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Nicholas Johnson: I am, and I thank you, and I thank your guests.

These process questions are so fundamental and so often ignored, so I thank you too, Ben, for making the discussion possible.  But having said that, I now have a substantive question.

What do we do with the cheerleaders?  How do we get the public and the public officials and the media to look at the cold hard facts?  And the example I’ll use is the Iowa Rainforest.

Vilsack has now said that the project is nuts.  That was obvious to every independent economist I ever talked to.  There was no basic business plan, they’ve not been able to raise a dime in ten years, and yet you could not find a local city council member, member of the Iowa legislature, or a newspaper's editorial board that would sit down and apply basic Business School 101.  Why don’t you have a business plan? What about the cash flow?  Where do you think a million and a half visitors are going to come from in a state where most attractions like this get between fifty and one hundred thousand visitors a year?

How can you make a community focus on the business realities when public money is involved? How can you get them to apply the kind of standards that any banker would use if they’d come in and asked for a loan instead of tax-payer’s money?

Ben Kieffer:  Nick, I want to thank you for calling in.  Our listeners don’t know, so I want to make sure people know who you are.  Nick Johnson is a University of Iowa professor of law and formerly FCC Commissioner for the United States.  And Nick, thank you for that great question.  Nick, you’ve had a big campaign against the Rain Forest Project here in Iowa, and now it seems the tide has turned against the Rain Forest.  But let’s get an answer to your question.  There was an overwhelming drive to get this thing done.

Tim Boyle:  Nick Johnson. Wow.  That’s tremendous.  Keep fighting the good fight, sir.

Nick Johnson: Thank you.  Let me add, if anybody’s actually interested in that particular issue, as well as the UI presidential search, check out www.nicholasjohnson.org, where I have thousands of screens of stuff about rain forests and other matters.

Ben Kieffer:  Okay, let’s get an answer to your question, Nick.  This particular example, any observations from our panelists today?

Tim Boyle: Well, first, my idea’s always been, rather than a pretend rain forest, why don’t we create a real natural prairie, because that’s what actually is indigenous to Iowa.  But that’s another issue.

I do think he’s touched upon, for lack of a better term, our Iowa-ness, in that dichotomy between, you know, “By golly, we need a big idea, a grand idea," and then you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, and then, “Well, that’s not gonna work because of this and that’s not gonna work because of that."  At some point you need to find that idea that is dramatic enough and may be crazy enough, but ultimately turns out to be stimulating.

The Golden Gate Bridge; if you’d looked at that pragmatically, an engineer would have said, “For crying out loud, you can’t build a bridge across the mouth of San Francisco Bay.  It won’t stand up.”  Well, sure enough, they did, and now it’s a landmark.

I was in a discussion with an architectural firm from Minneapolis that’s reviewing the situation in Cedar Rapids and they said they’ve never seen a community with so many plans.  We’re just planned within an inch of our lives.

Now we’ve got to act.  My line has become, "Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it was built."  Eventually they got down to it.  But that’s the debate.  What is too outrageous and outlandish? And then, what is dramatic and exciting?

Ben Kieffer:  I wanted to end our conversation -- we have just a few more minutes here.  Please, Nick Johnson, please stay on the line. -- I wanted to throw this out for some last comments here related to many of the things we’re talking about here.

Some research from the Kittering Foundation also identified another challenge. That research suggests that many of today’s citizens are just simply not engaged in the collective work of community problem-solving.  What is the key to engagement, to enthusiasm in civic activism?