The objectives of any post election efforts to involve the campaign volunteers in governing were never clearly defined in Deval release 1.0, nor was what it meant for people to remain engaged. A shared understanding between the administration and the campaign volunteers of what it means to remain engaged, and what both groups hope to achieve by that engagement is essential.
Then, and this I think comes from the top down, the administration’s paid employees need to understand that whatever engaging the campaign’s volunteers means, it’s a priority of the administration. Otherwise it will wither and die. As for this imperative coming from the over-romanticized “grassroots”, don’t kid yourself. It would require massive organization and resources to drive the Patrick administration from the outside to change its behavior. I just don’t see it.
Without these two things, it’s lots of fun to talk about nice sounding ideas such as “grassroots governing” and propose neat volunteer activities, but in the end it will be a waste of everyone’s time.
David also asked me if what has happened with the charter school in Gloucester is a deal breaker, given that everyone makes mistakes. My first reaction is that what happened with the Gloucester charter was not a mistake. It was a calculated effort to use our city and our schools as a poker chip – an effort that relied on hiding the truth from people.
Read Paul Reville’s email to Mitchell Chester, understand that the Charter School Offices independent evaluators had rejected all three applicants that year, then watch the video of Chester’s performance at the January 2009 BESE meeting when they granted the charter when he manages to mention that two of the three applicants were rejected, but avoids saying anything explicit about the Gloucester application. Savor his exchange with BESE member Fortmann about the quality of the CSO evaluation process. Browse the Inspector General’s report on this mess.
Once you’ve gotten your mind around it, understand that it happened after representatives of the Patrick administration had come to Gloucester and enlisted members of the field team to recruit community members to come talk with them about the Readiness Project.
The lesson I learned from Deval 1.0 is that the Patrick administration will not hesitate to turn around and treat a community as expendable if, by means they can’t or won’t explain, they calculate that it’s what they need to do to “remain viable to implement their agenda”. Those are a cabinet officer’s words, never questioned by a governor who thinks the process by which the Gloucester charter was granted was “sound”.
My advice, if you want to remain politically active following an election, and you don’t happen to command large sums of money or large numbers of potential voters, is to work locally where you can forge the alliances you are going to need if you have to negotiate with or battle an administration, be it Democrat or Republican. You’ll need people with all kinds of skills and resources, as well as people who know how to bring them together effectively. Don’t sit around waiting for the Patrick any other administration to put you to work. Don’t assume the administration is automatically your friend because you share a party affiliation, or think you have some values in common. Do what energizes you and just consider the Patrick administration as a potential partner, but keep in mind that it is a big organism with its own agendas – not to mention the personal agendas of its members.
If representatives from Patrick 2.0 or whatever they end up calling it come knocking, I’ll certainly hear them out respectfully. Maybe there is something we could work on together that would be beneficial to both of us. I won’t rule it out, but for today I remain sceptical.
Would “once burned, twice shy” be an appropriate phrase for this case?
Fool me twice, shame on me”, which is what I was thinking of saying in my post, but I didn’t think fooled was accurate. After the 2006 election, there was a lot of talk about something that would fall under the headings of civic engagement and keeping the volunteers engaged. My feeling at the time was, we don’t know what it will be exactly, but it’s worth moving forward under the assumption that we’ll figure out something good. Things didn’t play out that way, but since we didn’t really know what we were aiming for, fooled doesn’t fell quite right.
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p>I think it is important to keep up a level of citizen engagement, otherwise government will end up only serving only the interests of big money. Keeping people engaged between the peaks of campaigns in particular is a problem I’ve tried to tackle in Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts, which tried to capitalize on the enthusiasm generated by Bob Reich’s 2002 campaign. Also, as frustrated as I am with the Patrick administration’s recent behavior, it is the one we have to deal with right now.
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p>So, I tried, probably with mixed success, to think about what any administration might do to keep people engaged, and how people who might want to remain active should approach the large organization they hope to work with – all while keeping some of my personal feelings at as low a simmer as possible.
…why the Governor did not reach out to his base to get on their legislators to pass his agenda. Seems the easiest and most logical thing for average supporters to do.
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p>The base is a fickle beast; easy to please, but hard to satisfy. No matter what you do, someone will not like it. And, once you blur the lines between the represented and the representative you’re asking for a tug-o-war.
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p>That is not, however, to say the base should not be engaged… just to note that doing so invites a certain amount of messiness and complications.
The “base” does not agree with the Governor on many issues. People who are/were passionate about electing Deval do not always agree with the Governor. Even where there is agreement, people who are part of the base may not care enough to lobby their legislators. Just because someone supported the Governor does not mean that the person is ready to support, casino gambling as an example. Supporting a candidate is binary; you are either voting for that person, warts and all, or you are not. Issues are very different.
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p>I don’t understand where this type of thinking comes from. We are a representative democracy, that is to say, a Republic. Of course the Patrick administration is not going to put you to work, that would be abrogation of their duties as the representatives.
