Pruning Shears

Earlier this week I had a brief and unproductive Twitter exchange with Libby Spencer over leaks, whistleblowers and journalists. It was prompted by this from BooMan:

We need to get our heads around the distinction between a whistleblower, who observes criminal or unethical behavior by government officials, and a criminal who leaks highly sensitive classified intelligence that burns sources and endangers our national security. Sometimes these two things can overlap, as when we learned that the NSA was conducting warrantless wiretaps in violation of current law. Bradley Manning revealed official wrongdoing, too, but he also did so with no discrimination.

Libby supported this point of view, I disagreed, and it quickly became obvious we wouldn’t get anything productive done 140 characters at a time. So here is the post-length treatment. The summarized version of her position (correct me if I’m wrong Libby!) is to side with the government in cases where, as BooMan writes, a leaker provides information without discrimination, or when outlets engage in irresponsible journalism.

I think the distinction between a “whistleblower” and “a criminal who leaks highly sensitive classified intelligence that burns sources and endangers our national security” is specious (though he allows that “these two things can overlap”). My whistleblower may be your criminal who leaks etc. It largely depends on whether you support the leak in question.

BooMan’s post starts out looking at the recently revealed Justice Department (JD) investigation of James Rosen. Coming on the heels of the AP phone records seizure, it immediately became linked to that scandal. (That’s very fortunate timing! I wonder how the WaPo managed to unearth that “newly obtained court affidavit” at such a critical moment.)

There seem to be two big differences between them, though. The first is that Rosen was more narrowly targeted than the AP was, the second is that Rosen appeared to want to force a change in US policy as part of his reporting. So at least some the details on this particular case seem to support the JD’s actions.

The problem is that BooMan is not content to stay with the details of that one particular case. He moves on to some pretty troubling generalizations instead - his condemnation of indiscriminate leaking, for example.

Whistleblowers typically approach journalists in part because they want an organization with experience and resources to comb through the documents and figure out what to publish. Daniel Ellsberg indiscriminately leaked 7,000 pages to The New York Times. Do Libby and BooMan consider him a criminal?

We can debate whether WikiLeaks is a media outlet (I think it is, or at least it was at the time of its Afghan war diary coverage), but Manning’s smuggled documents were published simultaneously - and with the cooperation of - The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. Did those outlets engage in irresponsible journalism?

This debate doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Those who have been on the receiving end of the surveillance state’s attention tend to look at a story like Rosen’s in the broader context of the government attacks on the First Amendment. If national security reporting is now fair game for government attack, there’s no reason to think it will remain confined to sketchy characters like Rosen. Scoops like those from Charlie Savage and the New York Times will also presumably receive more scrutiny as well.

The American government’s sordid history of deception with highly classified intelligence goes back a long way. It’s somewhat astonishing to read someone uncritically pass along government claims that something endangers what BooMan calls “our” precious bodily fluids national security given its track record. One of the most visible tools used to keep information from the public has been the state secrets privilege (SSP), which was literally founded on a lie:

Although the state secrets privilege has existed in some form since the early 19th century, its modern use, and the rules governing its invocation, derive from the landmark Supreme Court case United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953). In Reynolds, the widows of three civilians who died in the crash of a military plane in Georgia filed a wrongful death action against the government. In response to their request for the accident report, the government insisted that the report could not be disclosed because it contained information about secret military equipment that was being tested aboard the aircraft during the fatal flight. When the accident report was finally declassified in 2004, it contained no details whatsoever about secret equipment. The government’s true motivation in asserting the state secrets privilege was to cover up its own negligence.

Of course, we didn’t find that out until fifty years later. When the government engages in objectionable and secretive behavior we only find out haphazardly. There is no mechanism that allows this stuff to make its way to the public domain. For the instances we are fortunate enough to discover, taking national security claims at face value has not been a good bet. For instance, even the judicial review in Reynolds was crucially dependent not on evidence but on earnest assurances from the executive branch (emph. added):

In the majority opinion, the court, having not seen the documents in question, relied on the Air Force affidavit to conclude that certainly there was a reasonable danger that the accident investigation report would contain references to the secret electronic equipment which was the primary concern of the mission.

