This Is Not News

I’ve been telling myself for months that I should write a post about why I support Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. And I think that what it comes down to is that over the last ten years or so, I have become deeply pessimistic about the present state of American democracy but almost equally optimistic about its potential future. I’ve talked a lot about how much I believe in John Dewey’s vision of a truly democratic society – one in which citizens actively participate in making the decisions that affect their lives. But numerous studies indicate that today, most Americans don’t have basic knowledge of what goes on in government; nor do they necessarily see how voting for certain officials leads to policies that create results that they oppose. I do not believe that we are teaching our children how to question the world around them, or how to see the connections between actions and their consequences. As a result, our civic discourse has become debased, subject to distortions, emotional appeals, and personality-driven debates. But at the same time, work like James Fishkin’s and Bruce Ackerman’s on deliberative democratic polling suggests that average Americans are capable of fulfilling that idealistic Deweyan vision if we provide the opportunity and some basic tools.

And this is where I think Barack Obama is so uniquely positioned at the intersection of my deepest doubts and my fondest hopes. His rhetorical skill and his ability to emotionally connect and engage with people – even those who disagree with him – suggest to me that he can win an election, inspire people to engage in the process, and muster support for policies that will provide incremental but significant gains for people across the country and all over the world. But his background as a community organizer, his emphasis on grass-roots activism, and his dedication to government transparency suggest to me that he can help build the foundation for a future where his achievements might be considered timid in comparison. He wrote about that moment when a person realizes that he or she has a voice that deserves to be heard in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, and the passages struck me so much that I had to incorporate them into my dissertation. In his policy book The Audacity of Hope, which helped to launch his presidential campaign, he cites the idea of deliberative democracy, of citizens explaining their beliefs to one another and respecting those explanations, even when we disagree. It’s that vision that I believe drives Obama’s calls for hope and for change, and it’s a powerful vision that I support very strongly. What millions of Americans can accomplish by taking control of their destinies is much greater than what one man – even a president – can accomplish. But that president might be able to get those millions of Americans started.

OK, starting tomorrow you’re probably gonna be stuck with a few days of REM blogging. But before I do, let me make a comment about one particular criticism in the Democratic presidential primary. The Clinton campaign apparently criticized Obama for calling himself a “law professor” when he was not a tenured faculty member and his title was Senior Lecturer. Now, I should probably call my lawyer brother to get his 2 cents on this, but I think it’s officially the second most ridiculous thing I’ve heard after the whole kindergarten essay thing.

I’m an adjunct. I am the epitome of the part time faculty. I have no responsibilities beyond the courses I teach – I don’t go to faculty meetings, I don’t work with grad students, I teach. My ID lists my title as “Adjunct Professor.” When I was a grad student teaching my own classes, my students called me Professor Thomer. Some still do, others call me Dr. Thomer. When people ask me what I do, I will sometimes call myself a part-time philosophy professor. Now, I would never put Professor of Philosophy on my resume, because in a formal setting, with the capital letters and all, that’s a rank I have absolutely no claim to. But in casual conversation? Who pays attention to academic rank? And who is still awake at the end of that conversation?

Bill Clinton apparently takes issue with a Barack Obama ad in which he says “I don’t want to spend the next year, or the next four years, re-fighting the same fights we had in the 1990s.” Clinton responded, “what fights should we not have made?”

Well, I think it would have been nice if we could have done without the year-long scandal and impeachment trial that resulted from Bill not being able to keep his hormones in check. But that’s just me.

I’m not denying that there were policy-based fights. And I’m not denying that the Republican approach to government often involves picking fights. But Bill Clinton’s personality, biography, and choices made many of those fights personal. And it would be nice to move on from those personality-driven fights, even if that only means we get to start new ones.

I don’t have a great many comments about the presidential primary at the moment. Maybe I will when Iowa finally settles on a date. I’m in a state now of expecting something to happen to shake up the narrative and dreading the possibility that nothing does. The major development that I’ve been running over in my head is John Edwards’ decision to opt into the federal matching system for the primary campaign. This will give him extra money for the next few months, but will limit what he can raise and spend up until the Democratic convention next year. There are many people who think this is a monumentally bad decision, because it means that if Edwards were to win the Democratic nomination, he’d have relatively little money to run a campaign during the spring and summer months when the primary election is supposedly still going on but the general election has for all intents and purposes begun.

Gotta say, I’m one of those people. Admittedly, I was not an Edwards supporter before this, so this is more an example of something that pushes him further down my list than something that changes my mind very much.

