Where Transformation Fits

As I admitted this morning, I haven't been entirely sure where TransformRI fits into a complementary strategy for the advancement of reform in Rhode Island. Looking at the group's Web site, my impression is that, beyond reinforcing grassroots efforts, the group's role should be to liaise between the Republican Party and the various groups that advisably remain independent.

Apart from collecting the Governor's radio appearances the Web site summarizes some of the bigger issues in the state and directs visitors to opportunities for action.

The challenge will be to preserve the mutual support, even when the imperative of independence causes rifts on one matter or another.

Pulling Together the Change Agents

If the statewide election results accomplished anything, this year, it was to up the ante for pessimism in Rhode Island. Whereas we used to ask each other how bad things would have to get, here, before voters would begin to wake up, it is beginning to seem more realistic to ask whether the state can save itself at all.

The partisan Democrats are busily constructing distractions to deflect the blame that obviously falls at their feet. The ideologically driven liberals have not relented in their push for progress toward oblivion and, indeed, have inhaled some pure oxygen with Obama's success. Economic recession, even depression, will shore up the poverty advocates' ammunition and expand the base of struggling families who are susceptible to their message. And public union members have, if anything, been sending a message that they want to compromise even less than their leaders.

Meanwhile, the exodus of productive taxpayers continues apace. In fact, I'll be so bold as to predict that the stream will become a flood unless Rhode Island manages to beat the rest of the nation out of recession — an unlikely scenario bordering on impossibility. For many residents who might be inclined to reorder the state, saying "uncle" won't entail resignation to changing our government, but to changing zip codes. Indeed, I can testify from my own experience that construction industry realities and disconcerting noises from my employer leave me little choice but to begin preparing an escape route.

In other words, time is short to rally those who would change Rhode Island for the better and to concentrate their talents for maximum effect. We have to push aside egos, spread around resources, and work together in designing structure:

• The Rhode Island GOP: The official state opposition party has to lower its profile for a while. Its role should retrench to support of grassroots operations and maintenance of a channel to the national party structure. Step away from the stove for a bit and let the boil stir the broth; perhaps it's to the best if some detritus burns to the bottom of the pot.
• Local "CC" Groups: Town-level taxpayer organizations, such as those in Tiverton, Portsmouth, East Providence, Lincoln, and Little Compton, need to arise in every town and concentrate on changing the habits and processes of government at the municipal level. Their focus should be on identifying citizens who might require only a little push to become active and to give residents a sense that they can make a difference if they would just engage. In this way, they may be able to give hope and a reason to stay to those Rhode Islanders whom we can't afford to lose, while building up a base of informed citizens with whom to populate town and state government.
• Rhode Island Statewide Coalition: While the local groups form and get up to speed, RISC should focus on building an infrastructure to link them together and identify areas of common cause. As the "CC" groups develop their understanding of municipal government, they'll begin to identify the areas in which state law hinders their advancement. They'll also run right into entrenched organizations, such as the teachers unions, that act statewide. RISC can facilitate the initiation of CCs, whether financially or by connecting interested organizers with the leaders of successful groups in other towns, aggregate the intelligence about state-level obstacles, and prepare channels by which town groups can expand to statewide office and action.
• Ocean State Policy Research Institute: As an organic network grows from town to town, there is clearly a role for a think-tank-style organization to research the statewide playing field and to develop policy suggestions that answer the CC groups' findings as well as broader problems that the state faces. While it will be important for OSPRI to remain organizationally independent from direct political interests, it will be critical for it and RISC to work together as complementary state-level organizations — in particular to avoid duplicated efforts.
• TransformRI: To be honest, I haven't developed a sufficient sense of TransformRI's goals to place it within this proposed structure, but there are certainly gaps remaining that it may readily fill. Again, the key will be for the organization to work with the others, not duplicating their efforts.

