Mood in Washington

The mood in Washington was a topic at dinner when I got home.  "Vitriolic", is what I'd say.  The cabbie said, "F****d up".  I was headed for the Library of Congress, to research some forty-year old testimony to a Senate committee when he volunteered his view.  The cabbie was trying to wend our way around the staging for the inauguration, in a cold drizzle that didn't encourage me to walk.

Everywhere the "fiscal cliff" was a topic.  The rancor over that seemed to be dying down, but the 'agreement' hadn't yet been reached.  The puzzle, everywhere I went, seemed to be "why is this an issue?  Didn't these guys vote these expenditures?"  It reminded me of capital budgets vs. operating budgets at HP.  Totally separate processes, seemingly separate money pots, sometimes easy to buy new equipment for workers you could not hire, and even stranger when you could hire them, but not equip them to do their job.

The "gun battle" over lethal weapons and our right to own them was heating up, but it seemed a foregone conclusion that no action would happen.  This, I was told repeatedly, is evidence that Congress can work across the aisle -- that too many Democrat Senators (Harry Reid, for example) are gun-toting characters themselves, so there is no chance the Senate could pass a bill that the House would have to consider.  The House, of course, wouldn't pass such a thing under any condition.  So here is a case that a heavily Democratic Senate and a fiercely combative Republican House can agree!

This week the nation was privy to the Hillary Clinton inquisition, and the spectacle of the Republicans deciding that if only they'd change the Electoral College rules, they could have elected Romney.  Whether the Republican governor of Virginia will have the courage to deny the quick-time bill jury-rigged by his party while the swing vote attended the inauguration awaits discovery, but for sure we'll see a fair amount of manipulation and maneuvering on these topics in the next two years.

I met with two women at one meeting -- they were most upset about the pro-choice and invasive health care issues, topics about which my wife and daughters are vociferous.

And I thought about the keynote speech that Larry Lessig gave for the tenth anniversary of Media X at Stanford the week before (January 8th).  Creator of the Creative Commons, and founder of the Cneter for Internet and Society at Stanford, Lessig now directs the Harvard Center for Ethics.  He has been sub rosa since leaving Stanford five years ago, and he used our Media X platform to unveil his program for 'fixing Congress'.  Lessig has always been a superb speaker, and this was a stemwinder performance.  

He started with historic documents re Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand of the Market, and examined what we know today about such a hand, especially tied to the "Cornucopia of the Commons" called the Internet, "the largest library of human creativity ever assembled."  I won't cover here his talk (might do it in a later blog), but the questions he posed eventually had to do with whether the Internet will 'stay free' and whether democracy in this country will survive.  His fairly gloomy answer for both was "NO" but in response to questions, said he has young children and feels compelled to try to help.  His current approach is "Rootstrikers", a group with the goal of "Fix Congress First" by getting the big money out of the election equation.  His numbers were compelling.   0.05% of Americans gave money last year for the Presidential or Congressional campaigns, and only 1 in 300 of them gave $200 or more.  Of those who gave more than $200, 1 in 30 gave more than $10,000, and 1 in 300 of them gave more than $1 million.  38 Americans gave 60% of all of the SuperPac money, which was half of the total spent.  He called it "subtle, understated, camouflaged power" behind almost all elected officials.  Hardly subtle.

The vitriol I sensed all week in Washington, from his view, is not that we have RED and BLUE states, which we do and which he decries, but that we have INSIDE the BELT WAY, and OUTSIDE, and it is that "DC is from Mars" and "We are from Earth".  The three hundred attendees murmured a lot, and the conversation later was ... ah, how do I say it ... troubled.

Not sure how to grab ahold of this for InnovaScapes, but it certainly my belief in rational arguments about how to find more funding for COPD research or more attention to the ills of America's innovation policy seem a bit irrelevant.