fiscal security has deteriorated:

- The Congressional Budget Office projects revenues will drop by $4.5 trillion while direct spending decreases only $1.1 trillion—a net deficit increase of $3.4 trillion over the next decade

This isn’t security. This is the opposite of security.

From Criticism to Solutions

It’s easy to point out failures. The harder question is: what do we build instead?

Here’s where the judo move completes itself. Republicans claim to own “security” and “opportunity.” Let’s show them what those words actually mean—and build a coalition around policies that deliver real security and genuine opportunity for all Americans.

The Bold Promise Framework

I propose we reframe the national conversation around a single covenant: The Bold Promise for the Next American Century. This isn’t a new entitlement program. It’s a partnership between government, industry, and academia focused on two non-negotiable goals:

1. Security in all its forms

2. Opportunity for every American

What Real Security Looks Like

Security isn’t just military hardware—though we absolutely need a defense and establishment capable of identifying and deterring threats while training to fight and win across every domain: land, sea, air, space, and cyber.

Real security means:

Health Security: Universal access to preventive care and vaccination programs that protect our children from diseases we conquered generations ago. When measles returns, we’ve failed at the most basic level of governance.

Economic Security: Living wages, portable benefits, and safety net programs that catch people when they fall—not after they’ve hit bottom, but before they’re seriously hurt. No holes.

Energy Security: True independence through diversified sources—renewable, nuclear, and transitional fuels—that insulate us from global price shocks and reduce our strategic vulnerabilities.

Infrastructure Security: Roads, bridges, railroads, ports, broadband, and electrical grids capable of moving goods, services, and information to every corner of the nation. A country that can’t deliver packages or data efficiently can’t compete globally.

Fiscal Security: This is where we must be ruthless. Our growing debt weakens the dollar, increases the risk of financial crisis, and hamstrings our ability to respond to emergencies or invest in priorities. We cannot borrow our way to prosperity. Every program must justify its existence based on return to the nation—not to special interests, not to individual districts, but to America’s competitive position and our children’s futures.

What Real Opportunity Looks Like

We need an education system that produces citizens across the entire spectrum of skills. Not every student should go to college—and that’s not a failure, it’s a feature.

Specific Policy Proposals:

Vocational Renaissance Initiative: $10 billion investment in partnerships between community colleges, unions, and industries to create paid apprenticeships in high-demand trades. We need HVAC technicians, electricians, plumbers, and machinists as desperately as we need software engineers. These are six-figure careers that don’t require six-figure debt. Let’s build pathways from high school to these jobs with the same prestige and support we give to pre-med programs.

Universal Pre-K and Childcare Support: Research shows every dollar invested in early childhood education returns $7 in reduced social costs and increased economic productivity. This isn’t charity—it’s the highest-ROI investment we can make. Make it available to every family making under $150,000 annually, scaled by income.

Higher Education Accountability: No more federal loans for programs that don’t deliver results. If your graduates can’t earn enough to repay their loans within 10 years, you don’t get federal funding. Period. This will force universities to either cut costs, improve outcomes, or shut down predatory programs.

STEM and Trades Tax Credit: Businesses that hire recent graduates in STEM fields or skilled trades get a $10,000 annual tax credit per employee for three years, provided those workers receive competitive wages and benefits. This creates immediate incentive for companies to invest in young workers.

High Speed Rail: Our cities are gridlocked with traffic. Commute times within metropolitan areas and travel times between regional commercial centers take too long. A public private partnership to build rail networks in the Northeast Corridor, Texas, California, Florida and in the midwest will create jobs and unlock productivity trapped on our crowded highways. A rail trip between Boston and New York or Houston and Dallas is less than 250 miles. High speed rail should shrink those trips to less than two hours from downtown to downtown.

The Judo Move

Here’s the beautiful part: every element of this agenda can be sold using conservative rhetoric about fiscal responsibility, national strength, and opportunity through hard work.

We’re not asking Republicans to abandon their values—we’re asking them to actually live up to them. That’s the judo move. We use their stated principles as leverage to achieve policies that work for everyone.

Can we afford this? The better question is: can we afford not to? Every dollar we don’t invest in our children’s education is a dollar spent on incarceration, emergency healthcare, and diminished competitiveness later. Every dollar we don’t spend on infrastructure is a dollar lost to inefficiency and missed economic opportunity.

A Covenant, Not a Handout

The Bold Promise is exactly that—a promise, not a guarantee of outcomes. It promises:

- An education system aligned to your aptitude and ambition

- Healthcare that won’t bankrupt your family

- Infrastructure that connects you to opportunity

- A defense that protects our interests without endless wars

- Fiscal responsibility that preserves the value of your labor

But it requires something in return: commitment, hard work, participation in civic life, and a willingness to compromise.

The Path Forward

We stand at an inflection point. We can continue down a path of manufactured cultural grievances and fiscal recklessness, or we can return to a politics grounded in the two things most Americans actually agree on:

• The country must be secure, and we must create opportunities for our children greater than those we had ourselves.

Everything else is distraction.

Republicans claim these values as their own. Fine. Let’s build policy around them—real policy with measurable outcomes, not slogans. Let’s redirect their rhetoric toward solutions that work.

That’s the judo move. And if we execute it properly, everyone wins—except the politicians who profit from division and the special interests who profit from dysfunction.

The Bold Promise isn’t a Democratic agenda or a Republican agenda. It’s an American agenda for those serious about governing rather than simply winning the next election.

Are you better off than you were before this administration took office? If not, isn’t it time we unite to build something better together?