Character Matters

Tomorrow’s Election Day comes without my writing much about this year’s Presidential race. Really, at this late date there’s not much reason to do so: everyone who knows me knows who I’m supporting, and I imagine that virtually everyone who might read this has made his or her decision–in fact, has probably voted already.

It won’t change a single mind or a single vote, but I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t write something about this most unusual Presidential campaign, and especially about the Republican candidate, because he poses a new problem for me.

I’ve been working on political campaigns for 48 years, and I’ve made it a point to respect my political adversaries and to assume
that whatever beliefs they hold, they probably hold sincerely. That habit has served me well: even when you suspect that it’s not realistic, it’s an approach to politics and politicians that keeps you humble and avoids bitterness.

But I haven’t been able to muster that attitude for this year’s Republican nominee. I don’t claim to have some ability to see the state of a person’s soul. I understand that he is a caring family man, he is said to be a generous benefactor, and he appears to show great personal discipline. But in a person who seeks the most powerful position in the world, we expect character that goes beyond  personal rectitude.

His constant changes of positions make it clear that he has no core political values except the desire to be elected. His manipulation of facts makes it clear that he will say anything to gain a vote. And his refusal to distance himself from the bigotry and hatred voiced by the President’s more extreme opponents shows that he lacks the courage needed in a Commander in Chief.

In Eyewitness to Power (2001), David Gergen quotes Alan Simpson as having said, “If you have integrity, nothing else matters.  If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.”

Those two Republicans have it right. Because of Mitt Romney’s lack of integrity, nothing else matters. Quite simply, he is not worthy of his followers’ loyalty.

Nothing Extra about Extracurriculars

I spent Saturday night in Chicago, attending my graduating class’s 45th reunion at St. Patrick High School. It was my first time back at the school since a few months after I graduated. While it was great seeing some of my classmates again, the highlight of the evening was reuniting with my old chorus director, Brother Konrad Diebold. And that made me think about the importance of extracurriculars, both in my own life and in general.

A great friend of ours believes that American schools should drop their emphasis on interscholastic sports and allow cities and clubs to organize recreational sports, as they do in Europe. And with all respect, I don’t think I can agree. Like it or not, extracurriculars are an integral part of the education process, and one of the great tragedies of education today is the obsessive pursuit of high test scores to the exclusion of almost everything else.

St. Pat’s is generally thought of as a fine school. It has been able to continue its mission of providing a faith-based education for young men as it did when it was founded in 1861. And yet, with a few exceptions, what I remember about St. Pat’s isn’t the academics. I was an indifferent student, working hard on things that interested me and not at all on things that didn’t. What St. Pat’s did have was an outstanding lineup of extracurricular activities. I have always had widely varied interests, and I belonged to a lot of extracurriculars in school. I very nearly lived at school, staying late many nights and working there on weekends. Forty-five years after graduating, I am still using things I learned in the extracurricular activities offered by my high school.

  • In our tour on Saturday, one of the sites we visited was the gym. There in a loft above the gym was – as it was then – the TV studio. In the sixties, when videotape was an exotic technology and black-and-white TV cameras were the size of suitcases, St. Pat’s had a TV station that delivered news broadcasts to the freshman building (which had closed-circuit TVs) and televised basketball games to overflow audiences. As a director and cameraman, I had a chance to work with that technology, and it began a romance with photography that continued into college and beyond.
  • How many schools have a Political Science Club? St. Pat’s did, and it was there that I learned about parliamentary procedure. When the club also sent me to interview a Congressional candidate, it led  to my volunteering in the first of many political campaigns.
  • Not enough schools have speech and debate teams, but St. Pat’s did: it was called the Sheen Club, named after the powerful Catholic preacher Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. As a member of the Sheen Club and a speech and debate competitor, I learned to become more comfortable talking in front of people.
  • As a writer and editor for Green and Gold, the school newspaper, I learned to write nonfiction on a deadline, as I continue to do today.
  • When I was a junior, the chorus needed an organist, and Brother Konrad signed me up for the job. Since the chorus already had a pianist and used the organist only occasionally, that meant that I also had a place among the singers, which began a lifetime love affair with choral singing.
  • Later that year, St. Pat’s staged Oliver, our first musical. At Brother Konrad’s request, I learned to play mallet instruments in the percussion section of the orchestra, which re-ignited a love of musical theater that had been dormant since eighth grade. I performed in the cast of Fiorello in my senior year, and those experiences helped me years later when I became a school drama director.
  • (It’s worth mentioning here that the benefits weren’t all professional. St. Pat’s was and is all-male. The chorus performed with nearby girls’s schools, and plays recruited female cast and orchestra members. These extracurriculars in particular were opportunities to meet girls, and I found I liked them.)

You may notice that I pretty much ignore athletics here. As a high school student, I generally avoided physical activity; I enjoyed being a spectator at interscholastic sports, but never participated in any. It’s clear to me, though, that athletics are just as important to many students as my non-athletic extracurricular activities were for me.

So it will come as no surprise that I think of extracurricular activities as critical to the mission of schools, at least for some students. Among the tragedies I see in school today are 1) the replacement of experiential learning with uniform, regimented instruction; 2) the equation of learning with testing; and 3) the epidemic of play-to-play schemes, which are based on the idea that extracurriculars aren’t integral to education.

