In Boston and New York, Bill Bratton brought modern management to police work. We asked Bratton what he learned from combating urban crime, and the fear associated with it, that can help in the quest for security in an age of terrorism. His answer? Law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to work together. And the public needs to get a grip.

If we feel safe from crime on the streets of Boston and New York City today, and largely we do, it’s in no small part thanks to Bill Bratton. Bouncing back and forth between the Hub and the Big Apple, from superintendent of the Boston Police Department to chief of New York’s transit police, then back to Boston to run the BPD and finally to the NYPD as police commissioner, William J. Bratton demonstrated that the fight against urban crime could be won at a time when many experts thought it was a lost cause.

In Boston, he nailed shut the coffin of the squad-car-bound, response-time-oriented model of policing. Then he transformed the squishy concept of “community policing,” which wanted beat cops to be social workers, into a form of decentralized management that put precinct commanders on the hook for solving locally defined problems. (Just as important, when he took off for New York for the second time, he left the department in the hands of Commissioner Paul Evans, who took the approach even further, deepening law-enforcement ties to neighborhood leaders, especially black ministers.)

In New York, working with the late Jack Maple, his legendary sidekick, Bratton made police leadership a management science with Compstat, a procedure that used sophisticated data-gathering and analysis to target the department’s crime-fighting resources and hold commanders accountable for results. It was only two years before Mayor Rudolph Giuliani forced out his high-profile–and high-living–police commissioner, just weeks after Time magazine put Bratton on its cover and gave him credit for an unprecedented decline in New York’s crime rate.

Since 1996, the 54-year-old Bratton has become a leading consultant on security and public safety, providing advice to public officials around the world and to audiences public and private on the lecture circuit. He currently heads his own small consulting firm, the Bratton Group, and maintains an ongoing relationship with Kroll, an international business-investigations, security, and intelligence firm. As security has become a priority, if not preoccupation, of institutions of all sorts, not to mention an anxious public, firms like Kroll have been more in demand than ever. And so has Bratton. Last fall, the rumor mill had him returning to the helm of the NYPD if Democrat Mark Green had become mayor of New York City, and his name came up repeatedly here in speculation about moves to shore up Massport’s security and public image.

But of more interest than the jobs that might come his way are Bratton’s thoughts since September 11. In speeches and in writings, he has begun to apply his experience from 30 years of reforming law-enforcement agencies to the new challenge of guarding against plots and conspiracies that were, in the United States at least, unimaginable only four months ago. Much as the police forces led by Bratton were forced to rethink their approach to fighting crime in the 1990s, law-enforcement and intelligence agencies up and down the governmental ladder must learn how to combat a threat that is barely understood. They can do so, Bratton argues, by employing the principles he developed over his years as a reformer: using broad and inclusive partnerships to identify the sources of threat (relying not only on law-enforcement and intelligence agencies but also on community leaders); using a problem-solving approach to combating those dangers; and maintaining a focus on preventing, rather than responding to, criminal acts. And, much as fear of crime was as debilitating to our cities as crime itself, Bratton says that in our not-so-brave new world we will need to combat fear of terrorism as well as terrorists.

CommonWealth caught up with Bratton in Boston, which he still visits often on business and, because of family and friends here, pleasure. It was just before Election Day, and he was in town to deliver one of his frequent speeches before flying back to New York for some last-minute campaigning. We began our discussion of community policing and homeland security that morning, then I tagged along to the talk, which was on much the same subject, and called him a week later for the conclusion. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation in two parts, with interlude.

CommonWealth: We’re here to talk about–in a phrase that you use pretty regularly–crime, fear, and disorder, but crime, fear, and disorder of a very different nature than what you tackled in the Boston and New York City police departments. We’re now almost two months past the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington and several weeks into scattered attacks of anthrax that continue to vex and baffle officials. But in the reaction, both public and official, to these unprecedented events I detect faint echoes of the urban crime epidemic of the ’80s and early ’90s, especially in a level of fear and anxiety that, while not unreasonable, still seems out of proportion to the actual danger most of us are in. Even in the darkest days, it was an urban truism that fear of crime was worse and more damaging to the community than crime itself. Much the same could be said today. We’re seeing public-safety agencies inundated with false alarms, as every mysterious envelope that lacks a return address gets called in as a potential anthrax carrier. We’ve got the mayor of Boston incensed–rightly, it seems to me–that the town of Marshfield banned school trips to or even passing through Boston, but at the same time he’s trying to stop the delivery of liquefied natural gas to the city on the grounds that a tanker could be attacked or sabotaged, igniting a conflagration. So in the effort to restore a sense of security in a suddenly insecure world, we seem to be, on an individual level and even on an official level, kind of flailing about. What’s your reaction to how we, as a society, are dealing with this new threat?

