Two Ways To Be a Legislator

My interview this week with Don Miller, the Republican incumbent in New York’s 127^th State Assembly District seat, makes a very interesting pair with my interview from a few weeks ago of his Democratic challenger, Al Stirpe.  This race is a rematch—Miller defeated Stirpe by a slim margin the last time around, despite being heavily outspent. 

If you listen to both interviews, you’ll find very clearly articulated differences between the candidates, not just in their policy positions, but also in their core notions of what the job of a legislator is all about, and the personal style that best brings the results they are aiming for.  After the Miller interview airs this Friday, you can find them both here.

The softer spoken Stirpe emphasizes cooperation, working within the system, and a focus on specific economic development projects that produce tangible benefits for the district and the surrounding region.  This message is very similar to his pitch for re-election in 2010—and indeed, his campaign literature this fall looks a lot like it did before, except perhaps for a more sustained repetition of the word “jobs.”  But in 2010, the mood of the country—and this area—was not as receptive to the “look what your government did for you” kind of political approach. 

The more animated Miller protests the state’s “addiction” to spending and taxes, and is something of a crusader on the topic.  The issue permeates his responses to almost every question, and even informs his conception of constituency service.  His fight is a state-wide bout, and he takes it pretty far.  In a year when most people think that all things considered, Albany did fairly well, he remained deeply critical of its workings, and opposed budget measures that his own party supported and that would have brought state money in to the local area.

The differences between the two candidates remind me in a way of Isaiah Berlin’s classic essay on the fox and the hedgehog—with the fox knowing a lot of little things and the hedgehog knowing one big thing.  At the very least, these guys are two different animals.  I’m also reminded of the difference between retail and wholesale politics, with Stirpe being much more the retail operator of projects, and Miller the wholesale dealer in ideas. 

It will be very interesting to see what business model the 127^th district opts for this November.

Outsourcing Wisdom

As we move into our third year of the Campbell Conversations—and it’s hard to believe that it’s been that long—it’s interesting for me to note that my favorite interviews so far have all been with people who were born outside of this country, talking about themes that relate to American ideals. 

First was Jan Carnogursky, the former dissident in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia.  He was jailed prior to the Velvet Revolution, co-founded the Christian Democratic Movement of Slovakia, and then went on to become the Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic and the Justice Minister of independent Slovakia.  In my interview, he spoke with passion—and humor—about his country’s struggle for freedom, and his own trials and tribulations.  (You can find that interview here.)

Then came Hazim Hamed, Chief of Staff in the Office of Vice President of Iraq from 2008 to 2011, and former advisor to Iraq’s President Talabani.  In an interview that obviously touched on sensitive professional and political issues for him, he mourned the lost promise of democracy in the American invasion of Iraq, especially in its aftermath. (I'm working on making that interview available.)

And now, in this week’s broadcast, is my conversation with Lopez Lomong.  He’s the former Lost Boy of Sudan who became the American Olympic distance runner, and the author of the new book, Running for my Life.  His story was so powerful and inspiring that it was very difficult for me to focus on the mechanics of the interview.  He spoke about his love and gratitude for the U.S., his personal faith, and the efforts he’s making in South Sudan through his charity, 4 South Sudan.  Would that the political candidates I’ve been interviewing had as good an answer as he regarding the one thing he would change about America.  It’s definitely worth a listen.  After the 9/14 broadcast, you can find it here.

What's in a Record?

My interview this week is with Dan Lamb, the Democrat who’s challenging Republican Richard Hanna in New York’s 22^nd district (formerly the 24^th).  You can find it here. 

The conversation brings up an interesting question for citizens:  How do you judge an incumbent’s record?  The incumbent Congressman Richard Hanna has established for himself a political identity as a moderate—as The Post-Standard once called him, in a feature piece, “Central New York’s man in the middle.”  Lamb’s campaign, however, has tried to portray Hanna as far more to the Right. 

Is Lamb’s characterization fair, and how well will it stick, given the apparent consensus that Hanna is willing to buck the Republican establishment on a number of issues?  I pushed Lamb on this question, and read to him a list of Hanna’s positions and actions which suggest he differs from the Republican mainstream in Congress—for example, he refused to sign Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge, and was one of only seven House Republicans to vote against defunding Planned Parenthood.  Lamb countered that Hanna’s image has been skillfully crafted by positions taken at the margins.  But on the big spending and tax issues, and the big votes, Hanna has been a reliable foot soldier for the Right. 

