Alex UA's blog

I've been pretty quiet in this here blogosphere over the past 4 or 5 months, but today, on this Super-Duper-Fat-Tuesday, I've decided to end my self-imposed blog-exile and speak out in support of the candidate who I would vote for if I currently lived in one of the Super Tuesday States (I live in PA).

Now, in case you don't know me, I was very hopeful that Al Gore would jump in the race, as he had the boldest positions on the issues that matter most to me (the Environment, Health Care, media reform, getting money out of politics, defending "reason", etc). When it became apparent that Gore wasn't going to jump in, I decided I'd vote for Edwards, given that he campaigned on a populist message that included fighting corporations, lifting up the poor, and other issues that weren't far from Gore's positions.

But, now that we're left with only two candidates, I have decided to join the cult, er campaign, to support Barack Obama. Here are a few reasons why I'm supporting Obama, and I hope you'll agree that these reasons are so strong that you too will have no choice but to bow down to, er support, Obama:

I hate to disagree with Mike, but I find the talk about Barak Obama's 'campaign of inclusiveness' to be laughable. If I was the youth outreach coordinator for the other campaigns I would be salivating over taking on an idiot who does truly idiotic things like praise a far-right extremist like Tom Coburn (via Talk Left):

"The opportunities are there to create a more effective relationship between parties." Members of the other party he would seek help from include Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana, John Warner of Virginia and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

It's this last guy who should raise some eyebrows. "I would also seek out people like Tom Coburn, who is probably the most conservative member of the U.S. Senate. He has become a friend of mine."

For a little refresher on who Obama's friend is, and what he believes in, we get a greatest hits, or sorts, from Democratic Underground :

Senator Coburn, who said that lesbianism is "so rampant in some of the schools...that they'll let only one girl go to the bathroom."

Senator Coburn, who claims he can tell if someone is telling the truth because of his medical training.

Dr. Coburn, who said: "You know, I immediately thought about silicone breast implants and the legal wrangling and the class-action suits off that. And I thought I would just share with you what science says today about silicone breast implants. If you have them, you're healthier than if you don't. That is what the ultimate science shows...In fact, there's no science that shows that silicone breast implants are detrimental and, in fact, they make you healthier."

Senator Coburn, who thought Schindler's List was smut, an "all-time low, with full-frontal nudity, violence and profanity.

On gay rights, Senator Coburn said: "The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power... That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That's a gay agenda."

Senator Coburn, who objects to legal abortion in cases of rape, and justifies his position by noting that his great-grandmother was raped by a sheriff.

Now, I'm not in charge of any of the youth campaigns for any of the candidates, but I can tell you that if any of them start going after Obama within the younger demographic they will have plenty of ammunition to use. In 2006 I did youth outreach in Philly, and by far the things that made young folks listen to me when I would tell them about Rick Santorum were quotes of Rick's concerning gays, women, and abortion. If I was running those campaigns I would tell every kid that I could: "Do you know that Senetor Obama plans to work with a guy who thinks that gay people are on a mission to take over the government, who wants to tell you who to have sex with, who thinks that lesbianism is rampant in our schools, who wants to illegalize all abortion, etc?"

Obama's "inclusiveness" is just a bunch of hollow words, and pretty e-mails. In reality the guy wants to work with the very people who want to exclude "undesirables" from U.S. society. And I hope that the other campaigns can help to dispel the mystique around this "New Democrat" and reveal the "good" Senator as the hack that he is.

For the next few days I'll be in Chicago attending the Second Annual Yearly Kos Convention. Last year I had a great time at the convention, but I didn't really get to sit in on many panels or blog much, as I was there on behalf of the Iraq War documentary The War Tapes. This year I'm working for myself, and so while I be spending some time networking to try and sell my "wares" (web/Drupal development and tech/outreach consulting), but mostly I'll be trying to sit in on as many panels as I can and blog about the convention here and on Young Philly Politics.

