Author: Samuel G. Howard

When I was on David Segal’s campaign for Democratic nominee for Congressman in 2010, I went to to the WPRI primary debate. One of the things Mr. Segal suggested as a way to combat the recession was investing in infrastructure. Months later, after the election, the Providence Journal published an editorial saying essentially that actually, that was a good idea, that the economic return on investments in infrastructure is relatively high (I’m unfortunately unable to find the editorial). But roads and train tracks and sewer lines aren’t glamorous things, so we forget the sinews of our nation, leaving them to fall into neglect and disrepair.

Likewise, progressive infrastructure is lacking in the state. Drinking Liberally, while a great place to meet and talk to great folks, is not progressive infrastructure. At best, it is the foundations of progressive infrastructure, a ground where ideas meet and mix, where initiatives are discussed. That’s fine. Those places need to exist. But they shouldn’t be the only places.

Perhaps it is the inevitable result of decades of near single-party rule in Rhode Island. Democrats, fat after years of legislative dominance, don’t fear other parties or insurgent challengers. Leadership exerts its control, with opportunists sneaking in and building their own power bases in the party apparatus. While not a perfectly dominant system, it largely functions. The factionalism of the past has diminished. If the only organization is the Party, then insurgents aren’t a threat. They lack organization, one that can rival the strength of the Democratic Party.

What seems to me to happen instead is that people largely fall in line behind particular people. We hitch our wagons to rising stars (although some people remain on the wagon long after the star has faded). As these power players jockey for position, our differences surface not only because of particular ideological positions, but also because of clashes of personality between our chosen candidates. It is a mercenary engagement at best, as otherwise dedicated people put aside their ideals for expedience and influence.

Rhode Island Democrats have been unabashed in their disdain for voters. For 72 years the Party has held legislative power in the state. This disdain for voters leads to ridiculous situations, such as the redistricting debacle aimed at protecting loyal incumbents and punishing opposition members in the General Assembly and in the cities and towns. Or the disenfranchisement of left-leaning voters in the name of preventing “fraud”. Or the knee-jerk “rally round the flag” response to abysmal poll numbers for U.S. Congressman David Cicilline, whose pride may very well be jeopardizing the Party’s control of Rhode Island’s Congressional District 1. Or the ability of the Party to run a candidate for Governor who not only ran like a Republican, but talked like one too. They paid for that misstep in the last election. They aim to make another in this one.

Where have progressive leaders been throughout this? Silent. Unable to vocalize their positions, even when such positions are the will of the people of the state, unless leadership also agrees. Then, a bone. They benefit from the same systems; the lack of uncompetitiveness in their districts or wards, the rise of personality-based politics, etc. They require the Party, so they go along to get along.

When Mr. Segal’s campaign ended, it stopped. The students like myself returned to our schools, those who were graduated returned to the labor force. They scattered. And there an opportunity was missed. We never formalized the ties that bound us. We believed in a progressive vision of Rhode Island. Over 11000 primary voters did, too. That is a sizable number in a state our size. Where was the infrastructure for that? What happened to it? That should be enough to make any candidate think twice about failing to court them. Our people vote. We need to build a progressive infrastructure to force the progressive agenda this state needs to the fore.

A progressive infrastructure is organized voting and activism and media. It’s saying that together, you are stronger than when you are alone. If you vote progressively, and talk to your friends, and that’s it, what did you do? When the politician you voted for gets into power, they won’t know you. They won’t consult with you. You didn’t tell them the reason you voted for them. Is it any mystery then why they ignore what you want? You’re just an anonymous voter. As far as they’re concerned, you wholly endorse all of their policies.

This is the first goal of any progressive infrastructure: organizing voters. When politicians must court voters, they have to, at least partially, implement those voters’ preferred policies or face a candidate who will. Since we can identify the vague issues that matter to voters via polling, we fail to organize voters, instead attempting to “motivate” them. Thus we forget that in a democracy, the loudest yellers get heard first. Those who never speak up get nothing. Rhode Islanders want specific things, but unless they’re willing to articulate those desires before they vote, they aren’t guaranteed of getting them.

