Norquist

A few weeks ago I joined the Open Debate Coalition, an effort to make the presidential debates more accountable to voters and in touch with the Internet Age.

The effort kicked off with a letter from Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig, who also founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and asks two things: 

1) Debate footage be authorized for public use.  Currently, it’s owned by the media and prohibited for reuse or repackaging by the public.

2) Townhall debate Internet questions be chosen by the public, and not solely the media.

Signers include political and new media enthusiasts from both sides of the aisle, mostly the Left (Arianna Huffington, Craig Newmark, MoveOn, Roger Hickey), but also right-leaning friends (me, Ruffini, Henke) including latest signer Grover Norquist.

While both candidates (McCain and Obama) blessed the letter with their endorsement of its principles, the debates did not change.  The media and the commission took minimal steps to support the release of debate footage and no steps to reform the debate format.

It’s too late to address the latter problem in this election, but the Commission does have a chance to make right the debate footage issue.  As Norquist said today:

If the Commission wants to show any bit of responsiveness this year, they'll make sure that debate footage is put in the public domain so people can put clips on YouTube and otherwise share key moments without being deemed copyright lawbreakers.

Nonetheless, both presidential candidates’ public endorsement of the open debate coalition principles set the standard for future presidential debates – and hopefully down-ballot debates in the interim. 

Democratizing the debate process -- something the Internet makes more possible -- goes beyond party or ideology.  It's about making the debates more accountable to those it's intended to serve -- the voters.

The candidates updating their approaches in response to the changing force of interactive media isn’t enough.  Debates matter.  And unless the presidential debate commission embraces reform, 2008 could well be their last year sitting on the debate throne.

I'm not a Grover Norquist clone, though I do agree with the vast majority of what he says, and even on what I disagree with he makes interesting points.  He's been doing events promoting his book "Leave Us Alone", in which he divides the political world into two main coalitions, the "takings" coaltion and, of course, the "leave us alone" coalition.

I'd highly recommend watching this video of Norquist in semi-hostile territory at the New America Foundation if you haven't seen him speak recently.  (The video clocks in at an hour and ten minutes, with four minutes of introduction, and the main spiel ending around the 30 min mark, followed by an interesting Q&A.)

"Leave us Alone" is, unfortunately, not a catchy slogan.  What caught my attention was the discussion of what ultimately motivates the leave-us-aloners is a direct threat to their particular voting issue.  Right off the top, Mr. Norquist asserts that it wasn't school prayer or Roe-v-Wade that catalyzed the religious right, but the idea that the Carter administration might take away the tax status of Christians schools and sic the FCC on Christian radio stations under the fairness doctrine.

Obama's "bitter" comments strike this same social nerve.  Of course people felt that their identities had been besmirched, but implicit in Obama's remarks was an actual threat to the religious and the gun owners.  They want those issues left alone.

Duplicating this outrage is the challenge.  We need to find "voting issues" on which activists and voters alike are righteously outraged.

Norquist cites the anti-earmark good-government movement as a potential voting issue.  I'm undecided as to whether this can be a voting issue, but at least McCain has the upper hand over Obama on that, particularly if Maverick will allow us to talk about the money Obama got for Father Pfleger's programs or for the hospital that happened to be his wife's employer.

Norquist also suggested that since the tax cuts on capital gains and dividends apparently caused the value of the stock market to increase, that Obama's proposed tax hikes could take a $5.5 trillion chunk out of people's 401k's and stock portfolios.  I think Norquist is wrong to imply a perfect correlation between the tax cuts and subsequent equity performance, but the basic idea is right - increasing these taxes will put a major hurting on (baby boomer) retirement accounts.

He is somewhat dismissive of the so-called 80/20 issue slates proposed by Newt Gingrich and others because they aren't framed as "voting issues", though he allows that some of them might be altered to fit such a mold.

So there's some food for thought.  Not too far off the beaten path, conveying a sense that coalitional calculus must still be performed, but steering us in the direction of finding the visceral connection with those areas where people's voting issues may be endangered.