« the folklore of communications and messaging | Main | the philosophical foundations of civic education »
December 9, 2010
Matt Leighninger on a vital moment
You should read Matt Leighninger's paper for the Bertelsmann Foundation, "Vitalizing Democracy Through Public Participation: A Vital Moment" (pdf). Here are some quotes to give a flavor, but the whole argument is important:
Obama was educated in the same community organizing tradition that has influenced the broader evolution of democratic governance and local politics. His campaign speeches were full of civic language. “I won't just ask for your vote as a candidate; I will ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am president of the United States,” Obama said while campaigning in Iowa. “This will not be a call issued in one speech or program; this will be a cause of my presidency.”
But ...
The confusion and unexplored questions about the Obama administration's approach to governance have been evident from the beginning. Soon after the 2008 election, tensions arose around the fate of Obama for America, the campaign‟s vast infrastructure of organizers and volunteers (and the massive database of email addresses they built). Amidst strident objections from people like Marshall Ganz, the longtime community organizer who helped direct the campaign, Obama for America was renamed Organizing for America (OfA) and incorporated into the Democratic Party.
This shift in the mission of OfA reflected one vision of active citizenship: At least some leaders within the White House saw participation activities primarily as a vehicle for encouraging citizens to support the president‟s legislative agenda. ...
While the fate of OfA was being debated in the months after the election, another set of administration staffers was experimenting with online tools to solicit ideas for how the president should govern. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) initiated an online brainstorming session aimed at producing a “Citizen's Briefing Book,” engaging thousands of people in developing and prioritizing policy proposals. The effort generated negative publicity when the two policy ideas with the most votes turned out to be the legalization of marijuana and a request for an investigation into whether Obama had in fact been born abroad (which would make him ineligible to serve as president). ...
These online participation efforts embody a somewhat different vision of citizenship: the citizen as a consumer and analyst of online data, who then uses that information to formulate new proposals for how government should function.
A third conception of citizenship evident in the White House is the vision of the citizen as volunteer. Soon after taking office, the president signed the Kennedy Serve America Act, which tripled the size of AmeriCorps and provided opportunities for 250,000 Americans – mostly young people – to serve for one year as volunteers in various charitable causes. ...
These three visions of citizenship – as legislative supporter, as online data-consumer and as volunteer – are being advanced by three different sets of people within the Obama administration, and their formulas for democracy reform rarely seem to intersect. One reason for the success of the Obama campaign may have been that it offered all three opportunities for active citizenship, combined in the same structure and the same experience. Without that holistic appeal, the administration has lost much of the power of its message about democracy, and much of the civic momentum it generated during the campaign.
December 9, 2010 1:26 PM | category: Barack Obama | Comments
Comments
nonePost a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)