The New York Times succinctly explained the context:

Following the direction of recent Supreme Court decisions, the appeals court held that independent groups have a First Amendment right to raise and spend freely to influence elections so long as they do not coordinate their activities with a candidate or a party.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government’s only legitimate interest in restricting political donations is combating the appearance or reality of corruption that could arise from allowing unlimited contributions directly to a candidate or political party.

The court has held that, on the other hand, a desire to level the playing field or limit the power of moneyed interests is not a permissible reason for the government to limit the amount a rich person might spend on independent efforts to elect or defeat a candidate. In this case, the appeals court held that nonprofit groups are essentially like rich individuals, so the government cannot restrict their independent spending either.

As the NYT blurb hints at, the underpinnings of decades of strict limits on campaign financing are tumbling.  In addition to the federal appeals court ruling on nonprofit money in politics, the Supreme Court appears poised to erase some of the limits on corporate and union money in elections, there’s some speculation that the next step would be removing or significantly raising limits on candidates and parties to keep parity with the corporations, unions, and non-profits, and just last month a federal court ruled that a Connecticut law providing public financing for elections is unconstitutional.

Without delving into the arguments for and against limits on campaign finance – though those arguments are myriad and interesting, addressing both the theoretical and the practical sides of how we go about selecting those who will govern our nation – the context of deregulation provides an excuse to do some thinking about the role of nonprofits in politics.

Some of questions at the top of my mind today:

1) Pending a SCOTUS appeal, non-profits now have much more leeway when it comes to influencing elections; does that also mean they have more responsibility? From housing to education to veterans benefits to the environment, nearly every issue non-profits work on are heavily influenced by federal policy, and therefore by federal policy makers.  With fewer legal limitations against electioneering, do non-profits have a responsibility to expand their policy work to advocating for those candidates who would make the best policy?

2) We know from years of data that political donors and “joiners” – those people who take a up a cause and give blood, sweat, and tears, or at least a few mouse clicks – are different than “charity” donors and joiners.  Is engaging directly with politics an opportunity for non-profits to bridge the gap, finding political donors to plug into more traditional nonprofit work and giving nonprofit folks a bigger voice in electoral politics? Or is that a trap – are two communities different enough that should remain separate but equal-ish, so to speak, to the nonprofit leader?

3) The locus of the conversation on this has been around fundamentally political non-profits.  EMILY’s list originated the most recent case, and EMILY’s list is first and foremost a political beast, regardless of which section of the IRS code it’s operating under.  As the lines get blurrier legally, does it make sense for the lines between ’service’ and political non-profits to get more solid, or should they blur, as well?

What the IRS allows is just one factor.  What’s best for the nonprofit sector, the people and causes non-profits serve, and the ways that politics should and shouldn’t intertwine are some of the factors that make up the big picture.  I hope we’ll all take this opportunity to be deliberate and about the path forward: there are opportunities to make a huge difference in the world if we get this right.

I’m as guilty as the next guy and gal working in the political world of putting on my “cycle blinders.”  Of forgetting what got me into politics in the first place: my firm belief that political communication is about more than selling something for the right now (which is why I’m building an advocacy and cause communications business, not a marketing business), but about making a difference in the world for the future.

The victory on election (or committee or floor voting day) is vital and, let’s be honest, lots of fun. But the real victory is in changing the way we think or feel on the big picture: how do we as a people come closer to our ideals? At it’s best, politics is about making us a better people, more like the Americans envisioned in our founding documents.

So I’ve been riveted lately by reporting on just how much of our political conversation is built on conventional wisdom that results from others’ victories, hard fought and won decades ago.

In Salon.com on Monday, Mike Madden made a compelling case that our stimulus and budget conversations today are driven by the victories won by Reagan in the eighties.  Moreover, he argues that while what we debate today are the specifics of particular tax and appropriations policies, the real conversation is about how we as Americans – and therefore American politicians – view the appropriate role of government in our economy.

As we’ve celebrated this past week with our client, the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids,  a major legislative victory in the U.S. House – passage by a wide, bipartisan margin of legislation allowing the FDA to regulate tobacco products and advertising (finally!) – I’ve been thinking more about the long-term victory the vote really represents.  This legislative session we’re debating specific bills, but for the past ten years TFK, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, and dozens of their partners in the health community have been battling to win a much bigger argument: that the federal government has an important role to play in our relationship with the businesses that would hope to sell us (and our children) stuff.

It’s an argument that’s important to food safety, and as we saw with last year’s many toy recalls, product safety.  And it’s an argument that gets to the heart of an even bigger element of our national identity: to what extent are we every man, woman and child for him or herself, versus a community that bands together to provide protections we cannot provide as individuals?

It’s my favorite part of politics – that sense that even in the knock-down, drag out fights we have about legitimate and deep-seated differences of opinions and values, we’re all of us working toward a better, safer, world.  I’m looking forward to more opportunities to work on terrific projects, with excellent clients moving that agenda forward, regardless of the cycle and the bill specifics.

-Shayna

You’re no doubt wondering what I plan to spend $100 on, and you can’t really say whether I’m getting the better deal or whether “it will work” until you know what I’m buying, what my neighbor is buying, and what I want “it” to do.

Obviously, If I’m buying a paperclip for $100 and my neighbor is buying a house for $150, she’s getting a better deal even though she’s spending more money. And as for whether my paperclip will work, that depends entirely on whether I’m hoping something will hold a stack of papers together.

