BloggerCon
Feb 20th, 2004 by jimmoore
Another BloggerCon is coming in April! See us in Cambridge in the Spring…
Also this
from Dave Winer. Dave has this idea that we should develop voter
support systems. His post highlights the need for the voter
support systems to include a candidate and elected official
accountability module.
Addendum: Dave’s post also highlights the need for the voter
suppor system to have a realtime dirty tricks detector and response
feature and a campaign competitive analysis and media manipulation
module.
I went to a seminar at the Kennedy School
yesterday doing a postmortem on the Dean campaign. The discussion was
led by a Chicago Sun-Times columnist and a political operative who ran
a PAC that ran negative ads successfully against Dean in Iowa. He
repeated that the only thing that mattered was winning. It didn’t occur
to me until this morning why that is wrong. Maybe it’s true from the
candidate’s perspective, but it’s not true from the voter’s. What
matters to the voter is getting representated. In the current political
system that can’t happen. Think about it this way. What if, in 2000,
your main issue had been No Nation Building. Easy. Vote for Bush. What
does he do his first week in office? Gets ready to do some
nation-building. Did he know he would invade Iraq when he was running?
You be the judge. In any case, as with most centralized businesses, the
voters are a herd, not meant to be heard. At one point I leaned over to
one of my colleagues and said “These guys are the enemy.” 
height=”9″ border=”0″ alt=”Permanent link to this item in the archive.”>