Finding a haven for the moderate middle

In last week’s column, I discussed the current unhappy state of our politics: Increasingly dominated by unelected billionaires. Filled with noisy ideologues who think compromise in the public interest is anathema. Driven by hyper-partisan ranting on cable and the web, from people who insist we treat their opinions as facts.

Within minutes came the following note: “Phil, I’ve been a fan of yours for some time. I think you make sense. I don’t think you make sense in this column. Rethink where you want to take your audience. In other words, what’s the next step?”

My reaction: Point well taken. So here’s my take on the next step, which is already well underway:

Back in 2006, I started something called the Center for Michigan, a nonprofit, nonpartisan “think-and-do-tank” designed to cure some of our political and policy ailments. Since then, it’s had a considerable impact in making Michigan a better place.

The Center’s work can be best described with three verbs:

Engage: Each year, the Center holds hundreds of informal “community conversations”, small groups of 15-20 Michigan citizens who gather for a couple of hours of deliberative democracy – candid, civil discussions of where our state is and where people want it to go. The conversations are led by trained facilitators and notes are carefully taken by scribes, while participants register their policy choices on hand-held clickers. The conversations are data-based at Public Sector Consultants, which releases the findings to the Center for review and for publication each year as “citizens’ agenda reports.”

We’ve been holding these conversations annually since 2007, and have so far involved more than 30,000 Michiganders, the largest public engagement campaign in state history.

The demography of participants in age, gender, race and geography almost exactly matches the diverse face of Michigan. These conversations are the method by which the Center frames its priorities and develops citizen-based policy proposals.

Taken together, they provide legitimate, citizen-driven public involvement in the Center’s work.

Inform: When I got into the newspaper business back in the 1960’s, there were a couple of busloads of reporters covering Lansing. Today there are less than 10 journalists – a consequence of the decline of newspapers and other traditional media journalism.

As a result, an information vacuum has arisen between us, the governed, and those in the halls of power who govern us.

To combat this, the Center for Michigan launched in 2011 Bridge Magazine, a free, online, thrice-weekly news report that deals with the important topics of the day: Our schools, our economy, our politics and our policy. Bridge’s fact-based, in-depth, nonpartisan journalism has attracted many more readers far more rapidly than any of us expected. It now is read annually by more than one million readers who scan more than four million pages. It’s based on the idea that the iron core of a democracy is an informed citizenry.

Achieve: Our community conversations are nourished and amplified by Bridge’s journalism. And the Center takes the citizen-driven policy conclusions into the halls of power as legitimate expressions of the people’s will.

And our leaders are listening and reacting. Bridge’s reporting highlighted the enormous importance of pre-K education programs for young children; over the past three years, Michigan responded by funding the nation’s largest expansion of public preschool. Our work has led to more than $250 million savings and ongoing reforms in the state prison system. We advocated for tougher certification tests for Michigan teachers and led the charge for increased support for the cost-effective “Pure Michigan” advertising campaign.

This work has proven an effective way to have concrete, long-lasting impact. Our fundamental objective is to demonstrate that it is possible today to make progress toward a citizen-driven political and policy system. A system grounded in its openness to public view, informed by balanced, fact-driven journalism, and expressed in effective advocacy that helps make Michigan a better place.

What about a call for a third party? I seriously doubt there’s much chance of that happening … unless something truly catastrophic undoes our entire economic and political system. A third party hasn’t replaced either of the two dominant parties since the 1850s, if only because the process is too complicated, costs too much and takes too long. Texas businessman and multimillionaire Ross Perot learned that back in 1992 when he ran for president as an independent, and nobody’s seriously tried it ever since.

The Center’s work is not designed to start a third party. Instead, it is designed to pull together and mobilize a broad coalition of stakeholders in Michigan, regardless of party, whose views can have significant impact on both parties and the future of our state.

My belief is that this can reinforce the best instincts of both political parties, rein in some of their worst ideological excesses, bring ordinary citizens directly into the policymaking process and hopefully help immunize our political system against failure.

A good way to think about this is to imagine that in varying degrees Democrats are on the left and Republicans on the right, with the base of both parties in hard-edged true believers. That leaves out the vast number of folks in the middle, who are not ideologically driven but who are interested in making their state a better place to live.

Call this group Independents, and polls suggest they are larger and growing more rapidly than either R’s or D. Politicians used to appeal to such swing voters, until both parties discovered that gerrymandering and pandering to their respective bases is more effective than appealing to the large number of folks in the middle.

Maybe so. But if the moderate middle can be engaged, informed and mobilized it could constitute a third force in our politics, one that could move either or both political parties toward collaboration for the public good.

That’s what the Center for Michigan is all about: Identifying stakeholders in our state, getting them together to discuss sensible, common ground public policy, and pulling together a series of citizen agendas that can drive the content of political discussion in ways designed to get things done rather than score political points.

We see it as an antidote to the partisan ailments that have infected and weakened our politics and our policy-making.

We think and hope most of our citizens would agree.