A few suggestions:

- organize local “Arts for Change” groups to seek out and support candidates for local office who will be creativity champions.

- hold candidate forums ask ask local candidates to express a position on the arts and culture for your area.

- finally, stop trying to influence bad politicians and BECOME the elected leaders you seek. Run for office yourselves as creativity champions. Tell your story of success in the arts and explain why you will be a better leader to help solve local problems than would the typical candidate - who is usually a lawyer, a prosecutor, a veteran or law enforcement person.

Actually, at this point, I’d nominate Bill T. Jones.

And, Roberto, I really appreciate your discussion of measuring and composing/creating meaning. This is a trap that the foundation world seems to be getting more and more stuck in as they focus on metrics to evaluate impact.

Your call for action is a necessary one and hopefully can be realized with a Democrat in the White House. But don’t hold your breath. Congress likes to talk about the arts but they behaviorally differently. After many years working with elected officials at the national, state and local level on efforts to strengthening the cultural sector and protect the rights of artists what I’ve seen is that in last 30 years are governmental cultural policies focus on controlling the content of artistic speech. Otherwise, it is the policy of willful neglect.

Your policy recommendations are on the mark. If Barack is elected an ArtCorps may happen, especially if our economy continues it’s downward spiral. Before you adulthood, and a bit of art history, during the 1970’s recession, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (or CETA) job works program was created and CETA employed artists’ prompted and created the artists’ space movement.

U.S Cultural Policy operates as a system of arrangements that include the NEA, State and Local Arts Councils, Corporate and Private Foundations, Cultural Institutions, Artists, Cultural Workers, Patrons, Arts Administrators…. What I hope for, from whoever is elected is an understanding of the decentralized nature of our nation’s cultural policy and given the symbolic importance of the NEA they appoint a Director who understands this dynamic.

The uninspired current leadership of Chairman Dana Gioia has turned the NEA into a branding device and if there’s a policy objective of the agency it is to construct complicity behind the idea of a nation as some kind of homogenized “Happy Face” without paradoxes, difference, innovation or risk.

Current cultural policymaking is dominated by technocratics blinded by the empiricist imperative to “measure” – the impact or outcome of the arts. (As if the knowledge gained by the quantifiable trumps the knowledge of aesthetic experiences) Measuring the world is different than composing the world. Artists’ compose the world - they create meaning.

Our change now is take this election moment and hopefully the election of Obama as opportunity to reengage and reanimate the potentiality of art and its power to present the beautiful, trigger the social imaginary and shape our relation to each other our -plurality.

So Mr. Sheingold, - onward and what’s my homework assignment?

Love

Roberto