Judged By Mischaracterized Intentions

One of the greatest pathologies of public life today is its pervasive gang mentality. We are constantly labeled by others — and at the same time do that very same labeling. By our actions, we divide ourselves up into tribes, Us and Them. It’s our hatred of Them that continually leaves us far, far short of our ideals.

When one enters the public square, when one speaks up, others listen and judge. Who is this person? What tribe are they with? Are they on my team or the other team? Are they friend or enemy?

Sometimes without realizing it, we give clues to answer those questions. Whether I refer to “Barack Hussein Obama” or “President Barack Obama” says a great deal. Whether I link to a CNN or a Fox News story does too. It all adds up and within thirty seconds a first impression has been set. 

Trouble is, most people aren’t really like their stereotypes. Think about the stereotype the “other side” has about your own tribe. How fair is it? How correct is it?

• Maybe you’re “liberal.” It’s probably not only unfair but also incorrect to say that you favor a move to socialism, or that you care more about redistributing wealth than you do about personal morality.
• Maybe you’re “conservative.” It’s probably not only unfair but incorrect to say that you are only interested in furthering the interests of the rich, or that you are just a mean-spirited person.

Yet these are the labels we smack on the other side.

My point: This is not only corrosive to public life — but it’s plain dumb. By allowing these incorrect stereotypes to persist in our own mind, we live in a delusional world. We don’t understand other people, which means we don’t really know what is being said in the public square.

I saw this play out in an ironic way just a couple of days ago. I noticed a derisive comment in a liberal avenue about some “stupid conservative’s” article that contained a misspelling. I went to go take a look.

Sure, the article was angry (conservatives feel quite besieged at the moment) — but it was thoughtful. More to the point, it was sincere. And it contained this complaint, describing what it’s like to be a conservative in the current environment:

“My intentions are mischaracterized, and then I am judged by those mischaracterized intentions.”

Actually, that’s an apt description of the public square as a whole. We can do so much better . . . because we are so much better.

Using New, Widely Available Tools At The White House

The White House is experimenting with using a freely-available, “crowd-sourced” tool as part of the backend to the “electronic town hall” it announced earlier this week. You can go here to see it in action.

The Town Hall is set for this morning. Here’s the White House blog post about it.

The system is using Google Moderator, which is a simple tool that allows anyone to submit a question and then vote on which ones ought to be asked. It is intended to harness the “wisdom of the crowd” so that the most relevant and interesting questions bubble up.

It’s introduced by a video message from President Obama, which is hosted on YouTube. Here it is:

For the most part, I applaud the experimentation and the use of widely-available tools. It’s pretty cool!

There are some tweaks that might be useful, though, when applying what was originally designed to help out at tech conferences to public issues.

When it comes to thorny public issues, often it’s not the “wisdom of crowds” that rises to the top but the “voice of the mob.” As people vote on what questions they want answered, sometimes the quiet, wise questions asking about the trade offs behind policies can get shoved aside.

For instance, when I first accessed the “health care” topic, the top questions were all versions of “why can’t we have ‘single-payer’ health care?” The question I would like to see answered, instead, might be: “What would the trade offs be if we moved to a single payer health care system?”

This is not a fatal flaw, just something to think about. Indeed, the White House team has given enough thought to issue a caution:

This experiment is about encouraging transparency and accountability, so ask the President exactly what it is you want to know – but let others do the same.  It is a community-moderated system, but remember that even though you may not like the viewpoint behind someone’s question, everyone has a right to their opinion.  Also remember that Americans of all ages will be participating in this event, so be thoughtful about the words you choose.

This is good, and there are guidelines provided, but it would be useful to see if there is a more structural way to filter in thoughtfulness and filter out yelling. Maybe that’s only something that can be done by an “editor,” but it’s worth pondering. 

It’s useful to think about, in fact, in many contexts. I would put the strategic question this way:

As we shift to more and more direct-input tools in public life, how can we ensure the fundamental questions don’t get pushed aside by the most intense voices?