Any successful network requires the involvement of "people groups," with the goal of furthering principles that they support:

• Rhode Island Republican Assembly: RIRA's Web site quotes Ronald Reagan as characterizing the California Republican Assembly as "the conscience of the Republican Party," and RIRA's role should be to populate the reform structure in Rhode Island with an eye toward maintaining principles that ought not be diluted.
• Moderate Party of Rhode Island: That said, there remain plenty of Rhode Islanders who recognize the pending calamity in their state and have a sound understanding of the steps necessary to avoid the worst of it. For that reason, it will remain important for dyed-in-the-wool conservatives and Republicans to work alongside self-identifying moderates. Compromises will have to go both ways, of course, such that nobody walks away from the table based on tangential or wholly irrelevant differences of opinion or aesthetic preferences. Toward that end distinct party labels are probably advisable, but cross-endorsements, so to speak, ought to be encouraged.
• College Republican Federation of Rhode Island and Rhode Island Young Republicans: Similarly to RIRA, groups for young Republicans in the state should be brought into the fold, not only to cull active participants, but to involve a different voice and perspective.

Where Anchor Rising Fits into the Scheme.

Having observed the results of such a project, the contributors of Anchor Rising have no intention of becoming a propaganda organ for partisan activism, but when the lines are so clear and the needs so broad as in RI, there is no conflict between independence and cooperation. Our unique platform and established voice put us in an advantageous position to fill in gaps between and connect the various groups described above, primarily for the ends of communications and messaging:

• The contributors are universally interested in researching and analyzing Rhode Island's problems, making it a natural inclination to take the findings of others — whether OSPRI's research or the CC groups' experience — and fit them into the narrative of the state. In that way, we would connect the various dots and help to make the case for suggested changes.
• Blogs are also an excellent route by which to bring exposure to stories and events that might fall through the cracks of mainstream media attention. Not only could we keep distant members of the statewide network informed, but we could provide a stepping stone from which to hand stories to larger media organizations, feeding the news upward, so to speak.
• As a setting for public discussion — not only in the comments, but also through our Engaged Citizen feature — we provide an online forum for continual principle and message development. To keep reformers focused and united will require a mechanism for sharing experience and working out differences (or agreeing to disagree), and an independent Web site allows that discussion to occur.

What I'm proposing, from our end, begins with a request: If you help us to generate enough revenue initially to fund a single full-time position for the site administrator (ahem), we can become a substantial force enabling the construction of a statewide opposition movement. We could expand our coverage of relevant events and develop our understanding of the players and playing field. I'd also take it as a goal to seek out and encourage Rhode Islanders who display an interest in getting involved, particularly with respect to public debate. I've got a list of specific initiatives on which I'd embark from day-one as a professional blogger (for lack of a better term), but I won't burden you with them, here; even presented vaguely, the value proposition is crystal clear.

For the time being, it is our intention to remain non-non-profit, so as to ensure both independence and privacy, but we'd be open to working with anybody who's interested in helping, whether via donations, advertising, or some other mutually beneficial arrangement.

Considering what we've accomplished as a group of part-time hobbyists, I'm confident that, if we can fund a single year of increased involvement, we could get Anchor Rising standing on its own feet, perhaps even chasing down Rhode Island's problems at a run within a year.

Please contact me with any leads or suggestions:

Justin Katz
jkatz@timshelarts.com
(401) 835-7156
P.O. Box 751
Portsmouth, RI 02871

Doing Something

Paul at Powerline suggests some actions that rightward Americans can take in order to rebound from the election. This one is particularly significant here in Rhode Island:

Support fledgling conservative institutions. The left has "marched through our institutions" - including the MSM, Hollywood, the public schools, academia, and even large swaths of corporate America. Conservatives need to respond by developing alternative sources of information, entertainment, and education. These alternatives won't succeed unless we support them.

If statewide elections illustrated anything, here, it's that Rhode Islanders don't feel that they've a viable alternative to the Democrats. The remedies are to (1) develop a compelling and palatable choice and (2) persuade our fellow residents that alternative policies will work. Toward those ends, a number of groups have sprung up around the state, but they operate largely on a volunteer basis, so they can only take their efforts so far.

We at Anchor Rising, for example, continue to see the growth of our readership and influence, but we're coming up against a wall of time that prevents our doing much more. You might be surprised at how little financial backing it would take to bring Anchor Rising out of the "hobby" category, and I'm confident that the blooming of our content and activities would impress under those circumstances.

