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January 8, 2004
Halley is making light of the Club for Growth today, and manages to work us around to a Joe Conason piece on the hypocrisy of rich addicts who are hardliners about drug users except when they’re them (so to speak).
A team of celebrities is determining the winner of MoveOn.org‘s contest for amateur commercials countering the Bush administration’s policies and propaganda. But we wee folks get to vote on winners in three categories: Funniest, Best Youth Pitch, and Best Animation. Some of the 12 entries are very well done and quite amusing.
The O’Reilly Digital Democrary Teach-In‘s lineup is now online. It’s sorta kinda part of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, which was a must-attend event last year and promises to be as good this year. The Teach-In — bring a flower and anything written by Howard Zinn — looks like it’ll be a great day with some fabulous folks who are actually making a difference. (Disclosure: I’m on the conference committee, but that doesn’t mean I’d lie to you about being excited about the event.)
I will admit it’s a little thing, but it irks me. The Boston Globe today has an article by Joanna Weiss about the Clark campaign “blasting” a leaflet from the Dean campaign. In order to build the narrative, the fourth paragraph says that “Clark aids said that the Dean attack was a sign that…the presidential race might be evolving into a two-way battle…”
The fifth paragraph then validates this point of view:
A New Hampshire tracking poll released this week by American Research Group indicated Clark in second place behind Dean, pulling ahead of … Kerry…
The sixth paragraph continues the story:
A USA Today poll indicated Clark and Dean in a statistical tie nationwide.
Hmm. The first poll mentioned has Clark at 16% and Kerry at 13%, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points. The second one has Dean with 24% and Clark with 20%, with a margin of error of 5. The Globe article ignores the margin of error in the NH poll but includes it in the national poll. Why? I can only presume because the story tells better that way.
Clark is coming up quickly in the polls. That’s an important story. We could do without shading the statistics to make it “tell” better.
The Globe’s lead story today is Bush’s immigration reform proposal. I read all three articles in the set and I still don’t what Bush is proposing or how it’s different than what currently exists. This is some bad reporting.
Here’s a Q&A from the Miami Herald that I found much more helpful.
It turns out that the proposal, which does not give illegal immigrants the right to apply for permanent residency, sets up a “guest” status where “guest” means “Willing to pay a fee to take a job so crappy that, even during the worst economy for jobs since the Depression, no American is willing to take it.” Be our guest to do our back-stooping, subsistence-paying labor! You’re welcome!
(Are FAQs becoming more useful than inverted pyramids in telling non-narrative journalistic stories?)
January 7, 2004
The Club for Growth, a Republicanish group, has spent $75,000 to air an ad in Iowa that features a couple saying, “I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding…[etc.] … freak-show back to Vermont.”
One has to wonder why. If Dean is the weakest candidate against Bush, why is a Republican group working so hard to keep him from getting the nomination? In fact, why would Karl Rove be telling the world that Dean is the candidate he would most like to run his boy against? Surely Karl is too devious to be giving the Democrats such good advice!
Anyway, thanks to the Club, we now have an easy way to gauge whether Dean is the candidate for you:
| Me | You | |
| Tax-hiking |  | |
| Government-expanding | | |
| Latte-drinking | | |
| Sushi-eating | ||
| Volvo-driving | | |
| New York Times-reading | | |
| Body-piercing | ||
| Hollywood-loving | ||
| Left-wing | | |
| Freak show | ||
| PERCENT DEAN SUPPORT | 70% | ?? |
By the way, in response to this ad, Dean supporters donated an additional $280,000 to the Governor’s campaign.
Charles Taylor at Salon has a good review (i.e., I generally agree with his assessment) of the ads created by amateurs as part of MoveOn.org’s contest. He particularly likes Charlie Fisher’s “Child Play.” Me, too. As Taylor says:
If I were Howard Dean or Wesley Clark, the impact and economy of these ads would make me think twice before I shelled out big bucks to some media professionals.
January 6, 2004
I sent an email to a friend this morning asking for help thinking of technology people who meet a particular parameter, you know, along the lines of “Do you know any techies who ____?” Unfortunately, my friend forwarded my hastily written mail to about 20 people who might also be able to fill in the blank.
One of those twenty mentioned Metcalfe’s Law in her reply. Someone else talked about the need to supplement that law in order to understand a different aspect of social dynamics. Someone else commented, contradicted, expanded…
Now those 20 people — strangers — are engaged in a conversation about social network dynamics.