What Will We Say About Now?

My friend Peter Levine, in an article that examines ways to look at the question of “whether President Obama is trying to do too much too fast,” mentions an analogy Bill Galston makes to Jimmy Carter’s early days in office.

In Peter’s view, those days are not at all comparable to where we are now. In making his case, Peter encapsulates the overal shift rightward that was occurring as the 70′s ended as well as I have seen anyone:

[T]he Zeitgeist was against poor old Jimmy Carter, as we can tell now that the Owl of Minerva has taken flight. Most of the industrialized countries moved substantially right after 1970. Liberals had already enacted the popular parts of the welfare state. They had consolidated prosperity for a majority of their populations, who were decreasingly generous toward the remaining poor. Keynsian policy couldn’t seem to handle stagflation. Liberal coalitions had shattered on the shoals of controversial social issues. Conservatives offered law-and-order and lower taxes, and that was a winning package. The only reason Carter was elected was that Richard Nixon had administered a deadly wound to his own party that took eight years to heal. It was hardly time for an ambitious liberal agenda.

What interests me is Peter’s perspective on that pivotal time, and the language he uses, spoken with the benefit of hindsight.

It seems evident that we are now in a similar shift, only moving the other way. When we look back, fifteen years and more later, what kind of language will we use? What tectonic factors will be relevant, and which will be just static?

That, of course, is a thought experiment and unanswerable. But it is worth thinking about, if only to gain perspective on the now.

Astroturf On Twitter

In organizing circles, “astroturf” refers to the practice of creating the simulation of a grassroots groundswell through robo calls, highly choreographed postcard campaigns, etc. People on Capitol Hill can tell it’s happening when they suddenly get pounds of mail that’s identical.

My friend Jed Miller raises some interesting (related) questions about using Twitter as a lobbying tool. Seems the Sunlight Foundation is urging people to press the seventeen Twitter-using US senators to sign onto a particular bill.

Jed asks:

Twitter’s peer-to-peer, right? Do we really want to single out the decision-makers in the virtual room? If we tweet-mob @JohnCornyn and @Barbara_Boxer don’t we hasten the blown-vein moment that grassroots email to Congress has reached? Where what was once more intimate access is just another crowd to be herded via retractable rope-barriers and CRM filters?

I think this could turn advocacy tweets from nightingales into woodpeckers. I hope I’m overreacting.

(He’s not alone, of course, if you look at the comments on Sunlight’s blog post.)

Jed, I don’t think you’re overreacting, I think you are raising important cautions.

There are new tools — we need to develop new norms for how to use them.

Stamped

I take a dim view, ordinarily, of the silly habit large organizations have of naming everything. If there’s a big, multi-day story, news networks will give it a name and a logo. New pieces of legislation have to have stupid acronyms that remind the reader of fourth-grade English homework (think of the USA PATRIOT act). Every time a major politician goes on a trip, it has to have a “theme” and a name emblazoned on the podium and behind the speaker.

So you’d think I would take a similarly dim view of the government’s plan to add a logo to all the projects that are underwritten with stimulus money.

 

From ABC News

But I actually think it’s a pretty good idea. Here, the logo is actually being used in teh way it is supposed to be: as a reminder, a branding mark.

 

My beef with the incessant titling of things is that it always seems more driven by bureaucratic issues than by real-world concerns. Ordinary people do not need a title for a presidential trip, and they don’t think of the budget as a book . . . they think of it as “the budget.”

But a recovery-funds logo is a nice reminder and can actually be a branding mark. It can help organize disparate things (all the different, specific programs being supported with recovery money) into a unified whole. This is palpably different than the typical use of titles and “themes” that I described above, which is all about spin.

By contrast, this is actually helpful and can serve a civic purpose.

