Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Zero Effect: The Arizona Shootings

It wouldn't surprise me whatsoever if the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords by Jared Loughner was politically motivated. And that's the picture that's starting to emerge. (Mr. Loughner shot others besides Representative Giffords, of course, but Giffords was his primary target, so I refer to the incident as her shooting.)

Indeed, it would surprise me if the incident were NOT politically motivated. If it turned out it was merely the product of voices in the gunman's had, or if there were some old family grudge he thought he was settling, basically ANY non-political motivation, that's what would surprise me.

With all the violence inherent in today's politics, I refer to violent rhetoric and violent implied inclinations, it's surprising that such an incident hasn't happened sooner. And let me say something that isn't politically correct, but is true: This violence is mostly, almost exclusively, found on the right. The days of the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army, violence on the left, are for the moment long past. Perhaps the most-violent rhetoric from the left I've seen in awhile came from Eliot Spitzer, and we saw what happened to him.

Some folks wish this shooting to be what public policy scholar Thomas Birkland calls a “focusing event,” a moment that crystallizes the need for a change. Seen as a focusing event, presumably the shootings would focus our attention on the need to increase civility in our public discourse, to recognize that there's a difference between winning an election and “knocking you down,” as now-former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer so eloquently threatened to do to now-former New York State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. Birkland was talking about a policy change following a focusing event, not a change in political tone or a process change, but the principle is the same in both cases.

And it sure would be nice if this shooting could serve some good. I'm tired of seeing the right portray President Obama as the Joker from Batman, or with a Nazi flag behind him. I'm tired of people bringing guns to meetings with their Representatives to protest the government giving them health care. I'm tired of people at rallies threatening to lynch the Attorney General of the United States. I'm tired of hearing the likes of G. Gordon Liddy advise people to shoot federal agents in the head. I'm tired of Newt Gingrich thinking he knows what a “normal American” is and who the enemy of those “normal Americans” are.

And, mostly, I'm tired of hearing Sarah Palin and Carl Paladino and those of their ilk use sex-laced, incendiary rhetoric and then hide behind the First Amendment when something bad happens. The First Amendment, after all, doesn't give one the right to yell fire in a crowded theater.

It would be nice if this shooting helped to end all that, helped to restore to America a conservative movement that not only understood that compromise was necessary but that praised the idea of compromise (as Ronald Reagan once did) and that understood your opponents could be friends after 6pm (as Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neil claimed to be). But let's face it. Even if the shooting was politically motivated (which it may-yet turn out to not be), and even if that fact if true were undeniable (and, sadly, everything is deniable these days), it still wouldn't change anything. The shooting will not be a focusing event for anything.

The shootings by army psychologist Nidal Hasan were successfully directed into scrutiny on American Muslims, and logic suggests the Arizona incident will direct a similar scrutiny toward the right. But contemporary American politics, as the shooting itself ironically suggests, is not about logic.

The violent rhetoric of the right isn't new, and we've seen similar potential focusing events before. The Oklahoma City bombing; the Branch Davidians' madness at Waco Texas; the Olympic Centennial Park bombing; the anti-government Right Wing rhetoric and violence of the Unabomber; various abortion-related killings; the flying of an airplane into IRS offices in Texas; the shooting at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; etc. All of these, and others, many others, were potential focusing events to change the increasingly ugly nature of our political discourse. But all were successfully redirected. Instead of focusing on militias, we focused on the alleged root cause of the militias: Bad government. Ironically, this is the same thought process, focusing on society and not the criminal as the root cause of crime, that the right has long decried when it's convenient for them, such as now, wherein we are told that Loughner is totally responsible for his own actions. The right wing insisted that we reach out to gun-toting politically-motivated lunatics (as long as their actions can be somehow traced to spontaneous anger at the government itself, and not the result of things said by the political right) with sympathy and understanding, even as they explicitly denied similar considerations to gun-toting, economically-motivated urban street thugs. Or to gun-toting politically-motivated lunatics whose actions can in part be traced to violent political rhetoric.

And that's what'll happen this time. Nothing. Or, worse than nothing, the incident will somehow be used to cast scrutiny in the wrong direction.

