By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Sep 7, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
People who are where they are seem the happiest….
Another morning at Starbucks. Another observation about the human condition that seems to occur to me as I impatiently wait in line each morning.
As I walked in to Starbucks this morning, I passed a passel of high school students. One was wearing a Harvard t-shirt, thinking ahead to college applications, I thought.
As I passed there was an overpowering whiff of perfume from one of the other young ladies, trying to be a little older than she is. I thought to myself, they are a group of “Kids trying to be adults”
Inside I watched a 40-something gentlemen dressed in jeans and a t-shirt hanging out with a much younger man and, I suspected, trying to fit in and get the youthful man’s approval. And I thought to myself, grown-ups are often just “Adults trying to be kids.”
“Funny,” I thought to myself. One group is trying to be 10 years older; the other trying to be 10 years younger.
And as I walked out I noticed the older couple who always sit together in Starbucks every morning and read the news paper together, drink coffee, and talk.
I thought about them and asked myself, “How would you categorize them?”
I would say, “Happy.”
They are who they are, where they are. And seem to be enjoying it.
Q: I’m 28, a young JD/MBA, triple Ivy, considering a run for office in 5–7 years. Tell me exactly what I should be doing now. —K.S., New York City
First and foremost, please don’t ever use the term “triple Ivy” again. On behalf of everyone you will ever meet, thank you.
I’m torn on this one. On one hand, there are some tried-and-true things that will likely help you down the line. Join your local Democratic or Republican club. Attend fundraisers for local candidates—or even better, host them. Knock on doors and phone-bank for your party’s nominees. Those things aren’t foolproof, but if you do them cheerfully for a few cycles, you’re much more likely to earn the support of party insiders.
Though that can work, it wasn’t what I did, and I only advise it to certain types of people. Ultimately it can be just as effective to find a cause you care a lot about and immerse yourself in it. For me it was cofounding a charter school. For you it could be anything, as long as it’s something you’re passionate about. Learn all you can, meet the big guns in that policy space, and better your community in some tangible way. And then, should you decide to run, you’ll have a solid bloc of supporters around your signature issue. It won’t get you the party’s support, but it will brand you as a genuine citizen as committed to the community as to your own political advancement.
Ideally you can focus on the second approach, with just enough of the first to not be ostracized by your local party. But you’ll have to choose your mix. Given your three (!) degrees, my guess is that the first approach is more your style.
Q: I saw the documentary about you, and now I want to run for office. But I don’t like asking for money. What’s your advice? —Name withheld, via Twitter
Do one of the following: 1) Start a business and get rich so you can self-fund; 2) Marry a rich girl/guy (more options if you’re here in New York than in most states); 3) Befriend a billionaire who will instinctively know to fund an independent expenditure on your behalf without your asking; 4) Run for town council or another office with an electorate under 10,000 people; or 5) Ditch your political dreams.
Q: Do yard signs matter? —S.S., San Diego
In the movie Singles (1992), Bridget Fonda’s character asks her boyfriend (played by Matt Dillon), whose taste tends toward voluptuous women, if her breasts are too small. “Sometimes,” he replies.
And so it is with yard signs. In a presidential election they don’t matter. About 95 percent of the country has already made up its mind, and those who haven’t have ready access to nearly unlimited information about the two candidates.
In low-information down-ballot elections, especially primaries, signs matter, especially for little-known underdog candidates who are desperately trying to raise their visibility and to show the support of people who are well respected in their neighborhoods. Signs can also help candidates keep their supporters psychologically invested in the campaign.
Q: I have a friend in politics who’s headed to prison, and he wants to hire a prison consultant. The one he contacted wanted $7,500 up front. Is it worth it? —C.M., New York City
I’d do it for half that. Oh, and tell him not to eat the Snickers. That one’s free.
Read the rest of… Jeff Smith’s Political Advice Column: Do As I Say
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Sep 6, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
The Wounded Healer
My son, at our celebratory dinner the night before he left for college last week, brought up an interesting topic. He asked who were the three historical figures I admired most.
As usual, I hemmed and hawed and asked for more clarification and kept trying to dodge answering. . But my son wouldn’t give in.
Finally, I said, “It’s funny, when I was about your age, I was having dinner with your great-grandfather (my grandfather) and it was about a year before he died and I asked him the very same question. But I think I can only remember one of the people he told me and I want to make my three choices different. “
“OK,” I said, “Here goes.” I proceeded to give two predictable names but was stuck on the third.
My son interjected, “So who was the name your grandfather gave that you still remember?”
I said, “It was an unusual choice whose name I had never heard before. It was Bill Wilson, or Bill W., as he is better known. He was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Your great-grandfather wasn’t a recovering alcoholic but had great respect for the program and, I guess, saw Bill Wilson as something of a pioneer who brought hope to people who had no hope.”
“So, Dad,” my son intoned, “Who is your third choice?”
