Inside Out ... Outside In

A few months ago, the City Council's Public Health and Human Services Committee held a hearing to discuss whether the city should put a warning label on utility bills alerting residents that fluoride had been added to their water. This was the third meeting the committee had held in a year about water fluoridation, and though during the previous two meetings city staff had presented what appeared to be a preponderance of scientific evidence and institutional support in favor of fluoridation, still the committee felt it reason­able to continue offering microphones to representatives of the anti-fluoridation crowd.

That was understandable when that witness was, say, a dentist who had grown skeptical of fluoride's advertised benefits. Or a scientist who had seen one too many correlations between fluoridation and thyroid problems for his liking. Or a civil liberties activist wondering if the government should really be in the business of medicating its constituency willy-nilly.

These were all reasonable souls.

But it's a different situation when a woman approaches the microphone and cites the Rothschild family and its secret plot to poison Central Texans. That's when reason tends to go out the window.

"Is there a giant plan to decrease the world's population?" Jackie Simon asked the committee. "It sounds insane. And surely only crazy conspiracy theorists think that way. But anyone willing to look will find dozens of clear videos showing the ultrawealthy speaking about their obsessive desire to depopulate. ... They include David Rockefeller, Bill Gates, Ted Turner, and other billionaire eugenicists."

Simon paused for the big reveal.

"But these people pale in comparison with the house of Rothschild."

At this point, this reporter looked around council chambers, sure that the packed house, no matter how dedicated they were to ending fluoridation, would shout this woman down and hound her from City Hall, back onto the street where she so clearly belonged. But they did nothing of the sort. They sat and listened. Many nodded in agreement.

"This banking cabal," Simon continued confidently, "has been behind genocidal leaders worldwide including Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Brezhnev, and others. And the only thing that's protected us in America is our right to bear arms. So the methods used to kill us must be a little more hidden, slow, and deceptive. ... But make no mistake: They are slowly and intentionally trying to kill us."

And amazingly, the crowd erupted into a standing ovation any performer would have killed for.

I had to wonder: What is my government doing with my tax dollars? Have the crackpots really grown so loud and has everyone else really grown so quiet that the City Council of a major American metropolis must hold multiple hearings on water fluoridation in order to keep people like this satisfied? Am I witnessing the inevitable result of having such a politically unengaged populace?

Diminishing Returns

The last time the city held an election for City Council, in May 2011, 7.4% of the eligible (registered) voting population cast ballots. (Turnout in the Place 3 run-off a month later was slightly higher.) And one of the corollaries of such low voter turnout is that those very few who do show up to vote and make their presence known at City Council meetings and in City Council members' offices and at fluoridation hearings or similar occasions – no matter how small their actual numbers – drown out absent or much quieter voices who may better and more completely represent the true interests of the city. Austin's great (or at least large) silent majority, if you will.

As the man with the gavel at City Council meetings, Mayor Lee Leffingwell knows all about drowned-out voices and passionate citizen discontent; he deals with it all the time. And he'll be spending at least part of his re-election campaign this spring fighting off mayoral challenger and council gadfly Clay Dafoe, who has turned aggravating Leffingwell from the audience lectern into an art. For readers unfamiliar with council meetings, Dafoe is the 7.4% writ large. At nearly every meeting, he picks several proposals under council consideration, seemingly at random, and denounces them as proof of a tyrannical and overreaching council indifferent to the will of the people. His squabbles with Leffingwell have become City Hall staples, and they're at least partially responsible for changes council has made recently to policies concerning citizen participation.

"As a result of low voter turnout, oftentimes I don't think we're getting a broad cross-section of the city of Austin," says Leffingwell. "As for striking a balance between the interests of the loudest of the loud and the interests of those who rarely raise their voices, you have to tell yourself that every week you realize there are folks that feel very passionately one way or another – but you also need to realize that there are other people in the city who have a different opinion, even if they're far quieter about it."

By this point, most everyone knows Leffingwell's proposed solution to the problem of low voter turnout and its various consequences: Move city elections to November (when turnout is considerably greater) and change council representation from an at-large system to some form of single-member districts. Both propositions are likely to be under voter consideration for City Charter revision next fall.

Longtime political consultant and current Austin Community College Center for Public Policy and Political Studies Director Peck Young puts the blame for Austin's dismal voting numbers elsewhere. After the city passed the "Little Less Corruption" ordinance in 1997, he says, imposing a $350 limit on individual campaign contributions, voter turnout plummeted. "That stupid ordinance – what we've termed the 'Lot Less Participation' ordinance – solved a problem that didn't exist," declares Young, "and took away the best tool we had for exposing real corruption: communication through campaigns." Without the sizable budgets they could collect previously, Young says, candidates and their campaigns could no longer afford sufficient mailers or effective phone banks. They could muster maybe one TV spot if they were lucky. Their message stopped getting out. People stopped listening. And voter participation sank.