This leads me to a conclusion: The Web is more social than I am.
January 5, 2004
MoveOn.org has posted the selected nominees in its create-an-ad contest. If I weren’t on deadline, I’d be watching them right now…
January 4, 2004
Dave Rogers asks, in a comment to my posting about canvassing for Dean, why I’m supporting the Gov. Here’s my reply:
If you matched my positions up with the candidates’ (see the WBUR vote by issue quiz), it’d come out pretty much a wash among all of them except Lieberman. So, although overall I prefer Dean’s stances, I’m not voting primarily on the issues. There are two other reasons I’m supporting Dean.
First, I think he has the best chance to beat Bush. There are clearly reasonable arguments about this and I have never made an accurate political prediction. But it still seems to me that we can’t win by competing for the center. We did that and “lost” last time. We need instead to energize the base and bring in new voters. I think Dean has the best chance of doing that.
Second, win or lose, I think Dean is transforming politics. He’s giving people hope. (Despite what the Republicans and the media say, hope outweighs anger in the Dean movement, IMO.) He’s breaking the mold of traditional broadcast politics. He’s genuinely committed to giving citizens a voice and letting us self-organize. I think we (the grassroots) are laying the groundwork for something new and important. So, even if Dean loses the nomination, I will be proud to have worked for him.
Since beating Bush is my number one priority, of course I will work for and contribute to the campaign of whomever the Dems nominate…although my ardor will be dampened if it’s Lieberman.
Some friends of mine are considering switching from Dean to Bush (!) because they doubt Dean’s commitment to Israel. They are especially exercised by Dean’s referring to members of Hamas as “soldiers.” In context, though, he was calling them soldiers in order to support Israel’s policy of assassinating them. I don’t see how this indicates any weakness in his support of Israel, although it was obviously stupid politically.
January 3, 2004
It should rain when you canvass for a candidate. Not a downpour but enough of a drizzle that your hair is plastered to your head and your shirt never gets quite dry. And it should be cold. Glove cold. And the first person you meet should definitely not agree with you. Easy virtue isn’t worth it. (Accidentally leaving your umbrella, hat, cell phone and lunch at the local campaign headquarters is purely optional, however. Sigh.)
I’m home and dry now. My shoes are off and my feet are up. I feel good that I did a little tiny bit today to help get the Governor into the White House. I knocked on the doors of the registered Democrats and Independents marked on the papers the Portsmouth Dean HQ gave me. Most weren’t home. (Where do the people of Portsmouth all go on a rainy Saturday? Or did they just see me coming?) Some were Dean supporters. One woman worked with Dean’s wife in an ER in Vermont. Another said she’s supporting Dean because she’s in health care services — no further explanation required. A bunch politely declined to talk with me. No one volunteered that they were supporting another Democrat. The very first person who responded said, “I’m supporting President George W. Bush” with a semper fi stare that nearly knocked me off his stoop. His neighbor is also supporting the president, but thanked me for coming out on a day like this. I thanked him for thanking me, and he thanked me back.
I spent most of my time in an apartment complex where most of the people I spoke with were not the ones listed for those apartments; apparently it’s an area with high turn over as the economy shakes people out of their jobs and homes. One young woman was trying to decide which Democrat’s position on education is closest to her own. She’s preparing to be a teacher. I started to say something about the failure of No Child Left Behind, but she beat me to it. “This insistence on testing, and on blaming schools and teachers, is ridiculous,” she said. That’s Dean position, I replied. “Whoever we get will be better than Bush on education,” I said, and she agreed. I said that I was supporting Dean not just because of the issues but also because I like the way he makes decisions: look at the facts, come to conclusions, change your mind if the facts change or if you were wrong. It’ll be good to have a person of science in the White House.
For those who weren’t home, I left a Dean brochure. I wrote “I hope you’ll consider Gov. Dean!” on each and signed it “- David W., a wet volunteer.” No one told me to do that. In fact, when Joe at the Portsmouth HQ gave us our instructions, he said, “When someone answers, tell them a sentence or two about why you’re supporting Gov. Dean.” No Message of the Day. No scripted talking points. Just go forth and converse. Cool.
I came back to Portsmouth earlier than the rest of the canvassers because I wear out sooner. And the luck of my day continued: My drive home coincided with a particularly good episode of “This American Life” on the radio.
I’m off to Portsmouth, NH, this morning to go door-to-door for Dean. I’ll let you know how it went…
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