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Politics as Usual by Jim Baron Kenneth Block thinks you are finally ready.
He thinks you have had enough of ineffective, incompetent, sometimes corrupt, self-interested, unrepresentative, unresponsive, and just generally crummy government in Rhode Island.
Block says the time has come when you have finally had enough of the sort-of-two-party-system status quo and now you just might be ready to embrace candidates and public officials from outside the Democratic and Republican parties.
And Block is putting his time, energy and money where his mouth is to offer what he says is going to be a real alternative: The Moderate Party of Rhode Island.
A Barrington resident and owner of a Warwick technology company, Block has taken a business-like approach to this political start-up. For one thing, he commissioned a poll to determine whether the dissatisfaction he was feeling with state government in general and the General Assembly in particular was just him, or if his fellow Rhode Islanders feel the same way he did.
It was those poll results, Block told Politics as Usual last week, that convinced him to go ahead. The poll of 400 Rhode Islanders was conducted by Alpha Research between Feb. 25 and March 3. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percent.
Some of the highlights:
• 81 percent said things in Rhode Island “have gotten seriously off on the wrong track, with 10 percent believing they are “going in the right direction.” Forty-six percent of people said their local communities are headed in the right direction, and 44 percent said wrong track.
• 75 percent said the Democratic Party is doing a fair (39) or poor (36) job of solving the state’s problems; 16 percent gave them credit for a good job and only 4 percent graded the Democrats excellent.
• Republicans fared even worse. 80 percent said they are doing a fair (36) or poor (44) job; 11 percent said the RIGOP is doing a good job and a rock-ribbed 1 percent gave them a rating of excellent. In a later question 34 percent said they “strongly agree” that the Republican Party “has proven it is a lost cause” in the Ocean State, while 33 percent said “somewhat agree,” 17 percent said they “somewhat disagree” and an unlucky 13 percent answered, “don’t agree at all.”
• 1 percent said the Rhode Island General Assembly is doing a good job dealing with the state’s problems (that can’t be the same 1 percent who think the Republicans are excellent), 12 percent gave them a good, 38 percent said they are doing a fair job and 44 percent said they stink (poor).
• 33 percent told pollsters they would be “very supportive” of “a new political party…that was moderate in its political thinking and not beholden to the state’s labor unions and special interests of the left or in lock step support of Republicans on the right,” 41 percent would be “somewhat unsupportive,” 6 percent would be “somewhat unsupportive and 10 percent “not supportive at all.”
Block said the intention is for his nascent party to “occupy the middle ground,” but it sounds like that, at least at first, he is going for a pro-business, low-taxes, ethics-in-government niche.
“The idea behind this effort is to provide a socially-acceptable alternative for what many Rhode Islanders are looking for in terms of their politics,” Block said in a telephone interview, “and yet at the same time we’re looking to provide some sanity in terms of how budgetary and ethical issues are hit. That’s really what we are looking for in terms of a sweet spot.”
The Moderate Party, Block said, “will be totally focused on the legislature.
“The legislature is where it all happens. That’s where the core of power is in this state. Until we get balance in that body, we are not going to get the kind of legislating we need to fix this mess.”
“My dream would be to put someone in a race wherever there is an uncontested seat,” he said. “The reality is, we’re not going to hit that, I’m sure. But that is our goal. We are going to hunt hard and we are going to find people and take this message out there. Just by getting someone to declare their candidacy for one of these seats, we are going to force that legislator to behave a little bit differently.
Block says he has some potential candidates in mind who are interested, but he can’t say who they are just yet. (He sounds like a real party leader already.) “We’re going to be tapping some specific folks on the shoulder and asking them for two years of service,” he told me, “basically asking them for two years of service.”
We have such an out-of-whack balance of power,” Block asserts, “that all of our legislating tends to the extreme, because we don’t have the numbers in the legislature to moderate it.
“The Republican Party in Rhode Island right now — I don’t really know what their message is,” he said. George W. Bush is a wildly unpopular president, here especially, and “A disaffected Democrat is very unlikely to go and vote for a Republican just because of that overhead, never mind anything else that might be out there,” Block explains. “And the other problem you have is the culture wars. The Rhode Island Republican Party itself has a bit of a schism right now with the hard-core conservative and the moderate Republicans. Even when voters have a Republican alternative, he said, they look at him or her as someone “whose party does not represent my core social beliefs.
“I don’t know how the state’s party differentiates itself from the national political scene,” Block said. “There is a real disconnect in this state with Republicans. It is almost a four-letter word with a lot of voters. “They have not made that clear at all and that is one humongous problem that they have.
“The strong, strong hope is (to) take the social issues off the table,” he said. “We are not looking to take on the hot-button social issues of our day, because Rhode Island has far worse problems that have to be hit head-on right now.
“That’s why I think this idea could succeed. We are going to very carefully enunciate exactly what our very narrow goals are and for the next two years that is plenty to bite off and chew on.
Those goals, as expressed on the party’s Web site (www.moderate-ri.org) are:
• Toughen ethics laws and employment agreements to make our elected, appointed and employed state officials far more accountable for their actions.
• Stop spending money that is not well spent.
• Induce businesses to locate to Rhode Island by bringing Rhode Island’s business taxes in line with Massachusetts' business taxes.
• Bring the total compensation packages (including wages, benefits, pension amounts and pension eligibility) for state employees in line with what private sector workers earn.
• Produce a balanced budget by reducing spending and waste and by not relying on one time gimmicks like selling tobacco settlement funds or revenue anticipation bonds.
“My strong sense is that if we don’t do something different, if we don’t make any changes now, to get better legislating right now, we are going to truly be in trouble,” he said. “And the only way to get better legislating now is to get candidates for these seats that go uncontested and to serve notice to sitting legislators that you are being watched and you are going to pay a price if you are not performing the way you need to.”
Best of luck to Block. Faithful readers of Politics as Usual know that the argument has been made in this space for years that the voters refusal to take any candidate seriously if they are not a Republican or Democrat is a big part of our problem at the national and local level. Part of the problem has been that a lot of Independent and third-party candidates have been wackos and losers.
Block looks like he is trying to put forward a reasonable, middle-of-the-road, not-radical alternative.
Let’s see if it will take. |
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