2006 NY Daily News Podcast Interview With Rahm Emanuel On Compulsory Service Plan, Will Media Ignore Again?

 **Updated with more transcription 11/12/08

As a follow up to my previous post on the media blowing off President-elect Barack Obama's conscription plan(which seems to be disappearing from the Obama transition team's site among many other agenda items, as Newsbuster Tom Blumer has discovered), Naked Emperor News has found some interesting audio of Rahm Emanuel, Obama's Chief of Staff appointee, talking to NY Daily News reporter Ben Smith in 2006 about his mandatory civil service plan.  The idea was detailed in Emanuel's co-authored book, The Plan.  (my emphasis added:)

SMITH: I meant to ask you about the universal service piece of the plan.  Can you tell me about it?  Like, how is this going to work?  Are people going to live in barracks?

EMANUEL:  Universal civil defense training…I think he had it at 18, but we were saying  somewhere between the ages of 18 to 25, you will do three months of training.  You can do it in your(inaudible).  Some point in college you can do just that. There can be nothing wrong with all Americans having a joint similar experience of civil ...what we call civil defense training or civil service...some sense of service to country in preparation, which will give people a sense of what it means to be an American.  We propose three months.  At the end of the day someone says it should be four more.  I’m not going to sit here and hold it up. 

SMITH: I mean it's a lot more than the U.S. government asks of anybody right now.

EMANUEL: Guess what? We have a lot more challenges, so we are going to need a lot to do it.

SMITH: I mean I don't mean to get hung up on the aesthetics of it, but like uniforms...is it like Europe...people go absent

EMANUEL: If you're worried about going to have to do 50 jumping jacks, the answer is "yes."

SMITH: Are you kinda shifting the "country-esque" Army bases in the Summers?  I mean... I wonder how it's going work.  This is people's experiences.  It's so abstract.  Do you go nine to five in some course in a Red Cross building?

EMANUEL:  The whole idea there is it will be worked on you can do it through your State-National guard could be the vehicle for that.  The goal here wasn't to sit here and work on piece of legislation for ya' and all that, but that's one venue of doing it.

 SMITH: I'm a little hung up on the Barracks.

EMANUEL: Is there a reason?  Do you want to talk about it?  Do you have Blue Cross Blue Shield coverage on this? Are you worried about this in some capacity?

SMITH: No, I'm just...just curious

EMANUEL: Rather than figure out if you take a train ride or a barrack, think of it this way: it will be a common experience, and you'll be prepared. God forbid there's a chemical hit, there's another terrorist act, or a natural disaster (which are coming more frequent), there will be a body of citizens who are ready and capable and trained.  That's all you have to think about.  We're all here for you, ok? It's a circle of love.

 Smith commented on the NY Daily News blog about Emanuel's reaction to his curiosity on the "universal service":

We also talked a bit about his new book, The Plan, written with Bruce Reed, and particularly about his argument for instituting some kind of universal service, in the form of civil-defense training. He found my interest in whether there will be barracks more amusing than I'd anticipated.

The mainstream media continues to ignore this plan, which is not necessarily unusual for them. However, considering the amount of youth voters who lined up for Obama this election season, it is truly unfortunate they are the last ones to find out about this "requirement" of the new Obama administration. The audio is uploaded at Eyeblast.tv. 

Cross Posted at Video Done Right