WHYY’s Election Forum In Wilmington

Last night cassandra m and I participated in the WHYY’s Election Forum held at the Delaware History Museum.  I had no idea what to expect, and confess that my expectations were low.  My expectations were wrong.  The event was great, and, unlike the events in Middletown and Dover, heavily attended.

Here’s how it went down.  After brief introductions and a general overview, participants were broken down into three groups.  My group consisted of young, old, white, black, Hispanic, men and women.  The first exercise consisted of word association.  The moderators of the group would throw out words and we were asked to respond with the first word that came to mind.  The words thrown out were candidates’ names, as well as the Tea Party.  Immediately it became apparent that my group was made up Democrats.  I was a little disappointed.

However, one of the words thrown out was the Delaware Way, which produced a broad round of laughter. The words associated with it described its lack of accountability and transparency, but also talked about the accessibility of politicians to voters and the incentives to work together.

The next thing we were asked to do is come up with what we would say if we were given a chance to talk – for only one minute – with our future Senator and Representative.  The time limitation of one minute was designed to make us prioritize our concerns.  The discussion was great, and as one person named their concerns others in the group added their viewpoints.  After everyone in the group listed what they would use their minute to discuss, the concerns/issues were then listed on a large sheet of paper.  Then came the hard part.  Everyone was given 3 round stickers and asked to place their stickers next to issues that mattered most to them.  (You could pick three different issues, or place two or three stickers on one issue)

After the stickers were placed the top four issues of the group were revealed.  Our group’s issue were:  Jobs, Health Care, The Environment, and Education.  Our group was then split in two, each taking two of the issues and coming up with specific questions to ask the candidates.  At the end of the exercise we were asked to walk around the room and look at the other groups questions.

Wow, there were some pretty impressive questions!  Not a softball in the bunch.  Very specific questions that require very specific answers.  In fact, there wasn’t a single question for which saying “I’m for liberty” would be an acceptable answer.  There were also no gotcha silly questions.  Nothing about witches or socialists.

• Do you believe in climate change?  Why or why not?
• If you want to shrink the size of government spending which specific programs would you cut?
• Specifically address the creation of jobs with “living wages”  (We wanted them to get off of the idea that any jobs are OK, but job creation that would support families in the upwardly mobile way we expect.)
• What plans, in detail, would you implement to get workers the additional skills and training to move to jobs that have some possible longevity?
• If elected how would you  be accountable for communicating with your constituents real information about bills and policy under consideration?
• If elected, how would you proactively work on ensuring that the ACA was tailored to the needs of constituents, not to the special interests?

Pretty good, huh?  There were many more questions on many more issues, but I hesitate to paraphrase.  One thing our group brought up was the role of the media in highlighting the misbehavior of the Tea Party – which is an issue for another post!

After the event I spoke with one of the moderators and asked if any Republicans/Tea Partiers were present.  He said that he believed there was one in another group – and there had been a self-described Libertarian presence in Dover.  I’m not certain what to make of  this, and I’m still disappointed.  The way the forum was conducted could have produced some interesting debate.

I’ll let cassandra m take it from here…

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this process.   And at the end, I was sorry that more people didn’t come out to get their voices heard.  The one thing that I wanted to see addressed that didn’t get ranked very high by my compatriots was the issue of Leadership.  I’d like for candidates to tell us that they are prepared to step out of the camera’s eye and do the real work of governing this great place.  Because it looks from here that we increasingly have folks who get to Congress ready for their closeups, but completely unprepared to do the hard work of governing.

I asked the gentleman in charge of WHYY’s First program if they would consider doing this in 2012 — especially for the City of Wilmington’s Mayoral race, which from here looks like it might be a free for all.  He said that they might be interested and I hope that they’ll come back, but come back early in the process to ask voters what they want the candidates to talk about so that campaigns are shaped around what people say they want to discuss.

This is the specific model that Jay Rosen talks about here in The Citizen’s Agenda in Campaign Coverage.

Last night’s effort at shaping questions for a candidate debate could be done early in a campaign cycle, which would give voters a narrative that may be more useful to them and may give journalists a way to persistently tackle issues as part of the narrative (are you listening, News Journal?).  And while Rosen’s model has journalists figuring out the big issues, we saw in action last night a group that does this civic engagement process routinely (and around topics other than political campaigns) and who could help do that bit of heavy lifting.  But this has some promise, really, of helping local media actually get what communities are concerned about and giving that media some reason to actually point its coverage that way. This was a great experience and many thanks to pandora for dragging me along…..