Complacency and comfort with the status quo and entrenched leadership and ideological orthodoxy and simple bad luck can all contribute to a failure to thrive.
For instance, why isn’t Cohen’s column emblazoned on Page One of Banker & Tradesman, along with the long-awaited announcement that he has been named the B&T sports editor?
The readers would clamor for it, if anybody asked them. But nobody does.
Consider the long-standing plans for a cool development for the Tenderloin area of Market Street in San Francisco. The activist crowd has blocked the project, in large part because it includes parking. Customer parking. The cool folks in San Francisco don’t like cars. Or customers. Or parking. As one observer noted in the San Francisco Chronicle: “This is San Francisco. You say mother and apple pie, and people call you a sexist sugar eater.”
But, you say, the political process is dynamic and forward thinking. Put the best ideas out there for all to see and the result will be progress and change.
Well, it depends. Imagine that you are a politician in the Northeast and what comes before you in a given year are prickly limitations on abortion rights and prohibitions on gay marriage and limitations on bilingual education and caps on property tax increases and bans on affirmative action and a request from Miss Jones’s fourth-grade class to name the garter snake as the state animal.
Your political instinct is not to wander the aisles of the marketplace of ideas and vote your conscience or the best interests of your constituents or the precepts of the Constitution or the precepts of the Old Testament. Your strategy is to dive under your desk and hope that the whole mess goes away.
Can the Little People rise up and demand action? Can the Great Unwashed make themselves heard; can they put forth proposals and demand legislative action? Can Scott Brown get any prettier?
Take The Initiative
Other than that last item, initiative and referendum try to achieve those ends, for better or for worse. The process is designed to bludgeon the status quo; to at least require action based on the direct vote of the folks in the bleachers.
In fact, most referenda in the various states that allow such stuff usually don’t pass, in part because the status quo lovers, the Establishment, the lobbyists, the unions, don’t approve of brash action that isn’t achieved through well-greased channels. And, in truth, some of the referenda are defeated because the proposals are kooky.
One of the classics of recent years was the “Michigan civil rights initiative” sneaked on the ballot in 2006. Everyone who was anyone opposed this anti-affirmative action initiative to ban racial preferences in state universities and government agencies. It wasn’t progressive, it wasn’t cool and, even worse, the politicians and business groups and editorial pages knew that the population probably supported it. Did it pass? Of course it did, with 58 percent of the vote.
Was this slap at affirmative action a good thing? Reasonable men (and, of course, women) can differ, but what was instructive was that a piece of legislation supported by almost 60 percent of the voters would never have become law through the traditional legislative process.
Massachusetts dabbles in the referenda game. The occasional draconian do-away-with-the-income-tax proposal staggers on to the ballot – losing, but scaring the tax-and-spend crowd half to death. This year’s probable piece of fun: slash the sales tax to 3 percent.
Another bit of subversion that may sneak on would open up the charter school process long held hostage by teacher unions and their co-conspirators in the legislature.
Massachusetts tends to take the middle-road on what has lovingly been called “citizen democracy.” Items are difficult to get on the ballot and what passes is subject to legislative sabotage. In Florida, for instance, the initiative process is always a Constitution-altering process that clutters up the precious document with such things as regulating the tethering of pregnant pigs.
In a state that views electing Republicans as a terrible accident that must be due to typographical error, the Massachusetts initiatives are often the only form of electoral recreation.
If you want to practice prior to the elections, petition the editor for a vote to make Cohen the Banker & Tradesman sports editor.
