We are living in a time of great promise, and probably unrealistic expectations.

Politics is changing at an ever-faster pace, spurred by unrealistic timelines, short attention spans and vast quantities of impatience.

Patience and looking ahead more than a year or two for future needs are virtues better understood in China than in our culture. The Chinese better understand timelines.

We are a tremendously impatient people who expect instantaneous solutions to difficult problems and we are prepared to tar-and-feather leaders who don’t cater to the simplistic notion of what have you done for me today.

Another way of looking at that is that our leaders may have done a poor job of setting realistic expectations and selling achievable timelines for accomplishments.

Most people today are not hard-core Democrats or hard-core Republicans. They are more independent than that and ready to turn against either party if it fails to meet minimal political expectations.

The media, which is also in a state of great flux and economic uncertainty, must share the blame for worshiping in the church of what’s happening now and why wasn’t it fixed yesterday.

Unrealistic timelines for solutions of long-term problems are set in today’s celebrity-and-entertainment-driven media, which is earning lower marks for trustworthiness along with most other institutions.

Bankers are depicted as thieves, lawyers as ambulance chasers, medical professionals as out-of-control profit centers, journalists as biased liars and politicians as worse than the rest of those professional scoundrals.

Why are the politics of our state and our nation seen as corrupted, out of touch and less than admirable?

Being a political leader today can be seen by as many as half the people as a little dirty, and suspect. Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” line is becoming a more commonly disbelieved defense.

When partisanship gets too intense, too pervasive, too prolonged and too nasty, the two teams that can’t play ball together earn scorn from non-affiliated independents as well as from the partisans of the other side.

It’s sort of like leveraging two-thirds of the public against your own excessive partisanship.

A lot of people view politics today as entertainment. This may feed some of the tendencies toward intense partisanship.

“In 2008, the presidential election became blockbuster entertainment,“ reads the first line in the new book Game Change by a pair of veteran journalists, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.

The presidential level does leave politicians open to be viewed as celebrities much more so than at the levels of politics closer to the people, and closer to the community. We are much more likely to treat neighbors as neighbors and as real people as opposed to celebrities when they are in political leadership roles at the local level.

But being a political leader does increase one’s visibility as just about any level above the soil and water conservation board, which is an elected position in Virginia somewhat quieter than the school board.

Still, unfortunate stereotypes become attached to many political leaders.

Democrats are depicted as tax-and-spend, terrorist-coddling baby killers and Republicans as pollution-loving, anti-tax, climate change denying, borrow-and-spend war mongers.

No wonder they can’t get along.

In truth, leadership involves the willingness and the ability to make ethical choices among competing goods and to compromise and work together to get things done.

Virginia has a long and distinguished list of political leaders and community leaders who, by and large, have understood the ethical demands and constraints of leadership.

At times, they can even work together.

One of those times in when government is divided as it is now and economic conditions are dire, as they are today.

A government that can’t compromise is a government that can quickly fail.

Now is a good time for injecting ethics, civility, respect and trust in politics along with a belief in the value of working together across the aisle to get things done for the people of our localities, our state and our nation.

Ethical choices involve timelines. What can we do today and what must we do for tomorrow.

U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh is a centrist kind of guy in the Indiana-Virginia tradition of moderates who occasionally thrive in one party or the other.

The Indiana Democrat stunned fellow party members on Presidents’ Day with his announcement that he would not seek a third Senate term on Nov. 2 at the end of a politically volatile year in which party polls have suddenly turned upside down.

2010 is an upside-down weather year in which Virginia inherited New York’s snowscapes, an upside-down political year in which Democrats inherited the last few years’ GOP poll numbers and a generally wacky time of rapid change driven largely by fear in economic and housing markets uncertain about when up is really up and down is really down.

Bayh, 54, is a man caught in the middle.

Centrists, including Bayh and Virginia’s pair of moderate Democrats, Jim Webb and Mark Warner, have been unable to draw both parties in the tradition-bound and prima-donna-centric Senate into coalitions able to govern from the middle.

Both parties reward the kind of team-sport and ideologically driven party bashing of the other side that makes the middle of the political road, as Texans used to brag, a place for yellow-striped dead armadillos.

Even hungry Americans in states where roadkill is a legal food supply are not particularly attracted to armadillos, and even bold moderates can find the middle hazardous to political health when super-partisanship trumps the otherwise practical notion of compromise.

Bayh, a 1981 University of Virginia law school graduate, said he was sick of politics as blood sport, fed up with the lack of bipartisan spirit needed to allow compromise and not hopeful partisan gridlock in Washington is about to change.

A two-term governor before he became a two-term senator, Bayh has the credentials, if not the charisma, for making a national ticket. But that is a road he has been down several times as a potential vice presidential choice, and, a little over two long years ago, as a tester of presidential waters who found them too chilly.

Neither Indiana nor Virginia has been a prolific mother of presidents in recent years despite efforts by former governors Chuck Robb, Doug Wilder, George Allen, Jim Gilmore and Mark Warner to order up periodic pregnancy tests.

Since the late John Dalton was governor from 1978 to 1982, the only Virginia chief executives not to publicly check the status of the Old Dominion’s presidential womb were governors Gerry Baliles and Tim Kaine, and Kaine did a quite public vice presidential pregnancy test.

There may be no womb for moderates, despite the once more commonly held belief that governing from the center is the smart way to put together lasting coalitions.

For Bayh to try again for the White House, the subject of some speculation since he declared he was more an executive type of guy than a lover of legislatures, he might recast himself as an outsider to the Congress and a radical centrist.

