Policy forums, in venues worthy of their importance

Perhaps this year’s presidential campaign will go down in history as one of the longest. It may also go down in history for having involved a different kind of conversation or a different format.

It was Sen. Obama who called for a different kind of conversation.

Sen. McCain proposed a different format for joint appearances, town hall meetings. There is still another kind of talk going on in the country during this campaign, and it brings the public into the conversation in a different way.

For the first time in history, all 12 presidential libraries are hosting a series of public policy discussions — called National Issues Forums (NIF) — between Labor Day and Election Day, in the heat of the presidential campaign.

For more than 25 years, forums convened by civic organizations in communities all across the nation have offered a different way to talk about public policy issues, one that is more deliberative.

Presidential libraries are part of the National Archives and Records Administration. They are public places, places where the public can gather for all sorts of events, now including public deliberation over some of the most pressing issues of the presidential campaign, according to Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States.

All the presidential libraries will host at least one forum on the issue of health care, on just about everyone’s list of urgent public policy issues this year. Some may do more than one forum on the health care issue. Individual libraries may choose from a large list of other urgent issues — among them immigration, education, jobs, national debt, energy and race — for their other forums.

“The goal,” Weinstein said, “should be hosting discussions which are balanced, civil in tone and fair-minded.”

NIF does not advocate specific solutions or points of view but provides citizens the opportunity to consider a broad range of choices, weigh the pros and cons of those choices, and meet with each other in a public dialogue to identify the concerns they hold in common.

What is public deliberation? Simply stated, it is people coming together to talk about a problem that is important to them. In forums, people deliberate with one another — eye-to-eye, face-to-face — exploring options, hearing others’ views, considering the costs and benefits of the public policy decisions.

Citizens make sound judgments by weighing the likely consequences of various options for action against all that they hold dear. The framework for a forum sets the stage for people to sort out and then work through the tensions — not to reach total agreement, but to identify a common direction or way to act on a problem.

A more complete understanding of the nature of the problem (and what people will and won’t do to solve it) often emerges from public deliberation.

In a democracy, citizens have an undelegable responsibility to make choices about how to solve public problems. Deliberation helps people make the difference they would like to make in our democracy.

And oftentimes, citizens’ views differ from candidates’ or officeholders’ views. Deliberation may reveal new possibilities for action that neither citizens, candidates nor officeholders saw before.

Without a doubt, there will be a lot of conversation about urgent national issues between Labor Day and Election Day this year in what NBC’s Tom Brokaw has called the most interesting presidential election campaign in the past 50 years. In this campaign, we the people will engage in public deliberation that will be balanced, civil in tone and fair-minded in a new venue — libraries dedicated to presidents from Hoover through Clinton.

That’s historic.

William Winter, former governor of Mississippi, is chairman of the National Issues Forums Institute.