Unfortunately, the reality is that small donations — as helpful and encouraging as they are — have thus far proven not enough to change the nature of the Web site. If anybody is interested and able to help us move forward, please contact me by email (jkatz@timshelarts.com) or phone (401-835-7156).

Getting the Message Out

I just passed a woman standing at the corner of Union and West Main in Portsmouth holding a home-made sign reading:

Try the REPUBLICANS for Change

Now, I don't know if she intended just to buck the national mantra or if she's referring to state and municipal elections, to which her message is more clearly applicable. But I love the idea that she had a thought and set about conveying it to hundreds of people, with no apparent direct personal benefit.

Stopping the Tides

When it so happens that the powers that be seem intent on acting in opposition to crystal clear reality, citizens are compelled to act. In Rhode Island, there's hope — or, in any case, we've hope — that plain information will serve to stop the tides, because it is in the universal self-interest to do so.

You've heard the argument: Our state's regime of taxation, regulation, and spending is driving away the range of citizens who are most likely to be productive, both as workers and as entrepreneurs, while attracting those most apt to partake of our too-generous services. As the taxation policies installed to compensate for the lack of further windfalls inspire the outward flow to continue, the government's shortfall with each budget will expand, rather than contract. How far down the path of economic stagnation do we want to go?

Under the principle that the impossibility of taking strides does not grant us permission to stand still, we've put together a flyer of sorts that seeks to convey one component of the vast body of evidence. We encourage you to print out copies to do with as you deem productive. Put them on public bulletin boards. Hand them out. Send them to media types and legislators. And if the effort meets any success, we'll proceed down the list of points until we've persuaded enough people to make it possible for Rhode Island to avoid utter (and utterly unnecessary) calamity.

The Counterprotest Must Go On

By the way, I would be shirking my agitator's duty if I didn't highlight some folks who managed to get out to Fall River and counterprotest the picket that didn't happen:

But even though a judge had said such picketing would be legal, the union didn't show up. Instead, two Portsmouth residents stood outside the hospital on Middle Avenue to picket the teachers' union. Forest Golden and Joe Robicheau held up signs in front of the main entrance to the hospital that read, "Tiverton School Committee: Taxpayer Heroes" and "NEA: Professional Bullies."

"We're here to picket the picketers," Mr. Golden said. "We support the School Committee. I applaud them for holding the line on spending."

Town Council members Joanne M. Arruda and Jay Edwards also turned up at St. Anne's Hospital to support Ms. deMedeiros.

Right on.

Protest Against Stephen Tocco

The Rhode Island Republican Assembly forwards this notice about a demonstration being held in Smithfield tonight...

There will be a resignation rally on Tuesday 8/7/2007 at 7:00pm @ Smithfield Town Hall (64 Farnum Pike, Route 104).

The purpose is to demand that disgraced former Capitol Police Chief Stephen Tocco resign from the Town Council.

Thomas J. Morgan of the Projo has the details on the former police chief's (who is now the town council President) direct involvment with corruption...

[Jeff Neal, spokesman for Governor Donald Carcieri,] declared on June 7 that Tocco had been “temporarily reassigned” while the governor’s office examined the police chief’s role as a facilitator of bribes in municipal corruption cases in the 1980s and 1990s. The issue arose after a reporter uncovered records in the archives of the U.S. District Court that had lain unnoticed for more than a decade...

Tocco, according to the transcript of the trial of Garafano, the former Providence public works director, testified under oath that he had negotiated bribes and carried thousands of dollars in bribes on a number of occasions both to Garafano and to Louis S. Simon, then public works director in Pawtucket during the administration of Mayor Brian J. Sarault. Simon and Sarault pleaded guilty and served jail terms. Garafano was convicted and sentenced to prison.

Tocco committed these acts while he was also an officer of the Capitol Police, he testified.

According to an earlier Thomas Morgan article, however, Smithfield Democrats (including Tocco himself), don't see what all the fuss is about...

Tocco, who also is president of the Smithfield Town Council, said he intended no change in that position.

“Sure, I’ll remain on the council,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I?”....