One of the votes—two votes in fact—that Lamb focused on in my interview to prove his point was Hanna’s support for the Ryan budget, which included a voucher plan for Medicare. 

In a Utica Observer-Dispatch piece on the race, Hanna noted that he had problems with the budget bill, but that “You have to start someplace.”  And this is the difficult part in considering an incumbent’s record.  Hanna did vote for the bills, but votes also have contexts.  In this case, it was known that the plan would fail in the Senate.  Perhaps his vote was driven by a desire to get something started (though the current Congress doesn’t give much hope of progress beyond a start).  Lamb wants us to focus on the yes votes as a definitive statement of where the Congressman’s true preferences lie—and true, a vote is a vote.  But as I suggested last week in a post on the Al Stirpe-Don Miller State Assembly race, the way a legislature works is complicated, and just as it’s difficult to assess a legislator’s effectiveness, it can be almost equally difficult to get a good read on the kind of influence a legislator is trying to have on the chamber by a simple tally of votes.

No doubt, candidates can spin the interviews they give, and they do, but I think if you listen to the interview with Dan Lamb, and then listen to the forthcoming interview with Richard Hanna (still being scheduled, but I’m reasonably confident it will happen), you’ll have a pretty good handle on where each candidate is coming from.  Listen and decide.

Al Stirpe and the Puzzle of Legislative Effectiveness

The Buerkle-Maffei-Rozum congressional race is not the only election rematch in town this fall.  Democrat Al Stirpe is trying to recapture the State Assembly seat he lost to Republican Don Miller in 2010.  This is in the new 127^th district, a slightly modified version of the current 121^st.  The district’s towns run in a crescent around the East side of Syracuse—Clay, Cicero, Manlius, Pompey, Fabius, and Tully. 

Miller, a staunch conservative, won an upset victory over Stirpe despite being outspent by a large margin.  In my WRVO Campbell Conversations interview with Stirpe (which you can find here after Friday), he explains why he thinks being an effective legislator requires more compromise and nuance than he sees in Miller, and defends the criticisms he has made about Miller's constituency service.  He also discusses the state's role in economic development and education, the conflicts over hydrofracking, and the financial challenges facing Syracuse, including some of the issues involved in various consolidation ideas.

The interview brings up some interesting questions about legislative effectiveness—in Albany and more generally.  When trying to figure out which members in a legislature are making a difference, media observers and political scientists tend to look for either the splashy piece of legislation, or other things that can be easily measured.  Who’s passed the big new social program? (This, despite a drumbeat from some of the same observers that government must tighten its belt.)  Who chairs a committee?  Who’s introduced the most bills?  How many have passed?  Who speaks on the floor?  Who never misses votes? (In a chamber where all bills brought to the floor pass, being there for every single one of them is immediately suspect as a measure of meaningful involvement in the process.) 

Al Stirpe makes the case for a more subtle notion of making a difference—working behind the scenes, often sotto voce, changing larger measures at the margins and redirecting funds.  It’s a tougher sell for voters, because you can’t hang your campaign hat on a high-profile measure or a rousing set of remarks delivered publicly (even to a chamber with its mind made up).

It’s up to the listeners to decide whether Stirpe is convincing on the claim that he really had that kind of influence in the chamber the last time he was there, and that he knows how to work those levers were he to return. 

But my own experience of spending the better part of two years watching two different legislatures demonstrated to me that the concept has merit.  During that time, I was let in pretty deeply, into private meetings in the speaker’s and minority leader’s offices, to otherwise closed-door caucuses, and was allowed to shadow individual legislators for days at a time.  I went in to that process looking for the traditional measures that my political science training had prepared me to look for.  From the inside, however, it soon became clear that influence within the chamber was a more complicated affair.  There was a sub-set of legislators who constituted the active core of the body in terms of thinking about policy issues and trying to craft government responses to challenges—including creative ways to scale-back and redirect government initiatives.  But they weren’t always the ones at the press conference afterward.  Fellow legislators recognized them and could talk openly about them as a group—often they were experts on particular issues—but they were not the same folks who would stand out when using the more traditional ways of measuring effectiveness.  I asked several of these legislators about the usefulness of counting things like bill introductions and speeches on the floor, and they were in agreement that such an approach picked up more of the noise than anything else. 

