Like a lot of folks who are deeply engaged in Philly and PA politics my initial reaction upon hearing that Dave Davies is retiring from reporting on politics on a regular basis was dismay and sadness. He is really the best political reporter in the state and one of the best I’ve ever read.
My second reaction was to stop and think about why Dave is so good and what we could all learn from him.
The first two things that come to mind is that Dave is a decent man who tries to see good in people. Unlike a lot of political reporters, he is not snarky about politicians; does not think that he’s better than them; and ins’t ways trying to play gotcha with them.
Now you might think s not a good quality in a reporter who might be better at his or her job if he were suspicious about them or trying to catch them in various kinds of compromised positions. But it turns out that this is not really true. Dave ask tough questions. But he does it in a way that enables him to understanding people in their own terms, to see the world as they do. Dave also has an inquisitive mind that isn’t Ā interested in easy answers or initial explanations that focus just on individual motives. Read Davies carefully and you can come to understand more about how politicians interact within a system of power.Together, his decency and his inquisitiveness give Dave an understanding of politics that is far deeper that not just the typical citizen but the typical reporter and, I would add, typical academic political scientists.
Central to Dave’s depth is his understanding that politics is both vital and hard. It is vital because governments provide goods and services that are critical to our well-being. And it’s hard because people disagree. And they don’t just disagree because they are self-interested or because they have different ideologies, although those things are incredibly important. They disagree because of a million personal quirks and individual oddities. And I’m talking about voters as well as politicians.
From the 30,000 feet vantage point of polls you can find some patterns. But up close, the political views of citizens like that of individual politicians, are made up of all kinds of strange bits of information, odd personal emphases on one ideal or another, and individual peculiarities in putting it all together. Politicians don’t succeed unless they can get people with oddly diverse views into agreement, or at least enough agreement to get something done.
Getting enough agreement, whether it is to a piece of legislation, a candidate, a political platform or even the language of a political poster or a Facebook post is not easy. Politics is hard work. it requires a strange combination of both boldness and self-effacement, a willingness to say what you stand for on some occasions and hold back and even hide what you really want on others. It requires time, effort, and dedication. And, if you are going to do it without losing much of your soul, it requires paying attention to the moral lines that one crosses at one’s peril.
Very few people who have not tried to do this work know how difficult it is, how much energy and devotion it takes, and how important it is that it gets done. And if you don’t understand it, you fail to get the context in which politicians work. And then it is easy to be snarky and moralistic about them and constantly complain that they are not living up to their responsibilities. That kind of easy cynicism doesn’t spur but undermines activism.
I know only a very few academic political scientists whose work is shaped by this kind of understanding of politics. And I know one really great political reporter who gets that as well, and that’s Dave Davies. Dave understands the difficulty and importance of politics; is sympathetic to the difficulties of political work; and, when he should be, is gently critical of those who fail to live up to its demands.
He understands the challenges and importance of politics better than almost anyone, h is, in the end, why I think reading him has taught me so much over the years.