Categories
General

Legislator as Negotiator

Politics is the art of the possible.

So said Otto Von Bismarck in 1867 and he was surely right. One of the challenges for an idealist is that compromise is a necessary and appropriate component of the political process. It happens within parties and it happens within legislative bodies. In both cases compromise is necessary because all decisions in those settings affect a number of people who are in a variety of life situations and hold varying goals for themselves and their communities and good decisions cannot be made without addressing the concerns and perspectives of those various parties. Some dislike this reality – and certainly some use it as an excuse to abandon all principle, but the ability to recognize when and how compromise is appropriate is an important skill for any good legislator.

Obviously the ability to analyze and communicate with colleagues and constituents is a critical prerequisite for a legislator to be an effective negotiator. The real challenge once the analysis and communication abilities are in place is knowing how to balance the ability to negotiate with the understanding of what values or positions are non-negotiable. A legislator should be a good negotiator, but they should not be a chameleon or even a contortionist.

Part of their negotiation must be that there is a core which is immutable – one that they have communicated to constituents. The constituents should be able to depend upon this core of principle to predict how their legislator will represent them and the legislator should be able to articulate how their actions during negotiations conform to those core principles. Once the core of principles has evaporated in the face of their legislative record constituents should be quick to replace their legislator – and a legislator should expect no less from their constituents.

Categories
General

Legislator as Communicator

The job of being a legislator demands that anyone who hopes to fill the role be a capable communicator. I’m not talking about the ability to speak in sound-bitese (although there is a place for that). I am talking about the ability to send and receive messages to voters and to other public officials they are called to work with (both outside and within the legislative body they are or hope to be members of).

Sending messages requires the ability both to craft a message and to deliver it in a way that it will be understood. That’s easy to say, but doing it is tricky as the message must be understood across a variety of media. The message must be understandable when it is delivered in written articles, interviews, town halls, sound bites, and in the various abbreviated forms that dominate the realms of advertising. Publishing is very easy in this age (just ask me, I’ve been publishing thoughts for years on many subjects), but some people realize that and seem to forget that actual communication is much more complicated.

Receiving messages  requires the ability to listen, read, or observe without filtering the input to remove any data that contradicts expectations. It also requires a willingness to be open to input from all sides and to make people aware of that willingness. That openness and ability to productively engage with detractors as well as supporters is crucial for a legislator to be effective and to have the necessary information to represent their constituents.

The skills of communication are one of the qualifications of a legislator that are crucial as part of the campaign and the actual job. In fact, the skills of communication should be vastly more important in re-election campaigns than fund raising (this is less true when first campaigning for an office). The only ability that should be as necessary as communicating in a re-election is the ability to work tirelessly.

Categories
General

What Journalism Could Offer

James Fallows offers a list of benefits that the journalist has the potential to offer consumers. I would like to share his list and see if there anything he left out of the list.

Perspective – reporters and editors are forced to act as a filter when deciding what to investigate and publish out of the endless supply of things that could be investigated and published. (This is the same basic process that the Attorney General has to go through when deciding whether he should be investigating the BCS or the Payday Lending industry.)

Placement in Time – little if any of the news that journalists choose to cover comes without any preceding events. On the other hand, many of those preceding events have gone unnoticed before the newsworthy item registers in the public consciousness. This might also be called “context.”

Similarities and Differences – most news items are not singular events. News has the potential to help us understand how the current event compares to previous similar events. This would allow us to learn what we can from prior experience and also know where we are breaking new ground.

Usefulness – there is a difference between information that is interesting and information that is useful. While there is some value in merely interesting information, that which is simply interesting should not crowd out that which can actually be useful to the news consumer. (News Fluff/Flash covers this idea.)

This seems like a reasonable list of offerings for journalism to tackle as an industry. Getting it right would be a challenge, but a very worthwhile challenge. I would be very interested in supporting a news operation that consistently gave me useful coverage of the things that mattered – rather than simply a datastream about what has been happening. If that coverage offered the placement in time and information on the similarities and differences between the curent event and past events of the same type I would find such an organization indispensible. (In fact I do find such coverage to be indispensible, but I don’t find that coverage from traditional sources.)

Categories
Local

Test the Candidates

When I talked to Kyle Roberts the other night I discussed how important communication was for me when I look at candidates and elected officials. It has been very exciting to see as Kyle has begun to implement some of my suggestions to open more channels of communication for the residents of House District 20. He is making more use of his blog (which he had before we talked) and he has added the option for residents to get his blog updates by email (or a variety of other means). As I have seen him implementing things I had suggested I realized that one of the things that voters can do in choosing a candidate to support is to test the candidates.

Go beyond reading what the candidates say and treat them like elected officials. If you like to ask questions or make suggestions to your representatives you should be doing that with the candidates. The key to representative government is citizen involvement – early and often. If we just vote and then stay out of the political process until the next election cycle the end result will be a government that is out of touch and out of control. It becomes dysfunctional like Washington D.C.

I like this discovery and I plan to make use of it in all races of interest to me in the future. I also like being able to follow the efforts of other people who are proactive in contacting candidates. Thad Van Ry provides a good example of that as he sent questions to the candidates for Senate District 23 (my senate district) and then posted their answers. (That is his intro to the series of answer posts.)

