Bob Graham and Chris Hand (Part I): How to ‘Fight City Hall’
By John Koenig
Editor and Publisher
Although Bob Graham retired from the U.S. Senate in 2005, he has not stopped his career in public service. He founded the Bob Graham Center for Public Service at the University of Florida, which provides students with opportunities to train for future leadership positions, meet current policymakers and take courses in critical thinking, language learning and studies of world cultures. And he serves on several national commissions. A few days ago, President Barack Obama appointed him to co-chair a commission investigating the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Between these efforts, he also found time with his former press secretary, Chris Hand, to write a book: America, The Owner’s Manual: Making Government Work for You. It’s a fast read that uses numerous case studies to illustrate how citizens can effectively organize and build campaigns to make government – local, state and national – responsive to their interests and needs.
Recently, I spoke with Graham and Hand. The first excerpt from our talk (“Bob Graham on U.S. Oil Policy: Don’t Drain America First”) was published last week. The following is an edited transcript of part of our conversation, with a third installment to be published Wednesday:
Question: Midway through your book, you quote Ronald Reagan’s famous statement that “government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.” Does this define much of the current political polarization in our country? On one side, we have those who absolutely believe that government is the problem and on the other side, those who believe that while government may often be imperfect, it is the best solution to many problems. Is that an irreconcilable difference among many of our citizens and political leaders?
Bob Graham
Bob Graham: The issue, I think, is not big government, small government, or government is our friend, government is our enemy. It’s the much more difficult task of figuring out how in a complex society the role of government can best serve the interests of people. It’s not so much a matter of quantity as it is of quality. I think we’re seeing it in this current oil issue. It wasn’t a question of whether the Department of Energy’s Minerals Management Service was big or small; there is evidence that it wasn’t functioning to carry out its assigned purpose of being the public’s eyes, ears and hands on what is public land. The offshore areas belong to the people of the United States, and there’s been a decision to lease those public lands to those various enterprises for a royalty price, and it requires prudent stewardship by some agency responsible to the people to make sure that arrangement is carried out as intended. There seems to be some preliminary evidence that that hasn’t been the case. That’s a question that needs to be raised, and it’s a qualitative one. Turning this issue into a bumper sticker on reducing the size of government – I haven’t seen many bumper stickers on increasing the size of government – but I think either one of those would be missing the fundamental point.
Chris Hand: There’s a bit of a vicious cycle in the relationship between the government and the governed that fosters a disconnect between elected and appointed leaders and the citizenry, and that is one of the reasons we wrote the book and we write a lot about this in the book. People tend to view government as remote, inaccessible and unresponsive, because in many cases it is. And that fuels a public perception that “you can’t fight City Hall.
One of the things we tried to do through America, The Owner’s Manual, is give people hope and confidence that you can fight City Hall, that you can change decisions being made at every level of government. In the book, we start with an overall case study and then have 10 other case studies of a single citizen, multiple citizens or citizen groups who have been effective in engaging government and forcing it to respond. One of the jobs that, hopefully, we’ve done is to show that when citizens properly organize, when they define the problem, when they determine who is the actual decision-maker, when they build coalitions and when they apply some of the other skills we talk about in the book, they actually can force government to respond and change to address problems they’ve identified.
‘How to Play the Game With Sufficient Depth to Be Successful’
Q: Forty years ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice wrote a book, Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience. I remember a promotional line from the cover that said this book should be in every protester’s hip pocket. Were I to write a blurb for your America, The Owner’s Manual, I might say that this book should be in the pocket of every member of the Tea Party. How would you feel about that?
Graham: I’d say it ought to be in the hip pocket of every American who wants to get out of the stands, on the field and not only play the game, but know how to play the game with sufficient depth so they can be successful. As an example, Chris and I were together in Jacksonville with a group called Save Duval Schools. This is a citizens’ organization devoted to saving Duval schools from the slide into mediocrity that many people feel they are currently experiencing. There are similar groups with different names in a number of communities in Florida. But Save Duval Schools will be using America, The Owner’s Manual as one of its training guides as it gets citizens engaged in the effort to reverse the decline in educational quality in that county.
Chris Hand
Hand: This book is not ideological; it’s not written with any partisan leanings. As people read the case studies, they’ll see that our examples are drawn from Republicans, Democrats, Independents and others who have been able to get government to change in ways they saw fit. It’s not about driving an ideological agenda. It’s about driving a civics agenda, namely the agenda of teaching people that through the right skills and techniques that they can get government to listen to what they have to say, which is exactly the way it’s supposed to work in a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Q: Do you think some of the citizen frustration reflected in the rise of the Tea Party and some other political groups stems in part from a decline in understanding of how government does and should work?
Graham: Absolutely, and it’s very quantifiable. I graduated from Miami Senior High School in 1955. I had taken not only the Florida, but also the national norm on civics, which was three one-year civics courses, between the seventh and 12th grades. My oldest granddaughter graduated a year ago this month from Leon High School in Tallahassee, and she had also taken the Florida and national norm of civics, which was one semester. When I graduated I had had 450 more hours of instruction in civics than my granddaughter had. There’s a price to be paid for that dramatic reduction in the exposure of young people to what it means to be a citizen in a democracy.
Beyond that, it’s my observation that, whereas in those three one-year courses that we took we had courses like problems in democracy in which we learned to think about the role of government in society. We also had a one-year course in the citizen in democracy in which we learned the competencies, the skills, of how a citizen uses his rights and responsibilities. Those have been long gone from the curriculum. Where we’re left with is what I call spectator civics, where we’re teaching people to be able to watch the game of democracy being played, but not have any of the skills to actually be a participant. This has led to people dropping out, adopting the attitude that you can’t fight City Hall, and a very sharp alienation between the people and the government.
I was recently at Dulles Airport, which has a kiosk that sells political memorabilia. One of the T-shirts it had was, “I love America. I hate its government.” Well, if you pledge allegiance to the flag, the next line is, “and to the Republic, for which it stands.” We’ve lost that sense that we are 310 million people who have an allegiance not only to the symbol, but also to the republic for which the flag stands.
Hand: You mentioned the Tea Party and other groups. One thing those groups are already doing is using some of the skills that we’ve outlined in the book. For example, any group that seeks to change public policy through the passage of a constitutional amendment – well, there’s organization that has to go along with that, there’s fund-raising that has to go along with that, there’s coalition building, so a number of the skills are already being employed.
To what Senator Graham said about the need to change the educational approach, I think we need to give credit to Florida legislators for two actions they’ve taken in recent years. Several years ago, they passed a requirement that every Florida sixth-grader have at least one semester of civics education before they move on. In this legislative session, the Senate and House unanimously passed a requirement that students be tested on their knowledge of civics. So while we still have a long way to go to get back to the standard that Senator Graham had when he was in high school, the Legislature deserves credit for the steps they’ve taken in that direction.
