The Bluegrass and Beyond

One of the November election’s big stories was how Barack Obama and other Democrats used the Internet to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in small contributions and connect with their supporters.

Much of that strategy and technology was developed by Blue State Digital, a company founded by four young guys who experimented with what the Internet could do for politics during the 2004 presidential campaigns of Howard Dean and Gen. Wesley Clark.

One of those guys, Ben Self, is a Lexington native. Not only that, he still lives here, although that seems to be a relative term these days. Last week he was in Portugal. Before that, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Australia and the Dominican Republic.

Business is booming for Blue State Digital. Politicians and parties, businesses, universities, unions and non-profit organizations around the world are hiring the company to try to get some of Obama’s online magic for themselves.

“It seems non-stop these days,” Self said when I first met him at a downtown coffee shop in April. “We’ve never done any marketing. All of our clients are people who come in through our Web site and say, ‘Can you help us with this?’ It’s overwhelming.”

In the past year, Blue State Digital has doubled its staff to more than 100 people. It has headquarters in Washington, D.C., a technology center in Boston and offices in New York, Los Angeles and London.

Self, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he spends several days each week on the road, but always tries to get back to Lexington for the weekend.

Even when he’s here, Self has conference calls at odd hours with clients around the world. Earlier this week, there was an evening conference call to Australia, where one of his clients is the prime minister.

Self lives in an old house in the Aylesford neighborhood with his wife, Rebecca. They met as students at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. A former teacher who also has a degree from MIT, she is the education director for Seedleaf, a local non-profit that develops sustainable food sources for people at risk of hunger.

“We love Lexington,” Self said. “We would never leave.”

After studying in Boston and living in Madison, Wis., founding Blue State Digital gave the Selfs the flexibility to move back to Lexington and be close to their families.

Self knew the election campaign would be all-consuming. While partner Joe Rospars worked as the Obama campaign’s new media director, Self was technology director for the Democratic National Committee, where he managed an overhaul of its Web site, computer infrastructure and national voter file database.

Blue State Digital’s pace hasn’t slowed much since November. The company continues to work for the DNC and Obama’s Organizing for America arm, as well as a growing list of progressive politicians and parties worldwide.

Blue State Digital also is developing other lines of work, such as helping universities build fund-raising relationships with alumni. The company’s 200 clients include the University of Florida, the American Red Cross, the Carter Center, the Tony Awards, the Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Project, the Sundance Film Festival and Wal-Mart Watch, which criticizes the retailer’s employment practices.

Clients are interested in Blue State Digital’s technology and expertise in building online communities.

“Technology is enabling people to organize quicker, more effectively and cheaper … and (public) engagement is tearing down all the walls,” Self said. “It’s about talking to people honestly and making them feel a part of your organization instead of customers of your organization, no matter what it is.”

As the name implies, Blue State Digital’s political and commercial work reflects the progressive values of its partners and employees, Self said. Several politicians and companies have approached the company and been rejected because they weren’t compatible with those values.

Eventually, the whirlwind will subside. But Self thinks Blue State Digital has a bright future as people’s use of the Internet matures. He finds the work fascinating, and he hopes he can continue doing it from Lexington.

“I feel like I got a fantastic education here in the public school system,” Self said, adding that Dunbar’s math, science and technology magnet program prepared him well for MIT.

If Lexington wants to keep and attract more smart people like Ben Self, it must continue to focus on the infrastructure and quality-of-life issues that technology entrepreneurs and workers look for in a city.

“I do wonder what would happen if I didn’t have this company,” Self said. “Would I be able to stay here? For a technologist, there’s not a huge number of opportunities here.”

One of the silliest things I’ve heard people say since the Lexington airport scandal began is that it’s a good thing the city didn’t take over the water company. After all, they say, business can always do a better job of running things than government can.

Apparently they haven’t been paying attention lately.

The mismanagement and malfeasance at Blue Grass Airport pale in comparison to the mess we’ve seen across corporate America. Most recently, some of our biggest banks and corporations have been running to the government seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts.

Many jobs are done best by private enterprise, but some should be left to government. Both can succeed, and neither has a monopoly on inefficiency, mismanagement, short-sighted leadership, greed or dishonesty.

The real issue is that both government and business must be held accountable for their actions where the public interest is concerned. That’s why we must return to sensible government regulation of business and the markets, and more transparency and accountability in government.

President Barack Obama set the right tone with several executive orders Wednesday, his first full day in office. He ordered stricter ethical standards for administration officials to try to curb the pay-to-play system that has corrupted Washington. And, more important, he reversed Bush administration policies that favored government secrecy.

Obama said that when citizens request information about government activities under the federal Freedom of Information Act, it should be released unless there’s a good reason to keep it secret. That’s the way it was before the Bush administration effectively reversed the rule to favor a presumption of secrecy.

President George Bush’s excuse was that terrorists might gain access to sensitive information. There was never any evidence of that, but excessive secrecy helped hide his administration’s waste, mismanagement and abuse of power. Some of it came to light anyway, and who knows how much more we’ll find out about now that the veil has been lifted.

Obama called the Freedom of Information Act “perhaps the most powerful instrument we have for making our government accountable and also transparent.” He’s right about that. The old saying is true: Sunlight is a powerful disinfectant.

Believe it or not, Kentucky is a national leader in freedom of information and government accountability. Under laws dating back to the 1960s, government meetings in Kentucky are open to the public, and closed sessions are allowed in very limited circumstances. Remedies for violation of the law are swift and significant.

State and local government information is assumed to be public unless officials can state a legal reason for keeping it secret. They must act on a citizen’s request within three working days. If information is withheld, citizens can appeal to the state attorney general, whose opinion carries the force of law, although government can appeal to the courts. The Kentucky attorney general’s office has a long, distinguished record of favoring openness.

These laws aren’t just for news organizations trying to be watchdogs. Citizens can, and often do, use these laws to hold public officials accountable. (For more information about Kentucky’s open records and meetings laws, visit the Kentucky Press Association’s Web site.)

Were it not for journalists’ active use of Kentucky’s “sunshine” laws, the public wouldn’t know about the abuses at Blue Grass Airport and many, many other cases of illegality, impropriety and questionable ethics in government throughout the Commonwealth.

Kentuckians should oppose efforts to curtail these laws, and urge their legislators to close some loopholes.

The Administrative Office of the Courts, which runs the state judiciary, is exempt from the Open Records law. That should change, especially in light of Herald-Leader reporting last year about the wasteful $880 million courthouse building spree the AOC has conducted with little oversight or accountability.

At the least, the AOC should allow the public access to electronic court records now available online only to lawyers and police agencies. Federal courts have done this for years. There’s no reason to make people go to courthouses to see records that already are public documents.

Another loophole that needs closing involves juvenile court records. Although there are legitimate privacy issues to consider, there’s a much bigger concern that keeping these records secret allows abuse by state agencies and the courts.

Some Kentucky officials are using the Internet to make government more transparent. Among the best examples are the new “Open Door” Web site, created by Gov. Steve Beshear and a bipartisan task force, and Secretary of State Trey Grayson’s “Online Checkbook” site.

Obama said that “transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones” of his administration. Those are bold words, and we must hold him to them. We also must demand the same of our state and local leaders — all of them.

I’m not usually an early riser, so it’s never easy to get out of bed when the alarm rings before dawn on that Monday in mid January. It is a holiday, after all, and almost always bitterly cold.

I get up because the Unity Breakfast and downtown march that begin Lexington’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. holiday commemoration are among my favorite events each year.

In addition to plenty of coffee, the breakfast includes awards for outstanding citizens, speeches about the ideals King preached and musical performances. One performer is always a child - an amazingly talented child.

When Alpa Phi Alpha fraternity started hosting the breakfast 15 years ago, it was a small affair and there wasn’t much unity - few whites attended. “Where are the rest of the white people?” retired Herald-Leader columnist Don Edward wrote after the second breakfast in 1996.

More than 1,300 people filled Heritage Hall for the breakfast Monday. Lexington’s leading citizens of all races were there, as were representatives of central Kentucky’s major institutions and corporations. The crowd was smaller than in recent years, because many people were in Washington for a much bigger celebration.

After the breakfast, more than 1,000 people walked a cold, windy circle around downtown.  As usual, it was a throwback to the Civil Rights marches of the early 1960s, with lots of banners and the singing of spirituals and protest songs such as “We Shall Overcome.”

The march is now about brotherhood and unity, rather than protest and defiance. It is Lexington at its best, with everyone showing what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

City officials and university presidents marched beside businessmen, workers, and groups from churches, schools and civic organizations. Asbury Theological Seminary was represented, as was the American Civil Liberties Union. Lexington Fairness, which crusades against discrimination based on sexual orientation, was there, marching right behind The Lexington School. Many parents brought their children for a civics and history lesson.

Jennifer Caravello, a teacher at Leestown Middle School, brought her son Dylan, 6. As they walked, she explained to him that the march was to remind people that everyone has equal rights. “I didn’t want him to leave thinking we had just walked around in a circle,” she said.

A generation ago, police in some Southern cities beat and turned hoses on civil rights marchers. Now, they block traffic for them. Lexington Police Chief Ronnie Bastin and his senior officers marched. Bastin said 56 Lexington officers were in Washington, helping with crowd control for the inauguration. “We had more who wanted to go than could go,” he said.

The marchers began outside Heritage Hall, just east of the home where Mary Todd Lincoln grew up. They walked east on Vine Street, then crossed on Rose Street and went west on Main Street. They passed Cheapside, once one of the South’s biggest slave auction blocks. They passed the former site of Woolworth’s, where black students staged sit-ins to demand service at the lunch counter in the early 1960s. And they passed the former site of the Phoenix Hotel, where trumpeter Louis Armstrong once played - but wasn’t allowed to spend the night.

Tuesday’s inauguration of Barack Obama added magic to the festivities. Many blacks said that, for the first time, they see hope that King’s dream of true equality may be possible.

“This is Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream right now - Obama becoming the first African American president,” said Michelle Brown, who marched with a big smile and an Obama-Biden yard sign. “This is a very special day.”

“I can’t wait for tomorrow,” said Robin Bond of Lexington. “There’s a change in the way people are feeling. They’re excited to see an African American president.”

Bond carried a homemade sign that summed up the thoughts of many marchers, black and white. On one side it said: “Pray for Obama. It’s no longer a dream.” On the other side: “Dr. King, thank you for sharing your dream.”

Some Kentuckians will believe anything, unless they hear it from a person well educated on the subject.

Historians have long noted Kentucky’s anti-intellectual streak, which has helped keep the state near the bottom of national rankings in education, income and other measures of progress.