The corrosive influence of Post-Modern philosophy on America's public life, once feared by the right, has become their greatest friend, because it enables them to sell us political goods we can't afford and have no good reason to buy. When all facts become opinions, it's the opinions of those with the biggest mouths and the most money that get to become facts again. And when all values are openly questioned, anger becomes the most-important value. Anger focuses, cuts through, motivates, intensifies. And, best of all, anger cheap to buy or manufacture.

The right, by far, has the most money (the Koch Brothers, unlike George Soros, aren't going to back down for fear of being misunderstood), the biggest mouths (conservative talk radio has reigned since the 1980s), and certainly the most anger. And if the anger already present isn't sufficient, the money can be used to buy more.

If Sarah Palin's pathetic, self-serving video, and her bizarre public E-Mail exchange with Glenn Beck, showed us anything, it's that the redirection process has already begun. And if the polls showing that Americans mostly think that the shootings in Arizona had nothing to do with politics are accurate, it may mean that the redirection process has already succeeded.

Zero effect. This, America, is the politics we're stuck with, the politics we've made. Focusing events may have no actual meaning.

On Legislative Staff

In a recent piece on Senator Leibell's ethical issues, I briefly mentioned Senator Leibell's staff. I wondered aloud if maybe one of Senator Leibell's problems was that he lacked staff with either the guts or the authority, or both, to tell him that what he was doing was both wrong, and stupid, and would harm all of them. (This of course assumes his staff had any idea what he was doing, and simply “knew better” than to call him on it. It might be the case, of course, that they had no idea at all.)

I was criticized for these remarks; I was accused of blaming Senator Leibell's problems on his staff. But I was doing no such thing.

Well, then was I saying that it was staff's responsibility to police the actions of the boss? Again, no, I wasn't. The responsibility for all legislators' actions, and all of a legislature's or legislative conference's actions as a collective body, falls on the legislators themselves.

What I was doing, however, was highlighting the important and oft-overlooked role of legislative staff. As a legislator, a good staff can, if you let them, save you from yourself, at least temporarily. (In the long run, of course, no one can save anyone from themselves. But staff can help in the short term.) Staff should be good enough, trusted enough, and have enough integrity to tell you that what you're doing is wrong, whether it's an unjustifiable policy choice, or an unethical or even an illegal action. Political trust between legislator and staff is important, yes. (Note, though, that political trust is not the same as political agreement.) But, at the end of the day, competence, intelligence, and guts are all more important than is political trust.

I should imagine that for a legislator one of the most tempting things in the world is to hire staff that will just stroke your ego, reenforce your ideology and your preconception, and find smart-sounding ways to simply confirm what you say. This is an understandable temptation that should be avoided.

It's incumbent upon legislators, individually for their offices and collectively for the house or conference, to build a good staff. To seek out people who know what they are doing, have integrity, and are unafraid. As the legislator, ultimately the decisions are yours, and staff should respect that. But the staff also shouldn't be afraid to tell you to your face, behind closed doors of course, that what you're doing is wrong. Whether it's a bad policy, or an unethical (or illegal) action. If you discourage staff from performing that critical function, or even worse if you initially hire staff who isn't inclined to perform it, you have done yourself, your constituency, your conference, your chamber, and your state a disservice.

Sadly, I have no impression that the New York State Legislature (I speak especially of the State Senate, which seems to make the news a lot more often) agrees with me. If they have the tough, smart, capable staff I envision, they keep it well-hidden, and seem to rarely or never listen to it. Bad policy and lack of ethics don't always, or even mostly, go hand-in-hand, but there are important linkages. Staff is one of those linkages.

I don't know for sure, of course, that Senator Leibell's staff didn't try to talk to him. Ditto for Senator Espada, Senator Bruno, Assembly Member Seminerio, or any of the others who have faced problems. It might be that in all these cases, staff tried to warn legislator, and legislator didn't listen. Or staff might have not known at all. (With Bruno at least, thanks to his trial, there's a record at least of what people say or claim went on, so someday perhaps I will obtain that record and see for myself. With the others, though, we may never know for sure.)

But with all the problems New York's state legislators have had of late, one wonders if part of it is that they are hiring folks who kiss up and kick down, John Bolton style, rather than the people they should be hiring. And indeed, there's actually some specific reasons to think that hiring bad staff might be part of the New York State Legislature's problem, at least as far as the Senate is concerned.

