Massachusetts

While the feedback I got from my earlier question about canceling our subscription to the Globe was largely negative (here’s a sample from Universal Hub: “If you enjoy reading the paper, keep your subscription. A newspaper dropped on your front stoop is a wonderful thing to wake up to each morning. That and coffee of course.” OTOH, my Facebook network was more positive: “Do it! Stop propping up dinosaurs”)

So, we’re canceling our daily subscription but keeping the Sunday paper (for now). As another Facebook friend who did the same thing put it, “I did the wimpy thing and went down to Sunday only.” Top reasons:

1. While it’s really great to feel like part of the local community by knowing what’s going on, etc., I probably spend 15 minutes per day “learning” things that really have no value to me (MP’s comment about social capital acknowledged but not, at the end of the day, enough to overcome my general feeling that I’m wasting time).
2. It really does irk me that some guy is driving around the neighborhood at 10 MPH delivering these things. And while maybe that guy will eventually lose a job if enough of us keep unsubscribing (as we seem to be), it’s not like I’m not encouraging new (and probably better-paying) jobs by doing more productive things with my time and money saved, including getting my news from other sources. (Not to mention the number of my plants this guy has beheaded over the years).
3. Plastic. Lots and lots of Boston Globe plastic.
4. Consumerism. Reading more ads — including the Globe’s own articles and product reviews — is not the way I want to spend my time, nor my money, nor the way I’d like to support local media.

On a more positive note, we continue to support WBUR as members, and I hope that as more of us defect from newspapers that public media will benefit. Why? Because I will donate money to WBUR; I won’t to the Globe. Sorry, that’s just the difference between a nonprofit and a for-profit. I’ll be getting my comics from the Houston Chronicle’s Roll-Your-Own (the only important one it lacks is Arlo & Janis).

btw I don’t do morning coffee. I listen to the news until something makes me so angry that I jolt myself out of bed.

A few days ago I came back from a rare early-morning run and noticed an old car slowly easing its way up our street, drive-by style. The man was clearly lost. He was also delivering the Boston Globe.

That’s yet another reason to cancel our subscription to the Globe: the horrible environmental impact of the delivery guys driving around town. Add that to the amount of time I waste every morning reading the paper (which is the same stuff I’d be reading online, plus all the other crap I really needn’t be reading, like the op-eds), not to mention the actual cost of subscribing.

There’s only one and a half reasons to keep subscribing:

One: I can’t think of any other way to support many of the comic strips I love so much, especially the less popular ones like Arlo & Janis.

Half: I really hate contributing to the continuing decline of the daily newspaper, even if the Globe continues to waste too much of its resources on unnecessary coverage. (The nation and world will march on if the Globe drops its national and international desks).

Suggestions???

Finding ourselves unable to install a windmill on the roof, Gene and I choose the NStar Green option today. So this means that we’ll be running our lights and laptops on wind power, right? Not quite. Our switch to green supports wind power, but apparently can’t guarantee wind sourcing. For that, we’ll be paying an extra $2-$4 a month for the 150-200 kilowatt hours that we typically use.

How do we know that premium will, indeed, support wind power and move us closer to the day when wind is a standard option - perhaps even a cheaper one - on our energy bill? Well, we’re relying on the good word of folks at the Conservation Law Foundation and Union of Concerned Scientists, both of whom collaborated with NStar to create this program.

And while we wait for our green-energy-wind-power utopia to develop here in Massachusetts, take a look at this scenario in the New Yorker. Could it happen here?

– Rachel

Dear Governor Patrick:

This supporter and volunteer still stands by you… but it’s been hard, and I fervently hope to hear you once again taking up the moral leadership that so many of us invested in you as governor of our Commonwealth.

I volunteered many hours helping you win the nomination and then the election because you had explained to us all what a “Commonwealth” means: that we all share in a common civic, economic, and political life, and that we are each others’ keepers.

It was time for us to face tough questions about whether “Commonwealth” was merely a word, or represented our actual commitments. And we and you all knew that at the end of the day, this meant that we would have to consider reasonable, fair, and sustainable sources of revenue to enable the Commonwealth to keep its promise to all of us.

You were able to connect revenues — or let’s just be clear here now, taxes — to values that we all share: better education, health care, services, infrastructure. So when you were elected, I was ready to take up the cause and join with you to close corporate tax loopholes and then embark on a serious conversation with my neighbors across Massachusetts about what our own commitment might mean.

I hope you can therefore understand my disappointment when, since last summer, you instead pursued an unfair, unsustainable, and immoral source of revenue from casinos. I know that we need the money, and we need it badly. But going down this path meant losing your moral legitimacy. It took us off the idea that taxes represent our shared commitments and instead echoed the false belief that we can magically meet the state’s needs without personal sacrifice.

