Tag: politicians

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Letter Be

By the time this appears in print, Gil’s letter should be almost ready to arrive.

Gil is my stunningly brilliant 6-year-old nephew. (No, it’s not short for Gilbert, and yes, my sister is an Anne of Green Gables fan.) He’s a budding student of the sciences, who once casually pointed out landmarks on the moon and Mars to me during an imaginary space odyssey. His busy hands have built long, elaborate marble runs, followed by long painstaking videos depicting the “races” between the marbles as they swerve and roll.

And now Mister Gil has discovered the epistolary art.

“Dear Anut Heathr/Uncle Scott/Missy,” he opened in carefully handwritten crayon, with animal and robot stickers decorating each line. “Wut things are you doing? And wut book are you reading? How is the weather? Please wriet back.”

My own response is finally ready for him. I say “finally” because … well, this is an admission that doesn’t come easily to a professional writer. This is between you, me, and a few thousand other readers, OK?

The fact is, I’m terrible at personal letters.

I know, it doesn’t make much sense. I’ve been a columnist for years. I can write news stories and PR pieces easily. And I’m quick to jump on emails, social media, and all the other communications tools of the 21st century. Easy.

But good old-fashioned mail? Too often, my brain resembles a kindergarten playground, trying to get everyone to line up properly and get back to class. “Oh, yeah, I need to send that reply out … oh, wait, we’re out of envelopes, I’ll pick some up at the store tomorrow … huh, the old envelope got recycled, I’d better email Carey for the address … OK, I know I have stamps around here somewhere …. “

If this all took place in one sitting, it might not be so bad. But each gets punctuated with occasions of Life Happening and soon “Scott’s Correspondence” has become the next long-running miniseries, complete with episodic cliffhangers. (“Will Scott and his envelope make it to the post office in the same trip?”)

Nonetheless … we’re doing this. Because it’s important to Gil. And therefore it’s important to us.

He’s learning. And all of us in the family want to encourage that. So we write. We click on his YouTube videos. We keep an eye out for books and toys that’ll fuel his interests even further. And we smile as he constantly finds more for us to encourage.

After all, when you reward behavior, you tend to see more of it.

That’s true for most people, whether we’re talking 6-year-olds or congressmen. Oh, granted, the 6-year-olds usually aren’t as stubborn and willful as the politicians (I blame a lack of regular naps and the occasional time-out), but the principles are the same. Communicate. Show up. Be clear. Encourage. Don’t stop. Packing a town hall or filling up a voice mail box may not be as cute as attending a school program, but it’s part of the same idea.

Smart politicians know this. The ones that forget sometimes become unemployed politicians.

And the best part is, it shapes you too. It makes you a better voter. A better relative. Maybe even a better letter-writer.

What you touch, touches you. And both can be better for the experience.

If you’re lucky, you’ll even get some cool robot stickers out of the deal.

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Opening the Door

Hell froze over. Pigs are soaring over the Rockies. The Chicago Cubs can start printing World Series programs.

In other words, Donald Trump just let a banned reporter back in a campaign event.

Not just one outlet, either. According to recent reports, the Donald has shredded his entire blacklist, a do-not-invite wall of spite that extended from the Washington Post to Buzzfeed and maybe even the Daily Planet while he was at it. Anyone who had dared offend him with their coverage or their cheek (one online outlet put their coverage of him in the Entertainment section) had been summarily shown the door.

And then, a wall that had been rising for over a year suddenly came down.

Not with an apology, of course, or any acknowledgement that the candidate had done anything ill-advised. That would be expecting a bit much. If anything, his press ban was lowered with a bit of resignation, a sigh of “I figure they can’t treat me any worse.” But still, lower it he did.

Reality finally broke down the front door.

This is one of those things that remains true whether you love or hate Trump, or for that matter, whether you love or hate the press. If you are a politician – whether holding office or running for it – you cannot do without the press, any more than a modern-day NFL team can do without television coverage or a lounge lizard can do without tacky gold chains and a pickup line. As a would-be representative of a free society, this is your reality.

It’s a reality that our nation’s leaders have tried to dodge on occasion. President Nixon was the most notorious, maintaining an outright “enemies list,” but he was hardly the first or last president to have an antagonistic relationship with the Fourth Estate. Even Thomas Jefferson, who once said he preferred newspapers without a government to a government without newspapers, once wrote in exasperation that “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”

Nothing is more tempting than to build a wall – if thy press offend thee, cut it off! But it’s a little like Mom’s warning about picking at a wound. It may feel good at the time, but it doesn’t help things, and it’s almost certainly going to make them worse.

As almost any veteran politician could have told Trump, cutting a press outlet out of your events doesn’t end the conversation. It just ends your control of it. Campaign events are highly staged, positioned to put a candidate in the best possible light and give him or her an opportunity to address the issues of the day. Take that away and – heaven forbid – the reporters may just go off and find news about you on their own.

What a concept, huh?

Add in the fact that a press wall is really leaky – many high-profile events with limited space have pool coverage, where reporters have agreed to share information – and the surrender becomes even more inevitable.

It’s not a bad rule of thumb for any of us: engagement and interaction beats withdrawal and disdain. Granted, there are some toxic people and situations where the best move is to create as much distance as possible. But remember that your refusal to interact with a situation does not guarantee that you cannot still be shaped by it. Pick your spots carefully and with much thought.

Gee. Forethought. Maybe that’s a word that more of our national politicians need to learn.

But maybe they prefer the taste of flying bacon.