All that leaves voters trying to figure out how effective their legislator is in a bit of a quandary, as it’s the other legislators who know best whether a colleague is exercising due diligence, and whether he or she is actually moving the dial.  You can often glean hints by the way legislators talk about their service, but it’s a murky enterprise trying to fathom this from the outside.  When it comes to how well the legislator fits with a voter’s views and values, there are voting records to examine, and public speeches can often tell you where they’re coming from.  But effectiveness is a somewhat different animal.

In the coming weeks, I plan to interview the incumbent Don Miller, and his case brings up another interesting facet of this effectiveness puzzle—the trade-offs between staunchly standing for a set of ideas, when you have one big idea that you believe is crucial, and using compromise to get some of what you want.  I’ll be exploring that with him, among other issues.  Stay tuned.

Barack and Bob

A juxtaposition just too good to pass up. Think of it as a Rorschach Test in prose.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.
      --President Barack Obama, July 13, 2012

Hopefully we can continue to increase what we do in this community. It's always up to government and it's their choice.
      --Developer Robert Congel, August 2, 2012

Maybe I'm Back...

This space has been dormant for several months--so long in fact that a whole new process greeted me when I opened up the page.  Like so much in life, other demands pushed out the time to feed this.  To the one or two readers still left and checking in occasionally, thank you.  I'll try to get something going again.

Taxing the Wealthy Debate To Be Broadcast on WRVO Next Week

The first Campbell Debate on taxing the wealthy will be broadcast on WRVO this Sunday at 3 p.m., and then again on Monday at 10 p.m.  Tune in to hear former governor Eliot Spitzer, State Senator John DeFrancisco, Maxwell Professor Len Burman, American Enterprise Institute economist and former Bush and McCain advisor Kevin Hassett, business advocate Deb Warner, and religion minister Jennifer Hamlin-Navias wrestle with this complicated issue.  Narrated and moderated by yours truly.

Presidents on a Roll?

It's hard to make generalizations about presidential administrations because there are relatively few cases in any given era, but they are on the verge of doing something that hasn't been done since the Monroe administration, and it has left me wondering what it might mean (if anything).

If the economy continues to turn around--which it is beginning to show signs of doing--and if presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney continues to offer a solid but uninspiring challenge to President Obama, it's likely that the president will be re-elected. 

And if that happens, it will be the first time since Jefferson-Madison-Monroe that three presidents in a row have sought and been re-elected to a second term.  The trio of Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower is the closest second, with FDR himself being re-elected three times and Truman serving most of Roosevelt's fourth term before being elected in his own right, but he did not stand for re-election in 1952, and probably would not have survived a challenge from IKE. 

It's even more interesting to note that Jefferson-Madison-Monroe were all in the same "Democratic-Republican" Party, while our recent three are far more diverse.  Clinton and Obama can each stake a claim to be centrists or moderates in their party--especially Clinton--but they are clearly cut from a different cloth than Bush. 

What does this mean?  Is it just coincidence?  Is it now harder somehow to beat an incumbent president?  Bush certainly seemed beatable in 2003, but in the end he was tough to dislodge.  Does it reflect something about our polarized politics?  Hypotheses welcome.

Should We Increase Taxes on the Wealthy?

We had our first Campbell Debate on February 1 and it was great--a lively and smart exchange among six panelists on a pressing public policy question.  The house was packed and there was a buzz before, during, and after the event. 

The proposition:  This Assembly Would Increase Taxes on the Wealthy. 

The audience was heavily tilted toward agreement going in, and that didn't change much going out--we did a pre and post-debate poll.  But nonetheless it was good, substantive political theater, in the best sense of that phrase.  The debaters really lit into the issues, argued well and passionately, and at all times remained civil.  Even though minds may not have changed, the basis for differing views was clearly enriched and a model for spirited interaction was put on display.  What personally struck me the most was how, particularly in response to the audience questions and comments, the issue became more complex as time went on.  It's a complicated question.

