This article has two parts - a trivial one, and an untrue one. The trivial one is that politicians should try to argue for their political views. If you think this merits a whole article, you're delusional.

The untrue one is that the success of the conservative movement is due to transformational politics, i.e. arguing why government was the problem. I reserve the right to be skeptical of any account of post-1980 conservative success that ignores the fact that 1970s America was a shitty place to live in, more due to liberal mistakes than conservative ones. Crime was up, and race riots plagued the cities. Welfare spending was at historic highs, while high property taxes hurt people on fixed income. Conversely, poverty was at historic lows, making it hard for 1930s-style liberalism to get traction. Liberalism had just destroyed its foreign policy credibility in Vietnam, and Watergate had reduced Americans' trust in the (liberal) federal government. In 1980 in particular the US was facing a Fed-made recession and the Iran hostage crisis.

Conversely, nowadays neoconservatism has destroyed its credibility in Iraq, health care costs have skyrocketed, the middle class has become less job-secure, taxes are too low for the Club for Growth's message to appeal to non-millionaires, crime is at forty-year lows, and immigration is tearing the conservative coalition apart.

Terry O’Neill, Esq.
The Constantine Institute
102 Willett Street
Albany, New York 12210-1008

TerryONeillEsq@aol.com
www.constantine-institute.org

6 March 2008

Hon. Eric Schneiderman
New York State Senate
313 Legislative Office Building
Albany, New York 12247

Dear Senator Schneiderman:

I was quite impressed with your recent essay on transformational politics in The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080310/schneiderman. It struck a chord with me because last year’s change in our gubernatorial administration had raised my hopes that we would see some of it. I’m afraid that has not happened to date.

I went to work for the Legislature in 1984 and sat that year through my first set of hearings on Governor Cuomo’s executive budget. My most vivid memory was of Assemblyman Arthur Eve and the late Tom Coughlin of the Department of Correctional Services sparring over what turned out to be the beginnings of our long and depressing prison building boom. For twelve years, Cuomo had us building prisons and locking up black people. Then came George Pataki who gave us twelve years of keeping those prisons full and ensuring that a term in prison was as brutal and pointless an experience as possible. For a quarter of a century now, this has been our response to society’s drug problem -- probably the greatest public mental health problem in history -- a cynical exercise in transactional politics that has done nothing but damage.

When I apply your concept of transformational progressivism to my field of public security, I believe we can do better. I make my top priorities to control and prevent crime by understanding it well and, failing that, as we inevitably do, to undo as well as we can the damage it does. I have had a most singular experience that demonstrated the transformative power of that kind of thinking.

In 1998, I was approached by a former State Trooper who had been shot and left paralyzed while on duty one night in September 1973. He asked me if I thought we could get the Legislature to pass a bill that would fund research toward a cure for paralysis. I thought that was an extraordinary response to the terrible injury that had been done to him and his family. More than that, the Assemblyman who agreed to sponsor our bill represented a district in Brooklyn in which paralysis as the result of gunshot wounds was not uncommon. The bill was a success. In the decade since, more than $50 million has been invested in advanced neurological research. When have we ever done anything that big and positive in response a crime?

You will observe that I write under the auspices of the Constantine Institute. As many in the field of public safety on both sides of the Atlantic are aware, that concept derives from my association with our internationally celebrated New York lawman Tom Constantine. Tom’s signature career achievements are the defeat and dismantling of the Cali drug cartel and the ending of more than three decades of terrorist violence in Northern Ireland. More broadly, it draws on the significance and achievements of one of the most transformational political leaders in the history of Western Civilization, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, who made the values of the Judaeo-Christian tradition the foundation of that civilization and the enduring institutions of law and government that it has achieved.

Governor Cuomo famously said: “We campaign in poetry but govern in prose.” I’ve always been appalled by that statement -- but challenged, as well. I’ve always regarded the metaphor as the most powerful problem-solving device we have. If I understand the implications of your concept of transformational politics, it has a lot in common with poetry and could well lead to the solutions of many problems that our infamously dysfunctional Albany politics would otherwise continue as long as a billable hour can possibly be milked out of them.

Thank you for writing this inspiring article.

Yours truly,
Terry O’Neill

Well much as I like Senator Schneiderman's article (and I like it a lot) I think it takes us down a blind alley. Sen. Scheiderman proposes that elected officials take leadership. They cannot. Their true goal (as a group) is re-election. The fault lies not in our elected leaders, but in our weak political organization. Our electeds are used to voting, governing and running for office. They will only take leadership if we, their constituents, demand it.

For example, at a recent meeting, I asked my State Senator about The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights now pending in the legislature (200,000 Domestic workers are, in large measure, excluded from the protections of NYS's Labor Law, the bill of rights, promoted by Domestic Workers United would fix that). My State Senator explained that he favored the bill but was powerless to help (and he's facing a primary challenge). I, and others at the meeting, told him we insisted that he take leadership. Will he? Well, as I see it, only if active voters hold his feet to the fire.

How do we do that? I don't know everyone's solution, but I propose a very old fashioned one: build local progressive political action organization. What I'm doing is this: I visit my neighbors. This is NYC. Do you know your neighbors' names? I help them register to vote, ask them their views, invite them over to meet each other and their elected officials. If I work hard, my block may have the highest progressive turn-out in the neighborhood next election. Perhaps then, for example, my otherwise progressive Member of Congress will rethink her opposition to universal single-payer health insurance. If she won't, perhaps we can help her rethink.

What are you doing?

Turnout is to a great extent a myth. Liberals have been talking about how they only have to increase turnout to win elections since the 1980s. Conservatives are now adopting the same language in order to make McCain look unelectable and Romney electable. It wasn't true then, and it's not true now. Usually increases in turnout affect all demographics to about the same degree, without a net change in power. What you do, registering your neighbors to vote, is important as part of the nitty-gritty of campaign work, but it's not what gives any side an advantage.

If I were you, I'd look for a roundabout way of getting the Senator to vote for the bill. One might be to leak to the local paper that he supports it but is afraid of a primary challenge. Depending on your district's demographic makeup, that alone might offend enough people to make him vote your way.

Lou Dobbs, why are you so negative when it comes to Obama? Maybe its because you
fear him and maybe think that there are more out there like him.....intelligent, well educated, well liked African Americans who might make a difference in society and put bigots like you off the airwaves!