He could try to ride a popular centrist agenda to tackle short-term job problems and long-term fiscal messes.

Nothing changes faster than change in our nation’s political life and fortunes these days.

One day a politician can be a tiger, tigress or hunk in the game of celebrity political Roller Derby played daily in different cable flavors, but the next he or she can be a washed-up hulk. Richard Nixon was the incredible hulk who bulked back up and returned to rule and then to ruin.

The inability of both political parties to face up to long-term problems is not changing, unless it’s worsening. Bayh sought entitlement reform and deficit reduction, which was undone by short-term partisan power jockeying.

A fitness fanatic who once had a union job in Washington during college summers building the Metro rail system, he knew the dangers of touching a third rail and risking political electrocution. His father was a senator, so he knew the job’s roles.

What he would have liked to have changed is the role and definition of moderate. Instead of being disrespected and run over, centrists could be operating in the public interest as respected bipartisan craftmasters of the compromise he believed is needed to solve longer-term problems.

In congressional time, there’s always plenty of time for partisan campaigning, but what Congress has not found time for in a while is bipartisan discussion and action that gets much more than lip service.

Bayh is still young and his time may still be in the future. Or, he may be the Senate’s latest member in both parties to leave office frustrated by a system that rewards and empowers the party pur-ists who pummel the other side hard and fast on everything, consequential or not.

Bob Gibson is executive director of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership. The opinions expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of the institute.

    A few decades ago, Virginia law forbade the sale of a mule after dark.

    That may have been good law a few centuries ago, before the dawn of electricity when fast talking mule salesmen might take advantage of a needy buyer on a moonless night.

    The mule-seller lobby may have been slack or lacked pull in those days of a more agrarian Old Dominion.

    Government also worked at a slower pace and was closer to the people. It kept up with mule hucksters and tricksters.

    Why the law grew musty on the books into the last decades of the 20th Century—long after the state’s dreaded mule tax was eliminated—tells a tale on state government.

    Richmond still reacts slowly to crisis and even more slowly when change has left in place a skeleton of law designed to handle problems that have moved on.

    Virginia’s tax structure, and even its unique system of entirely separate and distinct cities and counties, may have fit the needs and the state’s modernity of the 1920s.

    Its application to the needs of the 2010s leaves the state burdened with baggy skeletons of outdated tax structures that weigh Virginia down.

    The state’s adherence to fiscal conservatism is not enhanced by a bag of old law bones that never seem to die, be buried, reconnected to modern needs or reborn.

    We just carry them around, as if weightier books of law carry the magic of relevance to when they were born.

    They don’t.

      Do cities and counties need a personal property car tax or a business, professional and occupational license tax in 2010?

      Yes and no. No if they are given more modern and fair means of raising revenue, and yes if they aren’t.

      Instead, the state chooses to venerate the antiquated and celebrate only the least efficient and partial fixes, such as a Rube Goldberg contraption that funnels state taxpayer money to every local government in Virginia to pay a portion of car owners’ local tax bills. We Virginians double-dip pay part of our car tax out of one pocket as local taxpayers and part out of another as state taxpayers. It must hurt less that way.

      Who said inefficiency lacks rewards? No one had to raise a tax to create a system in which every taxpayer paid himself tax relief and the ability to pay car taxes out of two pockets instead of just one.

      Is the gross receipts business, professional and occupational license tax, or BPOL, tax fair? No.

      How fair is it to tax gross receipts even if there is no profit? What kind of business incentive is that when creation of jobs is a major goal?

      Is it antiquated? Yes.

      People waiting in traffic on Virginia’s highways can rest assured that governors come and governors go but some laws, like old taxes, will hang around until people forget why they were passed.

      At least it is now legal to buy a mule at midnight.

    The year that ends in just 13 days has brought newspapers to their knees with many praying for new business models that can sustain and revive American journalism.

    A crashing business model once based upon booming retail and classified ads and monopolistic rates of revenue isn’t coming back. Ad revenue and readership dipped and dived at papers whose profitability plummeted and whose size, staff and stories shrank.

    Newsrooms at major papers in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, Cleveland, San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles are pale shadows of their former selves. Coverage of state and local governments throughout the country is diminished or disappearing.

    Yet, some of journalism’s leading lights are voicing optimism that the days of newsrooms producing the quality of journalism vital to the functioning of democracy and to informed electorates are far from over.

    Journalism is changing more than it is dying. Dominant newspapers and their broadcasting cousins, major television network news operations, are losing ground to upstarts and far more diverse collections of news gatherers as people design their own sets of free media.

    Collections of non-profits, public radio operations and collaborations among traditional news gatherers and newer journalistic enterprises are creatively stepping up to supplement or replace the dying monopolistic media.

    Len Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, a professor of communication at Columbia University, have produced an upbeat report on how newer media can continue the traditions of what they call “accountability journalism” in this new age of .advocacy journalism. 

    Their report, The Reconstruction of American Journalism, discusses new collaborations starting up in the public interest around the country and recommends six steps to support diverse sources of independent news reporting.
The report is available online through the Journalism School at Columbia University:  http://www.columbiajournalismreport.org.

    In it, the authors discuss how larger newspapers battered by the recession are changing. Micropayments to read individual news stories through the Internet using a model of online digital music purchases and business-to-business arrangements to share in ad revenue from other sites that republish stories are two of the various proposals from Internet entrepreneurs playing around the margins of what readers now regard as free media on the web.