Bratton: The issue of the new paradigm that we’re dealing with, the new crime wave, is that this time it’s really amorphous. We really don’t know the scope of it. We don’t have the certainty we had in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, when it was the traditional crime: murder, rape, robbery, car thefts. We had defined it. We knew its dimensions. And now we really don’t know what those dimensions are. We’ve had the unheard-of events of September 11th, planes hijacked and crashed into buildings. We’ve got the anthrax scare. We now, for the first time, are seriously thinking about the potential for other types of terrorism activities: human bombs, nuclear warfare, smallpox–not unheard of but unimagined, if you will, within our borders. It was always over there. It was in Israel, it was in Lebanon, it was in Paris, it was in London, but it was never here. Well, it’s now here, and the parallel between the 20th and the 21st centuries is that we have to be very careful that fear doesn’t outpace the reality of what we’re dealing with. It’s more difficult to address the fear now than it was in the 20th century because we don’t know what the reality is at this juncture.

CommonWealth: It’s true. And it’s undeniable that all sorts of activities we took for granted not long ago now seem fraught with peril–everything from air travel to the daily mail delivery. And clearly some forms of security do need to be beefed up. Airport security, and not only at Logan, had become something of a joke. Everyone knew it, but we never really understood what could be at risk. But at the same time, it’s not clear that there are adequate technological and procedural remedies for terrorism, at least not ones that we can afford. Newsweek recently had a special issue on protecting America, and it went through 10 areas–such as air travel, water, and energy supply–that need to be protected and what it would take to protect them. It would cost billions, for instance, to reach the El Al standard in airport security, and it’s not even clear that it would be practical to do so.

Bratton: The reality of El Al is that they have a few flights a day. The United States has, what, 15,000 flights a day? The El Al standard, from a cost-effective standpoint, is probably not realistic.

CommonWealth: Exactly. And with the anthrax letters, there may have been, at most, a couple dozen of them, and yet we’re talking about irradiating every piece of mail across the country to sanitize it, at a cost of $2.5 billion for the machines alone. Here, the MBTA has bought bombproof trash barrels at a cost of $1,500 apiece –$400,000 in total. Is this Fortress America approach really the way to make us feel safe?

Bratton: At this particular time, we are flailing about, trying to find. . .how much [effort and expense] is enough to do three things: to reduce the fear, to reduce the threat, and to ultimately prevent actions from occurring. It is, from my perspective, a matter of applying so much of what we learned in dealing with the traditional crime problem in this country in the 20th century to the new paradigm of crime in the 21st. I think the old adage “everything old is new again” is very applicable. . . .We never really did solve the crime problem of the 20th century; we significantly mitigated it to the extent that we reduced the fear. Similarly, we’re not going to have the potential to solve [terrorism]. That’s because this crime is motivated, as the crime of the 20th century was, by human beings and individuals. [There are] over six billion of us on the planet, and absent eliminating human beings you’re not going to eliminate the potential threat. But I think we can significantly mitigate it.

The significant deficiencies we have at this time are the technology necessary to do the job–sophisticated technology, and we have the capability to develop that fairly quickly–and the cost, which is not known at all at this juncture. And will people be willing to bear that cost? We have the lessons learned from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s that, despite clear evidence that crime was destroying our cities, we were unwilling, really, until the 1990s to spend the amount of money necessary to begin to, as Malcolm Gladwell has coined the phrase, achieve a tipping point. We had reached a tipping point in the 1970s when crime went out of control in this country and nearly overwhelmed American police forces. It wasn’t until the 1990s that we were able to tip it back the other way. [But] right now fear is growing at an exponential rate. . . .A woman has recently died in New York City of anthrax, and they don’t have a clue as to how she contracted it. The fear level has now expanded exponentially because of that one death. And if we end up with a second or third, [it] will continue to grow.