Which comes to the second part: activism. The story goes that when Lyndon Johnson had spent a lot of political capital to get the Civil Rights Act passed, Martin Luther King, Jr. knew there was still a need for the Voting Rights Act, and he went to President Johnson and told him as much. And Johnson said, so the story goes, “I wanna do it. Now make me do it.” This is something we need to realize, politicians will disappoint. They have egos on them, but they have to, because their jobs demand it of them. You have to be active, you have to apply pressure. Without pressure, they’ll do whatever they want, no matter how irrelevant it is.

Part of that pressure is where media steps in. I want to be clear here: I think all media is subjective to some extent. To me, there is no truly objective news story besides no news story at all; if only because it comes from a human being. It’s important you know a reporter’s bias, but a biased reporter is not the same as a bad reporter. If a story’s facts are verifiable, if the writer address their own biases and doesn’t attempt to deceive you, then that’s good reporting. Media steers the conversation. It exposes problems, it relays the information that matters to its audience and, most importantly to this discussion, it identifies that audience.

As progressives, we have a duty to organize as voters, to pressure our politicians, and to support and foster our media. If you’re a progressive and you’re happy with what you have right now, then you’re insulated and isolated. We can no longer rely on a candidate-to-candidate strategy of advancing to our goals, because it’s not working.

Do you understand why we nominate presidents the way we do? As we get into the nominating contest, and the Democratic and Republican Parties decrease in popularity (helped along by a bad economy and their own hostile natures), more and more people across the political spectrum advocate for the end of the party system. Most recently, Patrick Laverty of Anchor Rising has advocated for it. It seems a simple enough reform; but I think it’s a short-sighted one. For one thing, it ignores the historical realities that led to state regulation of parties.

For those without the time to read, I’ll give a quick summation; essentially when the nominating process began utilizing a convention system (it took to around 1832 for parties to start utilizing it, prior to that, a party’s legislative caucus in a state nominated candidates) lawlessness in the process was pretty common. This is how you got political bosses who controlled machines. Since parties were more or less voluntary associations in the eyes of government, there was no need to regulate how they selected candidates. Most changes in the nominating process for president tended to be reforms of previous systems, and vary from state to state, creating a piecemeal system which still exists in the Republican Party today (Democrats overhauled their system in the 1970s and asserted national party control).

Now, Mr. Laverty strikes towards the abolition of political parties ignoring that politicians will tend to associate in factions. The same error was made by the Framers of the Constitution, which is why we got the Twelfth Amendment (reorganizing the Electoral College process) in the first place. Politics requires parties, if only to keep political alliances out in the open. Even officially non-partisan states like Nebraska have politicians who are of parties. Party-line votes still exist, and the parties endorse candidates. A non-partisan primary system is really just a first-round election in a run-off system. Simply put, there is no feasible way to organize a political system without parties; world views will always align with similar world views.

Though I’ve just laid out the issues of not having state control of the primary system, I do think there are some inherent issues in it. For one thing, the state can be a slow mover (witness our 1950s social programs grafted onto our Gilded Age economy). The second thing is that the state is much like corporations; both resist experimentation and new ideas (despite our “lively experiment” rhetoric). Having hit upon a successful formula, we cling to it. Government is thus almost always reactionary. You need only see how we respond to crises once they happen, instead of investing in prevention. Y2K, largely a punch line now, was prevented due to our prevention measures; systems did go down. But when the end of the world didn’t happen, we laughed it off. This inability to respond to future crises limits the scope of the debate when it comes to things like climate change. And it limits our ability to experiment in government. If things are working, why change?

An inherently conservative mindset, and one that I actually think must be asked. But if we take the view that there’s too much money politics, or that the elite few are foisting their views on the popular many, or whether special interests have too much power; then we can certainly says that things are due for a change. Both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street hit upon this view (“things need to change”) though their prescriptions are very far apart.

But no matter how you frame it, the call for greater democratic control is a very noble one. We do exist in a representative democracy, but this has always been fraught with trouble. For much of our early history, this meant only the well-off could vote or hold office (leading to the outbreak of the Dorr Rebellion). For the majority of our history, this meant black people couldn’t vote. Our representatives have always represented people they were never beholden to. This continues to this day.

That said, representative democracy does have its upsides. It is genuinely fine for people to have other concerns than politics. We don’t all need to be involved in government. Under the current system, you look to your politicians and essentially say, “I’m ceding my autonomy to you, so you can do the deciding for me, so I can get on with my life. But I reserve the right to yell at you if you do something I don’t like, and I reserve the right to throw you out next election.” The issue is that this then creates a system where the preferences of the politician are largely dominant to those of the voters.