The panelists were: 
In the Affirmative--Len Burman (Maxwell School, Syracuse University), Jennifer Hamlin-Navias (May Memorial Unitarian-Universalist Church), and Eliot Spitzer (former New York governor, attorney general and CNN host)
In the Negative--Senator John DeFrancisco (New York State Senate), Kevin Hassett (American Enterprise Institute), and Deborah Warner (CenterState CEO)

WRVO will broadcast the debate on Sunday February 19 at 3 p.m., and Monday February 20 at 10 p.m.  Check it out.

More Pension Myths?

The bashing of public employee salaries, pensions, collective bargaining rights, and competencies shows no signs of slowing.

Consider this more subtle example from today's Post-Standard lead editorial, "Pension Plutocrats," which you can find here.  The problem is in the following sentences:  "One problem with pension reform is that not everyone in the pension system is getting big bucks.  The average public pension in New York state is just $19,000 per year.  The federal average is $31,633.  But nearly 15,000 federal retirees receive six-figure pensions.  The most well-compensated federal retiree...."

And then the piece goes on to name several individuals with some justifiably unsettling pension payments.  These examples are in addition to the individual pension figures cited at the beginning of the piece, enjoyed by Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, and Tom Daschle. 

Here's the problem:  The listed examples are Members of Congress, a vice president, and two executives from federally funded institutions outside of the mainstream federal workforce.  They are not typical federal employees.  But many--and I'm guessing most--of those 15,000 in the paragraph above are former executives in the federal workforce--the "bureaucracy."  The clear implication is that no one who worked in the federal government deserves a six-figure pension.  That's what's debatable.

Let's look at two factors.  It's generally accepted that a pension (or the payouts from a 401k) should bear some relationship to one's earning history.  Rounded to the nearest hundred dollars, salaries in the management levels of the federal government--GS-14, GS-15, and the Senior Executive Service (SES)--have the following ranges:  GS-14, $84,700 to $110,100; GS-15, $99,600 to $129,500; SES, $119,600 to $179,700.  Many career federal employees spend a lot of their career life at these levels; I've met many GS-14s who are in their 30s and 40s, for example. 

The frequent reaction to the figures I've just noted--that federal employees are simply overpaid--introduces the second factor.  It's also generally accepted that rates of pay should bear some relationship to the level of responsibility and accountability of the employee.  But when you consider the amount of money, resources, and extensiveness of operations that these executives are responsible for, their salaries seem low in comparison with the private sector.  Again, I've met many GS-14s and GS-15s whose units they manage are responsible for hundreds of millions and often billions of dollars.  It's important, professional, managerial work. 

The real problem with public pensions is not their rates, per se--absent the kinds of outliers that the paper's editorial called out by name.  The real problem is the comparatively shorter amounts of time that career workers have to spend at a given earning level in order to earn the highest pensions.  But that, I think, is more a problem for certain state and local-level public employees.

I admit that it may seem like I'm banging on about a small wrinkle, but the level of toxicity surrounding public service as a profession is eroding the esprit de corps of the public workforce, such that performance and efficiency, not to mention quality of life, must be suffering.  We're not going to get to better government by beating up on government.

For More on the 4th District Race for Syracuse Common Council

A good, short piece on this race by Tim Knauss today in the Post-Standard.  If you'd like to hear more from the candidates directly in a substantive and lively half-hour conversation, see their recent appearance on the Campbell Conversations, which you can find here.  This is probably the most interesting and competitive race at the Common Council district level.

Three Syracuse Common Council Surprises

I had the pleasure of moderating the Syracuse Common Council candidate forum last night (Tuesday 10/25) at Nottingham High School, sponsored by Parents for Public Schools, the League of Women Voters, La Liga, and Alliance of Communities Transforming Syracuse (ACTS).  Many of the Council candidates participated--11 in all. 

I was surprised at least three times during the evening.

First, I was surprised by something several of the candidates told me after the event--that there have not been any similar all-candidate, city-wide forums.  Some individual district candidates have done their own events, but generally, the public has had very little opportunity to hear from the candidates directly.

Second, and made more surprising by the first surprise, it appears that this forum will not get coverage in the Post-Standard.  The photographer was there, but I did not see a reporter, and an email today to one reporter suggests that it will not get covered.  Hopefully I'm wrong about that.

Third, and perhaps most surprising of all, was the response I got to an extemporaneous question I posed to those candidates who had opponents. 