CommonWealth: As we talk about terrorism from abroad and anthrax letters that we don’t know quite where they’re coming from, it all seems a far cry from the streets of Dorchester or East New York. What is there to be learned from the innovations in urban crime fighting that you were responsible for that you think can be brought to bear on this new threat?

Bratton: One is that so much of what propelled the changes in American policing and the criminal-justice system in the 1990s, in particular, was the learning experiences of the failures of the ’70s and ’80s. [Throughout that time] we remained optimistic that we could do something about the problem. We tried a lot of different potential solutions. Some worked, some were dismal failures. But we didn’t give up trying to find a successful resolution of the problem–not solution, but resolution. And finally, we were able to achieve that in the ’90s. In policing we embraced a concept, a philosophy, called community policing that emphasized three basic elements. [One was] partnership–police, community, business community, and political leaders working together, rather than individually, the collective strength of all those people focusing their energies on problems. [The second was problem-solving.] We came to understand that so much of our crime was generated not by all these individual crimes but by sources, that if we would go at the source of the problem we could achieve. . .a tipping point. We wouldn’t eradicate the problem, but we’d so significantly diminish it that we could reduce not only the size of the problem but the fear generated by that problem. And then thirdly, and this is the optimistic component of it, there was the belief that we could actually prevent crime, that it was not just a matter of trying to control it but that we could prevent it. There was a belief that we had in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s that we could prevent crime by the way we policed. We returned to that in the 1990s.

In this era, we’re going to have to try to embrace the idea that we can deal with this new problem, this new paradigm, this new form of crime. There’s not going to be a quick solution, but we can get much better at it than we are right now. To expedite our ability to successfully deal with the problems that are being identified, as well as new ones that might occur, we can look to many of the systems, philosophies, and technologies we used so successfully in the 1990s to deal with the old crime problem.

CommonWealth: Let’s unpack that a little bit. Go through each of your three Ps–partnership, problem-solving, and prevention–and talk about how they would apply to this new problem. What form does partnership take in dealing with a problem like terrorism?

Bratton: Jack Maple, a former deputy commissioner in the NYPD, a very close friend and probably the most brilliant thinker on crime and what to do about it in the 1990s, used to say that the biggest lie in law enforcement is that we cooperate. We don’t. Law enforcement is the most turf-based institution in America. And when you have upwards of 19,000 separate police forces in a purposely decentralized law-enforcement environment, it’s a lot of individual turf to protect. . . .I’m a great believer in the concept of inclusion rather than exclusion. American policing, the American criminal-justice system, was very exclusionary. “We’re the police, you’re the public.” The Jack Webb type of policing–good old Jack Webb, badge 714, “just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.” Give us the facts, we’ll take care of the problem, no emotion, no compassion. [Then] we learned that we needed to involve others, that we couldn’t do it by ourselves. Partnership was an essential and compelling catalyst for the success that we began to have finally in the 1990s dealing with our crime problem. Partnership has clearly been identified–and that’s the good news–in the new paradigm as an essential first step. We’re seeing so many articles about the need for the FBI to cooperate [with other agencies]. We’re having congressional hearings on how to get the FBI, the CIA, to coordinate and cooperate. The creation of the office that Gov. Ridge is now occupying [federal Office of Homeland Security] is intended to try to improve the coordination and partnership between not only federal agencies, but state and local agencies. Partnership is an essential component. It was then and it will be now.

CommonWealth: Number two was problem-solving. In the community policing model, as I understand it, the problem-solving concept was, one, to put responsibility at the right level. You put responsibility at the precinct commander level–not on the beat cop, not on the police commissioner, but on the local commander. And the other part of problem-solving was solving small problems that lead to big ones–everything from fare jumping in subways to public disorder issues–with the understanding that that has an impact on more serious crimes. How do we transfer that kind of problem-solving approach to terrorism?

Bratton: You’re actually dealing with several issues within the umbrella of problem-solving. In problem-solving, as it applies to policing, the concept of partnership allowed us to more realistically identify the problems that were causing not only crime but fear of crime. In the ’70s and ’80s. . .we felt that we should focus on serious crime–the robberies, the rapes, the murders–and show through our arrest rates and our clearance rates that we were doing a good job there. [We thought] that is what the public wanted addressed. But the fear on the part of the public, particularly in America’s inner cities, was generated by what they were experiencing every day, which was not serious crime. . . .If [people] have to walk across the street to get away from drug dealers on the corner, and the prostitutes keep them awake at night entertaining their johns, and all the public drinking that would go on in the parks or on the corner with the kids–all these so-called victimless crimes were effectively creating a fear among people. . . .We came to understand the ‘broken windows ‘concept. So much of what was generating the fear was like weeds in a garden. If you don’t tend to the weeds, they’ll eventually smother the garden. . . .For 20 years, police were told, “don’t pay any attention to victimless crimes.” Just go after the crimes for which there are murder victims and robbery victims. We came to finally understand in community policing that the community was the victim of disorderly behavior.

