China and its Discontents

Archive for the ‘Barack Obama’ tag

Susannah Heschel at Trinity College

0 Comments

Susannah Heschel spoke at Baccalaureate during Trinity College’s 184th graduation weekend, and I thought her sermon was superb. Having grown up in a theologically conservative Episcopal church and having attended the services of many similar churches, I’ve found it so rare to hear a sermon that challenges the parish to action. Heschel framed scripture, drawing on all faiths and traditions, as the foundation for a ‘sacred trust’ that compels us to a ‘moral mission’.

For the first few minutes, I thought she was going to take the predictably boring course of sentimentalism and tired graduation advice. She drew her listeners in to a comfortable place, so that the charge she was to give would be accepted. She related a story according to Jewish oral tradition: a young scholar tells his Rabbi that after much study, he has gone through the Talmud three times. The Rabbi replies, ‘But how much of the Talmud has gone through you?’

“How much of Trinity has gone through you?”

Trinity’s largest major is economics. Many of those graduates, and many others besides, will pursue a career in investment banking. In fact, the commencement speaker this year is John Bogle, retired CEO of Vanguard. But as Heschel intoned again and again, we, as members of the Trinity College community and members of the world community, must be charged with a deeper purpose. One of the readings during the service, from the Tao te Ching, begins, “Reputation. Life. Which cultivates more love? Life. Wealth. Which is worth more? Gaining things, or having nothing. Which brings more trouble and distress?” Those that are not content with themselves alone will never be satisfied.

Heschel connected this moral imperative with all of the progress that she has seen and all of the potential she sees in the world. She matriculated to Trinity during the first year of coeducation. Since then, the civil rights and feminist movements have advanced racial and gender equality in the US. Apartheid has been abolished. A Black man is President of the United States. But these are just a beginning. Shias and Sunnis, Hutus and Tutsis, and people of all color and creed are bound in common humanity.

“But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” – Amos, 5:24.

This passage, quoted by Heschel, left the deepest impression on me. For some time, one of my favorite quotes has come from William Sloane Coffin’s conversation with Henry Kissinger, in which Coffin cried, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, and your job, sir, is to figure out the irrigation system!” Ever since I came to Trinity, I have considered my purpose in my education, and my purpose when I go out into the world. I ask, ‘What is my vocation?’ This rumination started when I went on Quest, the freshman orientation camping trip, and has evolved since then. But it can best be put: to build the irrigation system by which justice and righteousness flows across the earth. That is a far more eloquent statement than where I started out two years ago.

Susannah Heschel charged the Trinity College Class of 2010 with a mission – to bring about justice and righteousness through their daily lives and work, and even be open to changing their current path which might not afford them the ability to do so. Susannah Heschel’s father the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “The opposite of good is not evil, the opposite of good is indifference.” The Class of 2010 cannot be indifferent, and neither can you.

Obama’s Socialist Indoctrinaction Speech to Our Children

0 Comments

“No, I don’t,” said Greer. “But I would anticipate, based on this President being so vocal and so aggressive about his vision of America, where government is in every aspect of our lives, I believe that the speech that he was gonna give, based on the lesson plans, is different.”

That was Jim Greer in response to a question asking for proof of his claims by CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux. Greer, the Florida GOP Chair, last week lambasted Pres. Obama’s upcoming address to schoolchildren as socialist indoctrination. He recently became more receptive to the speech when the full text was released.

I would have liked Malveaux to then respond, “Yes Jim, a belief that is completely divorced from reality befitting your absurd point of view.”

Written by Will

September 8th, 2009 at 1:35 am

Scarcity and Political Campaigns

0 Comments

Chris Anderson’s recent article in Wired on the benefits of abundance versus scarcity got me thinking. Can treating processing power as abundant, and thus opening up creativity, innovation, and success, be something that I can apply to political campaigns? The prime question is: what should be considered the abundant factor in campaigns? Voters?

Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It’s Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity

Campaigns often treat voters as rather expensive entities. Millions are spent on direct mail, prime-time advertisements, and even telemarketing tools. In low turnout primaries, some candidates end up spending upwards of a $100 on each actual voter. One need only look at the last candidate I put energy into, Terry McAuliffe, who spent $90 per voter for the June primary. With all that money spent, how did his opponent Creigh Deeds turn the tide? What if (to the campaigns at least) every vote “didn’t” count?

The most surprising implication in this statement is that campaigns don’t need to work for every vote. This should have already been bored into me. Countless times, I’ve been told to drop a long phone conversation, or to not answer every obscure policy wonk, or not spend an inordinate amount of my time at any one door. Quantity rather than depth is bred into every campaign worker’s mentality because voter’s won’t remember more than two minutes of a conversation anyway.

This philosophy is not, however, worked into the macro level. Although you as an individual will not talk to that voter again, the campaign certainly will; through mass media and thousands of other volunteers, scarce voters will be hawkishly guarded. In the McAuliffe campaign, telemarketing calls were the communication mode du jour. This technique, meant to amplify the abilities of volunteers, instead magnified the problem. The more voters heard about Terry over the phone, the less sure they were about their support. Towards the end, we dropped telling people about Terry at all, focusing solely on Deeds. People don’t remember much about your particular conversation, but they do remember how you and everyone’s uncle called their house ten times.

Terry’s campaign had two key parts backwards. They treated voters as scarce and public patience and goodwill as abundant. This passage from Anderson’s article on cell phone companies and voicemail storage mirrors this:

They managed the scarcity they could measure (storage) but neglected to manage a much more critical scarcity (customer goodwill). No wonder phone companies are second only to cable TV companies in “most hated” rankings.

They also gave the most attention to what should have gotten the least attention. At the individual level, it pays to spend more personal time with a voter (as explained later). At the macro level, it doesn’t pay to push more contacts (i.e., spend more of the campaign’s time) with every voter.

Imagine a hypothetical campaign in which more voter contact was not always the end goal. What, instead of micro-targeting, would seed the campaign’s message across a wide swath of abundant voters? The voter’s themselves! A campaign that relied on an abundance of voters to spread its message becomes a movement, which is why campaigns rarely qualify.

In a scarce-voter world-view, the priority of campaigns is control – dictate the message, work directly through mass media, and don’t deviate. In an abundant-voter world-view, supporters would carry their personalized and human voice of support organically to exponentially growing numbers of people. In abundant-voter campaigns, there is a degree of trust and empowerment transferred between the campaign and the average supporter. Rank and file volunteers are encouraged to voice their support in as many diverse ways as possible because ultimately, personal relationships carry aboard more supporters than going off-message loses voters. Abundant-voter campaigns use phone tools to ensure name recognition and minimal tracking numbers, but ultimately put the most faith in long-lasting, in-depth, personal contact with campaign workers and volunteers. This starts with canvassing, but is fully realized in one-on-one meetings, house parties, and non-campaign socialization (which can all still be tracked quite effectively for accountability purposes). I only need to remember one piece of advice to re-affirm this idea: ‘They’ll come in for Barack, but they stay because of you.’ Finally, abundant-voter campaigns use television, mass-media, and stump speeches to engage voters in the same way campaign workers do in person: by treating voters, on a policy level, as intellectually-equal to the most senior campaign strategists.

It’s hard to change the prevailing philosophy solely in favor of statistics and ever-increasing numbers of voter contacts. This view is cemented in the minds of campaign strategists. Obama’s campaign took the abundant-voter philosophy. Many columnists would argue that since Obama’s campaign did not catapult an issue lasting Obama, it does not count as a movement. I disagree. A generational shift in organizational thinking is coming, and not just in campaigns. A new group of Americans, and many more born after them, who are inspired to organize government, business, and non-profits with the abundant-philosophy of the Obama campaign will radically transform society. I only hope that the administration lives up to the promise of its campaign.

Written by Will

July 13th, 2009 at 7:44 am