Can you imagine a worse mayor than Marion Barry, the crack-smoking, philandering demagog of Washington, DC? Residents of DC can, because they had one. Her name is Sharon Pratt Kelly. In the early '90s, she swept through the District like a nasty storm. Now this ex-mayor is using the Web to export what she describes as her political revolution to the entire United States. This is not a good thing.
Sharon Pratt Kelly represents the worst kind of electronic citizen - a sloppy-thinking one. Netizens would be smart to distance themselves from her online bluster.
Kelly served as mayor of DC from 1991 to 1995, sandwiched between Barry administrations. (Barry is again mayor, believe it or not.) I lived in Washington for about half of that time, and I covered the mayoral campaign that brought her to power. To audiences on the campaign trail, Kelly (then Sharon Pratt Dixon, before her marriage to New York businessman James Kelly) came across as a dynamic new voice in politics. She was an "outsider" with no previous involvement in local politics. She vowed to "clean house ... not with a broom, but with a shovel." Citizens who heard her speak once or twice were impressed. So was The Washington Post. The newspaper's late endorsement of Kelly helped propel her into an upset victory over the more qualified candidates, John Ray and Charlene Drew Jarvis.
But after a while, those of us who got to observe Kelly a little closer-up saw right through her. She came across as an opportunist; a gifted speaker with little real interest in the workings of government and few thoughtful ideas behind her rhetoric.
For the campaign, rhetoric was enough. But it didn't take long for Washington to realize they had elected the wrong person. Kelly was widely regarded as an ineffectual mayor who somehow managed to make a bad situation worse. Her tenure was "worse than a caretaker government," says Gawain Kripke, an astute political observer and DC resident who also covered her winning mayoral campaign. "It was nonexistent government, and by almost any measure the city and its institutions declined during her reign."
According to Washington City Paper, "her blunders and ineptness soured voters on inexperienced newcomers and paved the way for Barry's comeback."
After she was trounced in her re-election bid in 1994, says Kripke, "she disappeared and was not missed."
Now Kelly has resurfaced on the Web, with a site called Spirit for a New America, produced by respected Web site developer Omar Wasow's New York Online. When it was introduced a few weeks ago, Spirit for a New America got a friendly write-up in Wired News ("An Ex-Mayor Joins the Netizenry").
Spirit for a New America combines a grab bag of cheap political clichés with a penchant for lazy overstatement and fashionable, Third Wavish extremism: "With this Web site, Mrs. Kelly ... explains why traditional politics has become irrelevant. She details why 'inside the Beltway' politics is ineffective. She presents her unvarnished views on how 'We the People' can reclaim our government.... It presents one citizen politician's call for a Third Millennium Declaration of Independence." (Echoes of John Perry Barlow's silly "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," issued last year after President Clinton signed the plainly unconstitutional Communications Decency Act.)
Kelly's shovel is back. This time, she wants to clean house by clearing the House and the Senate. She calls for a constitutional convention in 1999 to "transform America into ... a political system that diminishes the role of representative democracy in favor of direct democracy."
Is this the kind of nonsense that we're in for as Internet zeal merges with millennial zeal? Let's hope not. The Internet does present an extraordinary opportunity for citizens to become more politically informed and involved. (Web sites like democracy.net lead the way in this new paradigm.) Web-assisted citizen research and activism are wonderful things, insofar as they will help people feel and be more connected to the goings-on in Washington.
My specific beef is with proposals from Kelly and others that this Web activism should be taken to the next level, where citizens would participate in regular electronic plebiscites on issues. Just because the Net provides the technological ability to institute Ross Perot's notion of an electronic town hall doesn't mean that we should adopt such a system. Actual direct democracy is a recipe for disaster - and that's not an overstatement. We're living in a complex, niche-fied world where people have less leisure time and are necessarily and understandably more narrowly focused on their own specific interests than ever before. Turn the political apparatus over to "We the People," and we the people would spit back a constant stream of short-sighted, uninformed referenda that would further polarize the nation. You think society is polarized now? A direct democracy would make today's cultural splinters look like pure harmony.
Representative democracy is not broken; it is simply corrupted by current finance laws and terrorized by constant polling. Americans do not need or deserve a "revolution," another declaration of independence. In fact, we don't even need representatives who are more responsive to public opinion. Rather than "return America to we the people," as Kelly prescribes, what we need are leaders who are not afraid to lead, to step out in front of public opinion, to make tough decisions that will aid the country in the long run. We as citizens need to find, nominate, and elect those kinds of leaders.
As citizens, we can start by paying closer attention to what we say. "Each day we wrestle with the unsettling winds ushered forth by change," Kelly writes in one of her online essays. "Yet no one speaks of it. No leader even comments upon a transforming America." Is that really what Kelly believes, or is she just bellowing? If she hasn't heard leaders and others talk about how America is changing, she simply isn't listening.
According to Kelly's site, "Spirit for a New America will highlight why the present political/social systems do not work and could not possibly work in a 'transforming' America." In a society where so many can stand on their electronic soapbox, it is understandable that people resort to outlandish statements to get attention. The danger of Internet politics is that we will all get so used to overstatement, to blather, that we will lose the power to traffic in more useful, understated ideas. We will lose a sense of who we really are. If Kelly really wants to lead a revolution, she should start with a radical transformation of her own rhetoric into words that sweep ideas along instead of shoveling silliness down our throats.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
