Thanks to Albert, I was able to get a press pass to the American Democracy Institute's Eastern Regional Summit. I was one of a few bloggers who showed up to cover the event. The others were Martin from Booman, ACM from A Smoke-Filled Room , Tulin from Politics Philly and, of course, Albert. The point of the day was to "identify, develop and support" young people, who are interested in progressive politics, although there were a few self-identified Republicans there. And, I guess to make them comfortable, Hillary Clinton gave the keynote address.
Photo credit: Albert Yee
There were a few things weighing against Hillary in my mind as I sat along the bloggers wall. (Pictured above. Plug'em if you got'em.) As I rode in on the train from Bucks, I read The Party of Davos by Jeff Faux in this week's Nation and I remembered ruefully the large part Bill Clinton played in getting NAFTA through. This NAFTA:
Given the influence of American elites, the model for this constitution is the North American Free Trade Agreement, conceived under Ronald Reagan, nurtured by George H.W. Bush and delivered by Bill Clinton. Among other things, NAFTA's 1,000-plus pages give international investors extraordinary rights to override government protections of workers and the environment. It sets up secret panels, rife with conflicts of interest, to judge disputes from which there is no appeal. It makes virtually all nonmilitary government services subject to privatization and systematically undercuts the public sector's ability to regulate business. Jorge Castañeda, later Mexico's foreign secretary, observed that NAFTA was "an agreement for the rich and powerful in the United States, Mexico and Canada, an agreement effectively excluding ordinary people in all three societies."
So when Sen. Clinton talked about hardworking Americans having trouble finding good jobs, I choked a little. I had the same reaction when she talked about hardworking Americans not being able to afford health care. I couldn't help but remember her Senate voting record on the Barriers to Bankruptcy Bill and how she suddenly lost her will to fight against it when contributions from financial institutions started figuring more prominently in her political career. Add to that her stirring defense of paperless electronic voting, which held up India (this India) as the gold standard for electoral systems, (It's so easy and technomalogical!) and I wasn't in the mood to join the rest of the audience as it lept to its feet when the speech ended with the obligatory, presidential "God bless you."
The speaker who did inspire me was Gene Nichol, the president of William and Mary, who gave a good old fashioned barnburner of a progressive speech that wondered at the end what the promises of America mean when so many social and economic injustices abound. He quoted the Declaration of Indepence, the Constitution and the Bible among several other sources to drive home the point that we are failing to live up to the promises of our beginnings and of our spiritual underpinnings. I've heard it done before, probably better, but that particular message always rings my bell.
But enough about the speakers. As far as the whole event went, they were a distant second to what was happening in the workshops. Remember, the point of the day was to fire up and educate mostly Democratic youth about the value of civic engagment. I'm stopping short of using the word "activism" for reasons I'll explain later. There were five workshops, each held once in the morning and again in the afternoon.
- The Constitution in the 21st Century (I heard from Tulin that this was an Alito-fest)
- Empowering Youth, Improving Communities (I wanted to see this one but didn't)
- Faith and Public Policy
- Role of Media in Politics
- Voting Rights - Crisis in the American Election System
It'll come as no surprise to hear that I went to the Voting Rights briefing first. I was disappointed when I found out that the panel had no plans to discuss electronic voting - the agenda was devoted to disenfranchisement via voter suppression - but the discussion was so good that I stayed for the whole hour and fifteen minutes. The panel was dynamic and so clearly dedicated to and experience in the cause of protecting the voting rights of the least empowered people in the country that I couldn't pull myself away.
There were four speakers: Steve Blackburn, an advocate for ex-offenders, who spoke about laws denying convicted felons the vote - Ruth Martin, Deputy Field Director for People for the American Way, who works with legislative reform, Jeanine Miller, Coordinator of Advocacy and Education for Project H.O.M.E and Tovah Wang, Senior Program Office and Democracy Fellow at the Century Foundation. These are my kind of people and the information they had about voter suppression through deceptive practices, Real ID and laws at the state and federal level went a long way to opening the eyes of the forty kids who heard them speak.
In the afternoon I went to the Media workshop. That one was okay. It was hard for me to imagine that anyone learned anything because I've been so immersed in the topic for two years but the kids in the audience probably needed to hear a lecture from Corporate Media 101. Dave Davies, Acel Moore, Marjorie Margolies-Mevinsky and Atrios were on the panel. Moore talked about the lack of diversity in newsrooms and on the page. Davies talked about how hard it is to do a good job of political reporting, what with the spin and the deadlines and staff cutbacks and all. He said that the swiftboats lies couldn't not be reported because the story was "so important." (gag) It took a question from the audience to bring up the role editors, and so ownership, play in the coverage. Atrios did a good job of briefly explaining Daou's triangle, but he didn't call it that. Margolies-Mevinsky talked about the fact that important stories just aren't covered by our media.
