Electile dysfunction: campaigns need civility

Kicking the can: Alternative spring break: small steps for awareness and the common good

Each year, the Joseph McKeen Center for the Common Good sends a group of students to Guatemala City for Spring Break. The students spend a week working with Safe Passage, an education nonprofit founded by the late Bowdoin alumna Hanley Denning ’92. In the community, Safe Passage works in and around the largest Guatemala City garbage dump. It provides educational support and English instruction for the children of the community and extracurricular clubs to nourish students’ interests. For younger children, the organization provides schooling full-time, and it will soon expand to provide full-time education for many older children as well.
It also runs community and economic development programs that provide alternative opportunities for the mothers of children enrolled in Safe Passage’s programs. It would be hard to find fault in Safe Passage’s work, and to say that the organization does not have a tangible positive effect would be to ignore visible changes in the community.I was one of the students who spent a week with Safe Passage this past Spring Break. As you might imagine, my time there both moved me and informed me about the lives of disadvantaged people so far removed from our world. I learned a lot, saw a lot, and understood a little. What I did not do was help the situation.
I went into the week assuming my presence would not magically shift the sands of Guatemala City and empower the least fortunate in the region, changing the pace of years of war, systematic oppression, and political and economic disenfranchisement in the country. I’m sad to say I was right. My accented Spanish and awkward participation in preschoolers’ educational songs and dances may have brightened the day of a couple small children, but my participation during that week did not change the circumstances that those same children face today, tomorrow, and later in life. In fact, our presence in some classrooms may have done more harm than good. It often felt like we were disrupting the classroom dynamic and preventing teachers from doing their jobs.The structure of the weeklong program reinforced my views on most of the community service we engage in during college—that we are observers and nominally participants, and we are largely preparing to do something more meaningful later. A portion of the volunteer fees we pay must go into Safe Passage’s budget, providing some immediate inflow of cash. That goes to sustain the organization.
Participation as a short-term volunteer on a “support team” includes learning a lot of facts about the area as well as about the organization. Participants are told about long-term volunteer opportunities as well as sponsorship opportunities. In short, they are being groomed to provide either time or money to the organization sometime down the line, ultimately sustaining the organization and its mission.
Our trips and our projects do not work miracles. They are more for us than for any of the communities in which we work. Through our experiences, we gain knowledge and awareness which encourage us to take action in the future. We should not expect that our actions will have a real impact, and if they do, we should not expect that impact to be substantial. Undoubtedly, some students are able to bring about projects or programs that have a visible effect on some aspect of the world. What the rest of us can do, however, is learn.
We can make ourselves aware of the world around us and how we fit into it. We can learn what we can do down the line to promote positive change. We can be encouraged to donate, especially once we have real jobs, and choose to put our money somewhere it will promote development and sustained community growth.
A dedication to the Common Good must necessarily go beyond “doing your part.” Not everyone has to dedicate their lives solely to the betterment of others—I certainly don’t plan to. The important thing is to be constantly cognizant of the world at large and the situations facing those outside our own communities.
But it is potentially destructive to think that most action we take now makes more than a microscopic difference. There are certainly exceptions, and Bowdoin students have proven themselves time and time again able to make those exceptions happen. But generally, for now, we are learning. Our knowledge gained both in the classroom and on trips such as ASB Guatemala will make us better citizens in the future. We cannot all be Hanley Denning, but we can, in some small way, help further her legacy.

Kicking the can: Gang green: Bowdoin divest must improve message

When deciding the path for our country to take, democratic principles as we now interpret them dictate that we defer to the will of the people. Political elites know that to enact policies, one must generally have the people on your side. Good ideas and potentially sympathetic groups come in all kinds of packages, and often it is the delivery rather than the idea that is important in the public eye. Bad ideas can be very persuasive when presented well, and good ideas can be presented terribly and correspondingly fail to gain traction. The political battle becomes less about who can produce the most convincing idea than who can field the best PR team.
At their inceptions, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were considered comparable movements for Republicans and Democrats respectively. They were the grassroots of the extreme wing of their parties coming together and working for change. There is one obvious and notable difference between the two parties, however: the Tea Party still exists and OWS does not.
The Tea Party started by expressing itself in living rooms and had respectable people wearing ties at its helm. It developed a compelling message of personal freedom and responsibility and made its way into the hearts of many Americans. The Tea Party, as I’m sure you all remember, was at first the “Taxed Enough Already” party that complained mostly about having to pay for things like roads and schools. I’m not really any more a fan of OWS ideology—they missed the bull’s eye by the same amount that the Tea Party did—but they did a much worse job of selling their image. Sexual assaults, drugs, and homeless people do not a great political point make.
Previously a nicely polished movement with wide appeal, the Tea Party eventually turned into a conservative race to the bottom that has become a nightmare for Republican Party elites. In 2010 Republican candidates were able to ride the Tea Party wave into office, but now they are having massive branding problems because of the Todd Akins and Richard Mourdocks of this world. If that’s not current enough for you, there’s also Lindsay Graham’s challenger, Det Bowers, a pastor who views women’s love of their children as the leading cause of their husbands’ cheating. The Republican elite cannot rein in the growing number of weird candidates running in Republican primaries, and it is hurting their image nationwide. At least some, like Jeb Bush, have realized that they cannot look like their economic policy was developed by a coked-up Ayn Rand, or have their social agenda resemble the Westboro Baptist Church with more guns.
Opponents of fracking have done a truly fantastic job of packaging their viewpoints, while supporters have been hard-pressed to come up with arguments that are compelling in the public sphere. Stories of flammable tap water and general ecological devastation are powerful, as is the voice of Middlebury’s Bill McKibben, the charismatic and passionate environmental activist who might as well lead the movement.
Fear is a powerful political tool, and the opponents of fracking have harnessed it masterfully to the detriment of better ideas. For instance, regulation or a clear establishment of accountability would perhaps be preferable in a utilitarian sense to an outright ban. But images of fire coming from a faucet drown out meek cries of “regulate!” In lieu of good PR from a more centrist side—somwhere between “no way in hell” and “drill, baby, drill”—those with the best story, if not the best ideas, have won out.
Perhaps the only well-known and talked-about political movement here at Bowdoin is the campaign for divestment of fossil fuels. The idea has taken hold at many schools, several of which are actively considering it. Bowdoin’s divestment movement is much less successful. Students tend to roll their eyes at the mention of it.
I’ve heard general Bowdoin apathy blamed, but I propose another reason: really, really bad relations with the campus. Building a slum on the quad (happened last year, sorry first years), circulating petitions that many students have called misleading, and a general “you’re with us or you’re killing the world” vibe don’t really result in making friends.
Part of having a persuasive message is knowing your audience, and many students here tend to be unreceptive to showy or preachy movements.
The secret to electoral or policy success is not necessarily a good idea. People are more convinced by a well-articulated message than a coherent idea. Most people often won’t look past a gilded exterior to a bad idea on the inside, and it is even harder to ignore really bad delivery to embrace a good idea.
The importance of branding and messaging cannot be underscored enough for political entrepreneurs, and citizens should strive to evaluate messages beyond the initial glitz. In our democratic marketplace of ideas, it is the skilled promoter rather than the skilled idea-maker who is rewarded most.