    They conclude that new digital technology combined with innovations and new reporting models can energize and expand possibilities for good reporting. Online journalists, non-profit entities and new collaborations among groups of newsrooms, such as the eight largest newspapers in Ohio pooling and sharing stories, are giving consumers of news fresh reporting and the ability to participate in journalism through multimedia sites, blogs, social networks, podcasts and videos.

    Newsrooms and non-profits alike are finding new partners in a media dance that speeds up the pace of news while allowing for reporting on multiple platforms.
    In Charlottesville, The Daily Progress is four months into a partnership with Charlottesville Tomorrow, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that covers land-use, growth and transportation issues in the city and Albemarle County with a full-time staff of two journalists and some University of Virginia interns. The newspaper and the non-profit both appear to benefit from sharing news on important issues. Stories and podcasts are distributed through the CvilleTomorrow.org Web site as well as through e-mail and social media such as Facebook, Twitter and a new Wiki known as Cvillepedia.org.

    Critics of the nonprofit could consider it more advocacy journalism than accountability journalism.

    Downie and Schudson propose half a dozen ways to further support independent news reporting. They include:

1. The Internal Revenue Service or Congress should explicitly authorize any independent news organization substantially devoted to reporting on public affairs to be created as or converted into a nonprofit entity or a low-profit Limited Liability Corporation serving the public interest, regardless of its mix of financial support, including commercial sponsorship and advertising. The IRS or Congress also should explicitly authorize program-related investments by philanthropic foundations in these hybrid news organizations—and in designated public service news reporting by for-profit news organizations.

2. Philanthropists, foundations, and community foundations should substantially increase their support for news organizations that have demonstrated a substantial commitment to public affairs and accountability reporting.

3. Public radio and television should be substantially reoriented to provide significant local news reporting in every community served by public stations and their Web sites. This requires urgent action by and reform of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, increased congressional funding and support for public media news reporting, and changes in mission and leadership for many public stations across the country.

4. Universities, both public and private, should become ongoing sources of local, state, specialized subject, and accountability news reporting as part of their educational missions. They should operate their own news organizations, host platforms for other nonprofit news and investigative reporting organizations, provide faculty positions for active individual journalists, and be laboratories for digital innovation in the gathering and sharing of news and information.

5. A national Fund for Local News should be created with money the Federal Communications Commission now collects from or could impose on telecom users, television and radio broadcast licensees, or Internet service providers and which would be administered in open competition through state Local News Fund Councils.

6. More should be done—by journalists, nonprofit organizations and governments—to increase the accessibility and usefulness of public information collected by federal, state, and local governments, to facilitate the gathering and dissemination of public information by citizens, and to expand public recognition of the many sources of relevant reporting.

    Some of the above may involve more government assistance than is likely, but the emphasis on mixing and matching new forms of collaboration demonstrates ways to enter the new year with a little more optimism about enhancing support for accountability journalism. Many Americans would object to further government subsidies of, or tax breaks for, any kind of media.

    Advocacy journalism is alive and flourishing, but the old-fashioned newsroom’s brand of holding individuals and governments accountable through honest, even-handed and diligent reporting of the news is an established value worth holding onto in a new media age. Let’s hope some can make a profit doing it right and others can do it with citizens and non-profits leading the way to new models of informing people about their politics.

    As Downie and Schudson sum up their goals, the report states, “Rather than depending primarily on newspapers and their waning reporting resources, each sizeable American community should have a range of diverse sources of news reporting. They should include a variety and mix of commercial and nonprofit news organizations that can both compete and collaborate with one another. They should be adapting traditional journalistic forms to the multimedia, interactive, real-time capabilities of digital communication, sharing the reporting and distribution of news with citizens, bloggers, and aggregators.“

      I hope and feel their optimism is justified. There is still a significant demand for news that voters, the owners of their government, can use.

(Published Nov. 25, 2009, by Old Dominion Watchdog, see: http://virginia.watchdog.org/2009/11/25/... )

Resignations like the one given by Del. Phil Hamilton last week are rare.

The Newport News Republican is one of only three Virginia legislators over the last three decades to leave the General Assembly due to ethical breaches, according to E.M. Miller, director of the division of legislative services.

Facing investigations by a House Ethics Advisory Panel and a federal grand jury, Hamilton yielded his seat in the face of charges that he negotiated for himself a $40,000 salary from an Old Dominion University teaching institute for which he had state money appropriated.

But when Hamilton resigned on Nov. 15, the House panel was required by state law to drop the investigation. A spokesperson at the U.S. Attorneys office in Alexandria said officials won’t comment on the ongoing federal investigation.

Now state lawmakers, including Governor Tim Kaine and Speaker of the House Bill Howell, say they want to change the law to allow such investigations to continue even after legislators relinquish their seats.

But it’s unlikely that lawmakers will actually toughen up ethics laws, said Bob Gibson, executive director of the Sorenson Institute for Political Leadership at the University of Virginia and former Charlottesville Daily Progress reporter.

‘'I don’t know if there’s a will to do that in Richmond right now,‘’ Gibson said. ‘'I don’t know if there’s any political will to make it stronger.‘’

Whether any changes are made, Virginia has a comparatively good record of ethical behavior by legislators, Gibson said. Especially compared to states like Illinois and New Jersey, the state has a long history of judging legislators on the basis of their integrity.

And Virginia’s ethical laws are no weaker than those governing Congress, Gibson said.

Still, he says there’s a lot of well-deserved skepticism regarding the effectiveness of ethics boards.

