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Jul
12
John Corlett, Senior Fellow and Director, Public Policy and Advocacy for The Center for Community Solutions, sat in the Meet the Bloggers hotseat on June 16, 2006. Scott Piepho of Pho’s Akron Pages has a nice post here about it. John posts at the Center’s blog but it hasn’t been updated since late May and I couldn’t find a direct link to it from the Center’s main webpage. Any news on that, anyone?
I’d anticipated this session for a few reasons, not the least of which was because my father was going to be in town and I wanted him to join the event. And join he did. Oddly, either by coincidence or an act of fate, there is no audio record of this event so my dad won’t get to hear the MTB session via the podcast and feel a part of the 21st Century. However, in his ever more increasingly frequent calls about the Lieberman-Lamont primary in CT (where my parents live), he always says now, “Jill. Blogs are our future. After they destroy the mainstream media, they’ll come after you.”
Promise: I can’t make this stuff up because my mother reads these posts, prints them out and hands them to my dad. He really has said that. At least twice.
Oh. John. Yes.
He was excellent. I love these kind of guys. I’ve always wanted to work for a think tank, or an organization “which support[s] multi-disciplinary theorists and intellectuals who endeavor to produce analysis or policy recommendations.” To have your job be one that involves gathering, analyzing and then disseminating information – well, I guess that’s kind of like a blog, right? No? Whatever.
Alas, I got a job in a development office faster than in a D.C. ivory tower and went through another sliding door.
So I was very excited to meet, listen to and get to ask questions of John. Other bloggers present included Tim and Gloria Ferris, Scott Piepho (for a bit), George Nemeth and Bill Callahan. We gathered in the usual Talkies room on a sunny, late Spring day, leaves swaying, voices wafting in from the shaded, outside patio. It was lovely, really.
As I listened to John explain how he got to be at the Center and the kinds of work he’s done over the years, I thought about how far away – in a literal and figurative sense – so many people are from the issues he deals with daily – poverty, education, unemployment, urban decay, community renewal, health care, fiscal management of cities and regions. Far away from framing the issues, affecting the issues, understanding the issues, addressing the issues.
I’ve thought before about how blogging has drawn me closer to centers of activity and how, even if I still am not very active compared to others I now meet, I’m more active than I was before I started to blog. And yet, before sitting in the room with John, I hadn’t really thought about how, as I zoom in more tightly, there are still millions and millions of people – people directly affected no less – who might not even be able to understand what John is saying, even though they’re in need of assistance from a place like the Center.
I just thought I’d share that paradox – irony? Both?
As Pho mentions, after listening to John talk about the Tax and Expenditure Limitation, or TEL amendment that Ken Blackwell championed to ballot status, only to finagle its withdrawal from the November ballot in exchange for a statutory TEL, I asked, if we agree that limiting spending, as a general proposition, is something pretty much everyone desires, what would a meaningful constitutional limit measure look like? What other measures can be constructed that wouldn’t be as onerous and disliked and restrictive and oligarchical? The implication being, why wouldn’t people choose to do something that would garner more support than Blackwell’s TEL, which wouldn’t be hard to do, even though Blackwell’s TEL got enough signatures to get it on the ballot.
John’s response was that the line item veto available to the governor, along with the balanced budget requirement, when used, can accomplish the same thing as the TEL. However, John concluded that, generally speaking, the TEL is a political issue and promise, not a matter of necessary, sound fiscal policy.
But, Ohio, we’re stuck with it – at least for now. Thank goodness we’re also “stuck” with people like John Corlett who can help us make sense and, hopefully, correct ourselves.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 5:44 pm July 12th, 2006 in Politics
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