I feel like this is roughly the conversation we’re having about the Senate, House, and conference stimulus bills. We’re hearing a lot about what they’ll cost, a little about what we hope they might do, and not a lot in terms of how those two factors relate. This morning on NPR I heard Senator Collins suggest that she was pleased as punch that the final bill to come out of conference was less then either the House or Senate versions. Full stop. She had no further comments explaining why that fact is a good thing for the economy, what was cut to reach that lower total number, or why those cuts were the right ones. She – and her colleagues being interviewed – had even less to say about what, precisely, they believe the stimulus package will do.

This irks me for a variety of reasons, including:

• My grandchildren will be reaping what the stimulus package and the TARP spending sow. When I meet them someday (hopefully a long, long time from now – my son is nine-years-old), I want to be able to look them in the eye and tell them what we thought we were doing, and that we honestly thought it was the right thing to do.  I can’t look anyone in the eye and honestly say I think the House, Senate, or conference bills are well-thought pieces of public policy.  The process has been such a hodgepodge, we’ve gone about it without real consideration of “first principles“, and the resulting compromise seems to be more about a final number (mustn’t go above $800 billion!) than any sense of what we’re hoping that money will buy, and for what purpose.
• As a communications professional I’m constantly railing against evaluating the wrong things.  For example, if your communications goal is changing attitudes, why do you only measure the number of media hits?  So, focusing on the secondary question – what does it cost? – at the expense of the primary question – what are we buying and what do we hope it will do? – offends me as a strategist.

Before I head out to spend $100 (groceries, for those of you dying to know), I’m going to spend a bit of time on ShovelWatch – http://www.shovelwatch.org -wishing that our national conversation on the stimulus might be as in-depth, and especially that our elected officials from both sides of the aisle respected us enough to have that conversation.

The argument strikes me as generally true, and his examples are compelling: large percentages of people believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, though there’s incontrovertible proof he is not.  Why do so many believe what is verifiably untrue?  Because individuals and entities whose interests are served by spreading that little lie spent time, energy, and money making sure it zipped across the information superhighway directly to the computer screens of those most likely to believe it.  The resources required to refute it would be massive and in the scheme of things wasted, so information that should die a small quiet death lives on with a too-large megaphone.

Now think of every dystopia you’ve read: is there a familiar theme?  In all of those I’ve read and remember a trademark of  misery is an absence of reliable truth. In some visions of our near future, the absence of truth is thanks to a maleavolent government.  I’m thinking of  Farenheit 451 and 1984.  In others, it’s thanks to an overabundance of information and a paucity of knowledge.  Caleb Carr’s Killing Time comes to mind, with it’s iconic topic sentence: “It is the greatest truth of our age: information is not knowledge.” In Carr’s vision of our near future (the novel is set in 2023) no single entity has caused the hyper-wired and plugged in populace to consume  mass quantities of misinformation, it’s a consequence of too much and too easily manipulated information.  Think Photoshop and mashups alongside “legitimate” news in a constant stream of bits and bytes too large and moving too fast to parse too closely.

Clive Thompson says the future is now.  We’re immersed in a sea of information, some of it good, some of it bad, but so much of it it’s hard to tell the difference.  So we have lots more information, but very little additional knowledge.

So what?  For our purposes, it means the organizations, candidates, and individuals that can be trusted to synthesize information into reliable knowledge will have the keys to the kingdom. Donors, voters, consumers – all of us – will increasingly be hunting for those streams of information that provide us not only with bits of this and bits of that, but a sense of a whole that makes sense and can be trusted.  My job will be to hep my clients fill that role.

With great power comes great responsibility, of course: a small slip and these paragons of wisdom will be cast aside faster than a snuggie in the summer, doomed to the dustbin of irrelevance.

A still bigger question looms: as the institutions that we as a populace used to lean on to provide this common sense of knowledge wither and die (think newspapers and the evening news), it seems clear that rather than building new institutions that provide a common view of reality, we’re balkanizing our information sources and turning in groups to the sources that report to us what we already think we know.  That can only serve to cement untruths and further prevent accumulation of knowledge.  And that is a subject for a future post.

Seth Godin posits the same question for our public schools.  He asks, “what is school for?” Before we can say whether they’re effective or not, whether they’re good investments or not, whether they’re meeting goals or not, we need not just standardized test results but the first principle: what is school supposed to do?

This is the fundamental point of the strategy class I teach at Georgetown: plans, tactics, and implementation are neither good nor bad in and of themselves.  They only have value if they happen in the context of a guiding principle (or set of principles) that lays down clearly where we start from, where we want to go, and how we think we can get there.  My question about the economy, and Seth’s about education, is at it’s core: what is our strategy?

Seth suggests a long list of possible answers for shools.  Take a look at his list here.  For what it’s worth, this is a first stab at my list of answers to the question, “what is school for?”

1. Be trained in the rudimentary skills to become a productive member of society
2. Learn how to be, live, and work with the many different sorts of people you share the world with (this might be the same as Seth’s “create a social fabric”)
3. Learn for the sake of learning
4. Learn creativity and problem solving
5. Be trained in the rudimentary skills  for effective citizenship

What does your list look like?  Does it change anything about how you think public school budgets should be spent?  How they should be evaluated?