Can communications save democracy?

The new Congress, a product of Election Day 2006, is not yet sworn in and the daily media drumbeat – on broadcast, cable and the blogosphere – is “enough already” with that; who’s going to run for President in 2008? This focus on the future may be part of our make-up or it might merely be a made-up agenda to cover the fact that most of us don’t care much about policy, only politics. Communications – from campaigns, corporations and media, too – have helped create the problem. It may also be part of the solution.

First, as they say, let’s look at the numbers. In San Francisco, where I live, a city that gets high marks for social and political activism, the latest election showed that very few of us who can vote, do vote. Of about 630,000 eligible voters only 420,000 are even registered and of those, only 156,000 voted. That's 37 percent of registered voters, 25 percent of eligible voters and 21 percent of the total population.

That a mayor can be elected here, as Mayor Gavin Newsom was here, with about 130,000 votes is bad enough. But that a supervisor can be given the opportunity to affect this entire City on the basis of as few as 5,000 is painful. Even when a supervisor's total vote count hits five figures, it still represents, at best, 20 percent of the eligible voters in his or her district. And this city is a reflection of the country.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg was re-elected in 2005 with 750,000 votes in a City of 8.1 million – and that was 5,000 more than he got when he won a contested battle in 2001. The numbers say we have gone from a participatory democracy to an observational one. It is clear that de Tocqueville, who called America “a nation of joiners,” wouldn’t recognize our bite-sized approach. But what changed first, the public appetite or the media recipe?

You could pin it on “60 Minutes” for showing the networks that news shows can generate a profit and forever linking news to ratings points; you could pin it on “USA Today” for shortening the need for an attention span, not offering a meal but McNuggets; you could pin it on Walter Winchell who pioneered celebrity journalism and embedded voyeurism in our day-to-day.

You can blame it on the disconnect that marks too much of what companies say and what they do; or you can hang it on the campaigns themselves that arrive exhausted on election day, as if that is the finish line. Recall Robert Redford’s line at the end of “The Candidate,” having won his race and hiding in a broom closet from exuberant supporters, he says: “What do I do now?”

First, you can take some short term lumps to make a long term case. True, the quarterly demands on public companies and the zero-sum guidelines prevalent in the business media make it hard to manage in public, but that is what needs to happen more and more because,

Second, the value of authenticity is more highly-prized that ever before. The market is hyper-sensitive to gamesmanship (evidence the standing of Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert) and so is drawn to people and companies that remain true to themselves.

And, third, it is not just marketing that is a conversation, success itself is now linked to a willingness to engage. Just as the arrival of the digital watch led us to re-brand those with a sweep hand as analog (thanks to William Safire for coining “retronym”), the empowerment of the customer made possible by the internet has become the standard for all company communication. We expect to be able to talk to those companies we deal with, and expect to hear back.

Any of these three steps is hard; in combination they have caused too many to shrink. And, if talking at all means talking about it all, then it is easier to say nothing at all. It is easier to play to the biases of the market than it is to buck 'em. It is easier to fly high on the wings of generalities than walk among the reality of the ground level terrain hard.

The result is that communications feeds a public discussion about the color of the problem but not the problem, political debate focusing on the presentation of the candidate but not whether a plan is presented and corporate marketing that delivers emotional impact but little differentiation -- all with a time horizon of hours, maybe days, but not a generation.

By letting or asking people only to react, we make it easy on them and easy on ourselves but more difficult for tomorrow because by diminishing perspective, we marginalize the past and reduce the importance of the future. If change it to come, it may fall to the subversives among advertising, marketing and public relations people to begin to seed the prevalent two-dimensional debate with a third -- the role each of us can play in the outcome.

Not how a story affects us individually, but how each of us -- individually -- can affect the story. Make the distant acts of government and business deeply personal and activism can follow.