“This is the first telephone call of a brand- new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally? We are participating in history as it is being made. . . Bear with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely. . . We can really move the needle and get stuff done.”
That was Yossi Sergant, communications director for the National Endowment for the Arts, on an Aug. 10 conference call that looks a lot like an effort to get recipients of government grants to lobby for the Obama agenda.
The NEA, along with the White House Office of Public Engagement and United We Serve (the administration’s volunteerism initiative), had invited 75 members of the arts community to listen to a discussion supposedly about national service. But one invitee, film producer Patrick Courrielche, soon blogged that the call turned out to be an effort to get participants to push the administration’s agenda: “They told us: We had played a key role in the election and now Obama was putting out the call of service to help create change. We knew ‘how to make a stink,’ and were encouraged to do so.”
In other words, the nation’s top funder of the arts was abusing its position as custodian of taxpayer dollars to promote the Obama agenda. This is unprecedented.
As a former National Endowment for the Humanities official told me, “Nowhere, as far as I know, has there been even the suspicion that federal agencies under any administration have been enlisted by the administration to further specific legislation or legislative goals. And that’s what happened. [They said,] ‘We want to make art that will specifically advance Obama’s agenda.’ ”
It may be a crime: Federal agencies can’t use public funds to lobby. At the least, it sounds huge conflict-of-interest alarms. A government agency enlisting grantees and potential grantees to do partisan favors?
Sergant clearly knew what he was asking. He reportedly said, “I would encourage you to pick something. Whether it is health-care, education, the environment. . . There’s four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service. And then my ask would be to apply your artistic, creative utilities. Bring them to the table. Again, I’m really, really honored to be working with you.”
So far, NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman hasn’t commented on the mess. But Sergant’s name has been removed from the NEA’s Web site, and the agency hasn’t responded to queries about his employment status.
Courrielche warns, “Art is powerful and therefore must be free of this apparatus or it can be used to manufacture consent.”
But “manufactured consent” is exactly what the administration seems to want — even if it has to break the rules and cripple a government agency to get it.