Take a look at the numbers: In 1971, 56.7% of eligible voters cast ballots. In 1975, it was 45%, and in 1981, 36%. In May 1997, the last election before the Little Less Corrup­tion Ordinance, the number had dropped to 17.1%, and the next election, in 2000, saw it topple to 7.4% – precisely where it stood last May. "Without money, you can't communicate; you can't run a sophisticated campaign," Young says. "People lost the ability to communicate without that. Nobody cares about voting because they don't know what's going on." And that drives down the voting pool to only those people who watch council meetings, who are already engaged and passionate, thereby putting insurgent candidates at a huge disadvantage because they don't have the name recognition council members do.

A 2009 study by Young's ACC group concludes that the city could probably best increase voter turnout by moving elections to November and establishing a single-member district voting system. Making the nomination process partisan rather than nonpartisan would help as well, it continues, as would changing Austin's municipal government from the council-city manager form to a strong-mayor form. In other words, the best way to increase voter turnout in Austin would be to change entirely how Austin votes and how Austin's government works.

Young may be right, but it's also possible such low turnout could instead open the door to an outsider candidate in a way that a race involving an engaged electorate never would. After all, when only 7% of voters are going to the polls, it doesn't take many votes to tilt a race in your favor, the same way it doesn't take too many loud voices to get the attention of council members.

Even Young admits 2012 is shaping up to be a strange year, one that could belie all expectations and predictions. "This year is different," he says. "All the polls I've seen say voters are mad at all incumbents at all levels for everything."

In other words, the time may just be ripe for an insurgent candidate.

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The Freedom Front

Laura Pressley – small-business owner, political activist, and recently announced candidate for City Council – stood at the makeshift podium in the YMCA Learning Center on a chilly Friday morning last month. Not three days earlier, she had sat in a conference room at the Terrazas Branch Library and watched in wonder as a hastily gathered coalition of volunteer campaign advisors, activists, leftists, conservatives, libertarians, anarchists, environmentalists, private-property advocates, cranks, and pie-eyed optimists came to quick agreement on which council member she should run against in the upcoming campaign. Now Pressley, a white woman from the relatively wealthy Allandale section of North Central Austin, was announcing that she would be challenging powerful two-term Place 2 incumbent Council Member Mike Martinez, resident of the city's predominately Mexican-American Eastside and occupier of the so-called Hispanic council seat, as recognized by the unofficial but de facto "gentleman's agreement" tracing back to the 1970s.

Looking out at the small crowd of supporters, reporters, and cameramen there that morning, Pressley searched for the words that would frame her improbable, quixotic campaign – born out of an even more improbable coalition of barely like-minded city agitators – words that would capture what she believed was a certain anti-government, anti-corporate spirit in the air in Austin and around the country, a spirit given early voice by the 2008 presidential campaign of Libertarian Ron Paul, garnished with electoral might and tri-pointed hats with the rise of the tea party in 2010, and finally taken to the streets and given its liberal veneer by the Occupy movement the year before. Surely there were words for that.

"Freedom is popular these days," Pressley said with a laugh, hearkening back to the name one of her supporters had given to her strange gathering three days earlier in that library conference room: the liberty movement.

Freedom may be popular these days, but it remains to be seen whether "freedom" can be turned into actual votes in Austin, if a movement tied together by only the vaguest of sympathies can coalesce to take down a popular incumbent council member. Pressley believes it can. "People say, 'You can't fight City Hall.' Well, there's a group in Austin that believes you really can," she said. "Maybe in the past there was this loud minority that made a lot of noise but didn't effect change, but I think we're at this critical place right now that more people think they can fight City Hall."

The issue, she believes, comes down to power: who has it and who doesn't. It's the common concern running from the Eastside, pro-affordability, anti-gentrification wing of her campaign team to the Ayn Rand libertarian industrialist wing. "Anti-fluoridation people: Their power of having water without medicine in it has been taken away," Pressley says. "The neighborhood associations: By letting short-term rentals in, you've taken the power of the safety of their neighborhoods away. [The League of United Latin American Citizens]: The power of having affordability in East Austin is being taken away with gentrification; they have no control over that. Libertarians: Their power is being taken away by the police state. People feel like their power has been taken away, and we're here to stand up for that. That's what the coalition is made of."

The Rosy Scenario

So how could it happen? How might an insurgent candidate defy the odds and prove that all that anti-government discontent out there isn't just noise but actually represents a political movement that can be tallied at the ballot box?

Here's what political consultants and political junkies in Austin agree would probably have to happen for an insurgent candidate in 2012 like Laura Pressley to unseat a sitting council member like Mike Martinez, with his record, his name recognition, and his campaign war chest. First, that insurgent would have to fight the establishment candidate more or less to a draw in the progressive precincts circling Downtown – Travis Heights, Clarksville, Hyde Park, Rosedale, Allandale, etc., or what local political junkie and former Chronicle reporter Mike Clark-Madison calls the "Birkenstock Belt" – where groups like the Austin Neigh­bor­hoods Council and Save Our Springs Alliance always manage to get voters out in higher numbers than most anywhere else in the city. Then, win handily in the more conservative districts lining MoPac from Circle C Ranch to Great Hills to Tarrytown, most likely by claiming that the current council has overreached its mandate and is encroaching on individual rights.