The SSP has remained a popular way for presidents - previous and current included - to cloak dubious activities in secrecy. Given that decades-long pattern (and the aggressive post-9/11 buildout of the surveillance state), it requires a pretty ahistoircal outlook to swallow whole the charge that James Rosen is “an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” We should expect more than government-furnished email excerpts, at least.

Those who defend the status quo deserve similar scrutiny. For instance, BooMan’s claim that “[t]he report relied on sources in the North Korean government” is sloppy. The story cites “sources inside North Korea,” not inside its government. I haven’t seen any reporting that the source was an actual government official, but those who are defending the JD’s actions (BooMan and see also the Mediaite story) have made that claim. Maybe that is a trivial distinction, but maybe it is something the JD is willing to have people infer.

The problem with all this cloak and dagger stuff is that ordinary citizens cannot reliably inform themselves on the issue. The quick way to choose whom to believe is to pick the side you like better. But after that first snap decision, it helps to look at the various parties’ credibility. This may be where Libby and I part company, because I have become so distrustful of government snooping and deception that I no longer believe its national security claims without some sort of independent corroboration. She still seems willing to. Maybe that makes me cynical or her gullible; who knows.

What I do know is that we are now in the twelfth year of a war that we are told encompasses the entire globe and that by definition will never end. And war corrupts democracy: It prevents citizens from becoming educated on one of the most important issues a nation can engage in. It turns political opponents into traitors and adversarial reporting into treason. Those who push back on a wartime president are endangering (our) national security. Those who question the wisdom of our policies are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. War does not, to put it mildly, promote a culture of free and open inquiry in the country that wages it. In an environment like that, I’ll err on the side of skepticism.

We’ve had three big stories this week, each showing how the right plays the scandal game better than the left. Of the three, one is a non-scandal (Benghazi), one is a minor scandal with the potential to turn into more (IRS),¹ and one is an honest-to-God scandal right now (AP). Republicans don’t bother with such fine distinctions though, and that’s why they are better at playing it than Democrats: when they get something they can run with, they do.

The targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS is a good example.² It was wrong of the IRS to target them, but at the end of the day what it all amounted to was more paperwork and delay. It’s much less onerous - and much less overtly political - than the actual audit the IRS did of the NAACP when it was critical of George Bush.

Yet the Democrats basically sat on their hands for that, and the best they can muster now is a weaksauce “oh yeah? Well why weren’t you outraged back then, GOP?” Republicans stand up for their allies in real time - they don’t sit back and watch them get pummeled. They don’t quietly file those episodes away, holding them as examples to be thrown back as countercharges down the road if need be. They seize the moment and take as many swings as they can.

Similarly, the business with the AP has Republicans once again schooling Democrats on this not-difficult-to-grasp aspect of politics. Any Democrats tempted to decry some Republicans’ newfound concern over the surveillance state should reflect instead on why their own party declined to weigh in as forcefully during the Bush years.³

It isn’t even worth pointing out that all these trips to the fainting couch are hypocrisy because the right was silent on it during the Bush years. They don’t pretend to adhere to a logically consistent set of principles; they just want to go after Obama. He wasn’t president in 2004, so they weren’t concerned then. Now he is, so they are.

The righteous indignation of media outlets, on the other hand, is a bit hard to take. There’s been a great deal of hyperventilating about how this is such a big deal because of its chilling effect on the press, and in case you hadn’t noticed the press is singled out in the First Amendment for protection!. Of course, in that very same clause - and before the press is mentioned, incidentally - the First Amendment prohibits abridging freedom of speech for anyone.⁴

And there’s certainly been a lot of free speech abridgement going on for the last twelve years! It isn’t hard to find, say, a catalog of sins produced by the Patriot Act (personal favorite), or reports on the wholesale seizure of ordinary citizens’ phone records (and by the way, Congress would have to grant retroactive immunity to the phone companies who cooperated with the AP seizure for the current episode to sink to the lows of the FISA Amendments Act), or the indiscriminate collection of Internet traffic, or the thuggish repression of media outlets that are not the right kind of nice, respectable media outlets.⁵

These kinds of outrageous abuses have been going on for years, yet the national press corps never bothered to rouse itself to the kind of adversarial pushback we are now seeing.⁶ It’s one thing to spy on the common rabble or disreputable operations like WikiLeaks, evidently, but when that treatment gets turned on reporters who thought they were comfortably embedded with government officials: First Amendment!