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p>You posit an aggrandized stand-off that, frankly, I simply don’t understand. If you want to be represented by Deval you vote for him. If you don’t, you vote for someone else. If you don’t like how anyone else represents you, then you should run for office yourself. Once in office, however, the duty of the represented is to respect their own vote and let the representative do their job… Anything else is, to be brutally honest, at best, meddling and at worst, actually undermining the work that is done.
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p>Of course, you’re free to advocate for progress towards a truer democracy, where everyone has a direct and immediate say rather than the representative democracy we have now. You are not, however, free to confuse the one for the other.
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p>My personal agenda is to promote mercy and justice. I, therefore, tend to ascribe similar tendencies toward righteousness, even if I find imperfect congruity to my values, to the personal agendas of most others. Of course, where complete incongruity exists and a demonstrated lack of mercy and a tin ear for justice exists, I don’t even bother. Hence, I haven’t voted for a Republican in years. But, lacking such clear signals, I’ll give the benefit of the doubt. I think public service is a noble calling and most do it for similar sentiments. I also know that people are imperfect and, further, that some are ahead of me, intellectually and morally, and some behind. Grace is often given to the latter and an ear always to the former.
Hmm. I don’t totally accept that view. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that
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p>That, I take it, is basically your view as well. Elections are great because we get to pick who we want to govern us, but in between elections, we’d better sit back and take what they give us, because there’s nothing we can or should do about it until the next election.
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p>I don’t think it’s that simple. I think we need to give elected officials some leeway to do their jobs. But I also think that if they go off the rails in some important respect, it’s entirely appropriate, and indeed incumbent upon us, to call them out loudly and repeatedly until they get it right. Similarly, I think it’s perfectly appropriate to inundate representatives’ offices with phone calls, emails, and the like, letting them know what we think about specific matters that are before them. You, I gather, think that that kind of thing is “at best, meddling and at worst, actually undermining the work that is done.” Well, I guess I’m a meddler then.
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p>Furthermore, what about the people whose candidates lost? Are they required, under your view, to be quiet until the next election? Are they somehow disqualified from making their voices heard, just because their guy didn’t win?
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p>I think that elections are for deciding who gets to hold office, and the time in between elections is for telling the people that we elected what’s important to us. I see no conflict between those two; indeed, they seem to me to go hand in hand, if we are serious about having a robust representative democracy.
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p>Plus, if you were right, what would we blog about other than at election time?
… that the original poster adopted a quite stark adversarial stance, gently sprinkled with casual cynicism, with respect to those for whom we vote, my point, I think, stands. I’m not advocating a complete hands-off approach between elections. I’m not in agreement with Rouseau, and I certainly don’t think it ‘slavery’. I am advocating both leeway and the benefit of the doubt for the representative to do his/her job.
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p>You’ve made my point. No elected official is ever, ever, ever, going to go more than 15 minutes without meeting some individuals definition of “going off the rails in some important respect”. Simply an impossibility. Of course, you’re sane and sober-minded and all that and YOU would NEVER meddle or undermine unless it’s totally a righteous cause and completely just and of the utmost importance… and that bozo over there who’s blabbing about tax cuts and nuking mars doesn’t know what he’s talking about… And, sure, free ice cream day is important, like that other guy who’s standing up and calling for ‘free ice cream day’ but let’s get our priorities straight cantwenow? For each and every person a specific outcome is the ideal outcome but we don’t vote for outcomes, we vote for the process. But some want the process to produce their specific outcome and are willing to jump in head first to make it happen. But we should never ever let anyone, righteous or no, to dictate an outcome, ever.
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p>I, too, think this perfectly appropriate. I do not, however, think you are entitled to feel slighted or “enslaved” if what you think and say fails to change, in the slightest, the opinion of the representative to whom it is directed. Nor, I repeat, are you entitled to adopt, as the original poster apparently does, a knee-jerk adverserial position wherein (he is convinced) the ‘personal agendas’ of the administration are, de jure, not at all congruent to his and, by virtue of demonstrated disagreement, can never be…
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p>You vote for the representative. You do not vote for an outcome in a specific decision making tree… You vote hoping that they’ll make decisions you agree with. However, failure to make decisions with which you agree does not make their representation a failure. That’s all I’m saying.
the last sentence.
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I view the Gloucester charter episode as my deepest disappointment during Patrick 1.0.
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p>During the Romney administration, we long had suspicions that the charter approval process was gamed. It was clear that the administration was attempting to discredit and defund public schools, while promoting and generously funding charters. The Pioneer Institute was well represented on the state Board of Education, which means the board was dominated by folks who were ideologically driven to support charters.
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p>We expected a level playing field, and open and honest governance, as soon as the Deval appointees gained majority control of the board. Mitchell Chester was chosen by a board that was still dominated by the Romney – Pioneer faction. Paul Reville was the choice of the governor, and this cabinet officer provided the lowest mark on the administration’s integrity scale.
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p>I’m not sure what’s next. I hope for the best.