‘'A lot of ethics complaints go to this type of commission and sort of disappear into a black hole and aren’t heard about much ever again,‘’ Gibson said. ‘'It’s not like this is an open discussion of ethical problems. It’s largely a quiet, out-of-the-way discussion that may or may not end up in a resolution.‘’

Virginia is one of only 10 states that do not have ethics commissions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Complaints against delegates and senators are instead handled by E.M. Miller, who passes them along to Judge Willian Sweeny, the panel chairman.

If the two decide the complaint is worth investigating, they convene a meeting of the five-member panel—which includes two former state legislators and two citizens. But considering that members live in Lynchburg, Richmond and Northern Virginia, that’s difficult to do, Miller says.

‘'It’s a fairly unique situation when an ethics complaint is filed’‘ Miller said. ‘'This group very seldom gets together. It causes a tremendous amount of work on my part that I don’t plan for.”

And when the panel does meet, the scope of their investigations is limited. They may only deal with certain conflicts of interest where financial stakes are involved, and investigations may only be prompted by formal complaints. So if a member reads a news story or recieves a tip about an ethical breach, they are not allowed to investigate it if a complaint is not first filed.

In addition, Virginia code gives the attorney general the power to decide what information about the investigation, if any, is made public—meaing that the public never hears about most investigations. When asked how many ethics complaints were filed and investigated this year, Miller declined to answer.

Regardless of how many ethics breaches have gone unchecked, Virginia is still known for an upright political culture, said Isaac Wood, assistant communications director for the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Wood attributes some of that tradition to the Byrd Organization, which dominated Virginia politics for the middle portion of the 20th century. Led by former Governor and U.S. Senator Harry F. Bryd, Sr., the organization had heavy influence in rural areas.

‘'There hasn’t been a need or really a demand from voters for a particularly robust system of ethical inquiry because the needs haven’t existed, at least in the public mind,” Wood said. “So it will be interesting to see whether the Hamilton case will create pressure.‘’

http://virginia.watchdog.org/2009/11/25/...

Now is the time for an injection of a little civility into the body politic.

Many politicians have succumbed to a political swine flu of sorts.

They behave a bit like pigs as they slop through campaigns and sessions of Congress trying to slime opponents with objectionable labels and ill motives.

Americans are free people, a Fluvanna County friend said recently, so that “Babbling idiots have the right to tarnish their public character just as poorly run businesses in a free market should have the right to fail. In this way, hopefully incivility takes care of itself.“

The friend, Stephen Scott, added, “I don’t think we should attempt to codify civility too much lest it become a form of control on free speech.“

As a First Amendment guy, I concur. Let the crude, rude and socially ugly characters lose their own arguments as the public reacts to punish outrageous attacks.

But, public opprobrium for shameful behavior is in short supply. Public disgrace or ill fame does not always follow from grossly wrong or vicious political conduct .

And, the media enjoy the outrageous attacks more than finding the truth or the reproach that can’t quite catch up to shameless political attackers who unfairly question others’ motives.

Incivility makes the news.

Actually, I have been insultingly unfair to pigs in this column.

As friend Andrea Young of McLean observes, “Even my animals show civility toward one another,“ observed Young a river-watcher, beekeeper and owner of a pack of large dogs. “When they don’t, one or the other will ‘alpha up’ and make sure the pack gets back to basic order.“

Young equates civility with respect. “It is that deep, abiding respect that allows me to have a discussion with those I disagree with, weigh the input, question my own motives and observations, and form an opinion grounded in reflection and thoughtfulness.“

“Civility is the lifelong personal challenge to open one’s mind to new ideas, listen with respect,“ she said.

What is civility? It involves respect for others, community service, tact, fairness and decency.

“Civility is complex,“ said P.M. Forni, who teaches Italian literature and civility at Johns Hopkins University. “Civility belongs in the realm of ethics. ... [I]t is not just an attitude of thoughtful relating to other individuals; it also entails an active interest in the well-being of our communities and even a concern for the health of the planet on which we live.“

George Washington cared deeply about civility in public life and his thoughts on the subject are earning a bit of a revival.

A sad irony surrounds the public’s layers of distrust and disgust with much of the political life centered in the nation’s capital bearing his name.

Fixing the nation’s giant civility deficit could take years. Many years of a civility surplus are not yet contemplated, budgeted or even imagined.

The Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership is considering the idea of bringing a national conference on civility in political life to Charlottesville.

Sorensen hopes to play at least a small part in a national revival of understanding and embracing the value of political civility.

Sorensen teaches ethics and civility in four programs each year that educate and train political leaders in communities across Virginia.

Eighteen Sorensen alumni will be sworn in as General Assembly members on Jan. 13, 10 of them Democrats and eight Republicans. They know the positive effects that flow and multiply from civility in public life. I know they try to practice what they preach even when the public half expects politicians to be pigs. Disclaimer: No actual pigs were harmed in the production of this column.

    Politicians really aren’t as bad as their opponents’ TV ads make them out to be, but you couldn’t prove it by their own ads.

    In a race for the political advertising gutter, both sides are apt to cut corners, shade truths, take facts well out of context and place sinister implications on their opponents’ words while slowing images enough to scare voters into believing the targets of such 30-second stink bombs are, or should be, doing perp walks.

    Any campaign spending more than $1 million these days appears more adept at throwing pungent slop at an opponent than making a strong enough case for the candidate spending the dough that he doesn’t have to throw the bitchin’ stink.

