Marc Miringoff

I'm still in shock at the news from last week that Marc Miringoff had passed away at 58. Marc's obituary hardly begins to capture his influence, not just on me, but on some recent political campaigns and thus the language of progressive politics. It's a little late, but I want to use this forum to call a little more attention to Marc's influence.

Marc's guiding vision was that "The Social Health of the Nation" was as measurable as the health of the economy, and that, if we accepted a few standard, agreed-upon measures of societal well-being, they could eventually become almost-automatic triggers to policy, so that an increase in the child poverty rate, for example, should force a response, much as a decline in the GDP forces the Fed to act. He was a master of complex demographic data, but what he aspired to do with it was to distill it down to a few essentials that would be easily understood and comparable over time.

Of course, plenty of earnest, well-trained social scientists have a command of data and believe that such facts should govern policy (a vision currently held up to mockery by the White House and Congress), and as the saying goes, that and $4.60 will get you a grande Frappucino. But Marc brought something else, or really, two other things: a deep understanding of public opinion and values, and a gift for the language of politics. He understood polling and the underlying views they represented probably as well as his brother, Lee Miringoff, director of the reliable and respected Marist Poll. In fact, whenever he talked about public opinion, he would add, "this is what my brother and I talk about for hours every Sunday night." That's a rare combination of skills and knowledge, and with the addition of being very funny and very caring, gave him a considerable advantage in trying to bring his ideas into the political process.

I first met Marc in 1999, when Bill Bradley asked him to put together a small group of intellectuals, writers, academics (actually, I'm not sure what the criteria for being included were) to develop some of the "big ideas" he wanted to put forward. I had a feeling this would be a futile exercise, because it wasn't built into the heart of the campaign and most of the other participants didn't know the candidate well, and that turned out to be true, but it was a pleasure to participate because of Marc. It didn't take longer than our first lunch together for us both to figure out that we had basically compatible visions, the same idea of what politics could aspire to.

After the Bradley campaign, Marc went on to play an important role as an advisor to Gore in 2000. Later, he helped organize a very interesting conference on developing an agenda for "compassionate government," sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Foundation, which was the rare conference that should have been four days long instead of a day and a half. This year, he had some significant involvement in the Edwards campaign. He was modest about that role, but the "Two Nations" theme that Edwards developed was pure Miringoff. I have no doubt that Marc helped persuade the candidate and the campaign first, that this was the reality, and second, that there was a way to talk about it that was powerful and could reach average people who thought the country could do better. What he wanted from politics was not influence, but to hear this kind of language put to good use, so the Edwards campaign was gratifying to him as it was to me.

There are a lot of familiar types that one meets around a political campaign. But there aren't many Marc Miringoffs. The same is true of academia. Although he was not that well known, Marc's absence in public life, apart from the loss to his family and friends, will be felt in ways that can't be imagined.