Robert Putnam: For Our Future's Sake, Hillary, Don't!

Robert Putnam's editorial in The Boston Globe The rebirth of American civic life is remarkable.

In it, the superhero-tastic author of "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" and "Better Together: Restoring the American Community" fires a shot across the Clinton bow - - for what it's worth.

The first 4/5ths of his article is a very concise summation of what is blogged here; about the rise of the politically engaged and civic minded millennial generation.

My only beef with his retelling of the last 7 years of Bush is that he assigns September 11th as the prime motivating factor for the awakening of the new Greatest Generation (as he calls Millennials) - whereas for me, and many of us from the dot org boom, the swift destruction wrought by George Bush is what spurred me to action as Alex UA and I discussed previously.

But really, the closer of his article is amazing. Look at what Putnam says after building up the New Greatest Generation:

The 2008 elections are thus the coming-out party of this new Greatest Generation. Their grandparents of the original Greatest Generation were the civic pillars of American democracy for more than a half-century, and at long last, just as that generation is leaving the scene, reinforcements are arriving. Americans of every political persuasion should rejoice at this epochal swing of the generational pendulum, for it portends precisely the sort of civic renaissance for which Jeremiahs have been calling for many years.

This, then, is what is at stake in the otherwise inside-baseball controversies about superdelegates and pledged delegates and the uncontested Florida and Michigan primaries - controversies now roiling Democratic party leaders. If the results of the caucuses and primaries are, despite record-breaking rates of popular participation, overturned by unelected (though officially legitimate) superdelegates or by delegates from states that all candidates had previously agreed not to contest, the lesson for the young civic stalwarts would be unmistakable - democratic politics is a sham. Politics is actually controlled by party bosses behind the scenes. Civic engagement is for suckers.

From Little League to student council races, we all learn to accept defeats we have lost fair and square. But losing in a contest in which the rules can be rigged teaches that the game is not worth the candle. Who can honestly doubt that if the Democratic presidential candidate preferred by a majority of the delegates elected in this spring's competitive contests (and by the overwhelming majority of young voters) were to be rejected solely by the power of unelected delegates (or those "elected" without any serious competition), the unmistakable civics lesson would be catastrophic for this incipient cadre of super citizens?

So as the superdelegates, the two campaigns, and Democratic Party leaders contemplate how to resolve the procedural issues before them - what to do about Michigan and Florida, and how superdelegates should vote - let's hope that they weigh the consequences not merely for their own candidates this year, and not merely for the Democratic prospects in the fall, but for the future vitality of American democracy.
emphasis mine

I read that as, "Senator Clinton, please don't ruin America?"

Putnam is respected in some circles - sadly not widely enough in the beltway circles for whom this piece was written. I doubt this essay will make an impact but it lands squarely and I hope the article gets more traction.

As so often is the case, Robert Putnam is right.