Noting that elections were about choices for the voters, I asked them, when it comes to education policy, what the most important difference was between them and their opponents. 

Most of them really struggled to answer this, and in four cases, the response was that they didn't know enough about their opponent's positions to draw a contrast.  They wanted to talk about their own general qualifications instead.  I have to admit, I've been in this business for 30 years and I was stunned.  If you  don't know enough about what you and your opponent stand for to make a distinction, how do you run?  Do you leave this essential contrast to the voter to figure out without any information?  On election day you can only pull one lever (or in the at-large race, two out of four).

As it turned out, the one candidate who was most eager to answer the question had no opponent and volunteered something about his recent visits with education groups.  Another incumbent highlighted that she had prior experience on the council.  Ok, but that's still not the contrasting information I need as a voter trying to sort this out.

The two candidates who were willing and able to talk about their differences, civilly I would add, were Howie Hawkins and Khalid Bey, the candidates for the fourth district seat.  On that note, I'd encourage readers interested in city elections to check out their Campbell Conversations "debate" on WRVO, which you can find here, and where they develop these differences at greater length.

Of course, when it comes to incomplete information things can get worse, and they did not too long ago in my own voting district East of Syracuse, when, in a school board election, there were only as many candidates as spots to fill and there was ABSOLUTELY NO policy-relevant information provided about the candidates.  And according to the school district, there were no public forums. 

(Voters sigh here.)

The Strange and Intriguing Political Death Spiral of Ann Marie Buerkle and Dan Maffei

Despite getting increasingly disgusted with some of the political rhetoric I've been hearing and reading (see earlier posts on this), I still love the way that politics creates strange ironies and paradoxes.

Here's one I've been pondering a bit recently:  Given likely redistricting outcomes, Dan Maffei and Ann Marie Buerkle desperately need each other. 

Why is this a paradox?  Because, based on watching the two of them debate and listening to what they have said publicly about each other--and not said--I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that they are not the best of pals.

But in considering possible redistricting schemes here in this area, their best--and perhaps only--chance of winning back or keeping a congressional seat in 2012 is if they can run against each other.

New York must give up two congressional districts, and pundits have identified the Syracuse area as ripe for getting carved up and merged into other existing districts, at the same time that those other districts are re-shaped.  There are several political reasons that this is the likely outcome--the subject for another blog perhaps.

But if this carving up were to happen, Ann Marie Buerkle would most likely be pitted against incumbent Richard Hanna in a Republican primary.  Hard to see her winning that match-up.  Hanna is a well-liked, bona fide moderate Republican.  Moderate Republican still fits this regional area well--just ask Joanie Mahoney for instance. 

The other scenarios have her running against a series of incumbent western Democrats, and given the politics of geography, those would be tough races for her (assuming she got the nomination).  The final more remote possibility is that she would take on Democrat Bill Owens, and in that race she'd have both geography and ideological positioning working against her.  Owens has established himself as a more moderate Democrat.

Dan Maffei has a similar problem, perhaps an even more severe version of it.  It's very hard to imagine him beating any of the aforementioned Democrats in a primary--and in some cases I doubt he'd even be likely to challenge them.  He'd be facing the same tough geographic politics, for one thing. 

In addition, despite the fact that he has run as a self-styled moderate, and also that he has some votes and positions to bolster that claim, I do not think he is solidly perceived to be particularly moderate, and perception is what counts in an election.  That would hurt him in a primary race against Bill Owens, for example.

But where that problem would really hurt him is in a general election against Richard Hanna.  Just like Buerkle, he'd be running against a well-liked bona fide moderate, and again, it's hard to imagine him winning that match-up if he's carrying any liberal baggage.

Of course, things can rapidly change in politics.  But the way it seems to be shaping up, the best hope either of them has is a re-match with the other.

Finally, A Political "Debate" That Worked

If you have any interest in the city of Syracuse, you might want to check out my recent Campbell Conversation program with Howie Hawkins and Khalid Bey, available on WRVO's website or through the Campbell Institute's website.

