(Tampa International Airport) Ron Fournier of the Associated Press wrote a nice news/opinion piece based on the America’s Civic Health Index. It’s on the Yahoo news portal and elsewhere. Fournier begins:

WASHINGTON – It happens every election year: Pollsters slice and dice the electorate, identify an important new group and give those voters a fad-worthy monicker. Reagan Democrats. Angry Men. Soccer Moms.

Here’s a heads-up on what should be the dynamite demographic of 2008: “The Civic Core.”

That’s the name given to 36 million Americans who actively discuss society’s problems and work to solve them. These community-building citizens are both a key to the nation’s future and a valuable resource for political candidates.

And yet, with few exceptions, Democrats and Republicans alike are giving the Civic Core — and community service itself — short shrift.

Thirty-six million is a soft estimate, because the survey questions on which it is based are all matters of degree. You can be more or less involved, for example, in addressing problems in your neighborhood. Therefore, you may answer a yes/no question about such involvement differently depending on the context in which you are asked. However, I pushed for throwing out some kind of estimate, because I want candidates to realize that millions of Americans are heavily involved in civic work and care about their opportunities to participate. As Fournier says at the end of his article: “Microtarget that.”

I’m in Tampa for the service-learning research conference. When not in sessions, I’m relaxing with my family in the Gulf of Mexico. Back online tomorrow.

Below in italics is the draft document, entitled Democracy 2.0 Declaration, that Mobilize.org has put together through an intensive collaboration. They will be posting it as a wiki so that it can be edited by other young people, although I don’t see how it could be improved. Apparently, they finished the drafting well after midnight (in the great tradition of the Port Huron Statement) and carried it down to Washington’s Tidal Pool to read it to Thomas Jefferson. Some say he shed a tear.

[You may have heard of TJ. He was on the development team of Democracy 1.0. They used a lot of open source components from projects in Greece and England (believe it or not), but they really took the concept to scale for the US market. Their product was kind of buggy. Some users were dissatisfied and there was a big issue around 1860 that almost killed the business. Still, thanks to user input, it turned into a robust platform. The 2.0 upgrade is eagerly anticipated.]

Democracy is an unfinished project. It’s time we upgrade.

It’s our democracy, it’s time to act.

I like Open Congress. This group has now created a widget that you can place on your blog or other website to follow automatically the progress of a bill that you care about. I can’t really use the widget right now, because the legislation that interests me most is Rep. George Miller’s proposal for a renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act. Mr. Miller is the House leader on education, so what he puts in the bill that he actually introduces will be very influential. But right now there is much debate and advocacy going on, and I don’t think Mr. Miller has yet introduced a bill. He has, instead, floated various draft documents. Those drafts cannot be tracked by something like Open Congress.

This situation underlines a limit with any accountability mechanism that focuses on bills and votes. An enormous amount of what Congress does happens before a bill is introduced–or squashed. This is also where most special-interest pressure is exerted. I have no reason to think that special interests are influencing Mr. Miller on NCLB; if anything, he seems to be annoying all the major players. But the time when openness is most important and hardest to obtain is before a bill is introduced.

I spent part of the weekend at a conference on the political process attended by some academics and reporters plus political operatives like Donna Brazile, Doug Bailey, and Ed Rollins. After dinner in a Washington steak house, participants rose to make impromptu speeches against the harshness and narrowness of today’s political discourse. I’m afraid I found most of the speeches quite superficial and banal. While people spoke, a Republican lobbyist and former elected official made heckling remarks which indicated that she felt the room was biased against her worldview. She finally rose and said (in my paraphrase): “What if Columbia University invited David Duke instead of Ahmadinejad to speak? I think there would be a huge protest. There are some people in America who just need to shut up.”

The comment was a non sequitur; but based on her other remarks, I think she meant that Columbia University is part of a leftist establishment. The University invited the Iranian president to speak because it had some sympathy for his views. The problem with American political discourse is that such views are expressed and tolerated.

I certainly didn’t reply, but I think my considered response would go like this: Whether to invite Ahmadinejad to Columbia–and how to treat him once he arrived–were delicate questions. The University needed to consider John Stuart Mill’s argument that we are always better off with a public debate versus the claim that offering an individual a prominent speaking role at a distinguished institution grants him recognition (which someone like Ahmadinejad doesn’t deserve). The University had to consider the norms of hospitality and respect for a head of state versus the duty to speak truth to power. And it had to weigh its own principles versus the consequences of treating Ahmadinejad badly. It would, for example, be possible to denounce the president publicly (in keeping with Columbia’s principles) and thereby strengthen Ahmadinejad’s hand in Iran. In that case, principles and consequences would collide.

In any case, it’s a triple mistake to see Columbia’s actual decisions as emblematic of any leftist agenda. First, Columbia encompasses ideological diversity; it isn’t leftist. Second, the decision to invite Ahmadinejad was based on classical liberalism of the John Stuart Mill variety, not on some leftist doctrine. Third, if Columbia has a leftish bias, that puts it on the opposite side of the political spectrum from an Iranian mullah who despises homosexuality, favors theocracy, and wants to preserve traditional gender roles.

I left the conference and poked around a little on the Web, where conservatives seem to be furious at MoveOn for rhyming Petraeus with “Betray Us,” liberals are outraged that Rush Limbaugh called troops who favor a withdrawal “phony soldiers,” Columbia is denounced for inviting Ahmadinejad, Stanford is attacked for hiring Rumsfeld, the denouncers of Columbia and Stanford are denounced for selectively ignoring free speech, and everyone sees hypocrisy everywhere. The game is to associate one’s opponents with some of the worst statements made by people supposedly on their side in the debate, so that they either look bad or have to distance themselves from their allies.

I don’t think I can respond in any way that’s less banal than the after-dinner speeches on Friday; but I would say: We have serious issues before us, such as what to do in Iraq. Especially when the issues are complex and difficult and there are no good answers, it is extremely tempting to conduct the debate by proxy–attacking Limbaugh and MoveOn (and Scooter Libby) instead of proposing and defending courses of action. The rhetorical temperature inevitably rises, and people start crossing what Senator Cornyn called “historic line[s] of decency.” They attack generals, claim that soldiers aren’t soldiers, and so on. But these lines of decency are vague and disputed, so there are all kinds of opportunities to find inconsistencies in the other side’s position. How can a Senator vote to condemn MoveOn but not Limbaugh? How can a university invite Ahmadinejad but not Duke? And so on, endlessly.

I fail to see how any of this serves the republic. In fact, if I were a Democratic Member of Congress, I’d be inclined to abstain on an anti-Limbaugh resolution, saying: “Enough is enough. We could spend the rest of the session finding stupid statements to denounce on a tit-for-tat basis. There’s enough stupidity on all sides of the political debate to keep this body permanently busy with resolutions. Why don’t we actually decide what to do about Iraq?”