Bring back Truman! Hell, Bring back Ike (Skelton)

Bring back Truman!  Hell, Bring back Ike (Skelton)

Scholarly treatments of congress tend to be damning.  For those who subscribe to noble visions of our nation’s legislative body, such as those presented by JFK in Profiles in Courage or conjured up by thoughts of Harry Truman overseeing spending in WWII, such rough treatment might be an eye opener. 

Yesterday my Honors American Government students read and discussed an excerpt from David Mayhew’s Congress: The Electoral Connection.  He proposed that members of congress are solely interested in getting reelected.  To further this goal they engage in three basic activities:

Advertising

Credit Claiming

And Strategic Position Taking

These three behaviors sound familiar as of late?  Such hard-nosed critiques of congress that border on theoretically minded denunciations are nothing new to political scientists.  And I want to raise this point: the self-interested behavior of congressmen and women has proven to be a non-partisan affair, neither party is immune to bad behavior when holding the majority.

It is difficult to tell how long this government shutdown will last, as we are entering unprecedented territory here.  Clinton and Gingrich’s 1996 offers little in the way of comparisons, as the political landscape since then has changed not so drastically.  That reminds me of people who place the Cold War on top of modern foreign policy seeking meaningful similarities and differences. 

In a few hours former member of the House of Representatives Ike Skelton (D-MO) is going to talk to my Political Leadership course. I can’t help but being a bit nostalgic for some of the congressional leaders of yesterday.  People who, like Missouri’s own Harry Truman, acted with a degree of trust in the opposition and willingness to bargain and compromise. 

If Mayors Ruled the World

If Mayors Ruled the World

At this year’s American Political Science Conference in Chicago a new book published by Yale University Press caught my eye:  If Mayors Ruled the World by noted scholar Benjamin Barber. 

This got me thinking about my appreciation for local leaders.  I place a high emphasis on grassroots community leadership, rather than the distant kind in Washington D.C.  Local leaders have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.  The decisions they make, though often small, rarely go unnoticed.  What they do touches people’s everyday lives directly: emergency services, roads, and garbage collection.

I’ve also had many positive interactions with them.  Often I’ll invite the Kansas City area’s regional leaders into classes to speak.  Generally, these folks that take the time to run for local offices are driven to do so because they care.  They care about their neighborhoods, and more importantly, their neighbors.  I have found them to be quite a different breed than national level office holders and seekers.  This isn’t to say there aren’t bad ineffective local leaders, there are!  But if nothing else, they just case an even deeper affection for the good ones.

This semester I’m helping Rockhurst political science alum Joe Reardon teach a course on regionalism.  Joe, who is no doubt a well-known civic leader to many reading this blog, is the former Mayor/CEO of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kansas.

While publicly known as the person who helped resurrect at least a part of the metropolitan area from life support (Cerner, Google, Sporting Kansas City…), I know him as a an all-around nice and smart guy.  He’s a great teacher too by the way!

Rockhurst is lucky enough to have its prominent alum back on campus educating our students.  While a primary theme of this new course is the necessity of innovation, the course is itself structured in an innovative way.  The class is of a smaller size – it has 15 in it - and is composed of students in both the social sciences and business.  It meets on Monday nights and has the students working on research projects centered on the concept of metropolitan regionalism.  Joe brings in some fantastic guest speakers from his contact list, and then speaks based on firsthand knowledge about local leadership.

My favorite feature of the class is probably the exchange of ideas between people in different disciplines: Professor Mike Stellern in economics, students from the Helzberg School, as well as undergraduates in political science. 

I’m proud to be a part of such a great group of people exploring such an important topic as regionalism!   That’s an idea I’ll have to return to in a later post…

Blog About a Blog

….just sitting here typing my blog

Though I’ve read plenty of blogs before, I’ve never written one myself.  I’m going to use the opportunity to talk about life as a professor at Rockhurst, what I’m working on as a scholar, and I’ll throw in some thoughts on political issues of the day.  And if that’s not enough content I suppose I can brag about Kansas basketball.

…man I bet Madison is over there next door writing a masterpiece for his blog right now.

I’m about ready to walk over for my Political Leadership class at 220.  When I first took over teaching this course it was taught as a series of historical biographies ranging from Jesus Christ and Gandhi right up to current politicians.  What I’ve done to it is add in some theoretical information on leadership, to ground it; as well as work in some case study content.  That way it’s not all over the map.

