Breaking news this afternoon comes from the San Francisco Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci, reporting the imminent shutdown of the governance reform think tank, Center for Governmental Studies (CGS).  Somewhat surprisingly, an email obtained by the Chronicle cites polarization and a primary factor leading to the closure.  Board member and former mayor of San Francisco, wrote in the email:

We have come to the end of the road with the Center for Governmental Studies. As we have discussed in recent board meetings, foundation support for the work of CGS has simply dried up; this despite over two decades of incredible work on behalf of our democracy. In my view this is the result of the impact of the recession on foundation but, more than that, the consequence of our dramatically polarized political environment and court rulings that have tended to gut laws and regulations aimed at making the democratic process fairer. I believe that foundations have given up hope of meaningful reform in this climate.

To read between the lines of the email, one would need to be steeped in the byzantine intricacies of campaign finance regulation.  Needless to say, reform advocates have always had a difficult time developing effective rules to limit political money because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1978 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, which equivocated money with free speech – and a corollary protection against unreasonable limits.  Think tanks like CGS have continued to develop ever-increasingly sophisticated approaches to regulating money in politics.  But unfortunately, such approaches will continue to be plagued with inevitable loopholes because of the Constitutional protection deemed by the courts.

Where does that leave us?  To be sure, I’ve been greatly influenced in my career by CGS heads Robert Stern and Tracy Westen.  In fact, I first became involved in politics out of a desire to learn more about campaign finance reform (we can reserve the implications of that tendency for another discussion).  I’m still young, but I’ve been around the block long enough to have learned that rules can’t be a substitute for leadership.  Think about it:  campaign finance regulation is all about creating incentives for politicians to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.  So it shouldn’t come as a shock, then, that this belief – coupled with a persistent impatience with the status quo – is why I’ve come to the conclusion that we need a new political party.

As legendary Speaker of the Assembly, Jesse Unruh, once said:

If you can’t drink a lobbyist’s whiskey, take his money, sleep with his women and still vote against him in the morning, you don’t belong in politics.

If we want leaders, we need to organize and elect them.  That’s how politics works.  Our agenda is good government and if we can build a constituency to support it, we can begin to see some of the changes for which we’d otherwise be advocating structural reforms to accomplish.

We can be the change we want to see in the world.  We can be the innovators who reject gridlock.  We can be the party that actually delivers results.  If you want reform, then you want to help us build a movement.