Demand Question Time: Can the Internet Change the Old Game of Politics?

On June 11, 1995, President William Jefferson Clinton and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich met at the Invitation of the Congress of Claremont Senior Citizens, Inc. to debate issues affecting senior citizens. During the debate, the political foes shook hands and pledged to create a bi-partisan commission to study federal limits on lobbying and the financing of election campaigns. This famous "handshake" on campaign finance reform was carried live on television and received widespread media coverage including front page attention in newspapers nationwide.

That's the wording of a historic plaque that sits outside the Earl Bourdon seniors center in Claremont, New Hampshire on Maple Ave. (Here's the Google Street view of the plaque; ain't technology amazing?!) A few years ago, my wife and I were visiting our kids at summer camp and stayed at a hotel in Claremont (a rambling old country inn with tons of charm whose name can't recall); I went out for a jog and ran past this sign on my way. I had to do a double-take; I actually knew the story of that long-forgotten handshake: Back in the late 90s, I worked for a while on the cause of campaign finance reform and public financing of elections.

Clinton and Gingrich had gone to New Hampshire to take part in a town-hall style meeting; recall that this way a few months after the political earthquake in 1994 that led to the Republicans taking over the House of Representatives. A sports shop owner and local county commissioner named Frank MacConnell Jr. asked them, "After the health care reform failure, the very very large disappointment of the last two years is that the special interest groups are really running the country. Would you be willing to have the same type of commission as a [military] base closure commission to review" the nation's campaign finance laws?

Clinton said, "I would love to have a bipartisan commission on it. I accept." And then Gingrich added, "Let's shake hands right here in front of everybody."

We all know how that story ended. Within days, both Clinton and Gingrich were headlining million-dollar events for their parties, and all talk of a bipartisan effort to reduce the power of special interest money in politics was forgotten. MacConnell passed away a year later, at the age of 61. Still, the people of Claremont thought the event was worth remembering by putting up a plaque at the site of the meeting, and indeed it is.

I bring this story up because today, along with a crosspartisan spectrum of activists, politicos, techies, bloggers and friends, I helped launch a modest effort to upgrade American politics aimed at making last Friday's impromptu and unprecedented appearance of President Obama before the House Republican caucus for an hour of live question-and-answer into a new political tradition that we're calling Question Time. You can read our "open letter" and petition here, and David Corn has a nice backgrounder on how we cobbled this together over the last few days here.

I'm not going to reiterate all the reasons for why I think a regular Question Time would be a "good thing" for American democracy; you can get that from the DemandQuestionTime.com site too.

I just want to say, with that old Clinton-Gingrich handshake in mind, we've been promised better behavior before. From time to time, the American public starts grumbling, and manages to get our elected representatives on the record promising to do better. And then, as soon as they can, they fall back into their old patterns. We've been grumbling a lot more lately, but whether that is going to lead to real changes in how politics works...well, I obviously am an eternal optimist, or maybe it's just that I have "change-the-world" disease.

But I'd like to believe that the Internet is a new factor that may change that old pattern, though I don't have any way to know or prove that. But I'm sure hoping that a few years from now, with all the things that we hackers of politics have been working on--and you know who I'm talking about--I hope we hackers of politics will have a lot more than a historic plaque to show for our efforts.