For many students, it’s the extracurriculars that give them a reason to go to school every day. They did that for me.

This Year, Issue Two Makes Sense

A year ago, many of us were thrilled that our fellow-citizens joined us in rejecting 2011’s Issue Two; this year, we’re asking them to support a completely different Issue Two! We didn’t choose the timing or the issue numbers, but it’s no surprise that there’s a lot of confusion out there.

This year’s Issue Two is the Reapportionment Amendment. It was organized by Voters First, a coalition let by the League of Women Voters. The Ohio Education Association was one of the groups that supported the initiative, enacting a temporary dues increase to help support it. Early polls indicated that the idea of reforming Ohio’s reapportionment system was popular, but the details are complicated, and it’s harder to explain in 10-second sound bites. Recent attacks make the issue’s passage seem less likely.

I’m supporting Issue Two, and in this article I’ll explain why. But first, an acknowledgment of the main reason why it’s been a tough go: this is wonkish stuff, reforming a technological side of the system, Last year’s Issue Two  was all about heroes and villains; this one is about computer models and the subtleties of an electoral system gone horribly wrong.

Let me acknowledge that in one respect, I’m like any Tea Partier you might know. Like members of the Tea Party, I’m deeply disturbed about the direction in which our country is going. But unlike them, one of my concerns is the extent to which the system rewards the wingnuts at the farthest extremes of the political spectrum. I’ve come to believe that Issue Two offers a chance to reform the system and bring some sanity to our political discourse.

And I’m feeling a bit wonkish myself, so let’s  dig in.

What would Issue Two do?

Issue Two would replace the present system of reapportionment with a system in which officeholders and party officials and would have much less control over the outcome.

Why is this important?

Our ability to elect good legislators depends on having competitive races. The present system creates both Democratic and Republic districts that are practically unassailable.

What’s wrong with that?

It makes most Democratic and Republic incumbents virtually unbeatable and therefore takes away much of their incentive to represent their constituents.

How does it do that?

Typically, by carefully drawing district boundaries so that minority-party voters are “packed” into designated legislative districts and the majority party enjoys districts custom-designed to elect members of the party in power.

So this is about Republicans and Democrats?

To some degree. In statewide elections, Ohioans split close to 50-50 between the two main parties. But the legislative districts developed for the 2012 elections will almost certainly produce overwhelming Republican majorities in the Ohio General Assembly and the Ohio Congressional delegation: they were designed to.

However, it also means that many incumbent Democrats have districts drawn so that they can’t lose. That decreases their incentives to serve their constituents.

Whoever wins the elections–state Senators and Representatives, and US Representatives–won’t really need to meet with or listen to their constituents, because their districts have been designed to re-elect them.

In Columbus recently, I talked with an elected Democratic legislator who bemoaned what might happen to his “nice, comfortable” district is Issue Two passes. Since he’s been a reliable friend over the years, I didn’t tell him what I was thinking and should be obvious: he’d actually need to campaign in the new district.

I thought we were supposed to choose our  representatives.

Voters are supposed to choose their representatives; however, under the present law the politicians chose their voters. Various media sources have identified the role of politicians in customizing district boundaries.

It can’t be that bad.

No? Let me illustrate with some congressional districts. The Voting Rights Act requires “minority opportunity districts.” Several media reports indicate that Ohio House Speaker Bill Batchelder suggested a minority Congressional district built like a barbell, with one cluster in Cleveland, another in Akron, and a narrow corridor between.

That packs Democrats into a safely Democratic district, but it also produces two monstrosities: first, there’s the black Democratic Congressional District 11 itself:

The design of that district allowed for  the creation of an overwhelmingly white Republican 
Congressional District 16, which  wraps around 
Congressional District 11 and the western tip of 
Congressional District 13, which runs from Barberton to the Pennsylvania border.

Or take a look at 
Congressional District 9, the widely-derided “Snake on the Lake,” which was designed to pit Democrats Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich against each other (and which it is virtually impossible to traverse on land):

Or Congressional District 4, which stretches 180 miles from Montezuma, in Mercer County (a few miles from Indiana), to Sheffield, in Lorain County.

Well, yes, these look pretty bad. But the critics are saying that Issue Two empowers unelected officials.

Right. And that’s because the present system allows elected officials to so clearly abuse their authority by creating districts that serve only partisan political purposes.

What will happen if Issue Two passes?

If Issue Two passes, a nonpartisan apportionment board will be charged with developing new districts to use beginning in the 2014 elections. Read more here.

The new criteria include community preservation, competitiveness, representational fairness, and 
compactness. And if they do a bad job, the commission’s work can be challenged in court.

As a centrist Democrat, my own hope is that more competitive districts will encourage officials to work toward the political middle rather than pander to the most extreme elements of their parties. At the very least, the result will clearly be more rational districts and better representation. But my hope is more ambitious: I hope that better districts can lead to a less polarized political life, with candidates talking about real issues rather than the demonizing ads that we’re being subjected to during this campaign season.