Now, Edwards says this is a matter of principle, of showing his support for publicly financed elections. I do have my suspicions about that – it’s late in the game to be making such declarations of principle. But even taking him at his word, it’s a bad way of supporting the principle. Publicly funded elections are not just about reducing a candidate’s dependence on particular donors – and a candidate who accepts matching funds is still going to be looking to collect plenty of $2300 checks. They’re about creating a level playing field where one person can’t drown out another message just by throwing money at it. Unilaterally accepting limits on donations and spending exacerbates that problem, rather than reducing it. So I don’t see how it really supports the principles Edwards is concerned about.

There’s a great post-mortem discussion of the 8th District Council race over at Young Philly Politics. One of the blog’s founders is the son of one of the three candidates who challenged the incumbent; he came in a very close third and the incumbent was re-elected. The discussion thread also includes some thoughts about the at-large council races, where a group of would-be progressive reformers failed to take any of the nominations.

It’s funny, because the headline story of the election is that Philadelphians voted for reform by putting Michael Nutter and Tom Knox first and second in the mayoral election. But 14 out of 17 Council incumbents were re-elected. Two of the ousted three were only recently elected in a special election during which the party ward leaders selected the Democratic candidate, so they did not have as much of a chance to build an incumbency advantage. The third oustee was Juan Ramos, a first-term incumbent with an at-large seat. News reports suggested that Juan Ramos had annoyed some people in the party structure and been cut from their endorsement ballots. Plus Juan Ramos was competing for the Latino vote with another at-large candidate named Ben Ramos who had a better ballot position. Furthermore, the three new Council members all had support from significant parts of the party power structure – they could draw on support from the local electricians’ union, Chaka Fattah’s organization, or some combination thereof.

The takeaway from this, judging from the discussion, is that reformers trying to go it completely alone are likely to get squished. The alternatives seem to be working to create an alternate organizational structure that can compete with the existing power structures, or find ways to become part of that structure. The former option would seem to hold the most promise for reformers to maintain their independence – but it takes time and money that no one seems to have. The latter option isn’t exactly a short term fix either, and it opens you up to having to make compromises.

In my “history sure does rhyme” moments, I find myself thinking about Jane Addams. She tried twice to organize political opposition to the machine boss and got nowhere. Her neighbors just didn’t see the political structure as the same kind of problems that she did, so her organizing efforts failed. I’m not sure I see that changing much in the near future, so I’m more sympathetic to the work-from-within approach and all the compromises that go with it. It’ll be interesting to see to what extent the conversation about 2011 starts now, and what effect that has.

Boy, when I said it was gonna be an interesting two weeks, I wasn’t kidding, was I?

Michael Nutter has become the clear front-runner in the mayoral primary. You can read some of Chris Bowers’ thoughts on that over at MyDD; Chris’s ward is one of those endorsing Nutter, so you can get a sense of the logic. Other candidates have clearly set their sights on Nutter – today Pattie and I each got two separate pieces of direct mail from Tom Knox calling Nutter a “typical politician,” and I saw a TV ad with the same theme. I gotta laugh at that. The purer-than-thou campaign might have worked before Knox held a press conference with another member of City Council to support her bid for the Council presidency. Then again, if there is a Throw All the Bums Out mentality in the city, maybe the message will stick. I tend to doubt it.

I’m actually surprised at how ineffectual other candidates have been in trying to take down Nutter. I can certainly understand the concerns over the stop-and-frisk and state-of-emergency elements of his crime plan, and I’d expect city unions and neighborhood groups to be concerned about his tax-cutting enthusiasm. But those messages aren’t getting a huge amount of play, and when someone tries to raise them, they seem to whack themselves in the foot – witness Chaka Fattah’s comments in the last TV debate where he suggested Nutter needed to remind himself he was African-American, a comment many people (including myself, but not everyone) thought was a low blow.

Ah well. They’re dropping off the voting machines on Saturday. Then the fun really begins.

I’m not sure if I’m linking to this post at The Next Mayor blog more because there are new polling numbers, or because of the Highlander references.

Looks like Nutter is moving up. If that gets confirmed, it could throw a monkeywrench into my tactical voting calculations. Gonna be an interesting two weeks or so.

Gonna cheat tonight, since I’m still feeling some annoying congestion. Here’s a link to a MyDD discussion on the effects of the current primary structure. I have a few comments in the discussion thread to that post that I think are worthwhile.