Taking advantage of change

Virginians are living in a state of change once again.

We are leaving a period of some stability and predictability for a period of more rapid and tumultuous change.

As a hopeless optimist, I would argue that the change we face, while unsettling, is good because we live in an age of opportunity.

Our politics, from New York to Florida to California, is broken. Our media are breaking apart, and our economic system is cracking around us.

The opportunity comes about because Americans are fed up with a political system that they don’t see serving their interests as much as special interests.

We are squarely in an age of designer information. Anyone who wishes can design his or her own information sources to reflect his or her own likes and prejudices. You can pick your own networks and other sources of instant information to tell you what your kind of thinking, or feeling, individual thinks and feels he or she wants to hear.

Like Sarah Palin? Watch or listen to Fox News.

Like Barack Obama? MSNBC is the network for thee.

Our nation is pretty evenly divided in hard partisan camps that don’t often meet each other, and they don’t read and watch the same information sources.
They tend to demonize each other and each other’s political heroes and, often, their information sources.

Many in political life are divided into hunkered-down ideological camps. Candidates are playing on the most uneven fields thanks to a badly broken redistricting system. That system yields 70 percent of legislative districts so safely partisan for one party or the other that the biggest threat a Democrat faces is a nomination challenge from the left or a Republican faces is a nomination challenge from the right.

When 70 percent of office holders fear most a challenge from the ideological partisans of their own party, it’s awfully hard for them or anyone else to meet in the middle.

But when politics is at its most divided, testy or negative, people are more open to demanding change.

Politics is pretty testy right now.

Campaigns these days are too often run by hit-and-run consultants who know how to draw blood.

Campaigns have become nasty endurance events in which consultants and managers play “hide the candidate” more often than they let him or her face the press in a free flow of questions. The idea is to not make mistakes and not to show too many cards. The press gets reduced to shouting questions and playing gotcha.

The winners have an opportunity via redistricting to draw less ideologically skewed or partisan-based districts if the public really demands such change.
An appreciation of the potential of public service for all Americans, not just those on a base, can fix what is not so good about our politics today.

People are willing to embrace the mission of bringing more civility to the political process, infusing our politics with more bipartisan policy discussion and to teaching civics and ethics in an age of cynicism.

No matter how far apart people appear to be, they can find common ground if they look for it.

It’s a good time to hunt.

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.