Democratic candidate Jill Long Thompson has some ideas.
Expand the responsibilities of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to include working directly with organizations that focus on parenting skills, preventing teen pregnancies, reducing the high school dropout rate and lowering the rate of recidivism. She also proposed creating a statewide Board of Faith and Community Partnerships to advise her administration on those matters.
Government and religion go together like fish and bicycles.
She also wants to expand the list of permissible documentation to prove one’s identity in order to exercise their right to vote. Currently, the list is arbitrarily limited to state and national identification with an expiration date.
She wants to give teeth to the Indiana Civil Rights Commission. And, she wants to give tax incentives to companies to provide high speed Internet access in rural counties.
I’m not a political strategist, but this campaign reminds me a little of the Gore-Kerry approach which, often times, looked like they were giving voters a laundry list of proposals. The more successful campaigns, it seems to me, take a page from some advice I’ve been given on trial presentation. You try to build a narrative. Tell the jury a story, and you weave the laundry list into a narrative. Maybe Long Thompson has been constructing such a narrative but I haven’t been listening very well.
Daniels more or less has a narrative that goes something like – bold, yet folksy, outsider brings outsider business leadership to sleepy, unresponsive government. It doesn’t matter if it’s bullshit. It’s easy to swallow. Americans are willing to suspend their disbelief while someone tells them a story.
Long Thompson has a narrative: “I’m not Mitch Daniels”. It’s the Washington Generals approach to the race.
About fish and bicycles, they are not religious initiatives but faith-based initiatives. If you don’t stick with the glossary, the OFBCI could come off sounding like “Office of Religious and Community Initiatives,” which might sound unconstitutional.
The Faith-Based Advisory Council might then sound like the “Religious Advisory Council.” And in their meeting minutes for example, if you use the word “religious,” the statement on page 2 would then read, “There were also a number of people who stated they received valuable information that would assist them in administering [religious]programs and write better grants.”
At that particular meeting, the Faith-Based (not Religious) Advisory Council heard a report on IN Corrections’ PLUS program. In that program’s faith-based tracts, there’s reference to American tribal tradition as “myth,” but related to Christian tradition God is with a capital G and hey, where’s the word “myth”?
I’m assuming Long-Thompson is doing the same as Obama has done with this area — not just hooking up with, but suggesting expansion.
What I love about a number of the Faith Based programs in prison is that they have unlimited access to prisoners. Like the “scary” Baptist church in Hammond can run all kinds of Bible studies at the Lake County Juvie Center with easy access. But one of my teens ends up in there and the mom has to get the judge to have a special hearing (which usually takes a month to schedule) to get me on the visitors list to see him.