Currently, I'm sitting in on the "Connecting Major Donors the the Netroots", featuring Rob Stein, Chris Bowers, Lisa Seitz Gruwell, Mike Lux, and Dave Johnson (pictured). Rob Stein is giving his famous presentation on Right Wing infrastructure, to which he recently added a piece on the growth of right-wing internet assets. The presentation definitely lived up to the hype, and it really is incredible how many resources right-wing activists and movement players have at their disposal.

Anyway, I have to get back to enjoying the conference. I'll put updates below the fold as the day goes on.

When I read Mike's post last week on his Yearly Kos panels, I nearly cried. Last year, I was working for the movie The War Tapes and got to go to the conference and screen the movie as part of my job, and had one of the best times of my life. Sure, the chocolate fondue fountain atop the space needle is the aspect that I talk/joke about the most, but the people I met and the connections I made while there were what really stuck with me. Given the diffuse nature of this networked world, getting to meet in person with people whom you work with and talk to online is invaluable. There is no better way to build the trust and friendships that these networks depend upon than teaching, learning, and getting pandered to together in person.

But, alas, the unemployment that came after my last campaign left me broker than broke (and completely turned off to working directly for a candidate again, but that's a whole other story), and so there just didn't seem to be anyway that it would be possible for me to fly to Chicago and spend a few nights in a hotel, despite how useful the conference might be. But thanks to a large financial turn for the better (I really don't know why I didn't think of doing Drupal/Web/Tech work before this month), and a generous donation of a ticket from a fellow politico who couldn't make it, I'm heading out to Yearly Kos this afternoon.

But please don't worry, I'm not on any panels, and I'm easy to spot in a crowd and thus easy to avoid. But if you do want to meet in person--and I'm sure there are some masochists out there--just look for the guy with the pimping hats, which I wear anytime I'm not asleep or under water. Or just ask for the "Hebrew Hammer" (As the saying goes: Half man. Half streets. 100% Kosher) Someone will point you in the right direction. But please don't mistake me for Hunter S. Thompson "Outlandish" Josh Koenig, or he will get really really mad (besides we look nothing alike).

I'll try and do some live blogging while I'm there, and if you want to join up with a bunch of us youth/culture focused folks, please head over to the Living Liberally Caucus, where you're sure to find a decent sized contingent of us.

Care2 just published a really interesting tool on their blog, frogloop, a Return on Investment (ROI) tool that calculates the value of social networking campaigns. From frogloop:

Wonder if you should spend your time campaigning in social networks?

You can use this tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator. Just enter the starting assumptions in the yellow boxes below and the tool calculates results automatically.

Need some metrics guidelines? You might check out some of the online advocacy and fundraising benchmark studies. If you don't measure results strictly by fundraising -- maybe your results are based on advocacy or branding only -- you can just look at the "cost per friend" or "cost per email name" to compare with the costs of recruiting people elsewhere. You can also see how that translates into cost per action or email viewed (opened).

Now, I did some calculations and came up with something like an $8,000 ROI, for an employee getting paid $40,000/year with benefits, which seems pretty high. I'm not sure if this is 100% accurate, but even if it isn't, it strikes me as a great attempt at putting a dollar value on social networking work, and hopefully will help those who are trying to convince their bosses, boards, or donors that this type of work is truly valuable.

If you play with the tool, let me know what kind of ROI you come up with!

Crossposted at OpenLeft

Yesterday, Chris wrote a post that looked at a recently published paper on heuristics and politics, which he described as a "new approach toward how voters make decisions". The paper described a few psychological phenomena, and came to the conclusion that people do not make rational decisions in politics, but rather rationalize their rather irrational political decisions.  Chris then went on to discuss how he thought the study related to the behavior of supporters of various candidates, including Gore supporters:

At first blush, this strikes as something I once called Creeping Dear Leader Syndrome online, to describe a phenomenon where people back a candidate and then either change their issue positions to match the candidate, or use contorted, hermeneutical reading of candidate positions to turn those positions into something they are not. It something you see in the comments of blog posts on the 2008 Democratic nomination campaign all the time. Even though it is not an "issue position," exactly, one of the most gratuitous examples is how Gore supporters seems to be able to consistently read Gore's statements that he has no intention of running as actually meaning that he is, after all, certain to run. People invent narratives and facts surrounding the candidates they support, in order to convince themselves that their beliefs and their chosen candidate's beliefs are identical. Unless I am mistaken, in political science circles this is a phenomenon known as "projection."

