Nothing but old news will be made next week at the University of Oklahoma when remnants of the last century’s New Deal model politics gather to crown themselves with the mantle of an independent third force in the 2008 presidential campaign.
Without New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the meeting organized by former Sens. David Boren of Oklahoma and Sam Nunn of Georgia would likely come and go with only fleeting notice.
But the prospect of an immensely wealthy news baron reportedly willing to spend a billion of his own dollars on a campaign is irresistible to the mainstream media political experts. They will troop to Norman, then dutifully file their dispatches heralding the latent — i.e. illusory — populist groundswell for a rich guy who numbers the New York City mayoralty among his many toys.
The journalists and politicos heading for Oklahoma seem blissfully ignorant of the first genuinely transpartisan political development of the Internet age. It has yet to find voice at the candidate level, but that hardly matters for now because the transparency movement is well along in changing the rules of the game in politics and public policy. And he who sets the rules ultimately wins the debate.
Haven’t heard of the transparency movement? No surprise there, because this column is probably the first time that title has been applied in a daily newspaper to the disparate elements from across the ideological spectrum that make up the emerging enterprise.
It includes insurgent conservatives disgusted by the federal spending and regulatory explosion of the Bush administration and the Republican majority in Congress, and liberal New Media activists soured by the Democratic Party’s subservience to special interests more concerned about enriching themselves than feeding the poor.
They began coalescing shortly after the 2000 presidential election as they realized the Internet could transform politics and government like it has the mainstream media and retail commerce. They work at places like the Heritage Foundation, OMB Watch, Club for Growth, Sunlight Foundation and National Taxpayers Union, and include bloggers like N.Z. Bear at Truth Laid Bear.
The infant movement’s strength first became evident with the Porkbusters’ Internet-based coalition advocating the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency (FFATA) Act of 2006 that mandated the Googlelike, searchable database now found at USASpending.gov. The database puts most federal spending within a few mouse clicks for every taxpayer.
The movement first actively came together in 2005 behind Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., whose seemingly unlikely partnership made FFATA a viable legislative proposal. Coburn and Obama have said repeatedly that FFATA would have not have become law without Porkbusters. The politics of federal spending will be changed as radically by USASpending.gov as campaign finance and strategy have been by OpenSecrets.org.
The transparency movement’s members don’t agree on the ends of government. Where they meet is changing the process of government via the Internet. Instead of centralized, top-down command-and-control government dominated by insulated elites, they seek a decentralized, participatory structure that empowers individuals and local communities.
The Porkbusters and FFATA are hardly the transparency movement’s sole point of impact on the political establishment to date. Earmarks have become the fulcrum of federal spending debates largely because of the movement.
For now, Heritage’s Center for Media and Public Policy and the Sunlight Foundation are the movement’s hub. But that will certainly change and not only because Sunlight’s R&D lab is developing a lengthy list of widgets and mash-ups that are even now putting an incredible array of research and information about government and politics within those few mouse clicks.
There is also a largely unreported ferment outside the normal partisan political channels represented by burgeoning groups like the Sam Adams Alliance and Citizens in Charge, which are recruiting and training a new generation of citizen activists adapting the initiative and referendum processes to the Internet age.
And there are millions of smart people across the country who every time they log on to the Internet start thinking up new ways to use it to improve their lives and those of their neighbors. They don’t need approval from a bunch of far-away bureaucrats and in a dynamic democratic economy, they will be heard.
So let the fading eminences have their meeting. Their time in the spotlight is likely to be as notable as the tenure of a losing OU football coach.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner
