Expect more from the public? Not

Just hours before the new fiscal year was to begin, Gov. David Paterson today issued a plea on U-Tube for voters to contact their local legislators and tell them they support cuts in spending.

So far, there are no reports of lawmakers’ phones ringing off the hook urging that government did them less.

There is an emerging consensus (myself and one other reporter who mentioned it today - have to start somewhere) that the real problem we have both in the state and nationally is that voters don’t want their representatives to make hard decisions.

They want more entitlements and lower taxes as well as less borrowing. And when their reps don’t deliver, they tend to get axed.

Wish someone had mentioned that in one of the many political-science courses I stayed awake for in college.

Paterson was trying to make the point that state lawmakers fear they’ll be voted out of office if they support cuts to education or health care, for example, and that people won’t understand they really had no choice. He was saying people should tell the leaders that they will understand. He’s probably wrong about that.

Paterson’s medium of choice today was U-Tube. Imagine if we had, say, daily printed reports, supported mostly by advertising, that would detail just what government policies are and the choices that confront our elected representatives. It seems that most of the current ways of communicating, like Twitter and texting, just don’t provide enough information for citizens to be really informed.

Oh well. Probably not feasible. You can tall I’m a creature of the last century.