Perhaps the most intriguing local race this November is the match-up in the fourth City Council district between Democrat and Working Families Party candidate Bey and Green Party candidate Hawkins.  Hawkins has run for many seats in the past, including governor and U.S. Senator, and not come close to winning, but the last time he ran for city council he garnered about 40 percent of the vote.  This race may be his best shot.  The seat is typically held by a Democrat.  In this lively conversation, the two candidates describe the specific new initiatives they would propose to the Council, the most important differences between them, and the biggest challenges facing the city.  In individual questions, Hawkins addresses how he’d try to be effective as a third party member on a Council dominated by Democrats, and Bey explains what phrases on his personal website like “Egyptian and Taoist alchemy” mean for his own personal development, and how he’d try to work in a bi-partisan manner if elected. 

[update:  The personal website providing that information appears to have been taken down since the interview.]

It's tough to get at meaningful substance in a short debate with political candidates, but in this conversation, I think the listener can walk away with a pretty good read on what each of them would emphasize in office, and what the most important differences are between them.  You can also begin to get a more general sense of how they think and who they are. 

One thing that helped the effort is that it seemed clear to me that these two candidates had some measure of respect for each other, and may even like each other.  This seemed to contribute to their general lack of defensiveness and caution and the absence of silly caricatures of what their opponent stood for.

Give it a listen and see what you think.

Getting Real on Global Warming

This week on The Campbell Conversations I’m talking with Dan Grossman, a freelance environmental journalist who has frequently appeared on NPR and the BBC, and has written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Scientific American.  He’s won a host of prestigious awards and been funded by many highly respected organizations—among them the Peabody award, the National Science Foundation, and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.  In our conversation he puzzles over the enduring controversy surrounding global warming, despite the clear scientific consensus on it, and he describes some of the problems that scientists have in communicating their findings to the public.  Along the way he relates some of the more interesting people he’s encountered in his adventures—I found the story about using sawdust to try to save glacier ice particularly interesting.

What I was most struck by, however, was Dan’s forcefulness in putting on the table the extent of change—and even sacrifice—that, according to him, is required to really address global warming.  He notes that even among his friends and colleagues, who are tuned in to global warming as a problem, there is a false sense of consciousness about what it will take to change it.  This is a politically tough position to adopt, and you do not hear it frequently expressed by candidates.  So his puzzling left me puzzling—over how to introduce those difficult conversations into meaningful political discussions.  I don’t have a ready answer for that.

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

(Note:  I am on distribution lists for a variety of political organizations and no one's hands are clean.)

I just received a mass email from Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the two independents in Congress.  It starts like this:

"Republicans hate Social Security because it has been an extraordinary success and has done exactly what it was designed to do. It is the most successful government program in our nation's history and is enormously popular."

Personally, I am not a big fan of the attacks on Social Security, and I have found some of them to be completely off-base, but this just doesn't help things.  Until we stop talking this nonsense about those with whom we disagree, we are going nowhere politically. 

This has got to change, all around.  In this game of chicken, will someone grab the steering wheel please?

Hollow Judicial Elections?

This November we'll reprise the curious American tradition of electing judges.  Most other western nations, such as Britain, use nonpartisan or bipartisan panels of legal experts to recommend or fill these posts.  On balance, I think this is probably the better way to go, despite its apparent non-democratic character.

The reason?  The information that a citizen can gather about the candidates is horribly thin, and thus these races usually turn into name-recognition contests or party-affiliation affairs--funded by private donations--in which voters have no real clue what they're doing.

The judicial candidates don't help matters.  They are loath to associate any kind of pattern of decision-making with their party affiliation, and they all tend to run on the following platform:  I'm honest, I'm tough on criminals, and I'm caring toward families.  As if their opponents are running on a platform of lying, promoting crime, and beating up children. 

The candidates will also share photos of themselves with their spouse, two children, and a dog.  (Why never a cat?  I guess because, at the end of the day, you can't trust a cat.  Actually, I have a cat you can trust, but to be honest he's pretty dumb.  I digress.)

Even with the advent of the Internet, it's tough to find out anything substantive about the candidates.  Tom Buckel, a local candidate for State Supreme Court Judge, comes close, however.  He's got some information on his website about how he intends to limit the influence of campaign contributions, by pledging to recuse himself from cases where contributors are involved.  He's also posted his "judicial philosophy," but this is in essence a commitment to be fair, reasonable and competent.  It's not a set of issue positions.

