The Party Faithful : How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap by Amy Sullivan [book review]

The Party Faithful : How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap by Amy Sullivan [book review]

Some on-line progressives to dismiss Amy Sullivan as a concern troll, mainly those who have managed to convince themselves that Democrats can somehow regain power without reconciling themselves to the vast majority of voters who take religion more seriously than they take politics. That they are wrong does not make Sullivan right on all counts, but she is certainly a voice worth hearing.

The book starts with a narrative of how Democrats lose the Evangelical and Catholic vote. History is rarely confined to a single narrative, but there is much to recommend Sullivan’s chronicle. To a great extent, Democrats did write off both groups as holding positions incompatible with the party’s. The most adept Republicans recognized that politics consists of unifying those holding differing positions to build a governing coalition. There can be no doubt that much that the Republicans did was deceitful and damaged both the party and the co-opted religious groups in a very short run. That does not excuse the Democrats for their failures.

Sullivan moves on to the Clinton years, in a chapter subtitled “faithful presidency”. This might seem like a bit of a stretch, but she hits the nail on the head in the following chapter on “John Kerry’s Religion Disaster.” It certainly wasn’t that Kerry was not a faithful Christian and a thoughtful Catholic, but that he pretended that whole part of his life didn’t matter. Religion matters to most religious people. Sullivan is right in pointing out that his response worked for Kennedy, but JFK didn’t have to address abortion. Forty years later, a lot has changed.

Similarly, Sullivan’s prescriptions for making the Democratic Party more “religion-friendly” have a lot of merit. It is not enough to show that the Republicans have been hypocrites or that they cynically manipulated believers, Democrats must earn votes. Nothing wrong with that. In a democracy, building coalitions is how you achieve the power to accomplish things.

Sullivan’s book is valuable to religious progressives for its narrative strength, though it will have little shocking to most of them. Those who want to either use or exclude religion will find little here of value.

PLa Conference in Minneapolis (2)

One of the programs I have now seen at least three times is Karen Hyman’s on Reinventing the Library.  I am normally skittish about “re-invention”, because I feel strongly about the mission of the public library and don’t think very highly of efforts by the likes of Steve Coffman to re-invent it. A re-invented wheel could roll better or it might be square. The way to tell the difference it to see it it still fulfills its mission. Too often, re-invented libraries are square wheels.

This is not true of Hyman’s presentations. They can be a bit of a slap across the face, in a good Zen way. Some of her best bits were in a section on the dangers of “active Inertia.”

[Organizations can] fall prey to active inertia — responding to even the most disruptive market shifts by accelerating activities that succeeded in the past. When the world changes, organizations trapped in active inertia do more of the same.  … To avoid active inertia, you can forget about…  “Best practices” i.e. things that possibly worked somewhere else last year.   The traditional long range plan with action steps i.e. things that might be good ideas if this year was like last year and next year was like this year.

This is based on the writings of Donald Sull, like Porter, someone who appears in Harvard Business Review. Damn, I have to get back to scanning articles there.

This ties back to the difference between operational and strategic. If you are in a hole, operational thinking asks how to make the hole deeper, wider and more comfortable. Strategic thinking asks about maybe getting out. (Note to GW Bush and friends)

Another takeaway is that every library is a destination / experience library, some just care about the experience people have when they arrive. Can  we be rude to a cute 9 year old – certainly, without thinking twice. If we are concerned about hospitality, we would need to change a lot of things.

One approach she and several other speakers mentioned is “zoning”, having a variety of spaces with differing rulesets, some loud gathering spaces, some quiet study spots, places for children and families, areas for adults to look at books. I think we “get” this at McMillan, but have it about half implemented. I’ll stop here since I have a dinner to cook and you can see the handout at the link above, which includes Hyman’s contact information.

Operational vs strategic

In CIP on the Moon, John Celli quotes noted business writer Michael Porter on the difference between management / operations / how we do things and leadership/strategy/ why we do things. I am going to break a small rule here and get political, so skip this if you want only library related thoughts.

Since this administration started the run up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, we have been fed reports every six months about how well things are going.  New sets of tactics (called strategies, but really operational) have been rolled out regularly to great acclaim.  New types of counter-insurgency ops would make a difference. Funding local warlords would strengthen democracy. Holding elections would make all the difference (ignoring the truism – one man/one vote / one time). This is made even more opaque when the military refers to mission. Libraries/ churches / organizations / businesses may have a mission which defines them, lets them know what success is and keeps them true to their origins.

It is in the sense that our Mission / Strategy in Iraq is a failure. Not that our troops (including my sons) don’t do their best, follow orders and act in the best tradition of their services, but that there is a failure right at the top, at the strategic level.

In The Pentagon’s New Map, Thomas PM Barnett details his A-Z roadmap for dealing with failed regimes. I believe that if this administration had followed something close to this as a strategy, we might well have obtained a worthy result in Iraq.

Sadly, this administration followed more of an Alpha to Omega strategy, one which intersects Barnett’s at at least one point (invade Iraq and depose Saddam), but diverges from it just about everywhere else. No coalition building, no buy-in from regional players, no broad based reconstruction effort, no concern for security until the situation was chaotic and beyond repair, no consideration of local conditions, too much emphasis on US political considerations.

