Immigration is evidently a huge issue, and one of the few that may play to the advantage of conservatives in 2008. Here’s a response that’s available to Democrats and Republicans who don’t want to shut the doors and deport people:

“We’re talking about ‘citizenship’ as if it’s just a matter of who can get a driver’s license or tuition benefits. We’re acting as if you’re a ‘citizen’ if you don’t have to worry about the INS.

“Throughout our history, we have always understood citizenship in a much deeper and more demanding way than that. It means the obligation and the power to work together to make America a better place than when we found it. It means voting and volunteering, discussing issues, supporting organizations, defining and solving community problems, creating public art and culture, serving in uniform, raising the next generation, and preserving the environment.

“Some of the people who have come to this country illegally are fully involved in those ways. Many legal immigrants are very active citizens. But a whole bunch of people who were born in the United States–and whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were born here–are not very involved. They are not truly acting as citizens, even though they have a birthright to a US passport.

“Some may just be couch potatoes, but some feel forced out of citizenship. They believe they cannot make a significant difference in education, the environment, or crime because the big bureaucratic structures that we have created don’t welcome their participation. As we debate citizenship for immigrants, let’s reform our institutions and strengthen our communities so that all Americans can once again be fully active and responsible citizens.”

The folks at Public Agenda–specifically, Will Friedman, Alison Kadlec, and Lara Birnbeck–have published a very important study of Bridgeport, CT. I remember Bridgeport as something of a basket case in the 1980s: the city was literally bankrupt, the leadership had a reputation for corruption, and the population was very hard hit by the loss of manufacturing jobs. Bridgeport is now doing much better, to the point (for instance) that its school system was one of five finalists for the Broad Prize in both 2006 and 2007. The Public Agenda team makes a strong case that the reason for Bridgeport’s renaissance is civic participation.

They start the story with the Connecticut Community Conversations Project, a series of public discussions of the type that John Gastil and I cataloged in The Deliberative Democracy Handbook. According to Public Agenda, the discussions of school reform led to many other such projects; deliberation is now a habit in Bridgeport. Citizens have shown that they are capable of making tough choices: for instance, shifting limited resources from teen after-school programs to programs for younger kids. There is much more collaboration today among businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies. The Public Agenda report quotes several business leaders who describe themselves as converts to public engagement, whose willingness to invest in the city has risen as they have gained trust in their fellow citizens. There is also a high rate of direct participation–for instance, mentoring.

Everyone feels that they share responsibility; problems are not left to officials. The School Superintendent says, “I’ve never seen anything like this. The community stakeholders at the table were adamant about this. They said, ‘We’re up front with you. The school district can’t do it by itself. We own it too.'”

Now, if we could only inject such examples into the national political debate.

Europeans and Americans tend to agree about at least one point: the built environment of the US is much newer and more homogeneous than that of Europe. Europeans, we assume, live in towns that date back to Roman times and have developed in their own, richly idiosyncratic ways for millennia. Meanwhile, we Americans live in suburbs that were designed by developers since the Kennedy Administration. That’s why we get out our cameras and guidebooks and head across the ocean for history.

There is some truth to this, but it can be exaggerated. As tourists, we get a biased sample of European communities because we choose to visit the oldest and best preserved ones. And Europeans get a somewhat biased picture of the US from TV. Most of the populous European cities and metropolitan areas are basically outgrowths of the industrial revolution. They expanded dramatically between 1830 and 1914. Then most of them were badly damaged by wars or social upheavals in the twentieth century and heavily rebuilt. Meanwhile, the great Eastern and Midwestern cities of the United States date back to the 1800s and often developed rather conservatively since World War One.

For example, Philadelphia was the second largest city in the British Empire at the time of Independence. That means that only London had more houses in Ben Franklin’s day. In both London and Philadelphia, many of the buildings that stood in 1776 were subsequently knocked down by developers, fire, or–in the case of London–by German bombs and missiles. I suppose London still has more buildings left over from the 18th century, and it has a few prominent relics from the middle ages and renaissance. But 281,000 extant structures in the Philadelphia metropolitan area were built before 1919 (pdf, p.15). This partly explains why Philadelphia–like Chicago, Charleston, and Cleveland–has a highly distinctive culture.

There’s a powerful storyline beneath the Democratic primary race that goes like this:

1. John Kerry lost the 2004 election because of the Swift Boat Vets attacks, which epitomized a particularly Republican form of nasty politics that is relatively new to politics.

2. Therefore, Democrats should nominate whoever can best handle the swift boat attacks of 2007.

3. And probably, that is the candidate who has the most experience with taking personal hits and dishing them out in return. Thus, for instance Mathew Yglesias on Obama:

There’s perhaps no holder of comparable office who’s had less experience tangling with the Republican Party [emphasis is Yglesias’] than Barak [sic] Obama. This worries me. Now, on the other hand, it’s true that he’s a very appealing person in any number of other ways. What I’d like him to see is to find some way to get himself down in the muck–put himself in a position where he’s leading some kind of fight and the GOP feels compelled to try to take him down a notch or two.

I’m not expressing a preference for any presidential candidate, but I think the narrative summarized above is all wrong.

1. John Kerry was extremely, almost uniquely, vulnerable to a Swift Boat-style attack because he had no positive vision. He did not explain what he would do about Iraq. He had a health care plan, but he never talked about it. His whole rationale was that he had fought in a war and George Bush had not. He might as well have announced: Let’s debate my Vietnam War record and you can vote for G.W. Bush unless you decide that I was a moral and military hero whereas he was a shirker. In reality, anyone’s war service will involve elements of ambiguity and complexity. Kerry was simply asking for those elements in his own story to be broadcast.

2. Bitter personal attacks, while they have been conducted effectively by modern Republicans such as Karl Rove, are by no means a GOP monopoly, nor an innovation. Yet strong candidates have often won elections without counter-punching. When an attack comes, it’s by no means obvious that the best response is to respond in kind (or to respond at all). I thought that Kerry needed to articulate a reason for electing him. Failing that, he at least needed to reply to the Swift Boat Attack with humor (a powerful political asset) or with dignified personal reflection.

Thus the question for Democratic voters this time is not: Who can dish it out? It’s: Who has something else (other than personal flaws) to talk about?