{"id":728,"date":"2004-11-15T00:00:23","date_gmt":"2004-11-15T00:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=728"},"modified":"2004-11-15T00:00:23","modified_gmt":"2004-11-15T00:00:23","slug":"what_do_we_want","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=728","title":{"rendered":"What do we want from our elected officials?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Reading Jason Shephard&#8217;s excellent &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.schoolinfosystem.org\/pdf\/112004\/robarts.html\">Robarts Gets The Treatment<\/a>&#8221; made me think about what we should expect from our elected officials.<br \/>\nHere are my initial thoughts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>Act Professionally<\/b><br \/> Debate is essential to our form of government.  Our elected leaders should engage in and value substantive debate.   Nothing engages the public more than this type of dialogue.\n<li><b>Use Data to Make Decisions<\/b>There&#8217;s a reason that the CBO (Congressional Budget Office), and LAB (Legislative Audit Bureau) exist\n<li><b>Communicate: Tell the Whole Story<br \/><\/b>Use the internet to converse with constituents.\n<li><b>Ask Tough Questions<\/b><\/ul>\n<p>Ruth Robarts and Kathleen Falk seem to be two local elected officials who are willing to challenge the status quo.  Shephard is correct when he refers to Robarts as &#8220;Public Ally Number 1&#8221;<br \/>\nI consider Russ Feingold to be nearly a perfect politician.   He&#8217;s idealist, yet has classic political abilities.  He&#8217;s also very smart.  Idealist in terms of compaign finance and local communications, political in terms of timely, political votes (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/archives\/000082.php\">NRA<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/archives\/000889.php\">Tax Giveaway<\/a>) and smart (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/archives\/000948.php\">debates<\/a>: where he shows that he knows the game very well).  To his credit, he&#8217;s always willing to chat and ask questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reading Jason Shephard&#8217;s excellent &#8220;Robarts Gets The Treatment&#8221; made me think about what we should expect from our elected officials. Here are my initial thoughts: Act Professionally Debate is essential to our form of government. Our elected leaders should engage in and value substantive debate. Nothing engages the public more than this type of dialogue. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}