Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times has blogged transcripts of press conferences given by the two candidates yesterday:

Barack Obama

John McCain

[Tags: obama mccain economy politics ]

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The Brian Lehrer Show, on the nation’s largest public radio station, WNYC, is asking listeners to use a set of wiki pages to help produce six segments about the candidates’ positions on some of the less-hyped issues in the presidential election. The first issue to air will be the Internet and Broadcast Regulation. It will be on this Friday, 10-12 (EDT).

[Tags: net_neutrality everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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PublicMarkUp lets you — yes, you — comment on the Paulson and Dodd proposals…

[Tags: politics everything_is_miscellaneous e-democracy ]

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The Obama campaign changed its tech policy statement, raising concerns that it was backtracking on its commitments. Now the campaign has explained that the changes were an attempt to de-geek the language and the original policy statement is still up on their site. The campaign says:

We’ve been updating the entire website to ensure consistency across the pages. The full tech plan is still available on the page, so there is absolutely no substantive change to our policy — folks who want more information can click to get our full plan.

To my reading, the explanation is consistent with the edits.

[Tags: obama tech_policy campaign ]

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I don’t understand economics or the current crisis. I thus don’t trust my own judgments about who to believe. But Paul Krugman’s concerns and analysis strike a chord. So do Eric Hovde‘s in the Washington Post.

Since I lack the education and background to understand the crisis and its context, I find myself thrown into rudderless thinking, where I find myself swayed by people who I already tend to agree with (= Krugman), who are able to pain a coherent picture, and whose broad premises seem in line with mine. In short, I feel pretty helpless not just about the crisis about even how to understand the crisis.

[Tags: paul_krugman eric_hovde economics crisis ]

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You don’t get this very often: A single sentence that disqualifies a candidate not because of a scandal or a slip, but because it is an clear and forthright expression of the candidate’s beliefs. This is from a statement McCain wrote for Contingencies, published by the American Academy of Actuaries (via Paul Krugman):

“Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

[Tags: mccain politics obama ]

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I want to propose an hypothesis.

Suppose our new president gets serious about using the Internet as a tool of governance. So, he takes his email list and uses it to kickstart a new e-gov social network. In fact, his opponent provides his email list, too. So, let’s say we have 5M on this network. Let’s say it prominently features blogs and forums. Let’s say after two years there are 30M registered users, and some good percentage of those are at least occasionally active. Of course, I’m making all of this up.

Now, the problem the Internet has faced almost from the beginning is how to scale conversations. We’ve solved it time after time, whether it’s threading and forking Usenet discussions or Amazon’s reviews of reviews. So, let’s imagine that this new social network solves the problem through a combination of forking (or recursive conversations … see orgware [Disclosure: I’m an adviser]) and reputation, more or less along the DailyKos lines.

So, 30M people are engaged in vital conversations. Some people gain prominence in discussions on particular issues. The administration notices this. The relevant government policy makers want to engage in these conversations, because otherwise the 30M citizens feel like they’re being ignored. The emergent discussion leaders become the online points of contact between the administration and the conversations, because that’s how those conversations scale.

For example, PolarKing111 gains an enormous reputation because he writes about polar warming so knowledgeably and passionately, because he engages with all sides in the discussion with respect, and because he’s so good at representing all the various opinions. Administration officials engage with him on the site, often in a spirited back-and-forth. He ably represents the concerns emerging from the many discussions on the site. It’s a public dialogue with just enough structure, one unlike any our democracy has seen.

Inevitably, one day in early 2011, the media will discover that PolarKing111 is a 15 year old girl, but that’s not my point. My point is that the emergent online discussion leaders play a role unprecedented in our democracy. They are not elected yet they represent us. They are not members of the government yet they directly affect government. They have some power but the power comes from an emergent process. We don’t even have a word for this role.

Of course, I’m making all of this up. It’s just an hypothesis. Yet, it’s easy to imagine something like this happening, while it simultaneously being impossible to predict exactly what will happen. Nevertheless, there’s a strong possibility that some form of e-gov social network will emerge, either from the government or from the people. This social network could create new roles or processes of democracy that could well turn out to be quite important. But, just as Facebook can alter the nature of privacy by deciding whether or not to set a checkbox on or off by default, the roles and processes of this new layer of democracy will depend to a large degree on small decisions about how the software happens to work.

Democracy is susceptible to software.

Personally, I think that’s likely to be a good thing. But, who knows?

No one, that’s who.

[Tags: democracy e-democracy e-government e-gov ]

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Talking Points Memo has a bunch of posts (latest) about the odd interview McCain gave to Radio Caracol Miami.

You can hear the unedited, original interview here. Or this embedded player (well, iframe) might work in some browsers, albeit not in mine: The first half is one economics. About halfway through, the interviewer asks about Venezuela and Bolivia. In response to a question about taking Latin America more seriously, McCain says: “I know the issues. I know the leaders.” Indeed, he gets them right.

About 3/4 of the way through, the interviewer asks him if he’d invite Zapatero to the White House. She says his full name — José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero — which might have thrown him, since he gives his generic answer about meeting with those who support democracy, and then starts talking about Mexico. It seems pretty clear to me that he didn’t catch the name and didn’t want to alienate the Florida audience by seeming to be thrown by the interviewer’s properly accented pronunciation. He then, unfortunately, gives a response about being willing to meet with friends of democracy, as if that were in doubt about Spain. The interviewer then explicitly says she’s talking about the president of Spain, and McCain repeats his answer. Since that’s a pretty dumb response when talking about an ally, I’m assuming that McCain felt he had dug himself into a hole and didn’t want to crawl out by admitting his error. The price, however, is a needless flap with an ally. [Tags: mccain obama politics spain ]

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This ad presses all my buttons — the right buttons! He’s calm, clear, offers a plan, offers hope beyond a plan, embodies the change he’s promising, and makes McCain look confused and self-serving in silent contrast.

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Yesterday, Sen. McCain was on the TV and said to Harry Smith

The point is, I was chairman of the commerce committee. Every part of America’s economy, I oversighted. I have a long record, certainly far more extensive of being involved in our economy than Senator Obama does.

Wow. This seems both to be an in-context quote and remarkably dunderheaded. McCain just shot the entire “experience” argument in the face.

Yesterday was a long day of gaffes and inadvertent truths for the McCain campaign. May the unraveling begin! [Tags: mccain obama politics economy dunderheads ]

Here’s a 4 minute NPR piece on Obama on the economy. The piece is not very substantial, however. More horse racey.

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