    Republicans point to Democrat Creigh Deeds and say the candidate for governor brags about being a big spender, not bothering to mention that Deeds’ budget amendments sought funding to bring Virginia teacher salaries up to the national average. That’s a goal Republican Bob McDonnell also endorsed.

    Democrats imply that McDonnell would try to strip married couples of the right to contraception when the closest he ever came to voting for such an unlikely ban was favoring a measure aimed at keeping birth-control pills out of the hands of James Madison University students at their student health dispensary.

    Voters are looking for big ideas and honest dialogue. Instead they are given Democratic ads trying to scare voters about the socially conservative McDonnell and Republican ads trying to paint Deeds as a tax-and-spend liberal.

    Scare tactics in the ads may turn a few voters the other way but also are likely, if not fully intended, to keep many voters away from the polls.

    It’s as if both sides collectively are saying, “No big ideas, no trust, just stay home.“

    If moderate or inattentive Virginians succumb to the scary ads, a smaller electorate of the Republican base and the Democratic base could end up deciding the Nov. 3 elections.

    The men running are more decent than their ad campaigns indicate. Neither one is about to bankrupt Virginia or ban us back to the Stone Age.

    One of them is going to win and then will have to work with the other party to get much done. Working across the aisle can be easier if you haven’t just spent millions of dollars trashing the other side.

    Neither man will singlehandedly raise tax rates or reduce contraceptive or reproductive rights without the majority support of both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly. 

    No Virginian is going to benefit from better schools or roads or transit unless the two sides can work together toward solutions that generally involve consensus and compromise.

    In the absence of big ideas in a governor’s race—and there are not too many floating out there this election—other factors decide elections.

    One factor at play this year is the national political dialogue and the agenda of President Obama.

    The major media and the Republicans, each for their own reasons, have decided to make the Deeds-McDonnell race into something it might not be: the measuring stick of Obama’s success or failure.

    That’s a little like sending the unpopular owner of the Baltimore Orioles a note saying it’s time for the unpopular owner of the Washington Redskins to go.

    Wrong bark. Wrong tree, perhaps. But many Republicans in Virginia want to continue the decades-long trend of this state choosing a governor from the opposite party than the winner of the White House the previous year. The GOP base is simply more enthusiastic this year. 

    Republicans have reasons for wanting to nationalize the Virginia race. A rejection of Deeds allows them to take the mansion in Richmond for the first time since Jim Gilmore lived there and claim it is an assault on every Democrat running for Congress in 2010.

    Media movers and shakers think a race that measures Obama’s first 10 months in office is a bigger story than a race that is decided by Virginians on Virginia issues, so they pretend to cover it as such.

    Democrats, meanwhile, campaign without big new ideas and seem locked into running on past successes and past fears.

    “Vote for a D like Creigh because you liked what we Ds did five years ago” and because he never wrote a controversial thesis 20 years ago that scares people who fear social conservatives, they would argue.

    Waving the bloody thesis carries a fear factor, a yuck factor and diminishing returns. If Deeds loses, his decision to run hard against the McDonnell thesis will no doubt be fat fodder for new theses, if not a dissing dissertation.

    There are positive ideas in each campaign. Just don’t look to see too many of them on TV, where the real money of campaigns continues to distort and attack and twist out of context until both candidates resemble creatures from the dark lagoon.

    They aren’t really. They just campaign that way.

    And they probably will until their highly paid consultants tell them that no longer works.

    I am afraid the bottom of the lagoon is not yet in sight.

There is little like a redistricting opportunity to focus the minds of a political party on a set of 100 Virginia House of Delegates elections.

Republicans say they have never run as many candidates for the House of Delegates as they are fielding this year.

Democrats, who have 72 House candidates—a full 13 fewer than the 85 Republicans running across Virginia, say they still expect to gain seats in the Nov. 3 elections. Republicans aren’t so sure.

Whichever party controls the House in 2010 and 2011 has a major say in the redrawing of all 100 House districts following the 2010 Census, so the numbers of uncontested seats in the 2009 House elections are way, way down.

Both parties have recruited more challengers than in recent election cycles. Plus, a number of surprise open seats have also popped into the mix, giving Virginians this fall probably the most expensive set of House elections in the state’s history.

In 2005, only 49 of the 100 House seats featured elections with at least two candidates.

In 2007, only 41 of the 100 House elections were contested.

This year, candidates for contested House seats are off and running in 70 districts and in every region of the state.

The power of redistricting is so strong that even with better party recruiting efforts—and the healthy increase in contested seats—this year’s set of elections still leaves 30 delegates in such uncompetitive districts that no challenger decided to try to unseat them. 

At least places in Southwest Virginia and from Danville to Dumfries and Delaplane to Dayton have two-party competition where there were fewer contests two and four years ago.

Republicans, who control the House and appear unlikely to lose their majority, have been the most active recruiters.

The GOP has done a better job of fund-raising. Republican candidates entered July with a total of $4.46 million in cash on hand compared with $2.88 million for Democrats.

Campaign finance reports show that 85 Republicans, 72 Democrats and 24 independents or members of smaller parties are seeking House seats on Nov. 3, increases that Virginians of all political stripes should applaud if they believe that political competition is a good thing.

Open seats due to retirements have made races more interesting in Staunton, Arlington, Halifax, Fairfax and Prince William. An open-seat race that could be ripe for a party turnover is in the Prince William district of retiring Del. Jeffrey M. Frederick, R-Woodbridge.