Making the transition to the 21st century, the problems. . .are still to be defined, [such as] what is, in fact, generating fear on the part of the public. On the criminal-justice side, the professional side, we understand it’s going to require, similar to the 1990s, the sharing of information to shape prevention-focused initiatives. Let’s learn from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and get the public involved. . . .What are they fearful of? Apart from the reality of the death of a woman from anthrax, or a World Trade Center situation, what else is happening that needs to be addressed? We’re in a stage now where we really don’t know.

CommonWealth: The focus on prevention rather than reaction–that was a wrenching adjustment for police work. How wrenching an adjustment can we expect that to be when that same shift takes place on the level of the FBI and the Justice Department, which need to gear up for preventing terrorism, not just investigating and prosecuting it?

Bratton: The idea was phenomenal, that you could prevent crime. For 30 years we measured, from a management standpoint, our success by how many arrests did we make, how many 911 calls did we answer, and how quickly did we respond to them. It was a reactive-focused management process. Prevention required a completely different form of management and a completely different set of goals to measure success. . . .[Today] the fear levels–whether it’s now, as we’re interviewing here in November, or at the time of publication in January–I don’t see the fear level being mitigated successfully in the short term. I think there are still too many unknowns that we’re dealing with. What we have to project is an optimism that we eventually will be able to define it, be able to contain it, and be able to address it.

CommonWealth: You and your colleague, Jack Maple, took the model of community policing to a new level with Compstat, the process by which you used crime data to guide your strategy and tried to prevent crime and also to hold police commanders and your partners in the anticrime effort accountable for results. How can a process like that help us against this new threat, and who should lead it?

Bratton: Well, for your readers, let’s define Compstat. Compstat is a management system developed at the NYPD to maximize the gathering and analysis of information for the assignment of police resources, for the purpose of effectively addressing the crime problems that were identified–to deal directly with those, but the overall goal was to then prevent those problems from reoccurring. Its name was derived from the term computer statistics, because the program was based significantly on the gathering of intelligence. . . .It was also based on a management concept of inclusion rather than exclusion, which had always been the mainstay of American policing. The need to know? Well, we felt that all 40,000 members of the NYPD needed to know about crime–where was it occurring, when, why, and how–and to get all of those people involved [in trying] to address it. Compstat also was all about the idea of accountability. We’re going to include you in the game, but you’re going to be accountable for developing plans to address the identified problems. . . .Compstat has four basic elements. [First,] the gathering of timely, accurate intelligence. Secondly, rapid response to what that intelligence tells you. Thirdly, effective tactics–what works to deal with the identified problems? And fourth, relentless follow-up, constantly analyzing and sifting through to identify new and emerging patterns or patterns once thought to be controlled that now spring up again.

At this point in our conversation, Bratton’s busy schedule intruded, and we had to suspend our discussion of Compstat and terrorism. The security guru was due at the law offices of Hill & Barlow, where he was keynote speaker for a luncheon panel on post-September 11 realities for employers and commercial-property owners. Afterward, he would be off to the shuttle so that, by 4 p.m., he could be walking the streets of Harlem with former president Bill Clinton, stumping on behalf of mayoral candidate Mark Green. As we walked to One International Place, Bratton acknowledged that if Green were to win, he would likely once again become police commissioner there.

As for Massport, Bratton said, “That story got out of control.” He did talk to officials here about a short-term security assignment, but that would have been too disruptive to his other business. He dismissed out of hand the idea of being a candidate for the executive director’s job vacated by Virginia Buckingham. “They’re going to want to do a national search for that,” he said, including a vetting process that, at this stage in his career, he would not subject himself to. “I am what I am,” he said.