So how do we found a new process that forces greater democratic control without hindering the ability of representatives to get their jobs done? That’s a question I can’t quite answer, but I will say one system is to actually control the platform. I pay attention to world politics a bit, and one of the things that interested me was the development of the idea of liquid democracy by the German Pirate Party utilizing LiquidFeedback.

Essentially, party platform can be suggested by anyone, with a proposal submitted to a central website. Members are free to discuss this system for a set period of time, and then a final draft is submitted and proposal is voted upon. But say a proposal comes up which you don’t really care or just can’t comprehend? In this case you can cast your vote yourself, or you can delegate your vote to another person; you can do this on an issue-by-issue basis or on a topic-by-topic basis. So if I know nothing about environmental policy, but my friend Jay does, I simply allow Jay to cast my vote for me. Jay might not fully grasp all aspects of environmental policy, and on certain issues might delegate to someone else. In this case, my vote would travel with Jay’s to this third person, who could then cast three votes.

There are serious drawbacks to this system. Issues like fraud, buying votes, and hacking are top concerns, along with the fact that not everyone has access to electronics or the Internet. But it’s intriguing as a system that essentially lowers the bar to participation, keeps politics relatively local, and allows a great amount of representation. Candidates could easily be nominated and selected using this system, instead of the complicated delegate rules that currently dominate the political parties.

But this is just one idea. Since I’ve gone on for a long time, how would you change things? What’s your ideal change in terms of politics or government or elections? How would you implement it?

A couple days ago, Daniel Lawlor pulled out the old saw of Rhode Island’s corrupt politics, telling us “political corruption is nothing new to Rhode Island.” While Mr. Lawlor’s article is nothing more than really a brief political history of the state, hardly more objectionable then telling us that some folks don’t wash their hands after going to the bathroom, it ties into a serious misapprehension about the state; namely that Rhode Island is a corrupt one. While I would hate to deprive people something to complain about, the facts don’t align with that particular point of view.

In reality, two different rankings (relying on federal data) have been published in the past year which put corruption nowhere near any sort of objectionable levels. The most recent is a study that showed up just over a week ago. Published by the University of Illinois  at Chicago’s Political Science Department, the report is titled “Chicago and Illinois, Leading the Pack in Corruption” and shows exactly what it says, that Illinois’ has convicted more people on public corruption charges than any other major metropolitan area. Providence and Rhode Island don’t even rank in the top 15.

Going down the list of appendices, we discover that from 2001 to 2010, the United States Attorney’s Office of Rhode Island convicted exactly 23 people of public corruption. States that ranked equal to or lower were Idaho (23), New Hampshire (16), Wyoming (16), and Vermont (15). In just totals, Rhode Island is the fifth least corrupt state in the entire United States. Per capita may change that number, but still not to astronomical levels.*

The Daily Beast released corruption rankings of the states and the District of Columbia nearly two years ago. Using a slightly different period of time (1998-2008), The Beast ranked states according to an aggregate of five categories of convictions; public corruption, racketeering and extortion (organized crime), forgery and counterfeiting, fraud, and embezzlement. Only one of those categories exclusive applies to public officials; the rest can all be committed by private citizens. The Beast ranked their top ten most corrupt states (from greatest to least) as Tennessee, Virginia, Mississippi, Delaware, North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Oklahoma. Where did Rhode Island fall? 11th? 15th? 20th? 25th?

27th. Out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, Rhode Island fell in a respectable slightly below the middle. However, it wasn’t public corruption or organized crime (we ranked 32nd in each). What brought our position up was fraud (14th) and embezzlement (7th), crimes completely capable of being committed by private citizens. Indeed, The Daily Beast singled out Lisa Torres of Johnston as their example. For those keeping track, we ranked 44th in forgery and counterfeiting.

The reality is that a state like Rhode Island is well-suited to battling corruption and keeping it out of the state. A relatively small population lowers the possibilities, while the high density means keeping corruption a secret is next to impossible. The ease of access the Rhode Island press corps has to lawmakers (I mean physically, it’s far easier to reach them then say those in Illinois), combined with our capital’s location in a major metropolitan area and media market increases the incentive to play by the rules. At present, the big news story of possible corruption was Sam Zurier, in a tiff with some constituents over the paltry sum of $100. Considering the circus that went on over that, the reaction if someone was corrupt for a sum of real value would probably overwhelm us for months.

