Blog: Politics

Larry Lessig is speaking at the PDF conference this morning, talking about his campaign to open up the content from the upcoming political debates. He showed a variety of innovative remixes of political content - Jon Stewart conducting a debate between President George W. Bush and 2000 Presidential candidate, Texas Governor Gerge W. Bush, a Paul Wolfowitz parody of "The Office", a love song between Bush and Blair, and the Obama 1984 video.

These remixes of political culture are a tremedous step forward in the ability of citizens to participate in political speech, but they require the ability for creators to use clips of public figures from the commercial media. And while Comedy Central has plenty of lawyers to defend Jon Stewart's right to do this, others don't. NBC attempted to block Robert Greenwald from using a clip of Bush, and the reason they gave? "It's not very flattering to the President." While they backed off this particular terrible excuse, media organizations continue to assert an absolute right to control all content.

Barack Obama and John Edwards have answered the call to open up debate content. Obama wrote, "The Internet has enabled an extraordinary range of citizens to participate in the political dialogue around this election. . . . We, as a Party, should do everything that we can to encourage this participation. . . . Rhere is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection [of copyright]. We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates."

Obama's words are terrific not only for their sentiment but also for their choice of themes - he mentions incentives, the fundamental goal of copyright. Where copyright creates incentives to create, it is performing a public good. Where, as in the case of debates, it instead blocks creativity and innovation, it is a harm and has no place in that particular context.

Senator Chris Dodd has also called for opening up the debate content to citizens, as has retired Republican Congressman Robert Livingston. Hillary Clinton has not spoken up on this issue, nor have the major Republican candidates.

I'm starting a candidate scorecard on issues of innovation. Here's the scorecard so far (For space, I'm only mentioning candidates where we know their positions, or who are in the top tier of national polls):

Candidate	Free Debates
Democrats
Obama	A+
Edwards	A
Dodd	A
Clinton	???
Republicans
Giuliani	???
McCain	???
Romney	???

During the 2004 election, a new idea burst into the popular political consciousness - "framing." The idea is simple, and to me, obvious: the way people talk about an issue influences the way they think about an issue. Say "estate tax" and people think about taxing big mansions for a small number of people; say "death tax" and it sounds like your grandmother is going to have to pay up when she passes away. Say "Social Security privatization" and people think about the failed energy schemes in California, but "personal accounts" sound like prudent saving for the future. "Partial-birth abortion" sounds gruesome, but it's just a scary way of talking about "late-term abortions".

Writers use words to persuade all the time. I called the California energy deregulation plan a "scheme" to convey the disaster that it represented for the state, rather than, say "experiment". Of course words have power, and nobody should recognize that more than writers.

That is why it's baffling the way some writers vehemently dispute the idea that framing could provide value. Jonathan Chait wrote a cover story in The New Republic this month about the rise of the netroots and their value to American politics. All in all, I think it's a remarkably even-handed analysis that gives credit to most of the netroots' major effects on politics, something most commentators outside of that world have thus far been slow to understand or reluctant to admit.

But he takes a sudden dig at framing:

Among the most revealing is the netroots' incessant use of the words "meme" or "frame" to describe ideas. It is a formulation that assumes that establishing the truth about an idea matters less than phrasing the idea in the most politically effective way and repeating it as much as possible. As Ed Kilgore (a moderate liberal blogger with a complicated relationship to the netroots) has put it, this wording "reflects the strange belief that politics is all about noise' and narratives'; whoever makes the most noise or gets the most Google hits is going to win, regardless of objective reality."

Chait's argument makes sense if you assume there is one objective truth and that intelligent people can always arrive at it. The netroots' fundamental claim, which Chait misses, is that it's impossible to agree on a single inviolable truth. Instead, reasonable people can disagree, and whoever is most effective at articulating their beliefs in easily comprehensible language is most likely to prevail. Yet there's remarkable resistance to this simple idea.

When some members of the profession of journalism build their self-images on the notion that they are ferreting out absolute truth, challenges to this orthodoxy can meet extremely strong opposition. Just look at the New York Times Book Review, which essentially printed an attack op-ed in the guise of reviewing an excellent book, Jeffrey Feldman's Framing the Debate. It's a baffling set of untruths and misreadings that Feldman rebuts more effectively than I can. But just the fact that the Times Book Review chose to run such an opinionated, direct argument as a review is telling. When reviewing a book about one of our Founding Fathers do they choose a scholar with an opposing view to write the review? The vehemence of the responses from various quarters can only mean that the idea of framing is hitting an uncomfortable nerve with certain members of the press. And it's long overdue.