The most telling moment of the workshop happened when Margolies-Mevinsky spoke. She's a former journalist who served one term in the nineties as a congresswoman from PA and then was swept out by Newt's revolution. Now she's the chairperson of a group that provides leadership training to women around the world. She was telling a story about being on a television show recently opposite Kate O'Beirne, whom she described as "awful." She was a few minutes into her story, which was about the harm that screaming "debates" do to the national discourse, when she mentioned the title of O'Beirne's book. A student in the audience interupted to say, "I saw that woman. I saw that show." Margolies-Mevinsky said, "That was me!" It was cute, we laughed. But nobody made the point, even later, when the topic turned back to the dangers of turning news into infotainment, that the young woman didn't remember seeing Margolies-Mevinsky on television; she remembered seeing Kate O'Beirne and she remembered the inflammatory title of O'Beirne's book: Women Who Make the World Worse. That's a problem. Are the people getting what the people want or are they wanting what they get? Try answering that in an hour.
So why did I stop short of saying that the ADI event wanted to turn these kids into activists? Because as far as I can tell - and I missed the Building Community workshop so I can't speak about that one - the kids were exposed to a lot of problems but weren't offered any substantive direction on what steps to take to solve them. Ideas were sort of sprinkled around: become a poll worker, change the direction of the media, buy a newspaper, blog, and my favorite, from Sen. Clinton: buy a share of Exxon stock and go to the shareholders' meeting to stand up and say "We need a change!" (Let's hope the kids with the stock don't sell out as quickly as Clinton did and can actually effect change that helps the disadvantaged instead of fellow stockholders.) In general the kids were told to get out there and make it happen, which isn't the kind of advice that sticks.
There were three speakers who addressed the whole crowd, a historian, Gene Nichol and a presidential candidate. The historian, I'm sorry to say, was useless unless his purpose was to get them to stop considering history as a major once and for all. The candidate was the big name draw. Nichol's speech, as I've said, was inspriational. But what the kids needed to hear was a speech from an actual activist. Someone who's on the ground daily fighting the fight. Someone who knows about the ups and very deep downs of trying to get people to understand and do the right thing. Someone who could share the idea that the poor aren't perfect. That fighting for their rights, when they don't seem to want to fight for them themselves, and sometimes, when they (god forgive me) don't act like they even deserve them, is draining. Someone who's been jailed for civil disobedience. Someone who gave up and then came back to the fight. This is what those kids needed to hear and they didn't.
And at the end of every workshop, they should have left with a card that had three things they can do right now to effect change. Write a letter to the editor. Write an op-ed. Join the NAACP, DFA, Move-On, Young Democrats, a church group that advocates for the poor ... Research motor voter laws, volunteer for a prison project, lobby their congressperson (a class on that would have been helpful) ... you get the point. I left that suggestion with a few of the workers and on the evaluation form I filled out at the end. We'll see what happens next year.
I suppose anyone attending could be assumed to already have a certain level of involvement.... what's needed more is the same sort of boosting on the blogosphere level rather than the local level -- or do you disagree?
I would think that the blogosphere is the entry level (reading without commenting) and that by the time you are physically attending meetings you might already be assumed to have done some of this other stuff. In other words I'd say that local involvement is already higher up the pole...?
Posted by: DavidByron | February 06, 2006 at 11:30 AM
I suppose anyone attending could be assumed to already have a certain level of involvement.... what's needed more is the same sort of boosting on the blogosphere level rather than the local level -- or do you disagree?
The kids attending were ready to get active and in some cases were on a small level, but I think they needed more nuts and bolts direction and definitely more encouragement if they were already involved. Clinton actually did some of that in her speech, but since she spoke in such empty language, I had a hard time crediting it.
As for the blogosphere's worth - don't get me started. I'm in a very dark place right now when it comes to the efficacy of blogging.
Posted by: eRobin | February 06, 2006 at 12:15 PM
You're upset about the paucity of response to your "Ask Ned Anything" diary?
I think dark days are pretty usual. There's a tendency to desire revolutionary answers but these things tend to be slow and incremental (at best). The dKos diaries would probably take you about a year to get to the stage where a large number of people read your stuff.
But not everyone has what it takes to get there at all, and not everyone frankly would do much substantially new if they got there.
I don't understand why these 'A' list bloggers don't do more to encourage participation. That's what you're saying about this local meeting too. It's a puzzle. It's enormously frustrating sometimes for me to see these inefficiencies and you stuck with a minor audience currently -- I'm sure it's worse for you.
One explanation would be that most people suck at encouragement -- don't even understand the need for it a lot of the time. Just don't see it.
As I have said before consistently -- you do. If that is a rare attribute then all the more reason for you to try and build up more of a following.
Unfortunately the alternative -- which would be to try and get the 'A' listers to see the importance of this stuff and teach them -- well I don't think it's so easy to teach. A lot of the encouragement you give seems to be a result of your own personality and activism locally - your enthusiasm and example.
Of course for me there are two other reasons it would be good to see you get more of a folowing: (1) because you connect the dots and (2) because you're extreme left. Those however wouldn't make you almost unique.
Posted by: DavidByron | February 06, 2006 at 04:16 PM
I'm sure it's worse for you.
I honestly only care about my powerlessness when it comes to eVoting, which, as you know, I think is the most important crisis facing the country today. Other than that it's all ego.
The Pennacchio thing bugs me too enormously but slightly less than the lack of attention to eVoting.
Posted by: eRobin | February 06, 2006 at 04:41 PM