Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gardner is a strong believer in the effectiveness of a citizens lobby: "One of the questions I get asked is where's your clout? You can't buy Congressmen, what are you going to do? The most important thing that we can do is what you might call citizen monitoring. It is really true that public officials who are under supervision behave differently than those who are not. It is a very powerful influence on public officials to know that they are under observation...
...governmental change: a mixture of political guerrilla warfare by the membership and frontal assault by lobbyists in Washington. This combination of savvy political lobbyists working directly on Capitol Hill, and a large membership pressuring their individual Representatives and Senators has proven an extremely effective method of promoting change. John Gardner, founder of Common Cause, believes that there is no more effective means of making a politician act responsibly than by letting him feel that he is being watched...
According to Gardner, the impact of citizen action has not been adequately appreciated: "I think that typically the academic world has enormously underrated the hard-hitting impact of citizen movements. If you look at the history of citizens' movements you see some very hard realities. The peace movement is a political reality. The civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the abolition of child labor, these movements have great vitality. These modes of reform are not adequately treated. But you think how long it would have taken for the civil rights movement to spring from the heart...
...Gardner believes that his organization must focus on things that have a definable end point. He realizes that there have been too many causes which have established vague platforms which are easily ignored by those in power. Gardner stresses that it is particularly the issues of structure and process that until now have not had a constituency. "Anybody can organize a group to speak out against hunger," Gardner said. "Common Cause is trying to get the point across, clearly and emphatically, that questions of hunger won't be solved as long as a septuagenarian Texan named W. A. Poage...
...philosopher turned activist, Gardner stated the basis for his change of heart. "We've got to get back into some sort of command of our situation. Individual Americans have to get back into command of their institutions again; this means access, this means responsiveness. These are great abstractions, but if you asked what is behind them you sooner or later come down to very specific log jams like seniority. You discover that over the years in every one of these institutions, people almost unconsciously have designed barricades to prevent access. They like the insiders game which makes it very difficult...