When Tocco sought election to the Smithfield Council in 2004, he apparently neglected to mention the skeleton in his closet to Larry Mancini, the chairman of the Democratic Town Committee. “It was never disclosed to me in any capacity,” Mancini said last week. “If it was disclosed to me and to those who participate in the candidate-selection process, I think we would have weighed that in the context of a viable candidate.”

Mancini added, however, “Knowing him as a person and having the ability to assess his qualities in my mind would have outweighed the negativity.

After all, if we didn't have people to carry the bribes, how would any business get done in Rhode Island?

Introducing the Ocean State Policy Research Institute

In an op-ed in today’s Projo, William Felkner introduces the Ocean State Policy Research Institute (OSPRI) and explains why such an organization is desperately needed here in Rhode Island…

Ironically, Rhode Island is stuck in a “conservative” cycle protecting the “liberal” status quo of excessive workplace rules, generous social programs, retentive regulation, entrenched unionism in state government and Horace Mann’s approach to education. Harking to the days of the Dorr War (1842) and the Bloodless Revolution (1935), our oligarchy is unwilling to risk the progress it has made by reassessing these circumstances lest the robber barons should rise from their graves.

A voice for a more independent perspective has been missing on the Rhode Island scene until this Independence Day heralded the founding of the Ocean State Policy Research Institute. This nonprofit foundation intends to promote free-market ideals not as partisan choices, but as foundational American aspirations no less worthy of consideration than socially collective compassion epitomized by the Great Society.

Rhode Island is replete with a collection of “special-interest groups” promoting government intervention as the solution. Such groups as the Poverty Institute, at Rhode Island College, Ocean State Action and other nonprofits and public institutions lobby for more government programs and spending. Paradoxically, your taxes fund part of this activity, effectively government lobbying itself in a spiral to budget insanity…Evidence from the solid accomplishments of free-market institutes in 46 other states suggests that Rhode Island should re-examine the prevailing ‘’wisdom” that expanding government is the way to solve problems.

The Wisdom of Bloggers: Doesn’t Balancing a Budget Mean Spending Only As Much as You Take In?

Local Coventry blogger Scott “I am the Duck” Duckworth appears in today's Nicole Wietrak Kent County Times story about last night’s Coventry financial town meeting…

The next issue on the table was the school budget, with resident Dennis Geoffroy making a motion to add $99,999 to the bottom line of $64.4 million.

Resident Scott Duckworth spoke in response to the motion and asked the school committee if the district’s budget had officially been balanced after the state announced its decision to level-fund education aid, which left Coventry $600,000 in the red.

"It is a balanced budget that we put together, which, as we all know now, is $600,000 short of what we requested," said School Committee Chairman Raymond E. Spear (R-Dist. 1).

"But if you don’t have the money for it, then it’s not a balanced budget," retorted Duckworth.

"Well, technically, no," answered Spear, "but we are aware of the place we’re at and we recognize that the budget is going to require cuts of up to a half a million dollars or more."

In the end, 105 residents voted to give the additional money to the school department compared with 144 who opposed the action.

Only technically?

The Dim Future for the Term Compassionate Conservatism Shouldn’t Doom its Underlying Idea

Marc's previous post on "civic conservatism" prompts me to give my report on the national-state of another conservative brand, "compassionate conservatism". It's finished as a political label, but it's rooted in better ideas than you might think.

At the NRI Conservative Summit, Professor Marvin Olasky, the individual probably most responsible for bringing the term “compassionate conservative” into mainstream public discourse, expressed disappointment with President Bush’s version of compassionately conservative social welfare policy. His complaint was that President Bush has invoked the term “compassionate conservatism” without implementing the underlying ideas on the scale that is necessary.

According to Professor Olasky, compassionate conservatism should involve a radical simplification (my term) in the way that government delivers social welfare benefits to its citizens. He named two specific examples: a) an expanded child tax-credit and b) vouchers that public aid-recipients could use to seek help from social service providers of their choice -- faith-based providers included. In contrast, President Bush’s big domestic initiatives, like No-Child-Left-Behind and Medicare part-D, have been attempts to reform and expand existing bureaucracies. Dare I say that on the homefront, President Bush has governed more as a “Rockefeller Republican” who believes that big bureaucracy works, if you just find the right set of managers, and not really as a “compassionate conservative” who believes that something is irretrievably lost when personal efforts to help one another are replaced with government regimentation?

