While I was away last week, Democracy Corps published a study based on focus groups of core Republican voters in Atlanta and Independents in Cleveland. The core or “base” Republicans held several beliefs that really separated them from other voters. They thought that Obama and the Democrats were deliberately trying to destroy the American economic system to pave the way for an authoritarian takeover. They believed that they had special information or insights because they watch people like Glenn Beck who report news that is deliberately hidden by the rest of the media. They felt an obligation to spread this news to other Americans, because the only thing keeping most of their fellow citizens from resisting the Democratic Administration was a lack of information. In contrast, Independents were dissatisfied with and skeptical about the Obama Administration so far, but they believed the president was trying to do a good job and shared their basic values.

According to the Democracy Corps, “the conservative Republican base represents almost one-in-five voters in the electorate, and nearly two out of every three self-identified Republicans.” That would imply a major tactical problem for Republicans. Participants in the Democracy Corps focus groups were highly skeptical of the GOP and will demand evidence that the party really shares their views. They will want to hear Republican candidates and party leaders say very explicitly that Obama (or at least Pelosi and Reid) are trying to destroy America. But those claims are exactly what alienate Independents and moderate Republicans.

For the Democrats, the lesson of the focus groups would basically be to ignore the Republican base, who mainly pose a threat to the GOP. Democrats should be careful not to let themselves believe that their important critics are right-wingers who see Obama as a socialist who was born in Kenya. The critics who matter to Democrats are Independents who see Obama as a good and smart American citizen who’s trying to help–but who has spent too much money too fast on things like auto and bank bailouts.

I think this is the right advice for Democrats, but I also suspect that the Democracy Corps study overestimates the prevalence of the views they found in the Atlanta focus groups. Participants in those groups matched about one in five voters in their answers to specific poll questions. That’s the basis for saying that they represented 20% of the electorate and two thirds of Republicans. But the focus group participants also expressed “adulation” for Glenn Beck. “More than half of the respondents in our conservative Republicans groups indicated that they try to watch or listen to Beck on a daily basis, with some going to great lengths to ensure they (and their families) do not miss a thing.” Beck’s daily audience is less than 3 million. The number of ballots cast in 2008 was 131 million. John McCain got 60 million votes. So even if you triple Beck’s daily audience to estimate the number of voters who closely share his views (and if you assume that all his viewers are eligible to vote), you still get a proportion of the electorate that’s more like 7% than 20%–and a proportion of Republican voters that’s more like 15% than 66%. That’s good news for Republicans because it means they can ignore their own relatively small “base” without as serious a penalty as the Democracy Corps study suggests. For Democrats, it just underlines the importance of addressing the criticisms of moderates, not the attacks by extreme conservatives.

(Washington, DC). I am here for the annual grantees’ meeting of Learn & Serve America, the federal program that funds community service as part of education (“service-learning”). In my own Tufts class last week, funded by L&SA, I asked my students to read the “Starfish Story,” which is very widely used to motivate service. (I have previously satirized the story, here).

Once a man was walking along a beach. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. Off in the distance he could see a person going back and forth between the surf’s edge and and the beach. Back and forth this person went. As the man approached he could see that there were hundreds of starfish stranded on the sand as the result of the natural action of the tide.

The man was stuck by the the apparent futility of the task. There were far too many starfish. Many of them were sure to perish. As he approached the person continued the task of picking up starfish one by one and throwing them into the surf.

As he came up to the person he said, “You must be crazy. There are thousands of miles of beach covered with starfish. You can’t possibly make a difference.” The person looked at the man. He then stooped down and pick up one more starfish and threw it back into the ocean. He turned back to the man and said, “It sure made a difference to that one!”

I asked my class to compare the Starfish Story to some principles that have adopted by our Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts. We say:

The College … strives to operate its community partnership activities in accordance with the following principles:
• To focus its programs in communities where Tufts University campuses are located: Boston’s Chinatown, Medford, Somerville, Grafton, the Mystic River Watershed and Talloires, France.
• To plan, conduct, and manage teaching, service and research activities in full collaboration with community partners. To take into consideration the impressive assets of local communities as well as the problems and challenges that they face.
• To fully orient and prepare people from Tufts to be effective in their community work. To elevate the knowledge of community representatives about Tufts. To maximize both (a) contributions to the education of Tufts students and to faculty research, and (b) benefits to communities.
• To support university and community representatives to jointly define high standards of quality, and to produce work that meets these standards. To document, evaluate and disseminate information about both educational outcomes and community benefits.
• To support and elevate faculty participation in community partnerships through their teaching, research and public service activities.

Some of the differences that my students identified …

The guy in the Starfish story doesn’t “plan.” He doesn’t appear to work in a community where he has roots or can be held accountable to the recipients of his service as fellow citizens. He doesn’t collaborate with the starfish. He doesn’t have standards of quality, certainly not ones that the starfish have helped to develop. There is no connection to research to learning. If the man in the story benefits from his actions, he is not conscious of the benefit.

From Alex and Me by Irene Pepperberg (which I’m not reading, but my wife Laura is):

The students occasionally took Alex to the washroom, where there was a very large mirror above the sinks. Alex used to march up and down the little shelf in front of the mirror, making noise, looking around, demanding things. Then one day in December 1980 when Kathy Davidson took him to the washroom, Alex seemed really to notice the mirror for the first time. He turned to look right into it, cocked his head back and forth a few times to get a fuller look, and said, ‘What’s that?’

‘That’s you,’ Kathy answered. ‘You’re a parrot.’

Alex looked some more and then said, ‘What color?’

Kathy said, ‘Gray. You’re a gray parrot, Alex.’ The two of them went through that sequence a couple more times. And that’s how Alex learned the color gray.

I have no idea what was really going on in Alex’s brain, but I do believe I understand why this story seems so touching. Alex learns that he happens to be a parrot. I happen to be a human being–and not just any human being, but exactly the one who happens to look back at me in mirrors (and who’s about as gray as Alex was). It all seems a matter of luck. You could be you, you could be someone else, you could be a very smart African gray parrot, or you could be a sea slug. I imagine a creature walking, crawling, or flapping through life until the point when it is suddenly told what it is. What a blow that could be! Our identity seems completely vulnerable to the whims of chance, not even slightly under our control. I only hope that Alex–if he really learned what he was–was glad about it. That’s about the best we can hope for.