Yet Democrats counting on a pickup there are hard pressed to find the net gain of five other seats they would need to take a House majority. For one thing, Democrats fielded only 20 challengers to sitting House Republicans while the GOP fielded 24 candidates challenging incumbent Democrats.

Strategists in both parties call a six-seat gain by Democrats and a resulting shift of party control of the House possible but unlikely.

Republicans contend that they are likely to pick up a few seats in Virginia Beach and Northern Virginia. A gain of even two seats by the GOP would leave Democrats farther behind in a quest for majority statu.

A number of potentially tight races have involved expensive campaigns in Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties in Northern Virginia plus the Hampton Roads, Danville and Charlottesville areas.

The 58th District race between Del. Rob Bell, R-Albemarle County, and his Democratic challenger Cynthia Neff around Charlottesville has become one of the state’s most expensive contests.

Bell, who has been airing political ads on television since early August, had raised more than $672,000 entering September while Neff had raised $148,689 and had about $84,000 in cash on hand. Bell led the state’s House candidates in cash on hand with more than $570,000 in the bank entering September.

Some other contests also are likely to come close to, or exceed, the million dollar milestone.

They include Republican Barbara J. Comstock’s challenge to Del. Margaret Vanderhye, D-McLean; Democrat Robin Abbott’s challenge to Del. Phillip A. Hamilton, R-Newport News; and Democrat Gregory A. Werkheiser’s bid to unseat Del. David B. Albo, R-Springfield.

Not all the 70 contested elections are likely to be close. A number of challengers are lightly funded and face entrenched incumbents.

Thirty House incumbents have free rides. Twenty 20 Republicans, nine Democrats and one independent drew no challenger on the Nov. 3 ballots.

Unopposed incumbents are not a rare breed in Richmond. Many incumbents have the advantage of better name recognition and often have a district that the once-a-decade reapportionment process has left heavily weighted with voters who support their political party.

The U.S. Supreme Court has opened the door in a Texas case to allowing states the option of redrawing legislative districts more often than once every 10 years, as Texas was allowed to do.

In effect, states are no longer required to wait 10 years to redistrict. Virginia, where Republicans hold power in the House of Delegates, and where Democrats hold most seats in the state Senate, could conceivably join Texas in the highly partisan political game of redistricting when one party gains a clean sweep of the House, the Senate and the governor.

In other words, if redistricting stays highly partisan in the Old Dominion, there is a chance that the next party to take control might not choose to wait 10 years until the Census numbers roll in again to take advantage of their next trifecta majority to redraw the lines of House and Senate districts.

They could do what Texas Republicans did under President George W. Bush and redraw congressional district lines while they are enjoying the status of legislators empowered to choose their own voters.

Nothing is certain, or permanent, about Virginia’s politics.

    Virginia is entering the second decade of the 21st Century richer in history but poorer in its residents’ knowledge of how government works.

    The state’s demographic makeup and its politics are changing faster than in previous decades, yet its burgeoning population, which hails increasingly from all across the nation and around the world, demonstrates flagging awareness of the functioning parts and roles of government, a crucial force and major employer whose actions touch everyone.
    The Old Dominion, long ago nicknamed the Mother of Presidents, has lost some of its distinctive political identity as its civic and political life more and more resembles the nation’s. Its hugely diverse politics and an educational system that has de-emphasized history and government are parts of national trends that tend to leave young people less than fully prepared to participate in a democracy that thrives best on citizen involvement.
Virginia and the nation could benefit from a better-informed citizenry with more of a grasp of the process of democracy.

    Put another way, Americans and Virginians are increasingly at risk of losing the civic virtues that undergird the rights and welfare of all if tolerance, understanding, social responsibility, respect for others and the American belief in a capacity to make a difference are allowed to wither.

    Calls for increasing civic education to help citizens make a difference accompany warnings that, in short, the nation is at risk of losing vital public participation.

    Add in the turmoil of a news media establishment losing jobs, readership and viewership while cutting news coverage—and searching for a working business model—and a toxic recipe exists for citizens who know little about government and politics. A growing segment of the population is likely to be even less informed about public policy issues, actions and choices.

    Reversing the loss of an informed and involved electorate should be a top national and state priority if rights and freedoms born in Virginia more than two centuries ago are to be preserved as the necessary safeguards of our form of government.
Understand It or Risk Losing It

    Retiring U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter in May delivered a stirring call for better education of the American public about how government works.

    The 19-year veteran of the court observed that surveys show large majorities of Americans cannot name the basic three branches of government: the executive, legislative and judicial branches.
    Souter, in a speech at Georgetown University Law Center, warned that lack of knowledge about how government works threatens judicial independence and threatens the republic itself.

    He reminded his audience that Benjamin Franklin, when asked after the Constitutional Convention of 1787 what type of government the new nation would have, replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Souter sounded a note of pessimism based on the lack of civic knowledge.

    “It can be lost, as he knew,” he said of Franklin. “And the lesson we have been learning over the past couple of years is that it is being lost. It is lost when it is not understood. If it is not understood, it will basically leech away.”
Souter said concern about attacks on judicial independence led to his understanding that “the real problem was the debasement, and in some places the disappearance, of knowledge of the structure and work of the government.”
The concepts of separation of powers and of a fair and independent judiciary must be widely understood for the American republic to survive, the 69-year-old jurist warned.

    In his home state of New Hampshire, where he has retired, he has just joined an independent curriculum committee to upgrade the teaching of civics from kindergarten through 12th grade.
Souter’s talk won a prolonged standing ovation from several hundred lawyers and judges from around the country, according to Tony Mauro of Legal Times.