Kicking the can

Electile dysfunction: campaigns need civility

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

David Steury

Columnist

April 17, 2014

Spring is in the air. Brunswick, Maine is finally melting. Ivies is right around the corner. This morning, I heard birds chirping outside my window, and I suspect that the first buds will appear on the Quad’s trees any day now.

And, because it’s an election year, there are absolutely hilarious ads from primary candidates surfacing, either viciously targeting incumbents or sprinting ahead in a race to the ideological bottom.

In today’s environment of political polarization and competitive primaries, candidates bring out the rhetorical big guns in primary races, attacking their opponents for being too conciliatory or not ideologically pure enough. In order to cater to the ideological elements that make up a significant percentage of primary voters, candidates swing far to the extremes of their party.
The impractically ideological rhetoric in primary campaigns can have dangerous implications for policy when weird candidates advance through the election system and eventually become elected officials.

“When The Moment is Right” is a new ad released in opposition to John Boehner by J.D. Winteregg, a primary challenger. The ad prescribes Winteregg as a remedy for “electile dysfunction,” or rather the condition of having a Boehner for 23 years. Winteregg childishly reduces Boehner’s name to its phonetic pronunciation and condemns the Speaker of the House for activities such as playing golf with the president, which is supposedly indicative of Boehner being too comfortable in Washington and not being able “to get the job done.”

Another gem, this one from Montana, depicts a Republican Candidate for the House of Representatives shooting down a drone allegedly belonging to the US government. Entitled “Rifle Shot,” the ad demonstrates to viewers exactly what Matt Rosendale thinks about government surveillance.

Not only does the ad focus on an issue that does not exist—the government does not routinely deploy drones to spy on American citizens—but it also advocates violent remedies to the make-believe problem. To Rosendale, any influence by Washington is a huge problem, and he literally opens fire on the problems he perceives.

Sensational campaign ads are hardly anything new. “Daisy,” perhaps the most famous campaign ad ever (it’s universally known among people who study that sort of thing), appears to promise nuclear Armageddon if Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson is elected president. That ad was aired during the halcyon days affectionately referred to as the “golden age” of American politics—days when polarization was at a minimum.

Ads fire up the electorate and may not be completely representative of the political situation; they appeal to base emotions such as fear, hate, or frustration and often do so quite crudely.
Campaign ads are designed to educate the public about candidates, sway undecided voters, and pump up a candidate’s core electorate. As public opinion, especially that of voters who participate in primary elections, becomes increasingly polarized, rhetoric in those races gets fierier and candidates’ positions and promises get more extreme.

This is especially true in primary elections. Those who vote in primaries tend to be party elites and those at ideological extremes. Joe Six-Pack does not generally vote in the primaries. The more candidates rely on rhetoric and base emotions to sell their positions, the more present such rhetoric and emotion becomes in everyday political discourse.

I don’t want to argue for civility as a virtue. Obviously, the defining feature of these ads is vitriolic and often rude rhetoric, but a lack of civility is a symptom, not a problem in and of itself. It’s a symptom that feeds back into and perpetuates the original problem of polarization, but politeness is not inherently a virtue in politics, a realm where remaining silent can result in disastrous consequences.

While ads such as Rosendale’s and Winteregg’s may just be pure political calculation to win votes, they legitimize an environment in which lawmakers can hate each other, engage in ad hominem attacks, and imply violent action against things with which they disagree.
Shooting drones while seated on a four-wheeler with grain silos in the background may win votes from a vocal minority, but bringing such imagery to an already gridlocked and dysfunctional legislative environment does little to improve America’s outlook.

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