I’ve been reading The Operators by Michael Hastings, and one passage towards the end has a striking relevance in the current situation. He describes the fallout in Washington over his Rolling Stone article on Stanley McChrystal which resulted in McChrystal’s dismissal. He refers to a “schmoozy relationship” between the political and media class and the icy reception he received from journalists in the capitol. Apparently he violated some vague but powerful etiquette that requires journalists to not report anything newsworthy (extended excerpt here.)

The rule of thumb is: don’t make waves. You’ll have a good gig as long as you don’t rock the boat. But that is exactly what the phone record seizure does. It’s a rude awakening for any reporters who thought they were on the same team as the officials they cover. The bureaucratic inertia of an ever-expanding intelligence gathering apparatus has combined with this administration’s maniacal pursuit of leakers to produce a very serious breach of etiquette in the village. It may have been illegal, who knows, but it was unquestionably gauche. It upset some very comfortable relations. That, in the end, may be a greater transgression among media elites than any violation of the Constitution.

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NOTES

1. If the story is this: a couple of employees in the bowels of the agency went rogue and even disobeyed orders to stop, the story ends there. If it was the result of a general atmosphere of improvisation throughout the agency in an effort to figure out the post-Citizens United rules of the road, there’s a little more to it. If senior officials were leaning hard on those down the chain of command to audit political opponents, we have a full blown scandal. Investigate it fairly and thoroughly, and let the chips fall where they may.
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2. Also, the IRS and the ATF seem to be particularly loathed by the right, so any scandal involving those agencies is pretty much guaranteed to send the outrage meter among conservatives to white hot levels.
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3. If you want to know how someone like Rand Paul manages to get traction on the left with a stunt like his filibuster, it’s at least partly because liberals have waited for over a decade for Democrats to make a big deal - at the relevant moment - on the issue. Many on the left have been desperate for anyone to take an appropriately visible and compelling stand. Refusing to engage might foster comity in Washington, but it frustrates the hell out of the base. And Republicans are more than willing to fill the political vacuum it creates.
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4. Not to go all strict constructionist on you, but I’m always struck at how infrequently First Amendment controversies directly bear on the actual text of the amendment itself:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The AP/DOJ scandal is a good example. The First Amendment just covers the prohibition of Congress passing laws establishing a religion or preventing citizens or the press from expressing dissent. It doesn’t say anything about the Department of Justice spying on media outlets, for instance. The First Amendment prohibits a fairly narrow range of behavior considering all the different ways the government can try to suppress unwelcome sentiment. I’m happy for the more expansive interpretation, but I’m always expecting someone to argue that the founders intended exactly the more limited reading of the text.
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5. Will Bunch:

It is yet another example of how the national security state that has dominated our political life since World War II has corrupted the American soul. It is exactly what Philadelphia’s own Benjamin Franklin tried to warn us about — trading liberty for security, and getting neither.

“Slippery slope” arguments are highly dependent on the framework they would have to exist in. Those who argue against, say, gay marriage because it would put us on the slippery slope towards polygamy (or whatever deviant vision is plaguing kinkmeister Rick Santorum these days) need to explain something: How does that happen using the model gay marriage activists used? What lobbying group is pushing for it and is trying to get legislatures to pass it? Who is putting it on the ballot with citizen initiatives? Anyone who wants to use the gay marriage model for some other kind of arrangement isn’t even raising awareness on the issue at the moment. And that is square one for any legislation-based effort.

On the other hand, the slippery slope Bunch describes is a much more realistic danger, because none of it is in the open and there is no transparency. When everything is happening in the shadows and out of public view, the slopes can get slippery pretty darn fast.