    His words reverberate strongly across Virginia, where civics education has taken a back seat and where occasional calls for strengthening it have been heard in the General Assembly.

    So little government is taught between the 8th and 11th grades that many Virginians today cannot name three branches of government at the state or federal level, much less understand the separation of powers.

    Ken Stroupe and Larry Sabato, who are with the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, found in a survey of 9th to 12th grade students in 20 states several years ago that:

    •  A third of students incorrectly thought that the Democratic Party is considered more conservative than the Republican Party.
    • About 30 percent could not name the U.S. vice president at the time (Dick Cheney).

    • More than 70 percent did not know the procedure by which a candidate is nominated to become president.

    • Only 29 percent were able to name even one of their state’s two U.S. senators.

    • Only 23 percent knew that most bills introduced in Congress are rejected in committee and never reach the full House or Senate.

    • More than half could not identify which branches of government are most susceptible to being influenced by lobbying and more than half said that they did not know the purpose of a political action committee.

    Bringing this disturbing story closer to home, a majority of the more than 3,000 students surveyed were from Virginia schools. In their study the authors found that “the extent to which young people fail to engage in civic life is a direct reflection of the values and priorities of the society of which they are a part. The apathy of today’s generation toward politics is a symptom of society’s neglect of civic education.”

    Involving more students in hands-on exercises—from volunteer experiences in their communities to civic game-playing in school and debates of issues—can be paths to teach civics through practice. Teaching the Bill of Rights by asking students to debate them could create a more universal understanding of why those rights were adopted, why they are still needed and why they are relevant to solving problems in our ever-more-diverse society.

    Some educators believe that lively discussions and mock elections and debates trump the mere knowledge gained from classroom lectures.

    David Weber, a veteran of more than 35 years of teaching at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, suggests that demonstrating examples of how rights are relevant in today’s society can bring alive the Bill of Rights and teach civics as a living exercise.

    Weber promotes the classroom use of case studies with selected primary sources. In his view, students “…need to understand the history of the collisions between the founding ideals and the times when the actualities have been pretty ugly.”

The Changing Face of Virginia

    Virginia is in a period of political change as its population becomes more diverse, more foreign-born and full of new and expanding cultural identities. The state’s evolving demographics alone help justify increasing and improving civics offerings in schools as well as in after-school or other community settings. An increasingly mobile and growing population means there are more people to familiarize with the basics of how government works.

    Half of Virginia’s residents were born outside the state, including a full 10 percent of the population born in another nation.5 No matter where they were born or where they went to school, Virginians have a better chance of improving life in the commonwealth the better they understand the civic life of their state and nation.

    The top five countries of birth for foreign-born Virginians are Mexico, El Salvador, India, Korea, and Guatemala.6 Breaking this down further, some 40 percent of the Virginians born abroad came from Asia, 36 percent from Latin America, 13 percent from Europe and 9 percent from Africa.
    The voters of Virginia’s present and future increasingly bring political traditions and predispositions with them from other states and nations. Some of the highest state-to-state immigration contributors include Maryland, New York, North Carolina, California, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

    Whether Virginians were born in Korea, India, New York or Richmond, they should know, for example, how Virginia’s George Mason contributed to the Bill of Rights. His work helped shape the constitutional guarantees they enjoy today. As another example, Thomas Jefferson promoted the religious freedoms they have. These are rights that everyone in the state and the nation enjoys in daily life.
See p. 1. http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/sitefiles/documents/ pdfs/numberscount/migration.pdf

See p. 16. http://www. coopercenter.org/demographics/sitefiles/documents/pdfs/presentations/var.pdf
The Role of Civic Education in a Democracy

    Our system of representative democracy depends upon reasoned debate, negotiation and compromise. Success depends on the involvement of individuals who choose to participate in a political process that can bring about changes if enough people have the faith and understanding to make it work.

    There is no better place for citizens to become involved than in state and local governments because they affect citizens most directly. In turn, people can affect those levels of government more directly. With this as a starting base, they can better understand the national government and ways to participate in that.

    Civil and bipartisan policy discussions work best when good faith, respect for others and understanding of how the process should work are shared as broadly among citizens as possible.
Virginia and the nation have enough problems to solve without the misunderstanding and paralysis that can result when people lack the faith or knowledge to make government work.

    Recognizing this, in its recent session the General Assembly prolonged the life and mission of a commission on civics education that had been created in 2005.

The Virginia Commission on Civics Education

    The commission has already helped rewrite state Standards of Learning (SOLs) in social studies for kindergarten through 12th grade to emphasize understanding and participation in state and local government and has provided Virginia specific chapters to be used in middle school civics courses and a required 12th grade government course.
    The commission’s charge from the General Assembly is broad and challenging as the legislature instructed it this year to:

    • Develop and coordinate outreach programs in collaboration with schools to educate students on the importance of understanding that (i) representative democracy is a process dependent on reasoned debate, good faith negotiation, and compromise; (ii) individual involvement is a critical factor in community success; and (iii) consideration of and respect for others must be shown when deliberating, negotiating and advocating positions on public concerns.
    • Identify civics education projects in the commonwealth and provide technical assistance as may be needed to such programs.

    • Build a network of civics education professionals to share information and strengthen partnerships.

    • Develop, in consultation with entities having representatives on the commission and others as determined by the commission, a clearinghouse that shall be available on the Department of Education’s website. The electronic clearinghouse shall include, among other things, (i) a database of civics education resources, lesson plans and other programs of best practices in civics education; (ii) a bulletin board to promote discussion on and exchange of ideas relative to civics education; (iii) an events calendar; and (iv) links to civics education research.