Public’s Priorities For 2009

I found this to be a useful research report from the Pew Center For The People And The Press:

“As Barack Obama takes office, the public’s focus is overwhelmingly on domestic policy concerns – particularly the economy. Strengthening the nation’s economy and improving the job situation stand at the top of the public’s list of domestic priorities for 2009. Meanwhile, the priority placed on issues such as the environment, crime, illegal immigration and even reducing health care costs has fallen off from a year ago. . . .

“Of the 20 issues people were asked to rate in both January 2008 and January 2009, five have slipped significantly in importance as attention to the economy has surged. Protecting the environment fell the most precipitously – just 41% rate this as a top priority today, down from 56% a year ago. The percentage rating illegal immigration as a top priority has fallen from 51% to 41% over the past year, and reducing crime has fallen by a similar amount (from 54% to 46%). And while reducing health care costs remains a top priority to 59% of Americans, this is down 10-points from 69% one year ago.”

Also of interest: Dealing with global warming, last on the list, at just 30%. What a difference a year makes.

You Know?

Ever since I was quoted as saying something along the lines of “there’s a lot of stuff out there” in an interview with the Toledo Blade, I have been aware of the usual policy of cleaning up quotations from interviews to best represent what the subject was saying. We all pepper our speech with ums and uhs, employ false starts at the beginnings of sentences, and speak in comma splices. (That’s a photo of me during the interview, I believe.)

Typically, journalists will clean up such things to make sentences coherent.One consequence is that you can usually tell when an editor or reporter does not like someone: their quotes are verbatim. While he does indeed use many malapropisms, I believe President Bush was on the receiving end of this. The glee with which people portrayed him as dumb seemed matched only by the enthusiasm newspapers had for printing verbatim remarks.

Another person who has recently been on the receiving end of this is Caroline Kennedy, who has unfairly been portrayed as the Queen Of You Know. While she may indeed use the phrase a bit often, her newspaper quotes are clearly unvarnished. Here is an interesting discussion of this, comparing Kennedy’s treatment with treatment of then-president-elect Obama.

Ends the piece:

Why the apparent double standard? During the interview, it seems, Kennedy annoyed the reporters by dismissing one of their questions: “Have you guys ever thought about writing for, like, a woman’s magazine or something?” Perhaps, like, the verbatim transcription was, you know, uh, payback.

Indeed.

Does Politics Understand Engagement?

Yesterday I wrote about misgivings I have in connecting civic engagement too closely with the formal workings of government.

My main concern is that citizen-generated activity could tend to be stifled and bureaucratized by creating some kind of “office of civic engagement” or an “engagement czar” (this is akin to President Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives). However, with the right kind of leadership, and support at the highest levels, such an office could have a hugely beneficial effect on the quality of our public life. In the end, I support such a move.

But there are other dangers, too. These have to do with politics (as opposed to government). The main problem here is that politics doesn’t know what to make of civic engagement.

This is a big problem for those of us who labor in this field — how do we let elected officials and other policy makers know about the results of public dialogue? How can we suggest it best be integrated into governance? No one has yet answered this question, from my observations.

(I wrote a report for the National Issues Forums Institute describing the efforts of one member of Congress to use citizen engagement as a way of gaining community knowledge.)

The Obama-Biden transition office is in the midst of a series of “community meetings” on health care reform. Seeing how these play out and how they are reported on is illuminating.

News coverage has chiefly used two frames. One frame is the “listening session” frame, in which the meetings are portrayed as an informal chance for HHS Secretary-designate Tom Daschle to gain first-hand knowledge of people’s concerns with health care. The other frame is the “political ammunition” frame, in which this effort represents the opening moves in an effort to build a grassroots, mobilizeable base on which to rely when the health care reform fight begins to get ugly. Politico’s coverage today is a good example.

Each of these frames is patently politics-as-usual: Citizens are either being asked to give testimony in a hearing, or they are being whipped into a frenzy so they can be mobilized.

Certainly, the former perception is preferable to the latter. But the default position for political journalists is skepticism — it’s easy for this effort to come off as just a campaign salvo.

