Turning adversity into opportunity

I had just finished bemoaning the time-wasting excesses of silly season, when this week one of the presidential candidates shows us what our candidates ought to be doing with the quiet time. We Democrats have two excellent candidates, who have given us all the information most voters can digest on policy and resume. What's left to campaign about? Sen. Barack Obama this week showed us a great answer: prove to the voters that you can lead.

The 2008 presidential contest is coming down to three US Senators, none of whom have ever held a high executive position. They can argue about who has visited more countries, who has been closest to executive power, who's seen more combat, who's had more employees, etc. etc. But let's face it, if anyone in the race had been a Governor, or CEO, or cabinet secretary, or ambassador, they would win the executive experience comparison hands-down.

Sen. Obama showed by example how there's a much more important comparison to be won. Instead of talking about leadership, he demonstrated it, right in front of our eyes, by taking on one of the most difficult and explosive topics of the day: race. He took what was becoming a big problem — the media obsession with a few provocative quotes from one of the Senator's millions of supporters — and turned it into a big opportunity.

The traditional approach of risk-averse presidential campaigns is to ignore media obsessions. If you can manage to ignore it long enough, it will go away, and you get a few brownie points for discipline by not flying off the handle. Obama could have taken the safe route.

But presidents often don't have the luxury of taking a safe route, and when they do, it can lead to failure of historic proportions. After 9/11 president Bush could have engaged extremism head-on, rallied the nation to come together against a common enemy, used the opportunity to make some real progress. Instead, he urged us to go shopping and be sure to pick up some plastic and duct tape. The us vs. them dynamic has been a powerful force in history, as when the US-Soviet rivalry pushed us into space exploration. Pitting the vast majority of us against a tiny pack of extremists could have been a powerful tool for progress in the right hands. Instead, Bush chose to divide the nation down the middle and make 9/11 into a purely destructive force. That's bad leadership, really bad.

We all know the world has a generous supply of adversity to send our way. Obama demonstrated how he thinks in a crunch, what he does with adversity. It's the same thing John F. Kennedy did, and it's a style of leadership we haven't seen since. No wonder young people are so impressed, just as my parents' and my generation were so impressed with Kennedy. When you're young, you don't want to face a long future of ignoring the same problems, of having your toothpaste inspected at airports, or endless war in Iraq, or the expanding gap between rich and poor, or loss of competitive edge, or racial animosities that never end because we never really try to end them. No one wants that for their children.

Many of these problems are too big for government to solve, but that doesn't mean they are unsolveable. Ronald Reagan told us government isn't the solution to every problem, but his response was to destroy government and not look for any better solutions. Kennedy asked us to ask ourselves what we can do for our country, and that is what Obama did in his speech on race. He asked us to try to understand each other's anger, to see how black anger and white anger are really the same thing, and how we can build on that common understanding to direct that energy to solving the problems we share. Never in a million years would George W. Bush or John McCain think of doing that, of asking us to look in the mirror, take responsibility, and do something hard for the common good. They would never be able to pull it off, and they know it.

If your standard for choosing a president is who can get more productivity out of government or who has the best set of priorities for the spending of government funds, all three candidates have things to quibble about as they jockey for advantage. But if your standard is who will be our best government ally and cultural leader in helping us as citizens to work together to solve problems government has never been able to solve, I think this week Obama set a very high standard, one that will be very difficult for the other two candidates to reach. 

Silly season is here!

With most of the primaries and caucuses over, we're now heading into silly season. You've probably noticed that much of the presidential primary season was shifted a month earlier this year, relative to past election cycles. It has been a great contest, much better than most years, but not because of the time shift. Indeed, the only real effect of the earlier primary calendar has been that silly season now starts even before April Fools Day.

What's silly season? It's that part of the election cycle every four years, when candidates run out of new things to talk about, get bored with their own great ideas. The media get bored as well, and turn their attention elsewhere. So the level of dialogue starts to decline. Campaign surrogates start saying more outlandish things in order to try to recapture attention. The topics of racism and sexism get raised as casually as the weather. Candidates pick at each other for the behavior of individuals among their 50 million supporters. Instead of debating healthcare, they debate haircare.

I'm glad Colorado moved its caucuses to the front line, but I don't think we're well-served by moving the entire calendar earlier on a nationwide basis. Our caucus attendance increased 18-fold from 2006 to 2008, because of our sudden relevance. It gave our party a fresh infusion of talent, diversity, and ideas. Maybe attendance would have been even higher if we jumped the line like Florida and Michigan, but it would not have been worth it. We can be grateful with what we have.

From the perspective of the national party and national campaigns, the whole point of the extended primary season, and the state and national conventions, is to get media attention, to lure TV viewers away from Fear Factor and Sex in the City. But there's a limit to the public's willingness to come to grips with real life. And we sure don't want to get to the point where presidential candidates have to take off their clothes or eat a bug to get attention.

