2008 Showed us the True Value of Advocacy

Among the many superlatives that applied to 2008 was that of the election year that made most use of Internet-based communications.  That’s not to say it was the first election in which campaign literature was distributed via the web;  it was more than that.  In 2008 every candidate in the country had a website, blogs both well-known and obscure filled the ether with information and opinion, news sites of all stripes told us of candidates’ speeches before their echoes died away, and advocacy groups (including Solar Nation) turned issue-specific spotlights on incumbents’ records.

In some instances we, the citizens, were invited to submit our ideas, fears, questions and suggestions directly to candidates’ sites;  in the case of the President-elect’s transition team site, this process is still continuing in its ‘Open for Questions’ feature.  And assuming the transition organization is not just paying lip service to the ideal of citizen interaction, this feature holds promise for a government that truly interacts with its people—round one of ‘Open for Questions’ received nearly one million votes from its audience.

It’s unlikely that many of those citizens who’ve submitted their thoughts and opinions to change.gov believe that their ideas will be picked up whole and turned into executive orders by the new Administration, so we’re bound to ask what value they think will accrue to them from the exercise.  And that question can be enlarged to address the whole subject of grass roots advocacy:  what is its value, and how—if at all—does it affect the legislative process?  How much notice do regulators and legislators take of mass communications sent to them from the public via advocacy groups?  For those of us in the non-profit advocacy world it’s a supremely important question;  our raison d’être depends on these questions having some sort of robustly positive answer.

A Discouraging Word—the Filibuster

There were occasions in 2008 when we wondered if we were being heard at all up on the Hill.  Time and time again the Senate and/or the House would drag back from the dead the issue of extending investment tax credits for solar power.  Just as often it would fall victim to the threat of the filibuster, and for all we could see, it would always do so.  But to draw that conclusion would be to miss an important point, i.e., that the good Congressmen were not dropping the effort at their first rebuff, but were devoting valuable floor time to keeping the issue alive and in the faces of the opposition.

We would love to take full credit for keeping the Congressional nose to the wheel, but we know well that our efforts were paralleled by those of many other groups—advocates not only for clean energy but also for climate stability, student action, the environment, energy efficiency, natural resources, scientific integrity, green business, and much more.  And these grass roots actions were being regularly supplemented by the face-to-face lobbying efforts of advocacy and industry group representatives.

Your Money or Your Vote

It’s largely this combination of in-detail lobbying and large-scale grass roots communication that makes an impact on legislators.  A lobbyist can tell a lawmaker that passage of a certain bill will be important to a large constituency, and can follow up in two ways.  He can make a surprisingly generous contribution to the Congressperson’s re-election campaign;  this actually shows not the size of the constituency but its wealth, and often enables the Congressperson to suddenly see the value of the lobbyist’s arguments.  Or he can demonstrate the constituency’s size in terms of the number of messages the Congressperson receives in support of the bill from voters in his district or state.  So why do we consider the latter path more effective?

Sadly enough, it sometimes isn’t.  We’ve heard lobbyists lament that they deployed their best arguments before a senator but couldn’t match the funds deployed by oil & gas industry lobbyists.  While this is a depressing indicator of the dynamics of our government, it’s also just another way of saying that there was no quality in the arguments of the latter group of lobbyists, only quantity.  And the senator knows very well that that kind of contribution ends up in the public record, available for his voters to examine next time around.   More to the point, he knows that every advocacy message his office receives represents a vote next time around, and a critical mass of such messages may mean a swing in the vote toward or away from him.

How Much Advocacy is Enough?

What makes up a critical mass?  There are no absolute numbers, of course, because every state and every race is different.  But one other thing the senator knows is that every message his staffers receive comes from someone who took the trouble to seek out his contact information because of a certain issue, or who found an advocacy group representing that issue and aligned himself or herself with the greater agenda of that group.  And for every person who takes that kind of trouble, he knows there will be more who feel the same way on the issue, but have not gone to the length of communicating with him.

So the petitions, sign-on letters, phone calls, faxes and e-mails piling up in Congressional offices form a bellwether of voter opinion for legislators, and they become significant not only when the message count gets abnormally high, but also when an issue attracts the attention of a variety of advocacy groups.  The messages from Solar Citizens urging passage of a clean energy bill, for instance, may join hands with similar communications from the Alliance for Climate Protection, the American Wind Energy Association, Environment America, Green America, the League of Conservation Voters, moveon.org, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Vote Solar, local sustainable energy groups and many more.  What this tells the recipient is that the issue is considered critical across a range of constituencies that may represent enough voters to have him clearing out his desk if he ignores their wishes.

In the End, it Worked

You may well have suffered chronic déjà-vu in 2008 as we exhorted you, time after time, to urge your Congresspersons to extend investment tax credits for solar power.  But the fact remains that your efforts (over seventy thousand messages by year’s end!), combined with intense face-to-face lobbying and parallel efforts by other advocacy groups and individuals, kept a hot-button issue alive in a hostile Congressional environment.  And that allowed its supporters on the Hill to include it in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act in October and finally get it onto the books.  The result is that residential and commercial solar will enjoy their 30% tax credit for another eight years, with the $2000 cap eliminated for residential PV.  Advocacy does indeed have a value.

Of course, few wars are decided by single battles, or even by multiple battles over the same ground.  Today’s parlous economic situation has reduced the value of tax credits, so we are gearing up to press for such credits to be made fully refundable, and for the upcoming economic stimulus package to maximize solar’s place in our energy future.

So it won’t be long before we’ll be looking for your help, once again, as advocates for solar power.  As Solar Citizens.