This demonstrates the importance of proper grand strategy. When you are aiming at the right target, even a near miss is effective. You can correct your aim and sight in on the target. When you are aiming at the wrong target, even a bullseye is not helpful. Mid-course corrections and adjustments just keep you on the wrong road. No matter how long we continue to pursue this current flawed strategy, no matter how effective the operations are, we are just wasting blood and treasure and time, none of which we can afford to spare.
Only a new strategy can retrieve the situation. More troops, more payouts to local warlords, more technology, more kinetics – even taken together they do not equal a change in strategy. They are just reinforcing failure, something that this administration has turned into an art form.

The American public recognizes this, without being able to articulate it. They know things are headed in the wrong direction, without being able to specify the right direction. It is one reason that Iraq is not in the forefront of discussion any more. It is a rear view decision. It was a mistake. We need to disentangle  ourselves. More of the same isn’t an option, even if it were possible, which it isn’t.

I now return you to your librarian. As always, political posts are (almost) always relegated to DailyKos.

CIP on the Moon – comments

CIP on the moon -By John Celli — netConnect, 1/15/2008

I often blow through the Net Connect part of Library Journal. I am not alone in that. I am probably the only person at my library who pays any attention to it at all.  Too much Library 2.0 and other hooey. But Celli caught my attention. Not only does he quote the Boston Trustees, he also cites Michael Porter, another favorite of mine and a seminal source for my writing.

Here is why this article matters:

“Improving operational effectiveness is a necessary part of management,” Michael Porter notes in On Competition (Harvard Business Sch., 1998), “but it is not strategy.”

A company’s history, Porter suggests, can also help to revitalize its strategy. “What was the vision of the founder? What were the products and customers that made the company?” he reminds us to ask. In his History of Libraries in the Western World (Scarecrow Pr., 1984), Michael Harris identifies a passage in the 1852 Trustees Report of the Boston Public Library that articulates, “perhaps better than any document before or since, the ideal conception of public library service”:

As Porter says elsewhere, technology is not only not a strategy, it isn’t even a competitive advantage.

Now that I am bumping up against just copying the article, time for some comments.

It is great to improve operational effectiveness and that is the function of good management. Keeping the basis of your business/ operations in mind and using it to guide the operations is leadership and strategy. Librarians, being a passive/aggressive profession, make decent managers, but few aspire to leadership. We love to tweak libraries and make them better, but there is a serious resistance to looking under the hood and seeing just what it is we actually are doing for a living. Library history is made even more boring than is needs to be and it isn’t thrilling reading. But without it, we lose sight of why libraries exist. As this article suggests, it is not the containers (books), but the content. Celli may not have all the answers, but he is asking the right questions. Bravo!

Another recent article in a non-library source asked if libraries could be started today and what justification could they use in requesting public funding. The only answer is: the same rationale that was used the first time.  Public education for citizens is the only answer that has any traction. Not as a middle class entitlement, not as some legacy institution. Certainly not as a First Amendment institution.

I was heartened to see mission emphasized in several programs at the 2008 PLA. Too many programs focus on how rather than why. It is great to see how someone displays materials or designs cool spaces, but why are those spaces designed that way, why does display matter. Why do we talk so little about the contents of our libraries? No matter how much content a library has, how much on-line access it facilitates, how much it displays, if the content isn’t first rate, you are reduced to selling sizzle when you are charged with providing steak. Thus we can circle back to mission, serving the local community and making the world a better place. To do less is to be less than managers – just bureaucrats.

Public Library Association in Minneapolis (1)

I now interrupt my tour of the Boston Trustees for a series of comments of the 2008 Public Library Association conference in Minneapolis.

For a start I will mention one of the highlights and a slight disappointment. The most energizing program I attended was presented by Greg Buss, the director of Richmond Public Library (BC). They generously keep their presentations on their website under About Us.

Now, my library (like many others) has used Richmond as a test bed for the last decade. They try things out and after we can see that they work, we adapt them to our situation.  We went self check after seeing how they did it, though we also owe a debt to Waukesha Public Library, who provided  a more local example. We have moved to display areas, also following their example. While we did not get any amazing new ideas from them this time, Buss did remind us of our goals and that sparked what I hope will be a new wave of innovation. His presentation may be the focus of our next staff training day.  He also echoed our main thesis – that you do all this to become a great library. Not a great bookstore, not an excellent retail establishment. No innovation should be planned without seeing that it serves the library’s mission – otherwise why bother. All this is also in line with my favorite Chesterton quote. I won’t repeat it, though you can find it in my book under Chesterton.

I was disappointed in the virtual conference – not in the content, but in the participation. I was granted permission to host a virtual Talk Table. Now I hosted a non-virtual Talk Table in Seattle four years ago and found it enlightening. It is helpful to get all your ducks in a row, think things through and put it on paper. My topic this time was about how we slowly evolved into a more displayed oriented library, especially small steps that can be taken to start on the road to where Richmond PL already is. I was quite pleased with the presentation, which was narrated /recorded PowerPoint, a format I hadn’t attempted before. But in the event, it seems that none of the Talk Tables generated much discussion. They also seemed hard to find and poorly linked from the main conference. Since they required registration (and a fee), I can’t link to it, though I may post it here later.

It’s too bad about the Talk Tables, since one of them was very relevant to us. It concerned coffee and tea service in a library, something that we have had a problem with. We simply do not have enough traffic for it to make financial sense. The start of the presentation made it clear though – if you are doing coffee/tea/food service, you must do it to support the mission of your institution. You can’t do it to make money, to be an entrepreneur or to show off. It has to make sense as a portion of your service or you shouldn’t spend any of your time on it.

As I write up my notes, I will be posting them here