And incidentally, systems like that also tend to take on lives of their own. Which means the “outrageous abuse of power by an intelligence agency” scandal will be a more or less permanent feature of every presidency going forward, since the dark government operates independently of the visible one.
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6. In the early stages of a story like this it might not matter who exactly approved the seizure. As more details come out, and as time passes, the major players may well patch things up and kiss and make up. If there’s plausible deniability in the right places and an appropriate scapegoat can be found I’m sure everything will get smoothed over. Still, an aggrandized surveillance state will naturally produce scandals like this from time to time. With no real oversight or regulation, it will inevitably gravitate towards broader and more audacious seizures.
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7. From pp. 329-30 of The Operators:

I’d run into politicians and government officials and they’d all tell me they liked my reporting. Maybe they were lying, or trying to bullshit me, I didn’t know. While living in Vermont, I hadn’t understood the exact nature of the official Washington freak-out. But once I arrived in DC and started going to the cocktail parties and hitting the bars, I saw how the political and media class had completely misinterpreted my piece. The story had terrified them, striking deep-seated fears in the Washington psyche. It demonstrated just how tenuous one’s own position could be - careers could flame out overnight. And the political and media class saw the story as a threat to their schmoozy relationship - their very existence and social life. If you can’t get wasted with a journalist who’s writing a profile of you and piss all over the president who appointed you, what’s the world coming to?

A number of famous journalists would say they heard these kinds of things all the time, but never reported them. It didn’t matter to them that I was on assignment to write a profile - I didn’t go to France and Kandahar on a social engagement. It didn’t seem to make a difference that I hadn’t violated any agreement with McChrystal. The unwritten rule I’d broken was a simple one: You really weren’t supposed to write honestly about people in power. Especially those the media deemed untouchable. Bash Sarah Palin all you want, but tread carefully when writing about the sacred cows like McChrystal and Petraeus. You’re supposed to keep ill myths going. I’d fucked up - I wasn’t to be trusted because I tried to tell the truth. At one event, a prominent Republican senator pulled me aside and said, “You know, your story was a good thing. Got everybody focused back on Afghanistan.”

Strangely, as I continued to report on the politics behind the scenes of the war, I ended up on pretty good terms with a number of military officials, White House officials, and State Department officials. It was the other journalists who covered the military and politics that I clashed with most often. A number of reporters had paid side gigs at defense-industry funded think tanks, essentially getting financial support from the very same people they were supposed to be covering. They seemed to take my criticism of the military-industrial complex personally. It might as well be called, I thought, the media-military-industrial complex.

I could understand why the government officials would be pissed; I was telling them their whole strategy was a waste of time. But the reaction from a number of journalists on the national security beat seemed pretty twisted.

(Back)

We’ve had three big stories this week, each showing how the right plays the scandal game better than the left. Of the three, one is a non-scandal (Benghazi), one is a minor scandal with the potential to turn into more (IRS),¹ and one is an honest-to-God scandal right now (AP). Republicans don’t bother with such fine distinctions though, and that’s why they are better at playing it than Democrats: when they get something they can run with, they do.

The targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS is a good example.² It was wrong of the IRS to target them, but at the end of the day what it all amounted to was more paperwork and delay. It’s much less onerous - and much less overtly political - than the actual audit the IRS did of the NAACP when it was critical of George Bush.

Yet the Democrats basically sat on their hands for that, and the best they can muster now is a weaksauce “oh yeah? Well why weren’t you outraged back then, GOP?” Republicans stand up for their allies in real time - they don’t sit back and watch them get pummeled. They don’t quietly file those episodes away, holding them as examples to be thrown back as countercharges down the road if need be. They seize the moment and take as many swings as they can.

Similarly, this business with the AP has Republicans once again schooling Democrats on this not-difficult-to-grasp aspect of politics. Any Democrats tempted to decry some Republicans’ newfound concern over the surveillance state should reflect instead on why their own party declined to weigh in as forcefully during the Bush years.³

It isn’t even worth pointing out that all these trips to the fainting couch are hypocrisy because the right was silent on it during the Bush years. They don’t pretend to adhere to a logically consistent set of principles; they just want to go after Obama. He wasn’t president in 2004, so they weren’t concerned then. Now he is, so they are.