Next – and this is the hardest part – motivate voters east and southeast of I-35 to get to the polls. This is hard, because voter participation in these areas is notoriously and consistently low; during the 2011 election, some Eastside districts counted their ballots in the single digits. And it will be especially hard for Pressley, who must convince voters there not only that she has their interests more at heart than does their fellow Hispanic Martinez (particularly on issues of gentrification, affordability, and environmental justice) but also that it's worth it for them to get out to the polls.

In other words: Form a coalition that is both to the right and to the left of the current council, one made up of pro-property-rights conservatives and anti-gentrification liberals, of libertarians and environmentalists, of wealthy donors and nontraditional voters – of citizens who, as Pressley puts it, are tired of having their power taken away. It's true that politics makes strange bedfellows; it's also true that voting coalitions based upon such marriages often produce quick divorces.

The Long March

I met with two members of the Pressley coalition at the local liberty movement's unofficial home, Brave New Books, an anti-government bookstore located, strangely enough, downstairs from the Chase bank branch on Guadalupe at MLK – both underground and in the belly of the beast.

John Bush is dressed in a black sweatshirt with the "Live Free or Die" snake printed on the front. He carries with him the air of satisfaction that can only come from popping your greatest enemy in the nose and getting away with it. In late December, Bush received a letter from the city saying that after an administrative review, his yearlong banishment from City Hall for disobeying Mayor Leffingwell during a council meeting last August had been reduced to time served. At the time, Bush's banishment had been confirmation of all his and his fellow liberty activists' most deeply held suspicions about the City Council. (Not that they needed any confirmation – the liberty movement is built on suspicion.)

With Bush was Heather Fazio, executive director of Texans for Accountable Govern­ment, a government watchdog group (previously headed by Bush, and with Pressley on the steering committee) that has made part of its name videotaping Austin police officers performing arrests and oftentimes, they say, harassing citizens. Both Bush and Fazio are suspicious of government altogether and would prefer there be none, but they also recognize that, until anarchy arrives, having someone on the inside of the system may not be the worst idea.

"I wish that there could be no government at all," says Bush, "but until that happens, running candidates that can get inside the system and slow it down and limit its ability to harm individuals who would rather not participate in programs they find to be immoral is certainly worthwhile. A candidate like Laura Pressley, with her credentials and her ability to communicate common sense and her position as a business leader, she has a shot to run and be consistent and promote the philosophy of liberty."

To Fazio, the city's paltry voter participation numbers aren't proof of voter apathy; they're proof of voter discontent, something she believes the Pressley campaign can capitalize on if they can just get their message out. "Ninety-seven percent are fed up with what's going on, so we have to let them know that someone like them is running," Fazio says. "The fact that only 7 percent vote demonstrates that there's a hell of a lot more of us than them who condone what's going on. It's just that people like us have been fed up for so long with people who don't give a damn about us. So when we have a candidate like Laura, I think we're going to have a huge spike in turnout, because she represents people who have been disenfranchised by the establishment."

Fazio says that she and her fellow colleagues are the loudest only because they're so passionate about the cause of liberty. That Pressley has run for council and garnered as much attention as she has is proof that all that noise is about to take the form of some real electoral action. She believes new voters are going to come out in droves.

The Green Factor

In the end, whether Pressley or Dafoe or Republican Place 5 challenger Dominic Chav­­ez – even mayoral hopeful Brigid Shea – or any of the other candidates looking to knock off an incumbent this season, have any chance will likely come down to what it always comes down to: money. Liberty movements and magical trans-ideological coalitions are fine, but this is still America. If a candidate cannot persuade a sufficient number of her followers to contribute at least a modicum of monetary support (all that is allowed in Austin), it would suggest that the enthusiasm for her candidacy is either not in fact very broad or mostly rhetorical.

As of Dec. 31, 2011, the incumbents in this year's races were sitting on war chests that far outpaced their rivals. Pressley, for example, had only $2,300 in her campaign fund. Compare that to Martinez's $64,700 and you begin to appreciate the size of the mountain Pressley is attempting to climb. Perhaps more importantly, none of the challengers listed contributions from a single "bundler" – big-name contribution gatherers (often developers, Downtown law firms, or combinations of the two) who by recruiting their friends to contribute are able to sidestep the limits of the campaign-finance ordinance. All of the incumbents listed bundlers, some of them five or more.

Despite the oddness of 2012, Peck Young still believes even a campaign that generates a lot of insurgent spirit is effectively doomed if it can't compete in the money game. "Pressley's is a coalition of people who are mad at everybody and aren't going to take it anymore, and there may be viability to it," he says, "But she can only win if she gets the money. Without money to communicate, George Washington wouldn't be a viable candidate."

Yet even if Young is right and money is needed to win elections because money gives campaigns the ability to communicate – some of these outsider candidates, Pressley in particular, may be in a good position to make some electoral noise. Despite their marginal assets, Pressley and Bush and Fazio and all the other members of the liberty movement have lots of experience getting their voices heard in rooms where nobody's listening. They've been doing it for years.