According to the Washington Post’ obituary of John R. Reilly, he was a classic Washington player who–among many other roles–held the switch to turn off the microphones at the great 1963 March on Washington if he decided that things had gotten too incendiary. He was ready to drown out Martin Luther King or A. Phillip Randolph with Mahalia Jackson’s version of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Mr. Reilly also lobbied and advised national Democratic leaders from 1968 through 1992. Patricia Sullivan writes:

[In 1984] he was considered an old hand. Kathy Bushkin, Gary Hart’s press secretary, lamented, “We don’t have a John Reilly on the plane; we don’t have someone to tell Gary when he’s gone wrong, when he’s messed up.”

Mr. Reilly joked to Newsweek about reaching “the third stage” of notoriety. “First, ‘ Who is John Reilly?’ Then, ‘Get me John Reilly.’ Next, ‘Get me a John Reilly.’ And then: ‘John Reilly — who’s he?’ “

I had heard this story second-hand and retold it on my blog in 2004. The irony is, I didn’t know who Mr. Reilly was when I wrote that post. I only learned his full name and biography when he died. I guess that proves that he had reached the fourth stage of notoriety–or (more accurately) of fame and respect.

Mobilize.org–an organization of some 35,000 young Americans, founded and led by talented Millennials (who happen to be friends of mine)–has released its Democracy 2.0 report. They wrote it collaboratively and deliberatively–much in keeping with their philosophy of democracy.

They depict themselves as a generation that is tech-savvy, tolerant, and educated, but also sometimes lazy, selfish, and image-conscious. I’d say they understand college-educated Millennials but don’t describe the one third of their cohort who drop out before completing high school, or their many peers who are quite baffled and intimidated by technology.

They are enthusiastic about democratic, deliberative, and participatory processes such as youth commissions. They call themselves “all partisan” and are notably non-ideological, in traditional terms. They decry the bad performance of government in cases like Katrina, but overall do not come across as angry or cynical.

It’s kind of fun to compare Democracy 2.0 to another statement written by young people who had a strong sense of generational identity:

We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit…. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people — these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.

… Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity — but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? …

Perhaps matured by the past, we have no sure formulas, no closed theories — but that does not mean values are beyond discussion and tentative determination. A first task of any social movement is to convince people that the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values is complex but worthwhile. We are aware that to avoid platitudes we must analyze the concrete conditions of social order. But to direct such an analysis we must use the guideposts of basic principles. Our own social values involve conceptions of human beings, human relationships, and social systems. …

Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.

As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation. …

In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles: that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings; that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;

that politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life …

Maybe we could call the Port Huron Statement “Democracy 1.5.” These two documents are similar, although there is much more angst in the former statement, and more ambivalence about technology. The Port Huron Statement mainly decries technology for putting people out of work, although the authors do see some potential: “How should technological advances be introduced into a society? By a public process, based on publicly-determined needs. Technological innovations should not be postponed from social use by private corporations in order to protect investment in older equipment.”

My blog posts (one and two) about celebrity politics–written before the 2008 election season began–caught the attention of USA Today writer Maria Puente, who quotes me in an article that starts, “Sometimes you have to wonder if the presidential candidates are running to be First Celebrity — or maybe Entertainer of the Year.” She writes:

Peter Levine, a scholar of civic learning at Tufts University in Boston who blogs about politics and celebrity, says that when candidates do something policy-related, it doesn’t get as much attention as, say, an argument over lipstick on a pig. “One interpretation is that this is not the candidates’ fault because substantive stuff does not pay,” Levine says. “Lipstick got more attention than McCain’s education plan.* There are big incentives for politicians to act like celebrities, but it’s bad for our politics.”

(I’m on a roll with USA Today. Last week, I was quoted in Jill Lawrence’s cover story on young voters.)

*I actually meant Obama’s education plan, which was released on the same day as the lipstick-on-pig flap. But the point holds either way.