Live Blog with Darcy Burner, WA-08

I made a decision to do it, and then jumped in with everything I had. That seems to be a pretty effective method. If you want to work in politics, just do it. Find a campaign, volunteer if you must, make yourself indispensible, but just dive in and make it happen, and learn everything you can on the way.

I owe you an email. :-)

Democrats Work is doing a great job of showing Democratic values in action, which is important as we reach out to voters who don't consider themselves to be Democrats. They don't necessarily know what we're about. But when they see us doing things like what we did a few weekends ago, where a group of us went out and helped clean up the Green River, they start to get that Democrats care about them and about their communities.

It would be fantastic if y'all could help me win the "Serve with the General" campaign; I have huge admiration and respect for General Clark, and I'd like to bend his ear a bit about the Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq. I figure if we're working side-by-side for a day on a project, that would give us a great opportunitiy to talk through his views on Iraq, the work I've done on it, and what we might do going forward.

One of the biggest challenges any campaign faces is how to reach the people who support you - or who might support you, if they knew who you were. And most campaigns use some combination of mail, calling people, canvassing, radio, outreach through local newspapers, and television ads to reach people. But more and more people can be reached online, where they are emailing and reading websites. So it's silly not to try to reach people where they are.

I admit that I have the good fortune of both living in a very tech-savvy district (Microsoft is here, as are many other software companies), and of being quite technical myself. (I'm pretty sure I'll be the first former Unix C and C++ compiler and interpreter programmer in Congress.) That combination means that we've been very aggressive about online outreach, with a fair amount of success.

Other candidates should figure out where the supporters they need are, and how to reach them, and then should act accordingly. Sometimes that will involve a lot of blog outreach. Sometimes it means using Facebook. Sometimes it may mean developing a really good email list. And nobody knows what new technologies will emerge in the next couple of years. But it's foolish not to try to reach voters where they are - because eventually the other side will.

American voters deserve to know how we can end the war in a way that stabilizes the Middle East, reduces the threat of terrorism, and minimizes casualties. So I worked with several retired Generals, people who had worked in the State Department, people who had worked in the Department of Defense, people who had worked on humanitarian issues, and other experts in national security to lay out what such a plan would look like.

How do we end the war and get our troops home safely? How do we stabilize Iraq and the Middle East? How do we fix the institutions that failed us and got us into this mess to begin with?

The first thing that was clear was this: there is no military solution in Iraq. And you don't have to take my word for it - General Petraeus has said so.

So the Responsible Plan lays out what a solution DOES look like, using the other tools in our arsenal, including diplomatic, economic, and political tools.

The whole plan is available online on my website at www.darcyburner.com. More than 50 other candidates have signed on - including Jared Polis, who was here earlier this week, and who has been a big proponent of this.

Right now we spend more than any other industrialized country in the world - about 16% of GDP, compared to about 8% for nearly everyone else - and we get less healthcare for it than the countries that spend half as much. We need to ensure that every American has access to affordable healthcare, and we need to fix it so that we invest in routine and preventative care, rather than waiting and paying at the other end for catastrophic and chronic care that is orders of magnitude more expensive.

I think that fixing our healthcare system will be one of the top priorities for our new Democratic President and the Congress next year.

If we want better technology policy, we should elect more people who understand technology.

We would be well-served by electing fewer people who think the Internet is a series of tubes through which gerbils carry messages in their little mouths, and more people who understand why net neutrality is key to the Internet remaining the great democratizing tool it currently is.

My background in computer science would, I think, be helpful.