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Austin Moving Forward Recap | by Ben

Glenn and I were at the Austin Moving Forward event earlier today. It looked like there were about 350 attending this session on the St. Edward's campus, including quite a few people from the Austin progressive political scene. I spotted a number of people from last weekend's DemFest among the audience and volunteers.

It was great hearing from Representative Lloyd Doggett, Dr. George Lakoff, State Representative Eddie Rodriguez, former Rep. Ann Kitchens, Rev. Emilee Dawn Whitehurst, and UT's own Bill Spellman. They all had interesting comments.

A highlight for me was Bill Spellman talking about how a lot of progressive ideas are viewed as special interests rather than general concerns because they've being advanced by small groups rather than broad coalitions. Bill also gave a great example of how a community group in Los Angeles was able to build a movement that let to major living wage reforms in the area.

The meeting wasn't all cheery. During the town hall portion, several people commented on the lack of non-whites in the crowd, and one of the organizers later apologized, saying they had made an effort to reach out to the Hispanic and Black communities, but they just hadn't shown up. There also didn't seem to be any consensus on what issues are most important for an Austin progressive agenda.

Rep. Doggett talked about how his job has changed after redistricting, now that he represents both south Austin and McAllen in a 350-mile long district. It sounds like he is handling the challenge well.

I'd not see George Lakoff speak before, but his talk was a real treat. He started with brand new material about the Karl Rove attack on the Democrats from last week. According to George, we fell into Karl's evil trap, taking his bait to reframe the debate to be about Democratic wimpyness rather than the bad decisions of the Republicans. After dissecting what Rove had done, George started into his standard talk, going over what led to the ideas of strict father versus nurturing parents, the constructing the arguments of both sides from these perspectives. However, I really liked the new spin he put on the material, coming from working on defeating Bush's social security proposal: we can organize Democratic/progressive ideas along this basic value statement:

We believe that the commonwealth should be used for the common good so that we all can pursue our individual goals.

This simple idea shows the true difference between us as progressives and the conservatives among us. We believe that government can benefit everyone. We believe that no one succeeds on his or her own and that society can be bettered. I think that's something really powerful, and I hope this framing idea will gain traction.

"kevin" from Latinos for Texas liveblogged the talks -- here are pointers to his entries:

Posted by Ben on 9:13 PM in Austin |

Comments

Other notes:

* The event was very well run. It started with a review of the Agenda, a list of goals for the meeting, introductions for each speaker, and a commitment card about how you would help (with a copy for yourself so you could remember what you'd committed to -- slick).

*Another takeaway from Spelman's talk: progressive issues poll well with the general public. Again, they're not just special-interest issues.

* In the "town hall", it was heartening to hear about the successes progressives have had locally. Eeek, I've just sent an e-mail to Fran volunteering to gather the list of local successes so we can share them with a wider audience before the next meeting.

* Other takeaways from Lakoff (I haven't read Elephants yet): As "nuturing parents", progressives believe in empathy and responsibility. Responsibility includes oneself and others. To help open conversations with conservatives, ask them where they feel responsible and ask how they support those to which they feel responsible.

Posted by: Glenn | June 26, 2005 5:05 PM