Our first example comes to us from the Senate Democrats. Under Democratic rule, the State Senate hired former disc jockey Christopher Sealey as “Director of Creative Services” (huh?), at a 2009 pay rate of about $92,000 a year. Published reports indicate that even he was surprised by his hire. Luckily, he's ended his State service entirely, and he can go back to being a disc jockey. I have no idea what he did for the Senate and I don't think he did either.

For our second example, we go to the Senate Republicans. Who could forget the bizarre E-Mail from Senator Dean Skelos' aide, Thomas Dunham, to then Senate employee Edward Lurie, which was sent in late 2008 and hit the news in early 2009, wherein Dunham blatantly plotted to use Senate research staff for electoral purposes? To do such a thing at all was bad enough, but Dunham also put it in E-Mail, apparently not aware that E-Mails sometimes get leaked. It was, thus, not enough for Dunham to do something wrong; he had to also do it stupidly. Despite this, Dunham continued to work for the Senate Republicans during their two-year stint in the minority, and in 2009, according to SeeThroughNY.net, he made $150,000 working for the Senate Minority. (Almost double what the Senate Democrats' disc jockey made.) One wonders how much he'll make in the Senate Majority.

For our third example we return to the Senate Democrats, and highlight the hiring of Senator Pedro Espada's son for a six-figure job, from which he was quickly removed after the hiring broke as a scandal, part of a small series of Senate Democratic hiring scandals.

Sadly, I have no impression these hires were atypical for the Senate. Any good people they may have hired have quite likely been simply drowned under the weight of the bad ones. It came as no surprise to me to read that the Senate Democrats had exceeded their staff budget by a considerable amount. It actually wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that the Senate Republicans had done it too, but I've read nothing that says so.

Political Scientist Alan Rosenthal once wrote that legislative staffing is an important element in building the capacity of state legislatures. A more-prepared staff means a more-prepared legislature. Political Scientist Michael Malbin has argued that at the federal level, legislative staff (which of course at the federal level means Congressional staff) has become so important to the legislative process that it endangers the principle of representation.

After two years, a little more, really, of the least competent State Legislature that I am aware of (the Senate casting a terrifying shadow over the State Assembly), I think New Yorkers are probably ready for a legislative staff that endangers the principle of representation, if such also means a Legislature that is run well and enacts policies that have at least the semblance of being thought out.

Now, let's be clear: None of this is staff's fault. The legislators' actions are ultimately the legislators' responsibility, and that includes building up staff.

I have to wonder, though if anyone told the Legislators any different. Did anyone drag Vincent Leibell aside and say, “please don't do this?” Did anyone tell Eric Schneiderman, “this millionaires' tax....what you're saying on floor of the Senate greatly exaggerates its potential?” Even if staff didn't know about Leibell's lack of ethics they surely knew of Schneiderman's wild exaggerations on the Senate Floor. Did they say anything? Were they even allowed to?

Or of the State Legislature, especially the Senate, has simply been hiring people who will help keep up the bubble?

If so, that's the wrong approach. It hurts the effort to make public policy that there's at least a good argument for. And, it hurts the effort to change the bizarre culture of Albany, which it seems only gets worse with increasingly strict ethics reforms. There are two aspects of Albany's corrupt culture that are within the State Legislators' direct control: Their own behavior, and who they hire to watch their backs. Someone can't watch your back when he's afraid he'll get fired for yelling in your ear. Or if he lacks the capacity to recognize a threat when one appaers.

In many ways, the key to good legislative staffing is to resist the temptation to stuff your ranks with political loyalists, cronies, and those to whom you owe favors. (Or, those whose families you owe favors to.) Currently, one could be forgiven for suspecting that staffing at the New York State Legislature is little more than a patronage mill. There are a few internship programs (for undergraduate students) or fellowship programs (for graduate students), in both chambers, that attempt to draw individuals with actual qualifications into both houses of the Legislature. But these are small in scale compared to the problem itself.

If ethics and good policy (or at least justifiable policy) aren't enough too make the Legislature think twice about who it hires, then consider this.

Competition was an important buzz word in Andrew Cuomo's 2011 State of the State message. Based on what I have seen and heard at the capital, the Legislature's staff, especially the Senate (both Conferences), is simply unprepared to compete with Andrew Cuomo. They will need smart, tough, educated, prepared people in order to remain relevant over the next few years.

Gubernatorial behavior, Legislators, is not within your power to control. Your capacity to respond to it, however, is. Good staff is your sword and your shield.