    • Make recommendations to the Board of Education regarding revisions to the Standards of Learning for civics and government.

    • Submit to the governor and the General Assembly an annual report. The chairman shall submit to the governor and the General Assembly an annual executive summary of the interim activity and work of the commission no later than the first day of each regular session of the General Assembly. The executive summary shall be submitted for publication as a report document as provided in the procedures of the Division of Legislative Automated Systems for the processing of legislative documents and reports and shall be posted on the General Assembly’s website.

    Now in its fifth year, the Virginia Commission on Civics Education this year became a legislative commission and is newly charged with helping strengthen the teaching of civics in schools and communities across Virginia. Civics education in and outside of schools is adding a new focus on citizen involvement in state and local government, according to a discussion at a recent meeting of the commission in August 2009.
    The commission will sponsor a civics education summit for teachers September 24 in Richmond at the Capitol to provide additional resources to help teach active engagement in civics, including new media tools to assist teaching and new websites to aid teachers.

    The 18-member body appointed mostly by the state legislature has decided to take an inventory on what Virginia students are learning in civics and history taught in schools across the state. Members were told that in grades 9, 10 and 11 there is a “civics strand” taught in some history courses that incorporates civics lessons and exercises even in the grades where civic education and government are not separate and distinct course offerings or requirements.

Conclusion

    The state’s politics have undergone significant change in the first decade of the 21st Century as the Old Dominion evolved from a Republican-leaning state to a swing state marked by highly competitive and increasingly expensive statewide elections.

    Now that Virginia is once again in the center of the national political spotlight, let us bring back the spirit of Mason, Jefferson and Madison to inform and guide new generations of residents in the balancing act that is a government of, by and for the people.

    As a newly appointed member of the Virginia Commission on Civics Education, who is well acquainted with its members, I find them to be serious about a desire to give civic education a more useful role in the lives of Virginians. This, in turn, can improve the lives of people through participation in the decisions that state, local and federal governments make.

    The commission cannot be effective in a vacuum or without the assistance of many in Virginia who value the rights and responsibilities of citizens and wish for a restoration of civil responsibilities and fuller exercise of civic rights.

    I would urge anyone with useful ideas and examples to further this mission to please submit them to me or to the commission.

http://www.coopercenter.org/publications/vanewsletter/.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Bob Gibson is executive director of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership, a non-partisan organization based at the University of Virginia and dedicated to improving political leadership and strengthening the quality of government at all levels. Before joining the institute in 2008, he was for many years a staff writer and editor with the Charlottesville Daily Progress, where he won many awards for his coverage of politics and government. He is a 1972 graduate of the University of Virginia with a B.A. in government and foreign affairs.

Virginians who live side-by-side or across town in communities across the state often do not hear the same words in the same ways.

The words “health care reform” carry vastly different meanings and connotations to the different ears that might hear them.

The power of language usually outweighs the sword, the spear, the cudgel and the bomb.

An author and former delegate from Patrick County gave a startling example the other day of how some language does not even translate from one cultural community to the next.

Barnie Day was talking about generational and cultural differences in language when he surprised a Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership class of 39 individuals by guaranteeing “there is a word that every African-American in this room knows—a word that not a single other individual here has ever heard.“

“You wouldn’t think that possible in this day and time, but it is. You’re going to see an astonishing black and white divide on this question,“ Day told the group. (He told me I could use his example.)

Day was 100 percent correct on both black and white. He asked for an honest show of hands for who knew the word “sadiddy” and only black hands shot skyward.

African-American class members explained to astonished white classmates that sadiddy means a person who acts completely superior toward another or has a perception that they are educationally or a class above another.

Day said he’d heard two black delegates describe a colleague by using the adjective, which he had never heard before.

“Language matters,“ he told the class. “Sometimes its precise meaning is critical.“

In any event, if there is one word that black Virginians use that white Virginians remain unaware of, there must be others that provide an invisible divide in understanding language.

Language is often used in politics to divide people as certain words and phrases carry special meanings for some groups and not others.

Politicians must use language their audience understands. They often choose to use language their intended audience understands especially well, even if others do not.

Consider the abortion debates in which one side emphasizes “life” and the other side stresses “choice.“ There, the code words can appear to be clearly understood by many.

Day calls the appropriation of language to carry messages intended for specific audiences and not for others “dog whistle messaging.“

“Everybody hears the words, but only the intended audience hears the message,“ he said.

A couple of examples could be “illegal immigrants” and “death panels,“ which carry powerful messages beyond the mere words.

Plenty of citizens on all sides of health care have legitimate concerns that need to be heard, but the mixing of emotional messages about illegal immigrants in with health care reform can make the chances of building consensus or compromise about as slight as getting media commentators Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann to endorse the same health care plan. Media coverage may not be helping people find reasonable policy.

Consensus, compromise, bipartisanship and civility all become casualties in media wars of dueling messages in which the exciting news of clashes outweighs the sorting out and agreement on reasonable courses of policy.

In truth, Virginians and Americans have plenty enough in common to craft agreements if leaders take the harder course of using the language and the messaging that can unite enough people behind compromises. There is agreement health care can be improved in some ways.

The easier course, of course, is division and defeat of even attainable agreements through the use of language that inflames more than informs.

Great pyrrhic victories, Mexican standoffs and poison pills are built on the tongues of talented tar-and-feather talkers.