I feel like I have kinda won my freedom inside a diabetes context. Most everything I ever wanted has been achieved…at least to some degree. The wheels are in motion. So, I started an analysis of what all had happened over the past ten years retrospectively.
I had one, lingering, overarching question that frustrated me. It was, “Why did my representative not even listen to me explain my problem with maintaining a drivers license when I went to her?” I was a constituent and that is her job. She did something bad to me, which was to not even speak with me. I couldn’t come up with any answer other than, “She hates diabetics,” because that was the only thing she knew about me. But that’s not the right answer. I was missing something.
So, I went down to my local precinct (her kingdom) out of curiosity to see what people did down there and do some general information gathering. As I see it, all my work has concluded, so there’s nothing to loose from going in and being totally open and having conversations with people.
After much misery, what I think I learned is that you can kinda subdivide the legislature into two different categories - partisan or policy. You have both types in both parties. You usually know instantaneously which type you are dealing with when you walk out of their office.
POLICY PEOPLE
Some people work in practical problem solving. Those people are like me. I call them, “policy people.” Policy people build relationships and deal in creative problem solving because that’s how you move legislation through the meatgrinder. You need to know everything about a problem in order to pass legislation that has any hope of being effective, to communicate about that problem with a wide variety of people, and gain trust.
PARTISAN PEOPLE
Talking to partisans is really tough. They exist in both parties. You can spin a problem any which way to try to spark interest in the partisans. It’s just not gonna be super effective because solving problems is neither their interest nor their role. Partisans play a role where they tow the party line and move money around. They take orders from above…from the party and do its bidding. Their work is a lot more bureaucratic and kinda boring.
You get different personality types drawn to either role. Sometimes people switch roles. So, when my Federal Senator became the whip, his people told me outright that he just was not able to participate in policy making anymore. He moved into partisan. There’s a lot of contradictory goals between policy makers and partisans. People are primarily doing one or the other.
In summary, when you go down to your legislature to ask for something as a constituent, if you hit a partisan person and you aren’t passing party-related legislation, then you just keep walking. You just go around them and find yourself a policy girl or guy to help you do the work. You want to find helpers on both sides of the isle. That’s how it works, anyway, if you don’t have any money. If you have money, then you just write a check to the partisan players. Those are money guys.
P.S. I really scared the ■■■■ out of those local partisans when I went sniffing around down there. I think its because I’m policy and I’m working Federal. They got really paranoid. They asked me a lot of questions about what I was doing there. I tried to answer honestly, but I honestly didn’t know. I was just curious how it works down there.
At that level of government, its not really a place for relationship building, its more like a viper pit of suspicious partisans trying to achieve very specific, well defined goals related to election outcomes and fundraising. That’s really different than what I do. It was good for me to explore that difference in roles. It helped me understand the system. They have a lot of difficulty maintaining relationships with one another at that level because people there have such diverse, nonoverlapping motivations. It’s really the opposite of the role I function in.
Here is a song about endings. It’s happy to achieve all the stuff that you want. But its also kinda sad and disorienting to not have further objective. Some people say that you always ought to leave a string of something that interests you left to explore so you don’t dry up. I don’t know what that is. I’m kinda relieved. I think this whole death march into legislative activities could be over for me.
This song even gets a little partisan at the end. When you hear stuff like that it stops you dead in your tracks because you know that you aren’t talking about policy and problems and ideas anymore. You aren’t gonna accomplish anything in this office. You are not gonna learn anything in this office. When you hear a partisan voice, you know that no one in this place wants to solve actual problems and its time to just keep walking to the next meeting. You see it on both sides. It’s the worst - excitable, partisan yapping is not the same as problem solving and doing the real business of government.
Everybody knows where to find me if they need me. I’m gonna lay low.