So rather than putting my energy behind supporting all that you stood for, I instead worked against you to battle casinos in Massachusetts. And I take no great satisfaction in winning.

But the fact is that the issue is over, and I for one and ready and willing to again join with you again in seeking reasonable solutions to our Commonwealth’s fiscal crisis. It is not an easy task, but we didn’t elect you to take on the easy tasks. We supported you, urged our neighbors to vote for you, and ultimately elected you by an overwhelming majority because we have faith in your ability to lead us through the difficulties ahead.

I still have faith in your ability to do just that. Please don’t let me down.

Sincerely yours,

Gene Koo
Cambridge, MA

Published today in the Boston Globe:

I was among the young Christians who traveled to Park Street Church last month to hear Jim Wallis’s call for social justice (”A New Generation Awakens,” March 12), and I can testify that a generational shift is indeed underway within American Christianity.

In fact, the Boston Faith + Justice Network, which also hosted an event with Mr. Wallis in Boston, is bringing together evangelical and mainline Christians to alleviate global poverty. Through Bible studies, we see our consumer habits in light of Scripture’s concern for the poor. As we awake to the global impact of our lifestyle, we are working for shifts in corporate and public policy to more justly steward and share our resources.

Still, many of my secular neighbors and friends consider “progressive evangelicals” mythical, even oxymoronic. Christian faith has been, and continues to be, a powerful force for social and economic justice.

Rachel Anderson
Director
Boston Faith + Justice Network

Dan Payne’s analysis of the Presidential race in today’s Boston Globe illustrates why he was a bad fit for the Deval Patrick campaign, which he left soon before Deval blew the lid off the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial primaries. Payne repeatedly cites, while also chastising himself for citing, poll numbers without any serious analysis of the correlation between pre-election polling and final results.

To analogize between a political campaign and a military one, tactics like endorsements and advertising are like long-range bombing: all they do is “soften up” the populace and provide the potential for votes. But warplanes and artillery do not capture territory: for that you need “boots on the ground,” which in the electoral context means real people making phone calls and canvassing door-to-door to convert general support into real votes.

Political analysts like Dan Payne are biased towards covering the “air war” because it’s sexy and easy to see. But a more accurate way to interpret poll data is to weight them by the presence of ground troops. Sudden shifts in popular numbers are unlikely to show up in real votes without a large and well-organized volunteer base to realize those gains. (The analysis is somewhat different when the numbers are static, in which case the leader will win, all else being equal). As I’d written earlier, Obama pulled the organizational structure out of Massachusetts, and Deval Patrick’s supporters just couldn’t cover the ground fast enough to capitalize on the sudden shift in public sentiment.

There’s a lesson in yesterday’s Massachusetts results that, in fairness to Hillary supporters, might give Obama fans some pause. As I described, we never really expected to win Massachusetts, but I do feel that we fell a few points shy of where we could have been in the popular vote (even if we achieved exactly what we were aiming for in the delegate fight). In the absence of campaign staff on the ground for either candidate, it was left to the local machinery to carry on the battle. And all else being equal, machines generally beat movements unless the movement is disciplined, prepared, and enthusiastic.

Unfortunately in Massachusetts, the Deval Patrick movement that could have turned out a better showing for Obama had largely washed away.

Movements, as the name implies, need to keep moving to maintain their vitality. Thus they inevitably come to an end, either dying off or coalescing into a new machine that replaces the previous one. If you’re looking for change, the game is to keep the movement going for as long as possible and then convert it into a machine as late as possible.

But the first trick is to keep the people in a movement going, which initially means winning small but significant victories — enough to put on a cushion for the inevitable defeats. Unfortunately, Patrick largely failed to do this, aiming too high (and alienating the legislature that controlled his agenda’s destiny) and failing to focus adequately on whatever he was aiming at. What’s more, the Establishment gave him no quarter, magnifying symbolic rookie mistakes with the aid of a compliant media. Starting with a weak leadership team and thus inadequate understanding of how the Massachusetts legislative branch works, Patrick hit a streaks of “L”s that turned an assassination attempt by the Establishment into an assisted suicide.

Patrick subsequently chalked up a few “W”s, but those victories were too late to resurrect the energy that had surrounded Deval the Candidate. Moreover, movements are touchy things with a life and a conscience of their own. If Patrick had any chance of rallying his grassroots to push the rest of his agenda, he’s probably blown it with his casino plan, which clashes with the values of his core constituents. Even if the casinos make rational sense (which is a debatable point), they just don’t make moral sense within the value structure that undergirded the Deval campaign. Deviating from specific legislation is one thing; contradicting your core principles is quite another (as Romney should now be able to attest to). What could have been a transformative governorship now seems to destined to be, at best, a pretty good one.

So when it came time to turn on that grassroots that swept in a governor whose slogan, “Together we can” echoes Obama’s (he’d used “Yes we can” in his 2004 Senate race), there weren’t that many who were ready to answer the call. And so the Establishment, Clinton, had the upper hand on Super Tuesday.

