Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Meaning more

Maggie says:
What occurs to me at the end of this day of reckoning is this:

  • Keep working on the wage increase. Being an optimist means recognizing that a high-dollar smear campaign by the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce and a low voter turnout barely worked. The vote to increase the minimum wage was extremely close. Given the poor turnout, given that the low-income workers who'd most benefit from the wage increase are the least likely to vote, and given how much money the Chamber put into killing this, the spread should have been much farther apart. Day-after second-guessing is not my favorite sport, so instead I'll say that next time, let's work on turnout. This is a case where people's inherent goodness should overpower big money and smear campaigns. Alone in the voting booth, it's their principles and nothing else. Principles are always better causes than a single person. So let's get the people there next time. It'll happen.
  • Again: principles, not people. Increasingly, politics are being sold as the story of one person. We're fed hero stories of one candidate that are inevitably shot down by the opposing candidate. The result is that no one seems believable, because it's rare to find a true hero running for office, yet the instinct for people to run as heroes makes things worse for all of us. How many of us think of ourselves as heroes? Yet how many politicians do? That's the reason people don't connect with elected officials. And over time, how many of us think we could never run for office; we're not heroes, we're not perfect. But no one is. Candidates should be more human. Instead of trying to be our pal or drinking buddy, stand for something we can stand for. Campaigns today have too much personality and too little substance. We shouldn't be picturing a candidate's parents or children or grade-school teacher when we vote for them, we should be thinking forward, about change and place and the future and the actions that person will take. That is substance, not heart-warming childhood tales. This was an election full of substantial issues, yet the connections weren't made. Too few people saw Eric Griego as someone for a living wage, against bad development, for more stable communities, "the mayor who will do XYZ."
  • Less business, more heart. Successful campaigns usually adopt a corporate stragegy, a game plan for winning. Think boardrooms and football fields and crushing opponents. The problem with this is that regular people are not typically in boardrooms, on a football field, or crushing anyone. Regular folks are out there making their way and connecting with people around them and shaping their life the best way they can. So why don't campaigns mirror that? I realize that Eric's "I'm in a hurry" commercial tried to do that, but it's still a commercial. Real connections don't happen on television, they happen on sidewalks. I won't discount the power of media - I think it's very powerful, and I think Marty's ads were very effective - but I do discount the notion that yard signs and radio spots can somehow replace the human element of politics. The problem with politics is how inhuman people think it is, when it actually affects their lives dramatically every day. This election could have been about connection, and it just wasn't. And see everything Paul Wellstone ever did for proof of how much heart still matters in politics.
  • Personal power. A "take back your government" campaign isn't politics as usual. It's empowerment. This election had so much there to empower people. Go to the polls, raise your hourly wage, vote for someone who will actually listen to you, shape your city. This is not small stuff. But the message gets lost in the same struggles this election could have helped: paying the bills, making rent, commuting in traffic from the house you can afford to the place where you work. People still matter. I believe that strongly, but so many others don't. The person who can effectively communicate to people that they matter will win. That didn't happen yesterday.
Finally, part of a poem that always speaks to me. It makes sense today, after this city remained bored and unheard and went about their business, passing by the chance to wake up and create change. A small piece of Michael Goldman's "Report on Human Beings:"
We did invent boredom,
a fruitful state.
It hid the size of our desires.
We were spared many murders,
many religions
because we could say, "I am bored."
A kind of clarity
came when we said it
and we could go to Paris or the movies,
give useful parties, master languages,
rather than sink our teeth into our lover's throat
and shake until things felt right again.