Americans for the Arts (actually the Americans for the Arts Action Fund) has published a comparison of the arts positions of John McCain and Barack Obama. I’m not wild about the list of issues they asked the campaigns about, since they address only very superficial considerations. Still, it’s an interesting read.
Whatever your political views, hopefully we can all agree on two things:
Fortunately, our community is pretty good on this latter count. Studies have consistently shown that artists vote at a substantially higher rate than the general public - around 80-85% for federal elections. But, of course, before you can vote, you have to register! Don’t neglect this important step and don’t wait until the last minutes. Here’s a list of state-by-state registration deadlines if you want to cast a ballot this November.
To help you along in this process, Fractured Atlas has partnered with Rock the Vote. We’ve got our own little widget that you can use to register instantly online:
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So no more excuses and no more delays. Register. And vote.
* Yeah, yeah, I know you live in a solidly blue (or red) state and one vote won’t make a difference and neither of the parties really represents you, etc. I used to be the same way until I came to my senses around 2002. Get over yourself and exercise your most fundamental democratic right. Either that or quit your whining when everything goes to sh*t.
A great nation needs all kinds of heroes. Soldiers. Diplomats. Defense attorneys. Firemen. Graphic designers?
There is very little doubt that George W. Bush was elected President in large part thanks to a crappy ballot design. (Really, it’s hard to imagine a worse layout.) Following the 2000 election debacle, there was much talk of subpar ballots in use throughout the country. Since then, however, very little has been done to fix the problem.
Richard Grefé and Jessica Friedman Hewitt of AIGA (a design trade association) are working to educate the powers that be about what good ballot design might look like. Let’s hope someone’s paying attention.
Watching the Democratic National Convention last night, I was struck by one of the most significant but rarely discussed aspects of a potential Obama presidency. Barack Obama would be the first president in memory - to my knowledge the first since Teddy Roosevelt - to come from an urban background. He grew up in Honolulu and has spent time in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Boston. This isn’t merely a biographical curiosity. It contributes to an unprecedented focus on urban policy for a major national politician.
America’s cities are stereotyped either as enclaves of effete, intellectual socialists or as concrete wastelands packed tight with welfare-dependent leeches. Authentic American individualism and entrepreneurship comes from the midwest, right? Not so much. The reality is that our cities provide massive subsidies to rural America. This is perhaps best illustrated by a report from the Tax Foundation showing a breakdown of which states receive the most federal aid compared to their tax contribution and which receive the least. (If you’re feeling feisty, check out this hilarious but informative rant from the day after the 2004 election.)
Over the coming years, America’s dependence on its cities is only going to grow, and our cities are going to play a bigger and more important role in the 21st century economy than they have in decades. Mainstream policymakers are finally starting to understand the creative economy - which is inextricably linked to urban environments - and its potency as an engine for economic development. Cities are hotbeds of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. At the same time, rising fuel costs and environmental consciousness highlight the benefits of mass transit and population density.
Yet the myth of rural/suburban authenticity and urban sloth is so entrenched that politicians with ambitions to national office wind up tripping over each other in an effort to see who can most shamelessly pander to the farm lobby.
All of this goes to show why it’s significant that Barack Obama has quietly made urban policy a centerpiece of his campaign platform. His urban policy plan contains some of his most detailed prescriptions, including symbolic steps such as the creation of a White House Office on Urban Policy and major investments in things like public-private business incubators.
The Obama campaign has published an arts platform as well, but I believe its ultimate potential impact on the arts community would not be as great as that of a more broad-based investment in America’s cities.
Cities provide the social context for so much of our collective artistic output. Yet rising real estate prices, deteriorating infrastructure, and a host of other problems are driving artists from cities like New York in droves. Some are landing in places like Philadelphia that are savvier and more progressive regarding urban cultural policy. But many others are bidding farewell to the US altogether and heading for foreign cultural hotspots like Berlin.
Retaining a vibrant arts and cultural sector in American cities won’t require massive public subsidies or a huge increase in the NEA’s budget. Artists are experts at making do with very little and generally rise to the challenge when given a chance to prove their worth through merit-based processes. What we need is a proverbial level playing field. In part, that means paying our cities even a fraction of the attention we’ve historically paid to rural America.
P.S. - Mainly out of genuine curiosity but also in the interest of fairness I did some research on John McCain’s urban policy and arts policy positions. Alas, it turns out that he doesn’t have either (at least not published by the campaign). The only comments I could find from McCain on urban issues were, uh, a bit scary.
I realize that I’m a healthcare policy nerd and that most folks find this stuff boring and impenetrable. That’s one reason why organizations like Fractured Atlas are needed; we deal with the esoteric minutia so you don’t have to.
Still, it never hurts to educate yourself, especially with an election coming up. The Kaiser Family Foundation has developed an excellent website for comparing and contrasting the major candidates healthcare policy platforms.
I’ve been tracking this stuff pretty closely, myself. To a certain extent it’s all fairly predictable. The Republican candidates mainly talk about increased competition and tax incentives for individual purchasers. The major Democratic candidates all offer proposals aimed at achieving universal coverage, generally by strengthening employer-based coverage and providing access to government-sponsored plans.
I could ramble on endlessly about this stuff, but if you’re actually interested, you’re probably better off just reading the proposals themselves (which are all accessible at health08.org).
Still here? Okay, then permit me one tiny bit of wonkishness. There’s been a lot of media coverage lately about the big dispute among the Dems, which is about whether or not to include a mandate that everyone must have insurance (Clinton and Edwards support the idea, Obama opposes it).
I’m basically a libertarian, so the very idea of such a mandate makes me squirm. However, as a practical matter, it’s absolutely essential for these kinds of “universal coverage” models to work. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama all propose new federal regulations which would require health insurance companies to insure people on a guaranteed issue, community rated basis. (Guaranteed issue means they can’t turn you down for coverage. Community rating means everyone pays the same premium, regardless of health status.) The practical problem with both of these well-intentioned concepts is that healthy people quickly figure out that they’re paying artificially higher rates to subsidize coverage for unhealthy people. Many of them, therefore, opt out of the system and decide to take their chances, rather than “overpay” for coverage. This creates a vicious circle of spiraling rate increases, as the risk pool steadily gets less and less healthy and more and more people find coverage too expensive to purchase. We’ve seen this happen in NY State, and it isn’t pretty.
An individual mandate solves this problem. By forcing everyone to have coverage, healthy or not, you stabilize the risk pool and prevent adverse selection. In my semi-educated opinion, the guaranteed issue, community rated model is simply unsustainable without either a mandate or some form of single-payer national coverage. Since the latter seems unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, mandates are probably the way to go.