The problem with silly season is that all the wonderful work the candidates have done so far to direct the public's attention to the big issues of the day, may be lost and forgotten in a flood of trivia.

I'm coming to the conclusion that we need a National Presidential Primary Day in order to keep silly season in check. I think sometime in May would be good. A national primary would be a much fairer and more inclusive system than the volunteers of political parties are able to muster. In the days leading up to the caucus, I didn't enjoy talking with people who were sick, had to work, had sick relatives to care for, lacked transportation, or had any number of other valid or heartbreaking reasons they couldn't attend the caucus. And having the primary on the same day everywhere would greatly increase turnout.

We can go ahead and have our caucuses and county assemblies earlier, use them to hold presidential "beauty contests" that attract new volunteers and media attention to the parties, to help donors direct their money to the most promising candidates, and to limit the power of concentrated media ownership in selecting the candidates. I'm convinced this part of the system is essential if we are to maintain a competitive political system with real choices. The caucus and assembly system is very effective in its job of bringing forward new candidates and fresh ideas. It also will have the same effect as the current caucus/primary system in attracting media attention and getting candidates to hang out in Iowa diners.

We still need a National Convention as a framework for pulling the party infrastructure together and creating a brand image, as well as for the essential job of performing the legal nomination in a representative democracy. But I'd like to do away with the parallel tracks of Assembly and Convention. After hours and hours of trying to explain this system to people, still barely more than four regular people in Colorado even understand it. (But two of them are in Douglas County, so at least my efforts have paid off a little.) Let's let the Congressional and State Assembly delegates elect the National Convention delegates, allocating those national delegates according to the results of the Presidential Primary vote. No more County Conventions, just County Assemblies. Only one binding preference vote at caucuses for electing delegates, though non-binding preference votes can be taken for other offices. Only one slate of delegates is sent forward from each level to the next.

Politics is a complicated business, there's no getting around it. But the feedback I'm getting is that the process this year has been longer and more complicated than it needs to be. Excessive complexity is a barrier, that discourages new people from staying involved. It's great that we've experimented with an earlier caucus/primary season and with voluntary state compliance with party rules. Now we know what works and what doesn't. The next logical step is a National Presidential Primary Day.

Some assembly required

Having slept for the past 48 hours, we are finally recovering from our biggest, most complex, and most satisfying Assembly and Convention ever! None of us can remember a County Convention where the presidential nomination was still hotly contested at that time. This led us to dust off some old procedures that had only been theoretical up to this point, used in other states but never here. They worked!

One of the biggest changes was the use of voting districts. The basic problem was that a group of 346 people had to elect 205 from among their number to take on an exciting role in higher-level Conventions, possibly leading to a seat at the Democratic National Convention. No one could imagine being given a list of 346 names and having to select 205 in a reasonable amount of time.

The solution was to divide up the county into voting districts. The trick was to make the districts big enough to ensure a reliable supply of alternates to replace any absent delegates; while small enough that the delegates in any group could reasonably contact each other and communicate on the Convention floor. We really guessed that one right: 22 districts seemed to be just the right number to meet both objectives.

Another new procedure was the use of pre-printed ballots for electing delegates. In the past the names had been written on paper only after determining the delegate list through a sort of verbal scrimmage. This was fine when everyone knew everyone else. It doesn't work when most people are new and don't know how to approach it.

The ballot system had its pluses and minuses. On the positive side, it made it much easier for people to match names with faces, and it saved a lot of time, maybe an hour or more. On the minus side, it had only a limited ability to help newbies understand what is in reality a very complex process no matter how you divide it up.

The feedback we've received on the ballot process was mostly positive. Of those who didn't like it, half were old-timers who were particularly skilled at the verbal scrimmage and missed it. The other half, mostly newbies, would have liked something even more strongly structured, perhaps broken up into more, smaller, pieces. Many people wished they had taken more time to read all the emailed instructions we sent them. A dry run example and more tightly-worded instructions would certainly help. An online system for submitting questionnaire responses would have helped many people and saved the volunteers a lot of time as well.

We had a few check-in snags, mostly related to needing much more space and some more preparation time, than we had available to us. The snags worked themselves out fairly quickly with some real-time adjustments by the brilliant and unflappable Sarah Mann. We've all heard that leading Democrats is like herding cats, and we have a new appreciation for that! We ended up only about 10 minutes over our time objective for the Credentials Report. Not bad for a totally new system.

We'll be doing a debrief of all the volunteers to capture what we've learned for next time. It might be 8 years before we have a Convention like this again, but we'll be ready. Many of the lessons can help us at any Assembly.