It's sad when journalists do a hit piece on bloggers. It's triply sad when the group tut-tuts on camera after the reportage about those silly bloggers' low ethical standards, only to have it turn out that the reporter who did the piece didn't read his sources, nobody fact-checked anything, and as a result the capstone accusation that justifies the piece is entirely false. And then it's quadruply sad when the media outlet in question issues a correction, and continues to get it wrong, only a little less wrong.

Here's the backstory: The New York Times did a fairly shoddy expose about how some bloggers get paid, and in response, Jonathan Singer of MyDD wrote a tongue-in-cheek post where he claims that he is really Jerome Armstrong, and so are Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller and Scott Shields. "Thought you met Matt, Chris or Jonathan at Yearly Kos or some other event? Most likely you met one of the young fellows I paid to play those roles. They're just out of work, dime a dozen actors from Los Angeles. Anyone could have played them." A local Boston commentator/tool named John Carroll then reported it as fact that Jerome was really all these other people.

After much well-deserved criticism and ribbing, they posted a correction on their show blog, but... wait for it... they still didn't read the post, saying that Jerome was kidding, when in fact Jerome didn't write the joke in the first place (Jonathan did, claiming to be Jerome)!

This would all be merely funny if it weren't for the extraordinarily self-righteous tone of the original piece, saying in effect, "these bloggers think they are journalists, but look, they aren't up to the same standards." No, they're above, at least above the standards of this particular show.

For his whole career, Senator Trent Lott has served the big money groups that fund him. Among them were the insurance companies, who have long pushed "tort reform," an innocuous phrase for efforts to take away Americans' right to take their insurers to court when their claims are wrongfully denied.

But last year, Lott found his shoe on the other foot, when Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home and State Farm denied his claims. According to an article by the Center for Justice and Democracy, "Senator Lott has not only filed his own suit but also talks about 'insensitivity and outright meanness' of insurers, saying, 'They have abused my people, my friends, the people I love.'" Lott has also introduced legislation to have the insurance industry investigated for fraud, and to repeal its unusual antitrust exemption. And observers hope his historic

It's gratifying that Lott has seen the light. But it's depressing that he only decided to stick up for ordinary people when he realized he could be one of those people. As long as he received special treatment, he was happy to carry water for his corporate donor base, and never ask the deeper questions to understand the effects their policies have on the people. Might Lott's newfound appreciation for the hardships of others extend to other areas of policy beyond insurance and tort reform?

Amie Loyer, host of Drinking Liberally Nashville, sent this to her chapter's list after the election. It's quite possibly the best articulation of why making politics fun and social is so important.

My friends, we need to have a party tonight.

Whether you realize it or not, you did something big and important when you added your email to this list, or came to see us for the first time. That was the first step in your decision to learn more, to reach out to other people, to challenge the conventional wisdom we all swim in that says politics isn't real life.

We're asked, fairly often, what good a group like DL can do when it's "just" social. We're not party-affiliated. We're prohibited from endorsing or disavowing candidates and ballot initiatives. Wouldn't we be so much more effective, the argument goes, if we just did more?

One flaw in that logic is the presumption that all of us who care about our country and its direction are in a common place in our political journeys, and in our awareness. That's just not true: most of our members say they weren't all that interested in politics before they got involved with DL, and now they can't wait to find out more.

Another flaw is that by being 'social,' we're devaluing direct action. That, too, isn't correct: by bringing together members of disparate groups, people are able to make even more connections and have even more opportunities to volunteer, canvass, support, raise awareness.

But the biggest flaw of all is that the group doesn't do anything. On the contrary, the group does what may be the most important thing of all: it allows ordinary people like us to integrate political awareness into the fabric of our lives. It gets us used to talking and thinking about these issues. It normalizes politics without asking us to drink anybody's Kool-Aid (just beer!). And it does that to such an extent that people who had no political awareness at all a year ago are now convincing their co-workers to change their votes. You're phone-banking. You're registering people to vote. You're volunteering. You're running for office, or considering a run. You're not being silent any more.

So thank you, all of you, for taking that first step. Tuesday didn't get all of us everything we wanted, but we did get change. Congratulations. It can be said that our country started in a bar, and we'll take it back from a bar.

It's been a rough couple of years for democracy. Congress eroded many freedoms, like habeas corpus, and let corruption, cronyism, and countless other bad behaviors run rampant in the administration without issuing a single subpoena no matter how egregious the abuse. Bush declared his intention to simply disregard certain acts of Congress. Would the US turn into a banana republic?

Last night, we discovered that democracy is fairly resilient after all. Democrats won the House in a landslide and narrowly took over the Senate as well, exceeding my expectations. In 2004, as I left Philadelphia after a day of canvassing, exit polls looked great for Kerry and good for a variety of Senate races, but by the time I got back to New York City we were losing. This year, things just kept getting better, as initial leads for Jim Talent and George Allen evaporated in later counting, giving Claire McCaskill the win in Missouri against the virulent stem cell research foe Talent, and Jim Webb a narrow lead over the racist George Allen. "Senator Man-on-Dog" Rick Santorum is going home in an ovewhelming loss.

I'm particularly happy about Jerry McNerney's victory over Richard Pombo in California, the only Bay Area Congressional seat held by a Republican. Pombo saw his job as chairman of the House Resources Committee to destroy all of our national resources as quickly as possible, even suggesting selling off the national parks last year. Now he's gone thanks to the efforts of Bay Area progressive groups who campaigned tirelessly. Kirsten Gillibrand, a personal friend of many politically active New Yorkers I know, beat John Sweeney in the Saratoga Springs area, while John Hall pulled of a surprising upset over super conservative Sue Kelly in the not so conservative northern Westchester area. And in a race closely watched by IPac, Paul Hodes unseated the copyright extremist (and extremist in other ways as well) Charlie Bass in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire has become a blue state: Democrats took both Congressional seats and control of both houses of the state legislature. The message is clear: the Republican Party chose to be the party of racists and religous nuts, appealing to a narrow constituency mostly in the South, and so the people of New Hampshire no longer care for that party. Nor do the people of Montana, of central New York, or the eastern Bay Area - or even Indiana, where Democrats swept all three competitive Congressional seats.

In New York State, where the State Senate is aggressively gerrymandered to protect Republican incumbents, Democrats held on to their most vulnerable seat (David Valesky) and look good to take the seat in Yonkers. While it's disappointing that the wonderful Brooke Ellison, who I campaigned for during Election Day in Stony Brook, was unable to unseat the very conservative John Flanagan, it's very exciting that with 84% of the vote counted, Andrea Stewart-Cousins leads Nick Spano by 1,100 votes in the Yonkers district where last year she lost by only 18 votes amidst widespread vote suppression and legal challenges.

Early this summer, a variety of progressive organizations of New York City worked together to identify a key race where we could make a difference, and chose to send volunteers in droves to Yonkers. ACT-NOW and DFNYC led phone banks and canvassing trips, and it looks like it paid off, despite endorsmenets for Spano by SEIU 1199 (health care workers), the Teamsters, and several other unions, the idiotic Empire State Pride Agenda and NARAL New York, and a lack of support in this race by the Working Families Party. And it's not over, but even just to be in the lead at this point is a clear victory for the grassroots and netroots over the establishment issue groups who are still working from an ultimately self-destructive playbook, in an attempt to be bipartisan, of endorsing a few Republicans who vote for a leadership that opposes their agenda.

At the state level, Democrats took many governorships, but almost as importantly, the Secretary of State position plays a key role in many states. Holding the office gives a Republican SoS the opportunity to suppress the vote by instituting possibly illegal ID requirements for voting, or selecting unauditable touch-screen machines, or limiting the numbers of voting machines available in Democratic cities, as Ken Blackwell (who lost his race for governor last night) did in Ohio. Thanks to the Secretary of State Project, Democrats won the SoS positions in Ohio, Minnesota, Iowa, Nevada, and New Mexico.

Republican efforts to intimidate voters, by making misleading and harassing robo-calls in the last days, threatening voters wrongly over the phone with criminal charges if they don't confirm their polling places, and a host of other tactics, may have made a few races closer or swung a close race or two into their column, but it wasn't enough to stop democracy reasserting itself. Their next tactic will be to try to steal the election in Virginia and maybe in Montana. But we won't let them.

I wrote previously about Intuit and H&R Block's efforts to block California's Ready Return program. Ready Return would send taxpayers with simpler returns (wage income only, for example) an already filled-out form, which they could simply review and sign. But making taxes easier hurts sales of TurboTax, so not only is Intuit lobbying against the program, they donated $1 million to the Republican candidate for California State Controller, since Democrat John Chiang supports Ready Return.

This is truly shameful behavior by Intuit. A company is pouring large amounts of money into a political race for the sole purpose of making people's lives more complicated, in order to sell them products they might not otherwise need. Are we next going to see private security companies supporting candidates who'd cut the budget for police protection? That would be unthinkable, and so should be Intuit's behavior.

MyDD has become my favorite blog of late. While it's not the progressive blogosphere's most highly trafficked blog, it's the most intelligent about strategy and movement building.

Matt Stoller led the way earlier this year on discussing whether the blogs should take on Joe Lieberman, and ultimately deciding to do so; rallying support for Net Neutrality, and questioning some of the ultimately destructive anti-movement behavior of well meaning elected officials like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Chris Bowers has the best election forecasting analysis, particularly for the House races. And this past week he has launched two terrific, innovative campaigns. The first was Use It Or Lose It, pressuring Democratic House members in safe districts to donate more money to close races.