“You know, Johnny, Bill Wilson was someone I was considering putting on the list but was trying not to because his contribution to the world is hard to explain–and he never sought the kind of public accolade we are talking about. He is a man who was faced with a life-threatening malady suffered by millions that science and logic could only grasp at impacting. He used pragmatic spiritual, psychological and common sense tools cobbled together with great humility to create something that on paper should never work. But did. And continues to. He didn’t have the luxury of caring how it looked on paper — only whether or not it worked. And he helped create a framework that has saved the lives of millions alcoholics and helped restore their families and spawned many related programs and therapies helping others with different but equally insidious diseases and disorders. And he did so as anonymously as he could to keep the focus on helping others rather than promoting himself.”
There was a pause.
And then I added, “So I guess that ought to be enough to make my top three list, huh? Bill Wilson.”
Check out the movie Bill W, the story of Bill Wilson’s life. Here’s the trailer:
By Zack Adams, RP Staff, on Thu Sep 6, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET
The Politics of Tech
Publicly educated children in Estonia will soon start learning to code in the 1st grade. [Venture Beat]
Microsoft updates their Terms of Service to an easily readable Q&A format. [Microsoft]
Founder of the ubiquitous torrent site Pirate Bay, Gottfrid Svartholm, has been arrested in Cambodia. [Torrent Freak]
Apple has rejected an app created by a New York developer that would track US drone strikes. [Wired]
So it turns out LG released a Linux based tablet called “iPad” 9 years ago? [Linux Devices]
Earlier this week saw reports claiming that Bruce Willis was gearing up to sue Apple over rights to his iTunes music. Those reports now appear to be false. [TechCrunch]
On the last evening of the 2000 Democratic National Convention, as the newly elected State Treasurer of Kentucky and a former staffer of the party’s presidential nominee, The RP spoke for three minutes in near-prime-time about his mentor and friend, Al Gore. It would be the highlight of his political career — he’d suffer through a decade more in the muck, never to be on such a large stage.
But thanks to the magic of YouTube, you can enjoy this twelve-year-old flashback:
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Sep 5, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET
The following piece, which appeared this weekend in the Harlan Daily, details the important work being done to battle the horrific problem of drug dependency in Appalachia by Pastor Kyle Burnette, father of The RP’s extraordinary Webmaster, Justin Burnette:
Photo courtesy of HarlanDaily.com
Taking steps to help others in his community has been a lifetime goal of Harlan resident Kyle Burnette. Pastoring since the age of 19, Burnette, now 58 years of age, is taking classes to obtain his master’s degree in psychology, with an emphasis on chemical dependency, to enable him to help those in need throughout Harlan County.
“A year ago, I decided to go back to school at Union College, in Barbourville,” said Burnette. “I was visiting there one day and I heard them talking about a course on drug dependency counseling. It sounded interesting to me and I thought I want to do that. I got to looking at drug abuse in our county and problems that are running rampant and I couldn’t help but ask myself the question, ‘why are these folks doing this?’ Folks just don’t wake up one day and say I think I’ll ruin my life with drugs today. So, I enrolled in that class simply with the intention of taking the chemical dependency certification class and be done with it. I got interested in this and decided to complete my master’s degree in psychology. This has opened a whole new realm for me, allowing me to possibly even do counseling, particularly in drug dependency.”
As a community-minded person, Burnette offers this insight to others in regard to those who are drug dependent, “Be very careful about judging what you think that person should be. Look at them for who they are and ultimately, as a pastor, who God wants them to be. Try to understand, as best you can, because you can’t always understand, what got those who are drug dependant to that point and try to find a way to help them get beyond that point. With the drug situation in our county, I daresay there’s not a family in our county that hasn’t been touched by this in someway. It may not be directly but might be indirectly. If we spent less time judging one another and more time helping one another, I think we could accomplish a lot more. This is something I am very passionate about. I’ve never been one to judge someone else — don’t want to be a judge. I just want to help someone who needs to be helped.”
Pastor of both Harlan and Baxter United Methodist Church, Burnette said in the Methodist tradition pastors are members of circuits, which allows pastors to travel and be responsible for more than one church. He is also an advertising consultant for WHLN Radio in Harlan. He is a member of the Harlan Lions Club and serves as a member on the Christian Outreach for Appalachian People (COAP) board.
Burnette graduated from Murray State, having been raised in Lee County, Va. He met and married his wife Shelia, who was a Middlesboro native, and they moved to Harlan County approximately 26 years ago. They have three sons and five grandchildren. They are also expecting their sixth grandchild very soon.
By Bradford Queen, Managing Editor, on Wed Sep 5, 2012 at 12:30 PM ET
The Politics of Faith
The Democratic National Convention is the intersection of politics and religion for one pastor. Fernando Cabrera, a New York City councilman and pastor of the New Life Church in the Bronx, is serving as a delegate this week, but he is not supportive of the whole of the party’s adopted platform. Cabrera decries the President’s and the party’s support of gay marriage. [WORLD Magazine]
Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the religious and political leader of the Unification Church, died Monday. [CNN]
Desmond Tutu, the retired Anglican Church’s archbishop of Africa, says Tony Blair and George W. Bush should “answer for their actions” for their roles in the war in Iraq. [WaPo]
A Texas judge ruled that praying for God to hurt someone is legal. [USA Today]
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Sep 5, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Troop Rallying or Pluribus Unuming?
