(
x-posted from The Albany Project)
It's easy to get jaded about things in New York sometimes. The seemingly endless parade of scandals, of indictments, of truly horrible policy can seem overwhelming. It often seems that New York is simply doomed to suck forever.
That's why it's so refreshing when we see something objectively awesome happening. Last night in Syracuse, Zephyr Teachout kicked off a tour that will take her all over New York, 18 stops in 16 days. She's making all of these stops to recruit teachers and women to run for public office.
Liberal activist Zephyr Teachout is touring New York starting tonight in Syracuse to try to recruit teachers and women to run for public office in New York.
Teachout, the Fordham Law School professor who ran against Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a Democratic primary last year, said the education policy battles at the state Capitol should spur teachers and parents to run for political office so their voice can be better heard.
“The focus is getting more people into the political process, and the focus here is on teachers and women,” Teachout said in an interview with Gannett’s Albany Bureau. “If there’s a central thrust, it’s educators and parents.”
This is just completely awesome. For one, government at all levels in New York is
desperately in need of some new blood. Too often we see
the same names, the same people, occupying the same offices for decades. In places like New York City that have term limits, the same pols bounce around from the City Council, to Albany, to DC and back in an ever shuffling circus of suck. Some seats are even regarded as family legacies. Consequently, we continue to get
terrible policy outcomes.
It's time for some new players and Teachout, along with the Working Families Party and NYSUT, can see what should be increasingly obvious. There is real potential for bringing new people into the process around education issues. The recent explosion of the so-called "opt-out" movement can't be ignored any longer, no matter how hard certain Albany players may try to do so.
She said the massive testing opt-out movement in New York in April, as well as protests to new teacher evaluationsshow that education advocates can play an increasingly important role in politics — on the state and local levels.
“I don’t think most people go into teaching in order to run for office, but they didn’t go into teaching to protest either,” Teachout said. “And they’ve become this incredible, powerful political force, and my hope is to engage some of those teachers who are political and hopefully get them elected and have more formal political power.”
The two biggest genuine grassroots movements afoot in New York these days are
the anti-fracking movement and that of parents and teachers revolting against
Andrew Cuomo's increasingly draconian education "
reforms." There is
real power to be tapped here and Teachout is trying to engage that power and bring these newly mobilized citizens into the political process.
Everything about that is both amazing and desperately needed.
And while I unreservedly praise this effort to bring new people into the political process, I also know that engagement and recruitment is not enough. Running for office, pretty much any office in New York isn't a cakewalk. The status quo is defended in depth. New York's political class have engineered a system that is often actively hostile to newcomers. It's why we see so many elections decided not at the ballot box, but in courtrooms when political players get challengers knocked off ballots. It is why we lag much of the nation in regards to things like same day voter registration, early voting, even vote by mail. This is the same system that has gerrymandered our state to obscene levels while also shutting down every attempt to enact meaningful reforms to our Wild West campaign finance laws. It's why we can't close the completely indefensible LLC loophole.
New York's politicians have carefully constructed a system that serves their needs, not the needs of those they were elected to represent, and certainly not the needs of those who would wish to replace them.
That's why we need to not only recruit new candidates, we need to train them on how to win in a state that stacks so much of the deck against them. We need to organize candidate boot camps that teach things like how to access the ballot, how to build a list, how to fundraise, who actually does what on a campaign and how to hire them, what a field operation actually looks like and how it works, etc. (And personally, I'd love to see a breakout titled simply "How to tell a vendor no," but that's just me.)
But all of this has to start somewhere. You can't train up and support candidates that don't exist. That's why I'm just so excited about what Zephyr Teachout is trying to do here.
Genuinely good developments in New York politics are all too rare these days. This development has the potential to be great.