Over lunch, we listened to a pair of Hill & Barlow lawyers discuss legal issues for the newly security-conscious businessman. Neil McKittrick reviewed dos and don’ts in employee background checks, drug testing, and surveillance. Gregory Bialecki discussed the security obligations of property owners and managers. The legal standard for building owners, he said, is to exercise “reasonable care,” but with the world suddenly changed, “it’s harder to know what reasonable care is.” Then Christopher Marquet, senior managing director of Kroll’s Boston office, gave the audience a rundown of “things we’re telling our clients,” including advice about screening employees and vendors (“the biggest threats come from within”).

Finally, Bratton delivered the keynote address, opening with his by-now standard reference to a song from his youth: “What a Diff’rence a Day Made.” In America today, he said, “We have to learn to deal with a new paradigm of crime.” He went on to describe “the failure of September 11th” in terms of “inadequacy in the gathering of intelligence, analysis of that intelligence, and sharing of intelligence” that he said “might have prevented” that day’s tragedies. Information gathering should not be limited to the FBI and CIA, he added. Seeming to speak for police chiefs everywhere, he said, “We want to get into this game.” He noted that there are 40,000 federal agents but a total of 750,000 local cops and asked, “Wouldn’t it have been nice if you knew, in West Trenton, New Jersey [where several anthrax letters were mailed], that there were these characters who stood out because they weren’t part of the community?” He wrapped up his remarks in typical can-do fashion, saying “I have a degree of optimism, because I was optimistic in the 1970s and ’80s” about dealing with urban crime. “We can’t let the fear overwhelm us. We didn’t let fear overwhelm us in the ’90s.”

We picked up our conversation a week later, when Republican media mogul Michael Bloomberg, not Mark Green, had been elected mayor of New York. That didn’t seem to disturb Bratton on a political level. Though he insisted that Green “would have made a very good mayor,” he added, “I’m also very comfortable with Bloomberg, who I’m actually friendlier with.” But Bratton would not be headed back to One Police Plaza and that, he admitted, was a disappointment. “I would have liked the opportunity at this particular time to return to the public sector,” he said. “It’s a very exciting arena at any time, but at this time it’s even more of a critical environment and one that I would like to have been a part of. But it’s not to be at this time.”

CommonWealth: I was hoping by the time we talked again that more would be known about the terrorist threat and how to respond to it. But here we are a week later and little more is known, particularly about the anthrax attacks. In fact, in today’s New York Times, Tom Ridge is quoted as saying that he hasn’t “included or excluded either a domestic or international source for the anthrax and we have not ruled out whether this is an act of an individual or a collective act.” Last week, we were talking about the Compstat process, which involves timely intelligence, rapid response, effective tactics, and relentless follow-up. Given what is still a very amorphous situation, if you were Tom Ridge, how would you put a process like Compstat to work?

Bratton: Quite frankly, I’m not even going to get into that. We could talk from now to doomsday about what Ridge has got ahead of him, as he has a nearly impossible job, but it would not be of any value to me or to you or to your readers to indicate how I would go about it. It’s just too complex to try and cover in an interview or an article. The theme that I talked about, about using Compstat, is, first off, the idea of gathering intelligence in a useful way. Today, I think in one of the papers there was a reference to some movement to merge several federal intelligence agencies into the CIA. . . .That’s a first step. . . .In the NYPD, by way of example, the problem we had with information was that it was gathered by detectives, it would go up the detectives’ silo, across the department, and then down the patrol silo, or the organized crime control bureau silo. It was just a very cumbersome process. What you’re effectively looking for is an elevator that everybody gets into and rides together rather than having everybody going up and down separate stairwells. So Ridge’s dilemma, and it was highlighted in this past Sunday’s New York Times, [is that when] you look at the organization chart of agencies that have some responsibility for national security, it’s phenomenal. Talk about a Tower of Babel. . . .All those people speaking different languages and in many instances not talking to each other.

CommonWealth: One thing that’s of concern to us here in Boston is, what’s the appropriate role for state and local agencies in terms of changing course–still maintaining their responsibilities, particularly public safety agencies, in terms of crime, but now seeming to have this expanded mandate around the much more general concept of security.