What’s the lesson here for Obama? Run the Presidency with as much care and strategic planning as the campaign. Expect political muggings from the Establishment early and often. Set expectations initially low, exceed them, and keep jacking them up rather than aiming impossibly high and failing (see: Hillarycare I). Educate followers about the actual relationship between the President and Congress (it’s not how the media portrays it). Through wise care and feeding of the grassroots, keep supporters fired up to do battle with the Establishment when the time comes to win the big battles.

So, does Deval’s freshman year offer Hillary supporters ammunition to shoot down Obama’s “politics of hope”? Yes — but. But if you believe that our country needs profound change, and not just tweaking around the margins, an Establishment leader like Clinton just doesn’t have enough leverage standing inside the machine to break the machine open. Those of us who support Obama do so knowing that any candidate is a roll of the dice — Hillary included — but believe that this particular candidate has also loaded the dice in his favor. Unlike Patrick, Obama’s previous experience as an organizer and then as a legislator gives him a political education in both legislation and in the power and frailty of movements. When our national political system has been so thoroughly broken by the Reagan legacy, tinkering incrementally at the policy level is simply a bigger risk than trying to rewrite the game itself.

We had known, when we arrived at Massachusetts headquarters last weekend, that the Obama campaign had pretty much given up on the Commonwealth; after South Carolina most of MA’s staff decamped to Connecticut, leaving behind a skeleton crew of seven (!). More on the strategic reasons behind this shift later.

Essentially, the local campaign’s task seems to have been to wage a defensive battle and prevent an outright embarrassment (especially to Senator Kennedy). I’m not sure how well we succeeded on that front: the margin in the popular vote was far wider than even I had expected, though I’m waiting for the delegate tally to judge.

Even though we were destined to lose this battle, I do think we fell far short of our potential. With just a few more feet on the ground here, and a few more weeks of advance work, we could have put out a more formidable voter-ID drive and GOTV effort. Considerable talent and energy was concentrated on Cambridge, where we had a total blowout (63% : 35%), while it seemed we had much feebler or no operations in other towns that could have been competitive (such as Milton, Deval Patrick’s hometown). We had repeatedly reminded the campaign that we had a car, were willing to go out to the suburbs, and were capable of running a small canvassing or outreach operation, but there was no one in the campaign to accept that offer. Instead, we were turned back to the Cambridge headquarters, where we left no stone unturned. I spent precious Sunday canvassing hours hunting down elusive 20-somethings who were either not home or not even in the state anymore.

After talking to quite a few other volunteers, it became clear that we were not the only ones who were ready and able to help scale the operations but were never tapped. Cambridge, of course, turns out to be a hotbed of activists who have run various campaigns over the years. Rather than fan out to other parts of the state, all of us were set loose on each other in the last few days. (We were canvassed at least

Perhaps the biggest alarm bell for me is that the grassroots organization that Deval put together in 2006 just didn’t re-materialize. Perhaps too many of them had been absorbed into the Administration (and therefore couldn’t volunteer); perhaps they didn’t really like Obama as much as Deval did; or perhaps they, like us, were never asked.

MA Democratic primary results (by town) — much more useful than the New York Times’ county-level map. The interesting trivia actually is in the Republican map — for example, former Governor Romney lost almost the entire western half of the state, Ron Paul won Boylston (322 votes) and Mike Huckabee won Salem (1,254 votes). I’m not sure that Christian-right Huckabee wants to brag about picking up the witch vote.

Nasty rain today (so much for my hand-painted sign ), but turnout looks pretty strong. Here in Ward 4, Precinct 1, we were counting 186 ballots by 9am — very brisk voting rate, I think.

Did visibility at the polls early morning (7-9am). Our small signs were disintegrating in the rain, and someone ran off with one. I was then sent out to Central Square with a ginormous, waterproof Obama face. The weather was literally dampening everyone’s mood, but we got a few good honks. We’ve been handing out copies of the Kennedys’, Kerry’s, and Patrick’s endorsements, but I’d be somewhat surprised if they change anyone’s minds, especially the independents we’re targeting with gusto. Stickers were a big, big hit, especially of course with kids (and thus their parents).

Incidentally, this (the Middle East / ZuZu’s) has got to be the nicest and coolest staging location I’ve ever seen.

White homeowners afraid of a black family moving into their neighborhoods often encourage the would-be seller to pull the home off the market. “I’m not racist,” they explain, “but other people are. And all of our home prices will suffer.”

These homeowners are perpetuating bigotry, and so are voters who won’t cast their ballots for a woman or African-American because of “electability.”

Stop wondering whether America is “ready” for a non-white or non-male person to be President. Wonder if YOU are ready. Then cast your vote for the best candidate.