How Obama and we may use Internet to help govern. Europe = Democrat, Asia= Republican.
http://community.livejournal.com/obama_2008/1096829.html
How Obama may use the Internet to help govern, and how we bloggers may help him.
How Europe votes Democrat, but Asia tends Republican. How the 2008 campaign has helped raise positive views of the U.S. around the world, for the first time in years.
HisSpace: How would Obama’s success in online campaigning translate into governing? (The Atlantic):
...Obama clearly intends to use the Web, if he is elected president, to transform governance just as he has transformed campaigning. Notably, he has spoken of conducting “online fireside chats” as president. And when one imagines how Obama’s political army, presumably intact, might be mobilized to lobby for major legislation with just a few keystrokes, it becomes possible, for a moment at least, to imagine that he might change the political culture of Washington simply by overwhelming it.
What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog-also with comments-would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.
There is some precedent for Obama’s vision. The British government has already used the Web to try to increase interaction with its citizenry, to limited effect. In November 2006, it established a Web site for citizens seeking redress from their government, http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/. More than 29,000 petitions have since been submitted, and about 9.5 percent of Britons have signed at least one of them. The petitions range from the class-conscious (“Order a independent report to identify reasons that the living conditions of working class people are poor in relation to higher classes”) to the parochial (“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to re-open sunderland ice rink”).
What does the government do with the petitions? It says it reads them and directs them, at its discretion, to the appropriate department; sometimes the department responds. Advocates of the system note that it enables the government to monitor public wants and attitudes in a way that opinion polling doesn’t.
Those in Obama’s campaign who think about technology and government see the U.K. site as merely a baby step-the first of many ways that Americans might interact with a President Obama. But the British example also helps show the limits of online participatory government. Communication and transparency are virtues only up to a point; as students of bureaucracies know, both eventually become an enemy to efficiency. Moreover, if an Obama presidency invited more input than it could reasonably weigh and respond to, it would quickly squander the networking capital that the campaign has built.
Today Obama is like a brand, his campaign like a $250 million company, and the voters like customers; the persuasion flows one way. If he becomes president, then power, authority, and legitimacy will flow in both directions; voters who are now keen to support the idea of Obama may push against his initiatives in office, sometimes unpredictably.
Indeed, in recent years the Web has without question generated and focused enough public pressure to force the hands of politicians on several occasions. So far, though, this pressure has been created spontaneously-and it has worked to the distinct disadvantage of the executive branch.
When President Bush nominated his longtime friend Harriet Miers to be a Supreme Court justice, wired conservative activists revolted. Minutes after the news broke, a blogger searched the federal campaign database and found that Miers had contributed to Democrats in the past, provoking a wave of questions about her ideological bona fides. In the space of a few hours, conservative outrage coalesced, and activists succeeded in throwing an unprepared White House and Republican National Committee off message; talk radio, the ether of the conservative movement, was filled with confusion, sown by angry e-mails and phone calls. I remember a senior GOP official asking me that night, “What the hell just happened?” It would take the RNC many hours to figure out that bloggers were generating the heat, and that bloggers had to be tended to first if the fire was to be put out.
More recently, the “netroots”-liberal Democrats organized online-have kept pressure on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to avoid compromise with Republicans on national-security legislation the president calls critical. They’ve organized online petitions and sent e-mails to key staff members; they’ve raised money to air issue-advocacy ads. The Daily Kos Web site regularly asks its millions of readers to evaluate the performance of their congressional leaders, and, just as regularly, members of those leaders’ staffs check to see whether their bosses have had a good or a bad month. Top Democrats are relying more and more on netroots money to fund their political action committees, so these evaluations matter....
The Obama Connection (NYT):
...Obama has been a classic Internet-start up, a movement spreading with viral intensity and propelled by some of Silicon Valley’s most creative minds. As with any online phenomenon, he has jumped national borders, stirring as much buzz in Berlin as he does back home.
He could not have achieved this without a sense of history, a conviction that the nature of the post-post-9/11 world - the one beyond war without end - is going to be determined by sociability and connectivity. In the globalized world of MySpace, LinkedIn and the rest, sociability is a force as strong as sovereignty.
I’ve searched in vain for a sense of this pivotal historical moment in Clinton. Her threat to “totally obliterate” Iran, her stomach-turning reference to the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy as a reason to stay in the race, her Bosnian fabrications, all reflect a view of history as something that’s there for political ends rather than as a source of inspiration or reflection.
It’s history as “Me, me, me.” That tends to be blinding.
Her most crippling blindness has been to networks, national and global, the threads that bind and have changed society. As David Singh Grewal writes in his excellent new book, “Network Power,” a core tension in the world is that: “Everything is being globalized except politics.”
Grewal continues: “We live in a world in which our relations of sociability - our commerce, culture, ideas, manners - are increasingly shared, coordinated by newly global conversations in these domains, but in which our politics remains inescapably national, centered in the nation states that are the only loci of sovereign decision making.”
The Bush administration has accentuated global awareness of this disjuncture. Connected people around the world were appalled by Bush policies - from the trashing of habeas corpus to renditions - but felt powerless to influence them.
The overwhelming global interest in the current U.S. election is tied in part to a spreading belief that America’s leader may be as important to French lives, for example, as the incumbent in the Élysée Palace.
Obama’s people get that. Connectivity means going it alone is a fool’s errand: that’s a basic lesson of Iraq. If Obama has promised to appoint a chief technology officer, to open up government via the Web, and to make dialogue rather than war a centerpiece of policy, it’s because he knows he must speak to a 21st-century world.
Grewal writes: “Politics is the only effective countervailing power that we have with which to refashion the structures that emerge through sociability.” Accumulated personal choices expressed through networks fashion sociability. Short of global governance, only sovereignty can channel that will.