The righteous indignation of media outlets, on the other hand, is a bit hard to take. There’s been a great deal of hyperventilating about how this is such a big deal because of its chilling effect on the press, and in case you hadn’t noticed the press is singled out in the First Amendment for protection!. Of course, in that very same clause - and before the press is mentioned, incidentally - the First Amendment prohibits abridging freedom of speech for anyone.⁴

And there’s certainly been a lot of free speech abridgement going on for the last twelve years! It isn’t hard to find, say, a catalog of sins produced by the Patriot Act (personal favorite), or reports on the wholesale seizure of ordinary citizens’ phone records (and by the way, Congress would have to grant retroactive immunity to the phone companies who cooperated with the AP seizure for the current episode to sink to the lows of the FISA Amendments Act), or the indiscriminate collection of Internet traffic, or the thuggish repression of media outlets that are not the right kind of nice, respectable media outlets.⁵

These kinds of outrageous abuses have been going on for years, yet the national press corps never bothered to rouse itself to the kind of adversarial pushback we are now seeing.⁶ It’s one thing to spy on the common rabble or disreputable operations like WikiLeaks, evidently, but when that treatment gets turned on reporters who thought they were comfortably embedded with government officials: First Amendment!

I’ve been reading The Operators by Michael Hastings, and one passage towards the end has a striking relevance in the current situation. He describes the fallout in Washington over his Rolling Stone article on Stanley McChrystal that resulted in McChrystal’s dismissal, and refers to a “schmoozy relationship” between the political and media class. He received an icy reception from journalists in the capitol because he violated some vague but powerful etiquette that requires journalists to not report anything newsworthy (extended excerpt here.)

The rule of thumb is: don’t make waves. You’ll have a good gig as long as you don’t rock the boat. But that is exactly what the phone record seizure does. It’s a rude awakening for any reporters who thought they were on the same team as the officials they cover. The bureaucratic inertia of an ever-expanding intelligence gathering apparatus has combined with this administration’s maniacal pursuit of leakers to produce a very serious breach of etiquette in the village. It may have been illegal, who knows, but it was unquestionably gauche. It upset some very comfortable relations. That, in the end, may be a greater transgression among media elites than any violation of the Constitution.

---

NOTES

1. If the story is this: a couple of employees in the bowels of the agency went rogue and even disobeyed orders to stop, the story ends there. If it was the result of a general atmosphere of improvisation throughout the agency in an effort to figure out the post-Citizens United rules of the road, there’s a little more to it. If senior officials were leaning hard on those down the chain of command to audit political opponents, we have a full blown scandal. Investigate it fairly and thoroughly, and let the chips fall where they may.
(Back)

2. Also, the IRS and the ATF seem to be particularly loathed by the right, so any scandal involving those agencies is pretty much guaranteed to send the outrage meter among conservatives to white hot levels.
(Back)

3. If you want to know how someone like Rand Paul manages to get traction on the left with a stunt like his filibuster, it’s at least partly because liberals have waited for over a decade for Democrats to make a big deal - at the relevant moment - on the issue. Many on the left have been desperate for anyone to make an appropriately visible and compelling stand on it. Refusing to engage might foster comity in Washington, but it frustrates the hell out of the base. And Republicans are more than willing to fill the political vacuum it creates.
(Back)

4. Not to go all strict constructionist on you, but I’m always struck at how infrequently First Amendment controversies directly bear on the actual text of the amendment itself:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The AP/DOJ scandal is a good example. The First Amendment just covers the prohibition of Congress passing laws establishing a religion or preventing citizens or the press from expressing dissent. It doesn’t say anything about the Department of Justice spying on media outlets, for instance. The First Amendment prohibits a fairly narrow range of behavior considering all the different ways the government can try to suppress unwelcome sentiment. I’m happy for the more expansive interpretation, but I’m always expecting someone to argue that the founders intended exactly the more limited reading of the text.
(Back)

5. Will Bunch:

It is yet another example of how the national security state that has dominated our political life since World War II has corrupted the American soul. It is exactly what Philadelphia’s own Benjamin Franklin tried to warn us about — trading liberty for security, and getting neither.