To gather the information that one would need in order to made a good decision among the candidates, a voter would have to know the candidates personally, or spend time with them as they reason through legal conflicts and react to legal challenges, or read the things that they've written before they announced their candidacies.  That's just not realistic on a mass scale. 

But none of this is meant to suggest that it doesn't matter who occupies these positions.  They are crucial for a healthy society and a functioning democracy.  And the races are not tweedle-dee versus tweedle-dum.  It's just that our method of making the choice does not promote democratic aims.

I think I'll try to get at least one set of judicial candidates on The Campbell Conversations this fall, to see if it's possible to have a substantive discussion in which the candidates will meaningfully disagree with each other.  It will be an interesting experiment, if nothing else. 

Until then, look for the Labrador Retriever.

Changes to The Campbell Conversations Airing Schedule

The Campbell Conversations on WRVO will now be a stand-alone program airing at 6:30 p.m. on Fridays and 4 p.m. on Saturdays.  As before, it will also be available as a podcast through WRVO's website.  WRVO is going through some staff reallocations and for now it has discontinued its "Weekly Edition" program, in which The Campbell Conversations had been embedded.  I'm excited that the program will now occupy an evening "prime-time" slot.

Please also note that for the upcoming program this week--my interview with Congresswoman Ann Marie Buerkle--the full interview will air at 4 p.m. on Saturday, and a somewhat shorter version of the interview will be broadcast on Friday morning during NPR's "Morning Edition," at 6:35 and 8:35.  The interview will not air Friday evening--that change becomes effective the following week.

If you are a listener to the program, I thank you for your support!

Remembering the Personal Loss of 9-11

On this week's Campbell Conversation interview--moved from its normal spot to the Morning Edition broadcast for Friday, September 9--I'm speaking with Mark Morabito.  Mark lost his wife, Laura Lee Defazio Morabito, in the September 11th attacks--she was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, one of the two planes flown into the World Trade Center.  In this interview he remembers the day and looks back at the 10 years that have passed--and how that event, and that loss, have affected his own life.  What is a vivid historical event for most Americans is a wrenching personal loss for him.  He talks about how some of his political views, as well as his views about life and death, have changed, and he also describes how he plans to mark 9-11 this year.

I left the interview thinking about this combination of an immediate personal loss and a historical event that remains vivid for those old enough to remember it, but which is also receding in time.  And I was reminded of a moment several years ago when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. visited our Syracuse campus to give a speech about the environment.  Along the way he referenced John F. Kennedy’s presidency and his memories of that era.  He then began a sentence with “When my uncle was murdered…,” which stopped me cold, and in that second reframed my sense of the Kennedy assassination—what had been a historical event captured on amateur film became a crime victim’s personal story. 

I imagine that dealing with that paradox will follow the families of the victims of 9-11 throughout their entire lives.

Inequality's Mountains

This week on the Campbell Conversations I'm talking with Pat Driscoll, the operations director for Syracuse’s Say Yes to Education Program.  Three years ago, Say Yes was rolled out with great expectations--words like “transformative” were used to describe the hoped-for impact of this program that blends an extensive in-class and extra-curricular support network with the ultimate promise of free college tuition.  Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner, for example, appears to have hung her hat--and perhaps her re-election--on this program.

The program has had past success elsewhere in targeting smaller numbers of children within a school, but it’s never been applied to an entire school district.  I was curious to know whether it's realizing its promise, three years on.  The question is particularly timely, as the program is slated to be financed solely by the city  in 2013, and it would then account for ten percent of the entire school budget.  Given the layoffs we've already seen in the school district, it's likely that continuing this program will mean fewer traditional teacher lines.  I explore that question with Pat, and we also discuss just what makes the program so different from previous efforts to overcome the educational challenges that disadvantaged students face.

This interview left me thinking about those challenges--and just how steep they are for the children growing up in poor neighborhoods.  Study after study has documented the rise in inequality over the past 30 years, and the backpedaling in real terms for those living in the bottom half of the income distribution.  Housing patterns have also become more segregated during the same time period.  All of this further concentrates educational problems in certain school districts and certain schools.  I wonder whether any program rooted in the educational system, however broadly framed, can effectively address the challenges.  If the program ultimately fails to demonstrate significant measurable improvement, it may be more a testament to the difficulty of the task than a breakdown in design and implementation.