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| Jefferson |
"If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy." - Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, November 29, 1802
How much time should Connecticut politicians spend consulting
Twitter and other like venues?
It depends how much time they have to waste. Positive
comments are self-affirming, negative comments put a dent in swelling egos.
Such sites are not a reliable guide to the majority temperaments of voters.
Do Washington DC political advisory groups offer winning
advice to state non-incumbent politicians?
That has not been the case in Connecticut in the recent
past. We all know that the second thing that happens after a non-unionized
company becomes unionized is that “going out of business sales” are posted. The
second thing that happens after a non-incumbent in Connecticut ties his or her
political ascent to a Washington DC campaign advisory group is that the
politician loses the race. State politics really is local. And politicians
easily lose themselves in the gap that forms when they adopt unthinkingly a
program hatched by underwriters detached from state issues. However,
the financing of state campaigns is sometimes national. So, Washington contacts
may be both financially necessary and politically lethal.
Is straddling the fence on “cultural issues” in
Connecticut useful or not?
It is not useful. There is a problem with the nomenclature.
Any issue not strictly economic is cultural. And there are very few economic
issues that have no cultural ramifications. Inflation, for instance, is both an
economic and a cultural issue, because excessive spending, excessive borrowing,
and the devaluation of the currency through excessive printing of money causes
cultural upheaval.
Straddling the fence on any issue, cultural or economic,
does not generally achieve a positive purpose, because the straddler must
engage in some form of dissimulation to garner the votes of both those who
support A and not-A.
Now, political compromise is not the same sort of thing as
embracing ends that exclude each other. You cannot both jump into
the pool and not jump into the pool. But you may fashion an arrangement between
swimmers and non-swimmers that may benefit both parties, for example by regulating
the time during which the pool may be used. Gun regulation and abortion
regulation are instances of this kind.
How much influence has Connecticut media had in shaping
the destiny of the state?
That depends on uniformity of purpose. A state media should
be intellectually diverse enough to accommodate rival political viewpoints and
,ideally, a state media that has not simply surrendered to the status quo should be contrarian.
This is what William Randolph Hearst meant when he said a newspaper “should
have no friends.”
Politics is too important a business to leave entirely in
the hands of incumbent politicians. When a state’s media offers political views
that do not differ markedly from those officiating in what we might call a
nearly permanent one-party state, it is fair to say that the nature of the
state is what it is because the nature of journalism is what it is.
We are living in a time when it has become exceedingly
dangerous to let the reigning power think for us. As an institution, the media,
which has changed a good deal over the years, has in the past been an
institution that has jealously guarded its indispensible mandate – to think
fearlessly, to say the thing that is, without fear or favor.
That is what a free press
really means. Thomas Jefferson, the archangel of First Amendment freedoms,
called our attention to the importance of a free press when he said that
constitutional government in a republic, once destroyed by politicians, could
be recovered and restored, provided the press remained free.
In a letter to Edward
Carrington in 1787, Jefferson wrote, “Were it left to me to decide
whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a
government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should
mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading
them.”
Jefferson served as president from March 4, 1801, to March
4, 1809. The Jefferson/John Adams campaign was especially bruising. Yet we find
Jefferson writing to the Marquis de Lafayette in 1823, “The only security of
all, is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted, when
permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted
to. It is necessary to keep the waters pure.” The turbulence aroused by a free
press, Jefferson stressed, is “as necessary in the political world as storms in
the physical… a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”
Everyday upon awakening, reporters should ask themselves,
“What turbulence have I caused today? Are we still free?”
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