Of course, many mainstream conservatives bristle at the suggestion that “compassionate” can ever be a proper qualifier for conservative, wary that the implication that there is something compassion-neutral about conservatism does more perceptual harm than the modifier heals. This unpopularity with conservatives, combined with compassionate conservatism’s association in the mind of the general public with President Bush and his in-the-thirties approval ratings has already settled the taxonomical argument -- “Compassionate Coservatism” as a defining paradigm is not going to catch on. This most emphatically does not mean that the merits of Professor Olasky’s ideas about the role of government in providing social services and individual opportunity should be dismissed.

Mitt Romney on Social Issues

I know. I’m not supposed to be posting anything on the 2008 Presidential campaign before June. However, I’m adding a codicil to my New Year’s resolution: I can make an exception when able to present primary-source material about a Presidential candidate (or someone with a Presidential exploratory committee) that adds to a discussion area already active here at Anchor Rising.

At the National Review Institute’s (direct quote from NRO-Editor-at-Large Jonah Goldberg: "Whatever that is") Conservative Summit held this past weekend in Washington D.C., Presidential Candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney gave a substantive address on his philosophy concerning the major issues in American politics -- limited and fiscally conservative government, healthcare, foreign policy, and social and life issues. Here's what Governor Romney had to say about gay marriage, abortion and stem-cell research...

Governor Mitt Romney: When I ran [for Governor of Massachusetts], there were a couple of social issues that were part of that debate. You probably know what some of them were.

One was gay marriage. I opposed then and do now oppose gay marriage and civil unions.

One was related to abortion. My opponent was in favor of lowering the age where a young woman could get an abortion without parental consent from 18 to 16…I, of course, opposed changing the law in that regard.

Another issue was the death penalty, I was for, [my opponent] was against.

Another was English immersion. For a long time, our state had bilingual education, where the schools or the parents get to choose what language their child is taught in. I said that’s just not right. If kids want to be successful in America, they have to learn the language of America. We fought for that, and by the way, I won that one, my opponent did not.

Now, as you know, after I got elected, Massachusetts became sort of the center stage for a number of very important social issues, one of them being gay marriage. I am proud of the fact that I and my team did everything within our power and within the law to stand up for traditional marriage. This is not, in my view and the view of my team, a matter of adult rights. We respect the rights of gay citizens to live as they wish and to have tolerance and respect and not be discriminated against. I feel that very deeply. At the same time, we believe that marriage is not primarily about adults. In a society, marriage is primarily about the development and nurturing of children. A child’s development, I believe, is enhanced by access to a mom and a dad. I believe in every child’s right to a mom and a dad.

Now, there’s one key social issue where I did not run as a social conservative, at least one. That was with regards to abortion. I said I would protect a woman’s right to choose an abortion. I’ve changed my view on that, as you probably know.

Let me tell you the history about that. Some years ago, when I was at the Olympics, I met a guy named Mark Lewis. He was head of our marketing there. He told me that he was a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship. I don’t know how far he got. His final interview was with a German interviewer and the interviewer said to him “Mr. Lewis, who is one of your political heroes?” and he said Ronald Reagan. The German had the predictable response -- *GASP*. He said how in the world can you square that statement with what Churchill said, which is that “a young person who is not a liberal has no heart?” Mark responded by repeating the last portion of that Churchillian comment, that “an older person who was not a conservative had no brain” and adding “I, Herr Doctor, simply matured early”.

On abortion, I wasn’t always a Ronald Reagan conservative. Neither was Ronald Regan, by the way. But like him, I learned with experience.

In my case, the point where that experience came most to bear was with regards to learning about stem-cell research. Let me tell you, there are so many different ways of getting stem cells. I was delving into that because my legislature was proposing new legislation that re-defined when life began. I think it’s interesting that the legislature thinks it has the capacity to make that determination. Our state had always said that life began at conception, but they were going to re-define when life began, so I spent some time learning (with, by the way, a number of people in this room who helped) about all of the different types and sources of stem-cells, not only adult stem cells and umbilical stem cells and stem cells from existing lines, but also surplus embryos from in-vitro fertilization. I supported all of those.