Even so, there’s another area where the effort can fall short, and that’s in the organizing. It is, after all, a political office that is responisble for planning and administering these community meetings. Politics is fast-moving and in its day-to-day workings it relies heavily on doing what’s beeen shown to work in the past. And so, for all its talk of being a “different” way to engage citizens on the health care debate, when you look at the community meeting discussion guide, it looks very much like a meeting designed to elicit sound bites and quotes. (To be fair, this is the participant guide; I have not been able to find a way to access the moedrator’s guide. If someone has a copy, please let me know.)

One of the great strengths of community dialogues when it comes to policy-making is that they provide a forum in which citizens can wrestle with the trade offs and downsides of various plans and approaches. But people typically need to be pushed to have such conversations. This is only natural — but when the reluctance is overcome, dramatic new insights can arise.

For civic engagement to be “used” most effectively, it needs to be organized in a way that recognizes its value. In order for that to happen, existing mindsets — those of journalists and those of political staffers — will need to be overcome. This is a tall order, but it is doable.

One way to help is for the “civic participation” community to continue to be as involved and engaged with the Obama-Biden transition office as it has been.

In that respect, the Agenda for Strengtheining America’s Democracy is a great step.

Inauguration Day Should Not Be A Holiday

The other day I got a letter from my daughter’s school describing a dilemma that the headmaster had faced, one that his counterparts in many other schools faced too: Whether to close up shop on the day Senator Barack Obama takes office as president of the United States. The school has not in the past taken the day off.

The letter described a number of rationales for doing so this time, all couched in a bunch of “learning about political responsibility” language. Shortly after the letter from my daughter’s school, I got word that the local public school system (along with others in the greater DC area) will be shuttered that day.

These schools all say that, from now on, Inauguration Day will be a holiday.

It’s obvious that these schools and school systems are making this move because they are pleased with the choice America has made. There is no way that, had Sen. McCain been the victor, any school would be pondering a day off. This is one in a series of examples of schools and educators applying their political biases to their pupils, while professing neutrality. In order to maintain the charade, the schools must turn a one-time event (Obama’s ascension) into a policy (every Inauguration Day is a holiday). [UPDATE: See comments below; there is more nuance to this that emerges.]

The beauty of experiment in self-rule we call the United States is that there is a mechanism in place for power to change hands without bloodshed, without coup, without drama. If anything, Inauguration Day is remarkable because it is so unremarkable. Yes, this is an historic rise of an African American to a the highest elected office in the land. But to institute a holiday across the board based on it is wrong headed. While we may be excited about one particular office holder, we may be just as alarmed by the next – the point should be, instead, that daily life goes on. We go to work or school just as before.

Instead, we are treated to a day off because our guy won.

Senator Kennedy: What Do We Know And When Will We Know It?

My friend Steve Clemons has written a great piece that well describes my misgivings as I watch the Caroline Kennedy train gathering steam.

It’s not that she is not the right person to take the open Senate seat of Hillary Rodham Clinton — it’s that we don’t know yet, and we have not had much of a chance to find out. What’s more, Kennedy only has to convince one person — governor David A. Paterson of New York, himself in office (in part) due to an unforeseen circumstance — that she’s the best pick.

Caroline Kennedy — when she shows she has thick-skin, can take tough-minded criticism for the mistakes she no doubt will make, and when she articulates coherent policy views on serious challenges facing the country — may make in fact make a great Senator from New York. I hope that she does and that she grows into the role. . . .

There are many questions in store for Kennedy as she pursues this Senate seat, and she needs to show a readiness to be grilled.

While the Kennedy clan is clearly one of America’s strongest and most enduring political family dynasties, the Kennedys that mattered were always the ones who stunned the public with their brilliance and tenacity.

Each of the most famous Kennedys — their audience would feel — could have been a successful political heavyweight even without the Kennedy name.

That will be the test for Caroline Kennedy. Can she show that she can be one of the best crafters of policy and one of the strongest animators of activism in ways that show that she should have always been in the Senate on her own merits — and not just because she got her resume read because of her last name?

Read it here.