Categories
National

Rhetoric Overshadows Facts

The well titled post, The World Is Not Going To End This Weekend, illustrates how easily an issue can be skewed simply by blurring the facts. Quoting from a post at the Politico which contains the rhetoric surrounding the debate about extending the Protect America Act Timothy Lee goes on to show the truth:

. . .” a measure to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as the deadline approaches. The measure, which failed 191 to 229, would have extended the bill an additional three weeks”. . .

FISA is not expiring this weekend. FISA was passed in 1978 and isn’t slated to expire ever. What’s going to expire this weekend is the Protect America Act, which gave the president some additional spying powers beyond those he enjoyed under FISA. And in fact, even that is misleading, because all that’s really going to expire is the ability to authorize new surveillance activities. The PAA allowed the government to authorize surveillance programs for a year, which means that any surveillance programs that have already been approved will continue to be authorized until August at the earliest.

What this means is that the only real effect of the PAA’s expiration is that if a new terrorist suspect comes to the government’s attention, and he makes a phone call or sends an email that passes through the United States, then the government would need to fill out the extra paperwork required to get a FISA warrant in order to surveil that call. This paperwork can be filled out after the interception begins, so we’re not talking about the NSA missing any important phone calls, we’re just talking about [a bit more paperwork].

This same kind of fudging happens from activists on both sides of most issues. It’s no wonder that the average voter who only knows what they see in the media has such a hard time seeing any debate completely clearly. Their views are almost always being skewed based on the news they receive.

In the midst of all our government social engineering maybe we could make a law to outlaw such abstraction in our news – but I guess that would be counterproductive every time a politician wants to make an emotional appeal to the country.

Categories
State

Face to Face

I was privileged to attend a meeting with our Lieutenant Governor this morning and I enjoyed meeting a few of those who have provided ideas to blog about as well as valuable feedback. It was quite enjoyable.

While we were talking with Lieutenant Governor Herbert (is there any legitimate way to shorten that title?) I came to appreciate even more the crucial need to keep the lines of communication open between government officials and voters. One thing that I really liked the sound of is a program called Be Ready Utah. The whole premise of the program is to be prepared to address emergency situations effectively at the ground level before larger levels of government (county, state, federal) are able to organize and lend a hand. I like that idea – in fact that should be the basic premise behind most of the functions that we expect of the government (think education).

What disappointed me was that I had never heard of this valuable program. I even went to website of the state government and discovered that there are no apparent links to the program (I found it by searching for the title of the program and close wasn’t good enough). Other issues we discussed, such as transportation and education, illustrated how we can suffer from poor communication between government and citizens (think back to the voucher debate).

I think that serious bloggers (meaning those who are blogging about serious topics of public interest) have the potential to enhance those lines of communication at every level of government – especially if we can come together in promoting a robust discussion of the important issues being addressed by our civic leaders.

Categories
General

Civic Communication 101

I went to a Planning and Zoning Commission meeting last night and learned a whole lot about communication between government and citizens. I also found it interesting this morning to see that some similar lessons were learned by a Tyler who attended a Truth in Taxation hearing in Davis County last night. The lessons that Tyler talks about are good for citizens and officials. I would like to list some other lessons that I learned – which may be a result of the fact that the meeting I attended was really a different type of meeting than the hearing he attended.

Citizens: Take yourself seriously

There was a group of neighborhood residents who came to present their concerns with elements of a specific development near them. Unfortunately many of those residents were attired in shorts, sandals, and baseball hats. While I accept the fact that we live in a very laid-back society these residents combined their casual dress with with a casual and subtly belligerent attitude which left them looking sophomoric when contrasted with the professionalism of the developer as he addressed their concerns. His professionalism is almost certainly the kind of professionalism that most of them display in their places of work. I don’t know if they really did not expect to accomplish anything or if they really did not understand that their cocksure demeanor would make it less likely that their concerns would be fairly considered.

Officials: Make meeting format flexible

The basic meeting format was to have an overview of the issue, any comments by the proposing party, and then public comment followed by response by the proposing party concluding with committee action. This format was adequate for most items, but there were two items where I noticed myself and others of the public who might have comments come to mind based on the response of the proposing party or the committee after the committee or proposing party responds to the initial public comments. The format of the meeting should be flexible enough to allow the committee to open up a second period of brief public comment as appropriate prior to committee action.

Citizens: Come prepared

The same group of residents who had been too casual had appointed a spokesperson (who was more appropriately attired) and had done their homework before the meeting. They knew their concerns and made sure that they got a say. Others who came for various issues were not so well prepared. When questioned by the committee they were left saying “I think . . .” or “I’ll have to get back to you on that” which could only result in their requests being tabled or else ignored. Certainly you cannot be prepared for every contingency that might arise, but doing your homework will make a big difference.

Officials: Make it possible for us to prepare

I think that officials do a lot of work to make this happen most of the time but on an issue of a new zoning category being proposed there was a resident who had concerns but who was unable to prepare adequately for the meeting because the committee had not made the text of the proposed ordinance available for review. Citizens do not need to have everything available to them that the committee members have to prepare for a meeting, but on a proposed ordinance they should have access to the proposed content of the ordinance even if it will undergo revision before it is passed. A one sentence description on the agenda is not usually sufficient for that kind of issue.

I sincerely believe that most involved citizens and most public officials are trying to work together in a positive way. This is not meant to be a criticizm against those efforts, but merely an effort to add my insights into the process.