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The impulse to share risks and opportunities, he says, shouldn't be inspired by altruism or charity. "What people don't realize is in so many ways it is in their self-interest to work in cooperation and in concert," he says.

The domestic challenge ahead for Democrats is to build a case for cooperation as compelling as the one Bush is constructing for ownership. With his fresh voice in this debate, Griffith may have started them on the way.

A Fresh Voice Sees the Downside of Bush's 'Ownership Society'
Ronald Brownstein
Washington Outlook
May 2, 2005

Mark Winston Griffith has spent most of his career helping low-income and minority families enter what President Bush calls "the ownership society."

In 1991, Griffith co-founded a community group called the Central Brooklyn Partnership that tried to revive mostly African American neighborhoods such as Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Eventually, the group formed its own credit union —  at the time, the nation's largest black-owned community credit union.

It made loans to local businesses. It held seminars to help first-time buyers navigate the process of acquiring a home. It converted workers and renters into owners. Every day, as the partnership's executive director, Griffith asked himself, "How do we leverage the collective wealth of these neighborhoods and build power for people so that they have control over local resources?"

So when Bush speaks, as he did again at his news conference last week, about the virtue of expanding ownership —  of homes, businesses and stocks  — Griffith understands the yearnings the president evokes.

"The whole idea of an ownership society resonates very deeply not only with community development people, but also with black folks who are thinking along self-help lines," says Griffith, now a fellow at the Drum Major Institute, a New York think tank affiliated with the civil rights movement.

But in the end, Griffith argues, the expanded ownership Bush is promoting won't produce a more equitable society by itself. As a vision of citizenship, Griffith maintains, ownership is too narrow and isolating. "The ownership society," Griffith worries, "is about getting the best deal I can, and forget everybody else."

No Democrat in years has crafted a unifying rationale for domestic policy nearly as sweeping as Bush's emphasis on ownership. Griffith hasn't either. But in a recent essay in the online journal TomPaine.com, he has made more progress than any liberal yet in conceptualizing an alternative to the ownership society that draws on the Democrats' strongest legacy: its tradition of promoting collective action to expand individual opportunity and strengthen the social safety net.