But for me, there was a bright-line when you started creating new life for the purposes of destruction and experimentation. That was somatic-cell nuclear transfer (or cloning) and also what’s known as embryo farming. At one point, I was sitting down with the head of the stem-cell research department at Harvard and the provost of Harvard University, and they were explaining these techniques to me. I imagined in my mind this embryo farming. Embryo farming is taking donor sperm and donor eggs and putting them together in the laboratory and creating a new embryo. If that’s not creating new life, then I don’t know what is. I imagined row after row after row of racks of these, created either by the cloning process or the farming process. At that point, one of the two gentleman said, “Governor, there’s really not a moral issue at stake here, because we destroy the embryos at 14 days”. I have to tell you, that comment and that perspective hit me very hard. As he left the room with his colleague, I turned to Beth Myers, my chief of staff, and said I want to make it real clear: we have so cheapened the value and sanctity of human life in our society that someone can think there’s not a moral issue because we kill embryos at 14 days.

Shortly thereafter, I announced I was firmly pro-life.

Now, you don’t have to take my word for it, by the way. The nice thing about being able to watch governors is you don’t have to look just at what they say, you can look at what they’ve done. Over my term, I had 4 or 5 different measures that came to my desk [concerning life issues] and on every single one I came down on the side of respecting human life. That didn’t make me real popular in the state. Remember, in Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy is considered a moderate….

In the next few days, I’ll have more from Mitt Romney on other issues, excerpts from Newt Gingrich and Jeb Bush on the meaning and future direction of conservatism and from Tony Snow on the Iraq Surge and the President’s new healthcare proposal, plus a whole lot of insights and opinions that I heard discussed at the conference that will bring you up-to-date on the state of conservatism…

Toward a New Direction in Rhode Island

Among the qualities that I love about Rhode Island is its size. For some Americans, for example, attending an event across their state requires a plane and a hotel. Rhode Islanders can traverse theirs without even stopping for gas. One can get to know this state; it's manageable.

Of course, its manageability is also its great vulnerability. Entrenched powers, with their short-sighted self-interest, have been managing it right into a hole. So much is this true, it increasingly seems with each passing election that the only reasonable response is to give up on electoral politics. Between Rhode-apathy and the habitual voting practices — most notably those of voting Democrat and of granting the state government permission to grab new money for worthwhile expenditures that ought to have been included in its general spending — it is tempting to dismiss the system as unfixable.

So, many of us have begun to think it necessary to look for ways to work outside of the system, and here the state's size emerges again as a wonderful quality — in terms of both effectiveness and opportunity for experimentation. Many of us have also begun to think that the way in which to implement the conservative approaches that can save this state is through the very conservative principle of community activity, the conservative ethos of open and plain discussion of facts, and the classically liberal application of universal freedoms. To put it into a credo: we must give everybody a forum in which to discuss matters of concern to us all, within the context of plain recitation of stubborn facts and honestly assessed principles, at the most basic levels of society.

One such, newly implemented, experiment is Bill Felkner's Parents' Forum for the Chariho School district. On the index page, the Web site offers links to more information than the average parent will have time or inclination to peruse. Perhaps more importantly, Felkner has set up a message board, in the form of a blog, through which parents can discuss matters of mutual interest. I encourage those to whom the site applies to participate, and those to whom it does not to pursue similar strategies.

The movement to push Rhode Island toward healthier societal construction will by necessity incorporate many roles, and it is crucial that we remember that, especially in this state, local involvement can have far-reaching effects.

Getting to Work... by Postponing Work

It was one thing to do nothing more active than sit in my office, blog, and write columns when I actually managed to make time to write. Lately that hasn't been possible. So, with the thought that "getting to work" in a metaphorical, political, and Anchor-Rising-al sense may now require me to actually leave the house (so as not to slip into working), I've decided to take a morning off and attend this Saturday's East Bay GOP Breakfast.

Whether you're from one of the ten technically included towns or otherwise, I encourage you to attend. Perhaps we can argue about Mayor Laffey's candidacy in the presence of the man himself.

ADDENDUM:
So as to provide me somebody behind whom to hide should things get testy, Andrew will be attending the breakfast, as well.