“Slippery slope” arguments are highly dependent on the framework they would have to exist in. Those who argue against, say, gay marriage because it would put us on the slippery slope towards polygamy or whatever deviant vision is plaguing kinkmeister Rick Santorum these days need to explain something: How does that happen using the model gay marriage activists used? What lobbying group is pushing for it and is trying to get legislatures to pass it? Who is putting it on the ballot with citizen initiatives? Anyone who wants to use the gay marriage model for some other kind of arrangement isn’t even raising awareness on the issue at the moment. And that is square one for any legislation-based effort.

On the other hand, the slippery slope Bunch describes is a much more realistic danger, because none of it is in the open and there is no transparency. When everything is happening in the shadows and out of public view, the slopes can get slippery pretty darn fast.

And incidentally, systems like that also tend to take on lives of their own. Which means the “outrageous abuse of power by an intelligence agency” scandal will be a more or less permanent feature of every presidency, since the dark government operates independently of the visible government.
(Back)

6. In the early stages of a story like this it might not matter who exactly approved the seizure. As more details come out, and as time passes, the major players may well patch things up and kiss and make up. If there’s plausible deniability in the right places and an appropriate scapegoat can be found I’m sure everything will get smoothed over. Still, an aggrandized surveillance state will naturally produce scandals like this from time to time. With no real oversight or regulation, it will inevitably gravitate towards broader and more audacious seizures.
(Back)

7. From pp. 329-30 of The Operators:

I’d run into politicians and government officials and they’d all tell me they liked my reporting. Maybe they were lying, or trying to bullshit me, I didn’t know. While living in Vermont, I hadn’t understood the exact nature of the official Washington freak-out. But once I arrived in DC and started going to the cocktail parties and hitting the bars, I saw how the political and media class had completely misinterpreted my piece. The story had terrified them, striking deep-seated fears in the Washington psyche. It demonstrated just how tenuous one’s own position could be - careers could flame out overnight. And the political and media class saw the story as a threat to their schmoozy relationship - their very existence and social life. If you can’t get wasted with a journalist who’s writing a profile of you and piss all over the president who appointed you, what’s the world coming to?

A number of famous journalists would say they heard these kinds of things all the time, but never reported them. It didn’t matter to them that I was on assignment to write a profile - I didn’t go to France and Kandahar on a social engagement. It didn’t seem to make a difference that I hadn’t violated any agreement with McChrystal. The unwritten rule I’d broken was a simple one: You really weren’t supposed to write honestly about people in power. Especially those the media deemed untouchable. Bash Sarah Palin all you want, but tread carefully when writing about the sacred cows like McChrystal and Petraeus. You’re supposed to keep ill myths going. I’d fucked up - I wasn’t to be trusted because I tried to tell the truth. At one event, a prominent Republican senator pulled me aside and said, “You know, your story was a good thing. Got everybody focused back on Afghanistan.”

Strangely, as I continued to report on the politics behind the scenes of the war, I ended up on pretty good terms with a number of military officials, White House officials, and State Department officials. It was the other journalists who covered the military and politics that I clashed with most often. A number of reporters had paid side gigs at defense-industry funded think tanks, essentially getting financial support from the very same people they were supposed to be covering. They seemed to take my criticism of the military-industrial complex personally. It might as well be called, I thought, the media-military-industrial complex.

I could understand why the government officials would be pissed; I was telling them their whole strategy was a waste of time. But the reaction from a number of journalists on the national security beat seemed pretty twisted.

(Back)

It can be difficult to write about activism in an open-ended effort like the one against fracking. It isn’t like a campaign where everything is geared toward election day, at which point everyone will know who won and who lost. It’s different even from an issue like the Keystone XL pipeline, which is a single (continent-spanning) contiguous piece of infrastructure, and which will ultimately get a definitive yes or no.