Citizens have every right to complain about government, and I don’t blame them for viewing the state in a negative light, since focusing on the negative is a common experience for people. But to tar our government with the brush of false corruption is a reckless thing. Rhode Island is a relative example of a government that plays by the rules (whether those rules are unfair and whether the winner is who we’d like it to be are other discussions). It’s time we congratulated ourselves for that, instead of insulting our own state. Corruption may not be new to us, but it is growing foreign to us.

*UPDATED:

According to my math (it may be shaky), Rhode Island ranks about 37th or 38th out of 53 states and territories in per capita public corruption convictions per 10000 residents. D.C.’s numbers may be inflated because it often tries officials from other states. Due to rounding, position numbers are not 100% accurate. Numbers utilize total convictions from 2001-2010 per U.S. Attorney’s Office District (states/territories with multiple offices have had totals combined) and the state’s population in the 2010 census.

1. DC: 5.6 per 10000
2. Guam & NMI: 3.56 per 10000
3. Virgin Islands: 3.38  per 10000
4. Georgia: 2.29 per 10000
5. Louisiana: 0.85 per 10000
6. North Dakota: 0.82 per 10000
7. Puerto Rico: 0.74 per 10000
8. South Dakota: 0.73 per 10000
9. Florida: 0.70 per 10000
10. Alaska: 0.67 per 10000
11. Kentucky: 0.65 per 10000
12. Mississippi: 0.60 per 10000
13. Montana: 0.60 per 10000
14. Alabama: 0.57 per 10000
15. Delaware: 0.51 per 10000
16. Virginia: 0.52 per 10000
17. New Jersey: 0.49 per 10000
18. Illinois: 0.44 per 10000
19. Ohio: 0.43 per 10000
20. Pennsylvania: 0.43 per 10000
21. Tennessee: 0.41 per 10000
22. West Virginia: 0.39 per 10000
23. Maryland: 0.38 per 10000
24. Oklahoma: 0.36 per 10000
25. Massachusetts: 0.32 per 10000
26. Hawaii: 0.32 per 10000
27. Missouri: 0.31 per 10000
28. Arkansas: 0.30 per 10000
29. New York: 0.30 per 10000
30. Connecticut: 0.28 per 10000
31. Texas: 0.28 per 10000
32. Wyoming: 0.28 per 10000
33. Arizona: 0.27 per 10000
34. Maine: 0.26 per 10000
35. Michigan: 0.25 per 10000
36. Vermont: 0.24 per 10000
37. New Mexico: 0.22 per 10000
38. Rhode Island: 0.22 per 10000
39. Wisconsin: 0.21 per 10000
40. Colorado: 0.19 per 10000
41. North Carolina: 0.19 per 10000
42. California: 0.18 per 10000
43. Iowa: 0.17 per 10000
44. Idaho 0.15 per 10000
45. Nebraska: 0.14 per 10000
46. Utah: 0.14 per 10000
47. Nevada: 0.13 per 10000
48. Washington: 0.13 per 10000
49. Kansas: 0.12 per 10000
50. Minnesota: 0.12 per 10000
51. New Hampshire: 0.12 per 10000
52. South Carolina: 0.12 per 10000
53. Oregon: 0.10 per 10000

“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet – there is where the bullet went through – and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”

So begins Teddy Roosevelt’s “It Takes More Than That to Kill a Bull Moose” speech, which he delivered for 90 minutes with a bullet in his chest. Moments before he had been the victim of an assassination attempt but, true to his image, he decided to make his speech anyways. Though he veered from his prepared remarks, Roosevelt made an impassioned speech asking the voters of Milwaukee to support him in his bid as the Progressive Party’s presidential candidate. A third-party candidate in a multiple candidate race, former President Roosevelt utilized the wound spilling blood into his shirt to attack newspapers supporting his opposition; sitting President William Howard Taft of the Republican Party, future President Woodrow Wilson of the Democratic Party, and future political prisoner Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party. Even in 1912, media bias was an issue, media objectivity a farce.