(A long winded spiel–so long and windy that you may just forget what you were mad about at half-time during the DNC and RNC conventions)
It’s political party convention time– it’s a party for the parties, so to speak–where partisan cheerleading becomes the order of the day. The goal of both the Democratic and Republican parties is to “rally the troops.” Both major political parties strive, as they should, to make the case most dramatically for their side to win in November. It’s a time honored tradition–and an important one. And hyperbole and histrionics are not only expected—they are featured front and center.
But with every rhetorical flourish, left or right, that hits it mark at the conventions, something else is jarred too. The opposite of rallying the troops, I suppose, is trying to find common ground in our already very divided nation. Political conventions are constructs that are a bit like Midnight Madness if you are a UK basketball fan. You leave such events not only feeling a stronger than ever allegiance to your team but stronger than ever animosity toward any team that threatens them.
If political conventions are successful, when they are over, those who identify with each party should feel stronger than ever about their party being right —and stronger than ever about the other party being wrong. We don’t put on war make up. But we do, say and wear some awfully silly things at these conventions. In more primitive cultures, they had these sorts of partisan conventions but they called them tribal war dances. Seriously. (See clip below.) Note that neither Clint Eastwood nor Betty White were given prominent roles in the pre-convention warrior dances. Our political pros today could learn a thing or two from these ancient tribal rituals. Stay on message; whip up feelings of righteousness to a fever pitch; and dance like the dickens. No need to use chairs as a dialectical prop by a tribal elder (republicans) or matriarchal elder (democrats). Ever. Just keep dancing.
Oh sure, we should have fun celebrating and rallying with our political brothers and sisters during our side’s convention. I certainly intend to! And hope my republican friends did so last week.
But I suspect it would be good to note, too, that “rallying the troops” theater, while good for cheerleading, isn’t terribly useful once the political parties’ parties are over. That’s important to remember –as it is to recall that we have many more brothers and sisters than just those sharing our political opinions. Our Founding Fathers certainly realized this and memorialized it in our new nation’s motto that they selected– a simple Latin phrase: E Pluribus Unum. I’m really glad a few weeks before our Constitution was signed we didn’t have competing conventions represented by the political factions of the day. We may not have a constitution. We may have instead had some funny stories about Benjamin Franklin getting his lights punched out by a lesser signer because of his acerbic speech a few weeks earlier. But we didn’t have political parties back then. In fact, the Founders warned against the dangers of divisive factionalism—or extreme troop rallying.
E Pluribus Unum means essentially that within our diverse differences we are committed to an unassailable unity. Not “My country, right or wrong” blind allegiance, but more like “our country no matter how right or wrong we believe ourselves or our political opponents to be.”
In many ways E Pluribus Unum is nearly the opposite of the raw partisan blood sport we see played out regularly today masquerading as serious debate . Is it the worst it’s ever been? Hardly. It’s easy to pull up some old allegations about Abe Lincoln looking like a baboon, or Thomas Jefferson being an heathen atheist. But it’s pretty bad. And it’s not the end game our Founding Fathers had in mind. I suspect our Founders wanted more of legacy for their efforts than Glenn Beck lecturing about left wing conspiracy theories or The Daily Kos flaming the Internet about right wing conspiracies. If this is the apex of 236 years of a great republic’s maturation, the Founders probably would have stayed home and played cribbage instead.
But we are better than our partisan extremes. A whole lot better. We are not at our best divided and petty. Granted, it’s difficult to be united and idealistic for very long when there are over 300 million of us. But we don’t have to be that way all the time. I’d settle for opinionated but respectful –and a little more curious. Maybe a little more open-minded about where we might find common ground rather than determined to more deeply draw the boundaries that divide us.
But last week in Tampa and this week in Charlotte, is not the landscape for such things. Our country’s simple yet complex motto won’t be on prominent display in either city. That’s not the point of political party conventions. Or tribal war dances.
But unity among diversity is what makes for a great nation. And I hope that as we inch toward—and then beyond—the November election we don’t forget the motto our Founders hoped we’d live up to. To be a more unified nation. A time when political warrior dances are replaced again by Dancing with the Stars.
Even if it means I have to cheer again for Tom Delay.
Like all adolescent girls, I went through a phase of being attracted to charming jerks, since anyone who actually treated me well must have had something wrong with him. And although most of us eventually outgrow that phase, it was hard not to be reminded of it lately as Paul Ryan emerged as a political heartthrob. Those steely eyes! That chiselled chin! Those archaic, reactionary views! This political bad boy may not be the pot-smoking, school-failing rebel of our teen years, but for those of us raised by liberal parents, what better way to rebel than to fall under the spell of a right-wing Republican? Besides, just like with the bad boys, usually we just want to look at him, not listen to his ideology. (There’s a reason why, for at least a few days, the #1 Google search was “Paul Ryan shirtless”. Hasn’t the runaway success of “50 Shades Of Gray” proven that women fantasize about a powerful, conservative man who will patronize us?)
Here’s my tribute to Mr. Ryan’s appeal (sung with my tongue firmly in my cheek):
People who are where they are seem the happiest….