Fracking involves lots of activity in communities dotted across the nation. There are big shale plays in some parts of the west, some parts of the Midwest, some parts of the east, and so on. But nothing connects those dots, and that makes it hard to give the thing a sense of its nationwide scope. Coverage will tend to be on a smaller scale, which makes it easier to dismiss it as a purely local or parochial concern.

Another issue with coverage is that developments tend to move slower than the news cycle. Activists like our group might start something like a monthly water monitoring program, but after kicking it off there really isn’t much new to report on it. You can’t make much of a story out of: We’re still monitoring!

This week there was an interesting new development though. Our county had not approved an increase in funding to our health district since 1955. We’ve had lots of renewals, but no increases. Counties and other regional bodies are capable of providing valuable services to residents, but those services cost money - paid through taxes. Asking people to raise their taxes is a pretty heavy lift, as our track record on this issue shows.

Because of the contacts and knowledge our group has gained through our water monitoring program, we knew about the replacement levy coming up and invited someone from the board to speak. He talked in general terms about what the department was doing, what its challenges were, and so on. We raised our concerns about fracking to him, and he said the department would look into subsidizing the cost of its water testing program if the levy passed.¹

So we ordered a batch of signs and put them out on our lawns:

We also talked up the issue with friends and neighbors, and generally tried to promote the issue as we could. We weren’t in any way prime movers in the effort, but we pitched in as we were able to.² And miracle of miracles, it actually passed.

There are a couple of interesting notes in the article. The eye popping one for me is this: voter turnout of 8.87 percent. My experience at the polls was certainly congruent with that. I got there about a half an hour after polls opened and I thought I’d gone to the wrong place. It was deserted.

Inside, I initially went to the wrong room (misplaced signage - not my fault!) and found out I was the first voter to show up. I then made my way to the correct room and found out I was the first voter there as well. By contrast, last November I arrived about ten minutes after polls opened and there was already a long line. It was quick inside the booth as well - the health levy was literally the only item on the ballot. That wasn’t true county wide, of course, but it’s safe to say there were considerably fewer issues than in November.

These two factors make an interesting dynamic: Lower voter turnout means each voter who does show up gets more bang for the buck. Your vote has more weight if it’s one of ten than it does if it’s one of a million. And the thinner ballot means the election results generally were something of a referendum on the levy itself. Last November’s replacement levy defeat was bundled with votes for president, Congress, and so on. But Tuesday’s replacement levy success was close to an endorsement of the levy, plain and simple.

There are potentially some good lessons for activists. The first is that action on a controversial issue like fracking can be taken through less contentious avenues like health department funding. Lots of people enthusiastically support the oil and gas industry, but the population opposed to local health department funding is pretty much limited to anti-tax zealots.

Second, a group that believes it has popular support on an issue might do well to look to special elections to get on the ballot. There is less chance of the issue getting diluted or obscured by other issues, and activists can translate their support into maximum leverage at the polls.

Finally, the process of identifying issues and reaching out to key players is a great way to build social capital. It gets you in touch with people you wouldn’t have been in touch with otherwise and can help support a related issue in ways that might not have been obvious. And every now and then it all translates, as it did on Tuesday, into a surprising and pleasant victory.

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NOTES

1. Technical/legal note: we refer to our program as water monitoring and not water testing, because we don’t want anyone to think the handful of metrics we look at is in any way equivalent to the far more extensive testing done by the county or the EPA. We are very careful about our word choice.
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2. This sort of purely grassroots effort is one where a third party could make hay. One would think that a party like, say, the Greens would be strongly in favor of, say, adequate funding for health departments. To the extent they are absent, they are missing out on a party building opportunity. They may not have the time, resources or inclination to do so in my neck of the woods, which is fine. But I will be decidedly unimpressed with their guilt trips about supporting the awful two party system when the next presidential election rolls around.
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I got really, really sick in the middle of last week. The worst of it passed pretty quickly but I haven’t been up for thinking many deep thoughts this week. Back next week!