Roosevelt was not the last great American orator, but the end of the 20th Century seems to have finished most of them off. If President Obama is the greatest speaker of his generation, then it reflects poorly on his apparently inarticulate generation. The era of the sound-bite should’ve sharpened oration, not dulled it. Every sentence should be a sound-bite. Instead, we nestle them away, like jewelry hidden in a sock drawer. Modern speeches have all the pep of socks in a drawer, you know exactly what’s coming. There is only one way the State of the Union ends: some slight variation on “the state of the Union is strong,” and then “thank you. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.”

Perhaps much of this is the media’s fault. With its eagerness to jump on any misstep by anyone, the result has been that candidates shy away from powerful imagery or anything that could be taken out of context. Reliably tested and polled talking points dominate. No one wants to be Mitt Romney, quoted as saying “I like being able to fire people.” The full sentence was “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service that I need, I want to say, ‘I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.'” This was all in the context of how the tax structure makes it hard for individuals to purchase health insurance. But those seven words, “I like being able to fire people,” fit into a media narrative of Mr. Romney and the nuance got lost. That’s what happens, you get reduced.

Roosevelt also stands apart for being interesting. Patrician, imperialist, patriarchal reformer; all these things are true about him. But Roosevelt fought against the excesses of the Gilded Age and for conservation of land. It’s largely thanks to his Presidency that many of our open spaces exist at all. Plenty of Roosevelt’s successors were interesting, but after about 1968 our presidential candidates have largely lost any real interesting backstory or compelling narrative, instead descending more into the seedy. What can be said of President Obama’s or Mr. Romney’s careers? There is little drama there. The tension of President Obama was his historic first, that an African-American President would finally rule over the country, nearly 150 years from the end of the Civil War and 50 years from the end of Jim Crow’s pseudo-slavery. No one today, however, looms larger than life.

Perhaps the largest figure produced in Rhode Island in recent years is Buddy Cianci. Despite the obvious corruption which seems to have quashed his political career, Cianci without a doubt changed Providence for the better. It would have been impossible for him to rule for over 21 years (with a seven year interruption) otherwise. In all honesty, I miss the Renaissance City image he cultivated; it conjured up da Vinci and Michelangelo. “The Creative Capital”, with its $200,000 “P” seems a pale imitation. I was too young to ever hear Mr. Cianci speak, but he seems energetic and emphatic if not overly eloquent in the sole clip I can find of him at the 1980 Republican National Convention. It won’t endear him any to anyone but you get a quick sense of what his speaking ability was like. I do remember him briefly taking the stage at my sister’s high school graduation to hand out jars of his marina sauce. Mr. Cianci has always struck me as much like Huey Long, although without the populist message.

In contrast, Rhode Island has always dealt with patrician politicians of an odder mold, along with its share of awkward policy wonks. Though I view the latter as necessary, the former generally entrench elite interests except for the few that push to assist the poor. Claiborne Pell was one of those exceptions. The recent State of the City speech by Providence Mayor Angel Taveras hasn’t made Mr. Taveras appear much more than a man in a difficult position to me. Hamstrung by the budgetary demands of austerity, Mr. Taveras may simply be unable to be the robust booster the city needs, and it may not be in his style to appear a fighter. He has an opening with Brown University, but it’s unclear whether he’ll take it.

Finally, Lincoln Chafee to me seems someone with a chance to be interesting who just hasn’t managed to find his voice. A former farrier, a defier of the Bush Administration while a Republican (voting against the Iraq War when so many “progressive” politicians got that call wrong), the state’s first independent Governor… There is much to Chafee that just doesn’t come through. This may well handicap him if he decides to pursue reelection in the 2014, though that is too far away. But it certainly will handicap him over the next three years of his term. Without charisma, Chafee can be easily misconstrued and portrayed negatively by his opponents.

We decry the reduction of media to entertainment, that it cheapens politics. But we can be overzealous in our application of this as well. PolitiFact works fine when it checks actual facts; too often it has strayed into opinionated statements about rhetoric. Frankly, I’d rather have politics entertaining than dull. People sat and listened to Roosevelt speak for 90 minutes while he bled from the chest (some tried to stop him and get him to seek medical attention). Do you think they were all there because they really loved Roosevelt, or do you think the fact that there weren’t televisions, electronics, movies, or even radio had something to do with it?

Politicians compete for attention with every other possible distraction in the world. This is the society we live in. Why should I listen to a politician when I’ve got work to do or can play Angry Birds on my smartphone? It’s pretty simple. Engage people and win.