OpenLeft

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.

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.