More recently, Chris launched a great idea to get the word out about terrible Republican candidates by getting progressive bloggers to link to revealing press articles about each of them, thus promoting high Google rankings (often known as "Google bombing") for those articles about candidates like Jon Kyl, Rick Renzi, J.D. Hayworth, John Doolittle, Richard Pombo, Brian Bilbray, Marilyn Musgrave, Doug Lamborn, Rick O'Donnell, Christopher Shays, Vernon Buchanan, Joe Negron, Clay Shaw, Bill Sali, Peter Roskam, Mark Kirk, Dennis Hastert, Chris Chocola, John Hostettler, Mike Whalen, Jim Ryun, Anne Northup, Geoff Davis, Michael Steele, Gil Gutknecht, Michele Bachmann, Jim Talent, Conrad Burns, Jon Porter, Charlie Bass, Mike Ferguson, Heather Wilson, Peter King, John Sweeney, Tom Reynolds, Randy Kuhl, Robin Hayes, Charles Taylor, Steve Chabot, Jean Schmidt, Deborah Pryce, Joy Padgett, Melissa Hart, Curt Weldon, Mike Fitzpatrick, Don Sherwood, Lincoln Chafee, Bob Corker, George Allen, Frank Wolf, Mike McGavick, and Dave Reichert.

Bowers will also (through BlogPac) buy Google AdWords on searches for the name of each candidate, parallelling the very successful campaign by the Drum Major Institute who purchased AdWords on each New York State legislator's name with the score he or she received on their Middle Class Report Card. I'm told that people from small upstate communities who haven't heard of DMI have often heard, and repeat, their legislator's score which they found out about through the AdWords campaign.

Could America become a police state? The current unpopularity of the administration gives hope that democracy is quite resilient. Nonetheless, two chilling articles give reasons to continue to be vigilant.

First, Ian Welsh writes a stirring condemnation of the recent legalization of torture by Congress, a few weeks ago. And just yesterday, it was revealed that in in June, Vice President Dick Cheney (allegedly) ordered a man arrested for doing no more than politely criticizing his policies to his face.

A democratic election is the only thing, the very single thing, standing between this bunch and a police state. It's clear they want to operate that way, and the Congress will let them. Hopefully the American people won't.

Nothing arouses conservative ire like former President Bill Clinton, and a lot of people in politics crave the glamour of proximity to famous people. Combine these in an event where some people participate in a lunch with Clinton, and where the only information available at first is a photograph of the bloggers involved, and we have a recipe for bad behavior.

When women first started advocating for the right to vote, or equal treatment in the workplace, or protection against violence, many people not only resisted these changes but ridiculed the individuals involved. That continues to this day - the terrific blog Feministing gets enormous numbers of nasty comments, far more than more general-interest political blogs. The authors get attacked in the most objectifying ways, like commenters commenting on their "fuckability" no matter what serious topic they are trying to cover.

Most recently, a conservative blogger named Ann Althouse attacked Feministing founder Jessica Valenti for her participation in the aforementioned Clinton lunch. It seems she happened to be standing in the front row and was turned at an angle to the camera (as were the others near her), making the shaper of her breasts visible. Since in the worldview of those who attacked the liks of Susan B. Anthony back in the day, women should only succeed in the world based on their looks, and those who look good must be doing so only to get ahead, Jessica was savagely attacked by Althouse and her commenters for "flaunting" her body.

Well, Jessica Valenti has my eternal respect for being a real trailblazer. She puts up with a lot of abuse on her blog in order to expose young people to feminism. And now she is once again setting an example by not letting critics use her looks to silence her words while also not letting enemies make her ashamed of being attractive. Here's Jessica's take-no-prisoners strike back and another great response from another terrific blogger, Feministe.

On the other end of bad behavior we have another little hoopla about the same picture which happened to only include white bloggers. Peter Daou, who organized the event, invited black and Latino bloggers, who unfortunately couldn't attend. It's reasonable to point out the issue, but it opened the door for some people, envious they weren't invited, to harp on race to the detriment of everyone. Unfortunately, we have trouble separating real racial conversation from the tendency of a few people to bring up race every time they aren't personally given the attention they feel they deserve, as Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher says explains in reaction to one such critique.

I'm sad when a prominent figure tries to step into the netroots world and gets savaged from all sides for trivialities. It happened when Mark Warner threw his party at Yearly Kos that would raise no eyebrows in any corporate industry conference but had bloggers self-flagellating over whether they were being "bought". And now, under attack from the right with valiant people like Jessica Valenti defending themselves for being too pretty, we're "shooting ourselves in the foot," as Oliver Willis put it, not just by criticizing the "first black President" for not being concerned enough with racial diversity, but also by jumping on yet another influential public figure trying to reach out.