…all over the map, I’ll tell you what’s all over the map is this damn blog entry.

So yesterday was Constitution Day, which Professor Chuck Moran and I celebrated in Sedgwick Hall.  He brought in Lamar’s Donuts and milk and the political science honors society, Pi Sigma Alpha, provided pizza and soda.  We watched the Mel Gibson movie the Patriot, also Dr. Moran’s.  Turnout was pretty solid and it was a good excuse to eat free food.

…holy cooooooow, could they have not found a louder lawnmower. 

Monday we hosted the Chilean Ambassador to the OAS, Dario Paya, in the Science Center.  It was a lovely event with many students turning out to hear what he had to say.  He was a great speaker, and told stories to get his point across.  He compared his smaller nation’s economy to a fly in a jumbo jet.  The fly might be moving south, but the jet is rushing him north anyway. 

Anyway, after a couple of late evenings on campus, tonight I’m happy to be going to the Royals game and taking it easy. 

Why I'm working on a Saturday

Procrastination mainly.

But also magis, or “the more.”  Each year Rockhurst picks one of its six core Jesuit values to focus on as a community.  This year the selected value is magis.  If magis were an action movie star he would be the Rock.

I say this because at one point in early summer he had four movies out simultaneously (Snitch, G.I. Joe Retaliation, Pain & Gain, and Fast & Furious)!  Also, he has 5.5 million Twitter followers and follows no one back; which, though unbelievably arrogant, is epic.  

 https://twitter.com/TheRock

But I want to be careful throwing out the word magis like I’m repeating some kind of catchy new One Direction lyric or yelling YOLO to encourage a group of friends.  The word, and more importantly the outstandingly rich idea is serves as a placeholder for, needs some context.  Timothy Hanchin, a teacher at Boston College High School wrote that there is a danger in reducing a Jesuit institution’s mission down to a few single words or phrases (America, May 8, 2006).  He brought up the example of a Jesuit high school that reduced “man for others” to M.F.O.  So, lol btw.  (Fortunately, the the set of first letters of Rockhurst's six chosen values contains no vowels, thus making acronyms unpronounceable). 

G.M.R.C.C.W.

The beauty in what the Rockhurst campus does is in its providing an ongoing community dialogue about the idea of magis.   And more important than that, we actually strive to live out the value in practice.  There are student and staff reflections on the meaning of the concept sent out to the campus community electronically, and the faculty is encouraged to incorporate it into their teaching. 

Though it might surprise some of my current students my approach to magis does not entail more reading and more assignments.  Rather, working magis into how I teach can be as simple as talking about the concept in terms of a political decision, and it can also be so pervasive as to not require continual reintroduction.  This value is now serving as a guiding framework to how I’m talking about the Constitution and the Founding in my Honors American Government course: the founder’s striving for “more” in the balance between personal economic interest and principled ideas.  Their structured response, the Constitution, is after all their best bargaining and compromise to reach for more in a new nation.  I see James Madison, in this one respect, as a late 18^th century Rock.

He didn’t have the Rock’s agent though, or Twitter cache. 

 

If you're not first you're last

Rockhurst students usually don't enroll in PS1100, American Government,  so they can learn about the nation's founding.  More typically they are interested in current events and controversy.  They are more prone to enter the class with opinions about current politicians rather than the thoughts and views of the framers.  Some tend to like President Obama rather than Republicans. 

While other might think he is a bit out of touch.

So it might be difficult to engage students in a discussion about the founder's motivations and principles when their attention is understandably drawn to current events, such as those in Syria.  The glory that makes the connection easy is that present day political actions are guided by the structures of government established all those years ago by men such as Jefferson, Madison, and Washington. 



Concepts such as the separation of powers and checks and balances play out on the modern political stage. 

Public conversation today is hinging on if the President of the United States should have sent a powerful foreign policy message by acting quickly without the consent of Congress.  If he would have attacked Syria with no Congressional resolution he is, according to those eager to let loose a missile salvo, teaching the world that the US remains the dominant power in the middle east.




However, on this one I come down on the side of the President.  While communication from the White House has been bewildering, sending a message to the world that democratic processes will have their say rather than quick unilateral action is a wonderful thing.  To use a sports analogy: this is an "audible from the line of scrimmage" being cast by the White House as well thought out set play.  I think all of that inside the D.C. Beltway analysis is far less important though when compared to getting the right result: the correct handling of a foreign policy and humanitarian crisis.