Well, Chris was wrong on multiple points in this post, and so I thought I'd address a few of those mistakes, including his mischaracterization of why Gore supporters believe that the former Vice President will run.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

--George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Let me just go ahead and preface what I'm about to write with some background: I have a serious, bordering on obsessive, dislike for certain types of academics. If you come from a Cultural Studies department, or use words such as "post-structuralist", "post new left", "hegemonic" or numerous other phrases seemingly aimed at confusion and obfuscation rather than explanation and elucidation, the chances that I will have a hard time taking a single thing that you say seriously are pretty high. In fact, there is a good chance that, smelling bullshit and a certain mental weakness, I will feel a somewhat primordial urge to take you down and will attack, sometimes viscously, regardless of the merits of any particular point that you might have.

This urge may have been present before I entered college, but it certainly grew and took its present form while I was in the undergraduate and graduate programs at the New School, in New York City, where I received both a bachelor and masters degree, and which seems to have a disproportionately large student body of loquacious losers.

I remember, during the first day of my first graduate level sociology class (I was a Junior at the time), the teacher asked us a question about social status and education. I can't remember exactly what that question was, nor can I remember my the answer that I gave, but I remember very clearly that the class looked at me as though I had three eyes for what I thought was a pretty reasonable statement (even if was made, pretty crudely, using my Philly slang, which was definitely more pronounced at the time). A moment later, another student raised their hand and gave the same damned answer that I did, accept this student threw in a bunch of words that I either knew, but would never use, or words that I had never heard of, but would become very familiar with as I sat through 5 years of classes at the New School. Needless to say, the class applauded loudly to this girl, and I was left feeling a bit lame brained for not having the language to express myself to this crowd, and a bit peeved that they didn't seem to get what seemed to me to be a perfectly clear explanation of my thinking.

You know, sometimes I really have to wonder if the right-wing Republican propagandists over at Fox news take themselves seriously, because I have to believe that every time the cameras turn off the "reporters" let loose a devious "Bwaa-Haa-Haa". Check out Fox News' reaction to Sicko, and the way that they use the latest (and completely inept) terror attacks in London as a means to scare Americans away from supporting Universal Health Care

Here's the Paul Krugman article mentioned in the video: Health Care Terror.

These days terrorism is the first refuge of scoundrels. So when British authorities announced that a ring of Muslim doctors working for the National Health Service was behind the recent failed bomb plot, we should have known what was coming.

"National healthcare: Breeding ground for terror?" read the on-screen headline, as the Fox News host Neil Cavuto and the commentator Jerry Bowyer solemnly discussed how universal health care promotes terrorism.

While this was crass even by the standards of Bush-era political discourse, Fox was following in a long tradition. For more than 60 years, the medical-industrial complex and its political allies have used scare tactics to prevent America from following its conscience and making access to health care a right for all its citizens.

...

What outrages people who see "Sicko" is the sheer cruelty and injustice of the American health care system - sick people who can't pay their hospital bills literally dumped on the sidewalk, a child who dies because an emergency room that isn't a participant in her mother's health plan won't treat her, hard-working Americans driven into humiliating poverty by medical bills.

"Sicko" is a powerful call to action - but don't count the defenders of the status quo out. History shows that they're very good at fending off reform by finding new ways to scare us.

These scare tactics have often included over-the-top claims about the dangers of government insurance. "Sicko" plays part of a recording Ronald Reagan once made for the American Medical Association, warning that a proposed program of health insurance for the elderly - the program now known as Medicare - would lead to totalitarianism.

