What if more of "our" people took the cause into gov't service? Now The Albany Project's Phillip Anderson has gone to Albany

Our colleague and friend Phillip Anderson has headed for Albany.

"One can only accomplish so much from the sidelines and this opportunity to work to diminish the space between people and the government that serves them was one that I simply could not pass up."

-- The Albany Project's Phillip Anderson, in a Monday blogpost
announcing his new career undertaking

by Ken

As regular DWT readers know, I have a sentimental attachment to the strange workings of the New York State Legislature, dating back in particular to the last time the Democrats took control of the State Senate (and the Assembly as well), in the LBJ landslide of 1964 -- a tenure that, remarkably, lasted less than a year.

The problem for Albany Democrats back then was a split in the state party (between factions loyal to New York City Mayor Robert Wagner and to U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy), which made them unable to elect a leadership in either house until, finally, an exasperated Nelson Rockefeller, the imperial Republican governor at the time, ordered "his" legislators to vote with one faction to organize the two houses of the legislature. As I wrote way back when, that exercise in legislative comedy and futility figured prominently in the story of how I got into Harvard, except for this one tiny niggling hitch where as it turned out I didn't get into Harvard, the joke was on me, ha ha. I laughed about it a lot, and for a long time after. (If you think I'm going to retell that particular humiliation, you're wrong. The link is above.)

As we've had a number of occasions to chronicle, this year's Democratic takeover of the NYS Senate hasn't been exactly a thing of beauty. In the spirit of the recently passed Passover season, it's hard not to think of the Senate Democrats emerging from their 40-year servitude as a permanent minority as something like the Israelites' emergence from slavery in Egypt. It's often suggested that the Israelites' ensuing 40 years of wandering in the desert were needed to gradually rid them of their slave mentality. The Senate Democrats don't have another 40 years to spare, however; they have a host of legislative urgencies to deal with.

I confess that I don't pay intimate attention to the arcane workings of our esteemed legislature, but I have the highest regard for the people who actually make it their business to. You know they haven't taken on the job for the glamour. And I'm far from the only one who has come to depend in particular on Phillip Anderson and the fine website he's developed, The Albany Project, devoted to the inner workings of New York State government and politics.

(On a personal level, I think of Phillip as a comrade in the tiny band led by the indefatigable Mike Stark to turn the tables on Bill O'Reilly by visiting his Long Island home to offer him the sort of "accountability moment" he continues to inflict on people he thinks need to be held to account for things they've said or done. Alas, Phillip missed the grand confrontation in Billo's driveway, as he caught the train out of Penn Station in Manhattan after the one I took, and it unfortunately turned out to be a train doomed by the Long Island Railroad gods never to get farther east than Queens. None of the wild improvisations he and Mike concocted in a steady stream of mobile-phone traffic could get him any closer to Manhasset.)

Here's Phillip's announcement of his new undertaking (from the TAP blogpost noted above):

I'm writing this on a train barreling northward into the belly of the beast - Albany. All melodrama aside, I'm writing this to tell you about what I'm now doing and, perhaps most importantly, why I'm doing it. I've accepted the job of Director of New Media Communications with the New York State Senate. Before the words "selling out" cross your lips, let me tell you why I believe I am "buying in."

When we started this site in 2006, we did so because we believed that the state government in Albany was, amongst other things, dysfunctional and opaque. Over the years I and others have relentlessly critiqued the lack of transparency in the way our government goes about the business of serving those whom they were elected to represent.

The majority of the remedies needed to facilitate a more open and transparent government are policy and process based, but a great number of them are grounded in using technology. I'm happy to report that I think great strides are being made in that arena. I've written some about the work that Andrew Hoppin, the Senate's new CIO, and his team are working to open up that body using new media tools. After seeing them working up close, I feel confident in saying that they are doing a hell of a job, building some amazing tools and working their tails off to bring tons of data that belongs to the people of New York to the light of day. (The first big rollout will be the new Senate website.It will blow the doors off the current Senate site. Trust me, it'll be a quantum leap.)

So, I've decided to put my money where my mouth is. Instead of critiquing the Senate's new media efforts from the sidelines, I am signing on to make these efforts as effective and as useful to the public as they possibly be. Instead of complaining from the sidelines about an institution that has historically hidden data bought and paid for by the people of New York, I am joining the effort to free that data.

And that's why I call it "buying in." It's easy to heckle from the cheap seats. It's quite another to take some responsibility for this stuff and work like a dog to make things better. Besides working with Andrew Hoppin and his CIO team, I'll also be working with another TAP alum, our very own Brian Keeler. One can only accomplish so much from the sidelines and this opportunity to work to diminish the space between people and the government that serves them was one that I simply could not pass up.

Is it necessary to add that this seems a splendid hire by the Senate leadership? I know how frustrated progressive sympathizers working in government are by the naivete or even cluelessness they see in the pontificating we do from the sidelines, and they're right: Making government work better -- both more effectively and more accountably -- really requires actual knowledge of how government works.

Phillip explains in his post that The Albany Project has been carefully established and nurtured to be more than any one of its participants, and so is expected to continue doing the same job it's been doing -- with occasional contributions from him.

It seems to me an altogether healthy development to see more of our most respected denizens of the blogosphere venturing into actual government service. When another friend of DWT, Matt Stoller, announced in early January that he had taken a job in the House of Representatives, I wrote a post about his remarkably thoughtful explanation, for which he coined the term "rootsgap" to describe the growing gap between Democratic Party leadership and the party's actual grass roots.

The job Matt took turned out to be senior policy adviser to FL-08 freshman Rep. Alan Grayson, who was one of our favorite House candidates and has become one of our favorite House members. Alan hit the ground running, and as Howie has had frequent occasion to note, he has been a whirlwind of activity and good sense in his first months in the House. It certainly appears from the outside that Matt has made an invaluable contribution.

I don't see any reason to doubt that both Phillip and Matt will be fighting for the objectives and agendas they've championed so persuasively. At the same time they're going to know a whole lot more about the workings of government than they knew going in.


UPDATE FROM HOWIE: Another Kind of Infiltration

Ken's right about Stoller doing a magnificent job for Rep. Grayson. Several other bloggers have been working on the campaigns of some of the most exciting candidates out there. Recently Todd Beeton, who you might know from MyDD, started working with Judy Chu who's running for Hilda Solis' old House seat (CA-32), for example. But I was struck with an entirely different kind of infiltration story this week, more of a hit and run kind. A student from Brown University, Kevin Roose, transfered to a Buy Bull "college" in Virginia to write a book about the experience. Roose went to Jerry Falwell's subversive Liberty "University" and wrote The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University.

He was determined to not mock the school, thinking it would be too easy — and unfair. He aimed to immerse himself in the culture, examine what conservative Christians believe and see if he could find some common ground. He had less weighty questions too: How did they spend Friday nights? Did they use Facebook? Did they go on dates? Did they watch Gossip Girl?

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