Bratton: The reality of today’s world is that every entity, whether in business, the private sector, or the public sector, has a new burden. . . .I just came from a meeting of the City University of New York, the 20 presidents of the 20 colleges that make up that system. And they’re having their annual two-day conference and they’re focusing a half day of those two days on this issue, where in the last 15 years if they spent 10 minutes on this issue it would have been a lot. So there’s one example of how their world has changed. Something that was always an area to be cut when they had a budget crisis, now in a budget-crisis period where they’re being asked to cut 15 percent of their budget, one of the areas that they’re increasing the budget [for] is security. . . .But there’s no denying that local police, state police, federal agencies now have an enlarged set of responsibilities. It could be argued that they have a totally new paradigm to deal with. They’ve got the traditional paradigm of crime that they’ve always dealt with, but this one is so new in terms of its undefined scope, so new in terms of its undefined ways of creating problems, and so new in terms of. . .[what] resources are going to be necessary to deal with what is right now an amorphous enemy. It’s like trying to hold a cloud between your hands. . . .And that’s why it would have been an exciting time in my case to have gone back into the public sector because I’d like to think myself and the people I worked with. . .played a pretty significant role in helping to finally deal with the old paradigm of crime and deal with it successfully. It would be exciting to be involved in trying to have similar successes with this new emerging problem.

CommonWealth: At this point, the only thing that seems clear is that we can look forward to a long period of unaccustomed insecurity. What advice do you have for us all as individuals‹public officials, business executives, parents, citizens‹as we take on the dual task of going about our daily lives but also keeping our guards up?

Bratton: People have to go about their daily lives and try as best they can to move this issue off to the side. [That’s] because, other than the inconvenience that a lot of these new security systems are going to require–at least in the short term, until they get more sophisticated with technology and begin to reduce the actual physical intrusion–this stuff is not going to touch most people. [Take] the anthrax scare right now that everybody is so concerned with. . . .We lose more people here every day in New York to accidents and homicides than have been lost to this international scare. . . .So, with that understanding, people have to realize as they adjust to this new era–and it is a new era that’s going to be with us–that we’re all going to have to learn to go about our lives and live them as we did before and not allow the fear to so overwhelm us that our lives become untenable. I’d liken it to New York City in 1990, with the fear of crime versus the reality. The reality was very significant. We were losing six or seven [people] murdered a day and 6,000 people shot in this one city in one year. Eight million New Yorkers went about their business without being the victims of crime. They were all aware of it, but they lived their lives largely. . .[without] being so cowed or intimidated they didn’t leave their homes. We just are going to have to adjust to this new reality.

And I think over time we will. I’m very comfortable that we will. Human beings are very adaptable, and we’ve seen a lot of stories about London, for example, during the blitz, about how people adjusted their lifestyles to things certainly as horrific as anything we just experienced. There they were having nightly bombings, not the one-time event. They knew for certain every night those bombs were coming over and they adjusted, they lived with it. It wasn’t a life that they wanted, but they lived with it and were always hopeful it would improve. Similarly, here I think there will be many improvements over time, particularly if we can keep the terrorists off guard and eventually apprehend or eliminate the most significant ones. And then, some of the intrusions that are meant to improve our safety–the need to have enhanced ID cards or security systems–the less intrusive we can make those, [the more] we’ll adjust to that fairly quickly. People adjusted very quickly to the concept of going through metal scanners at airports. Most kids in New York City have adjusted to the idea of going through metal scanners to get into their classrooms. You and I, when we grew up, we would have thought it was crazy to go through a metal scanner to go to school. That’s a fact of life here.

CommonWealth: And what about for you? You’re not going to become police commissioner again, but certainly this line of work that you’re in, more broadly, this is the time to be in that business. What role do you see for yourself?

Bratton: What I do right now professionally. . .allows me to make a very good living. It allows me to select what I want to work on, in terms of consultancies, papers that I want to write, op-eds that I want to do, TV shows that I want to participate in. . . .Would I have preferred to get back into the game as I described it, the public sector, to have had a more significant role in putting into effect ideas and opinions? Certainly, but at least as of this time one of those doors has been closed. In the meantime life’s not too bad. You’re not going to see me complaining. And as far as disappointments [go], I’ve always been somebody that–I don’t spend much time looking behind me. I can’t change yesterday, but I can certainly try to change tomorrow. And I think that’s what I try to project, whether it’s when I’m actually leading an organization or when I’m trying to influence an organization as a consultant or when I’m trying to shape public opinion through either speeches or media appearances: the idea of optimism. I don’t think there’s any problem if you put your mind to it that you can’t, [not] necessarily solve, but maybe resolve or reduce in significance.