Ever since 2004, those of us who have been involved in youth outreach have been annoyed, to put it mildly, by the constant parroting of the lie that young people are apathetic, and that they will not vote. No matter how many studies came out, no matter how many experts debunk this myth, and despite the fact that the last two elections showed a pretty significant upswing in young voters, the media seemed determined to parrot talking points that claimed that young people were not worth doing outreach towards, and many campaigns seemed to go right along. Well, it looks like we may finally have turned the corner in regards to this meme, as Time Magazine featured an article last week titled Reaching Out Early for the Youth Vote.

Even in a presidential campaign that has started as early as this one, Heather Smith couldn't have expected she would already be so busy. But "my phone started ringing the day after midterms and it hasn't stopped ringing since," says Smith, 30, the executive director of Young Voter Strategies (YVS). Her non-partisan organization, which she founded after the 2004 election with funding help from Pew and George Washington University, analyzes how to best mobilize young voters. That section of the electorate has traditionally been treated as an afterthought until weeks before the actual voting. But this time around top presidential contenders and political strategists are starting to focus early on the youth vote.
...
Smith's tips could be more important than ever in 2008. After more than a decade of declining or stagnating numbers, turnout among voters under age 30 increased by almost 5 million in 2004 and almost 2 million in 2006. Voting experts say this is because a new generation has come of age — the Millienials — and they are more civically engaged young adults than so-called GenXers were during the 1990s. The Millenial Generation — those born between 1979 and 1994 — is also three times the size of Generation X. They've voted Democratic in the last two elections and according to a New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll released in late June, they plan to again in 2008. That poll found that 54% of voters under age 30 say they intend to vote Democratic. But 40% of young adults ages 18 to 24 describe themselves as Independents, according to an April poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics. Because of that, Smith says Republicans could still win the youth vote in 2008.

Welcome to the real world, Time Magazine! I hope you enjoy your stay!

I guess my only real question at this point is: why haven't our phones been ringing off the hooks?

My only question in regards to the article has to do with this quote:

"Nobody in either party thinks that the youth vote is not worth paying serious attention to and spending money on programs to get them registered and turned out."

Really? I mean, I know that there are a few good progressive groups out there giving pretty heavily to youth outreach programs, but the Democratic Party seems pretty incapable of reaching out to a younger audience. But hell, maybe they've turned that corner too.

Two of my favorite bloggers/activists--Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, both formerly of MyDD--have officially launched their new community blog--Open Left--along with Mike Lux, whom I've never heard of before. Matt Stoller explains the name:

Why Open Left? Why not just netroots?

Good question. We've never been comfortable with the term 'netroots'. It's a term without a coherent meaning, sometimes pointing to liberals that organize in online communities, sometimes meaning anyone online who does so. This term doesn't describe who we are, because there is no divide between online and offline at this point; insiders use email and blogs, and outsider activists run campaigns and have in-person conferences. The term 'Open Left' is a much wider and more descriptive way of understanding the larger political dynamics at play. It is not the use of the internet that matters, it is the expression of traditional left-wing American principles on open systems that is the institutional innovation at work here.

This has been a long time coming. The internet itself expresses certain values that go back to very early American philosophers, and its communal and networked structure combined with its rampant capacity for individualism is uniquely situated for our moment in history. The third important left wing movement in modern American history is nearly ten years old, it's time we recognize what's going on.

Thus, OpenLeft.com.

I'll be very interested to see how this effects MyDD and its readership. One thing that I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years, and espescially since Mike and Co. left Music for America, is that we have to look at staffing of progressive institutions that are a part of, or provide services to, the movement in a new way. This movement has arisen partly because of the political climate, and partly because of the rise of networked technology. And since the network is really a mixture of connections between people and through technologies, the network (or movement) might "abandon" an organization or site when the person (in network terms, the connecting node) who was connecting that org or site to the broader movement leaves. In this case I believe that Jerome Armstrong and MyDD are entrenched enough within the movement that this may not have much effect at all on MyDD's readership. I guess we'll see.

Update: Well it didn't take long for things to get a bit testy. Check out Jerome's response to Open Left forgetting to put MyDD on its blogroll. Jerome is also tiring of all of this "movement" talk and doesn't seem too happy with the choice of Clintonite Lux. Hmm... This could get interesting...