Ugly Stuff on Your Plate

When I asked a group of students at Lowell House recently if any of them had thought of running for public office, one of them quipped, "All Harvard students are planning on being President." The laughter that followed was only partly at my expense. On campus only since September, I am still surprised that so many students here feel responsible to uphold Harvard's tradition of providing America with its leaders. "From day one, I felt the pressure of creating my future so as not to let Harvard down," one student from Chicago told me. In language I'm becoming accustomed the elite and we know we are expected to uphold the tradition."

With such high expectations for national leadership, these same bright and ambitious students would do better to take the opportunity while at Harvard to learn some politics. This, I know is a hard sell. Anxious to make their impact on America's destiny, these students have come here for serious study with top-flight scholars. They push themselves hard in order to graduate with outstanding educational achievements and impressive resumes. Committed to scholarship, their attitude toward politics falls somewhere between disdain and indifference. Even at the Kennedy School of Government many students think that policy expertise is a fungible commodity with political experience. They are not interested in learning the essential political road maps, and like students at other elite campuses, too many Harvard students want to make policy without making politics. This is about as realistic as wanting to win a gold medal in the butterfly stroke without putting your face in the water.

Savvy politics and sound policy are both essential components of good government. The best politicians, like the best advocates, treasure the value of rigorously researched analysis as a starting point for good policies. However, experienced politicians and informed scholars know that the libraries are full of great policy analysis that failed for lack of a good political strategy. Scholars, politicians and advocates all share inter-dependencies that may not be apparent to the uninitiated in any of these fields.

Policy success is always dependent on the capacity to compete in the political arena. Even when the public is sympathetic, little is accomplished without a political strategy and the resources to pull it off. For instance, most of the positions promoted by environmental organizations are widely accepted by a concerned public. High standards for protecting water and air are consistently popular issues and most people now think we need to do more about greenhouse gases that are causing global warming. Yet, it is common to find experienced but ineffective environmental activists who want to stay as far away as possible from politics.

Meanwhile, the anti-environmental forces have been investing heavily in the political arena with lobbyists, fundraising, public relations and creative initiatives called "astro-turf," which are designed to make it look as though there is a grass roots movement to repeal environmental protections. These interest groups, usually but not always led by a trade group, are not standing apart from the political process. Indeed they are often creatively inventing it as they go along.

In contrast to this enthusiastic participation and warm embrace by anti-environmentalists on the political dance floor, I see a lot of environmentally concerned people standing around the periphery of politics, unwilling for whatever reason to step on to the floor where the real policy is being made.

Among the environmentally concerned students at Harvard, the antipathy to politics is not hard to understand. Environmentalists tend to be especially sensitive to ethics, aesthetics and public health concerns. More often they think in terms of generations, not election cycles, and at Harvard, they focus on the serious study of complex and fundamentally important natural systems.

Like the old adage that you never want to watch sausage or laws being made--they both can give you indigestion--I can understand why people have such little tolerance for politics. But unlike sausage, which you can avoid, laws, especially environmental laws with their messy pottage of political ingredients, are part of everyone's diet. People who choose to look the other way will not avoid the consequences of politics and they might end up with some ugly stuff on their plates.

I admit that after 25 years on the political battlefields, I have been called a political junkie. But while sick of the corrosive influence of political fundraising, I am still attracted to politics because that is the only road that can take me to the places where policy decisions happen.

In the environmental debates, I have seen that the most effective advocates are seriously, but not exclusively, concerned with policy matters. These are the brainy people, often recent graduates themselves, who love the strategic challenges of figuring out how they can outsmart the forces who either don't understand or don't care about environmentally sustainable development.

As we turn the corner into the next century, Harvard's graduates, true to their tradition, will no doubt be among the leaders in the rush to solve global warming and other complex and compelling environmental issues. Among them, the most successful will be those who have developed an educated appetite for politics and who know that you just can't do policy without doing politics.

Lana Pollack is a fellow at the Institute of Politics and president of the Michigan Environmental Council. She served in the Michigan State Senate from 1983-1994.