In concrete terms, you won’t make globalization more equable in its distribution of income without politics. But first you must see sociability for what it is: a form of 21st-century personal sovereignty that rivals national sovereignty....
Asia’s Republican Leanings (NYT):
Europe votes Democrat, but Asia tends Republican.
That’s the headline from the fastest-growing part of the world where, as throughout a shrinking globe, the U.S. election is arousing passionate interest. Many a Shanghai dumpling gets slurped to the accompaniment of chat about superdelegates.
Eric John, the U.S. ambassador to Thailand, told me the campaign was “the best public diplomacy tool I’ve had in a long time.”
Democracy at work is riveting. In Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain, America has produced three remarkable candidates. It’s not surprising that a recent BBC World Service global survey showed positive views of the United States increasing for the first time in years. The rise was to 35 percent from 31 percent a year earlier. Negative views fell to 47 percent from 52 percent.
The shift is not seismic but shows the world is looking beyond the Bush administration. What it sees, however, is by no means uniform. Across Europe, the Democratic consensus is overwhelming. That’s not surprising: Bush hatred is a blood sport.
The values of the Republican Party on everything from the death penalty to the place of religion in society lie outside the European mainstream. Europe’s America is blue-state America. The rest is a discomfiting blur of churches, cowboys and electric chairs.
But in Asia, there’s a different view. The three largest powers - China, India and Japan - have all had reasons to view Bush with favor, and all have nagging fears about a Democratic administration. At a deeper level, they’ve felt comfortable enough with a United States playing power politics, while that strut-your-stuff style has appalled consensus-driven Europeans.
I don’t mean the Iraq invasion pleased Asians. It didn’t. But China and India rising see the world more in terms of classic balance-of-power equations, driven by the might and self-interest of nations, than through the post-sovereign European prism of international institution-building and soft power. Already, China and India are jostling for dominance, not least in the Indian Ocean and Africa....
How Obama may use the Internet to help govern, and how we bloggers may help him.
How Europe votes Democrat, but Asia tends Republican. How the 2008 campaign has helped raise positive views of the U.S. around the world, for the first time in years.
HisSpace: How would Obama’s success in online campaigning translate into governing? (The Atlantic):
...Obama clearly intends to use the Web, if he is elected president, to transform governance just as he has transformed campaigning. Notably, he has spoken of conducting “online fireside chats” as president. And when one imagines how Obama’s political army, presumably intact, might be mobilized to lobby for major legislation with just a few keystrokes, it becomes possible, for a moment at least, to imagine that he might change the political culture of Washington simply by overwhelming it.
What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog-also with comments-would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.
There is some precedent for Obama’s vision. The British government has already used the Web to try to increase interaction with its citizenry, to limited effect. In November 2006, it established a Web site for citizens seeking redress from their government, http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/. More than 29,000 petitions have since been submitted, and about 9.5 percent of Britons have signed at least one of them. The petitions range from the class-conscious (“Order a independent report to identify reasons that the living conditions of working class people are poor in relation to higher classes”) to the parochial (“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to re-open sunderland ice rink”).
What does the government do with the petitions? It says it reads them and directs them, at its discretion, to the appropriate department; sometimes the department responds. Advocates of the system note that it enables the government to monitor public wants and attitudes in a way that opinion polling doesn’t.
Those in Obama’s campaign who think about technology and government see the U.K. site as merely a baby step-the first of many ways that Americans might interact with a President Obama. But the British example also helps show the limits of online participatory government. Communication and transparency are virtues only up to a point; as students of bureaucracies know, both eventually become an enemy to efficiency. Moreover, if an Obama presidency invited more input than it could reasonably weigh and respond to, it would quickly squander the networking capital that the campaign has built.
Today Obama is like a brand, his campaign like a $250 million company, and the voters like customers; the persuasion flows one way. If he becomes president, then power, authority, and legitimacy will flow in both directions; voters who are now keen to support the idea of Obama may push against his initiatives in office, sometimes unpredictably.
Indeed, in recent years the Web has without question generated and focused enough public pressure to force the hands of politicians on several occasions. So far, though, this pressure has been created spontaneously-and it has worked to the distinct disadvantage of the executive branch.
When President Bush nominated his longtime friend Harriet Miers to be a Supreme Court justice, wired conservative activists revolted. Minutes after the news broke, a blogger searched the federal campaign database and found that Miers had contributed to Democrats in the past, provoking a wave of questions about her ideological bona fides. In the space of a few hours, conservative outrage coalesced, and activists succeeded in throwing an unprepared White House and Republican National Committee off message; talk radio, the ether of the conservative movement, was filled with confusion, sown by angry e-mails and phone calls. I remember a senior GOP official asking me that night, “What the hell just happened?” It would take the RNC many hours to figure out that bloggers were generating the heat, and that bloggers had to be tended to first if the fire was to be put out.
More recently, the “netroots”-liberal Democrats organized online-have kept pressure on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to avoid compromise with Republicans on national-security legislation the president calls critical. They’ve organized online petitions and sent e-mails to key staff members; they’ve raised money to air issue-advocacy ads. The Daily Kos Web site regularly asks its millions of readers to evaluate the performance of their congressional leaders, and, just as regularly, members of those leaders’ staffs check to see whether their bosses have had a good or a bad month. Top Democrats are relying more and more on netroots money to fund their political action committees, so these evaluations matter....
The Obama Connection (NYT):
...Obama has been a classic Internet-start up, a movement spreading with viral intensity and propelled by some of Silicon Valley’s most creative minds. As with any online phenomenon, he has jumped national borders, stirring as much buzz in Berlin as he does back home.
He could not have achieved this without a sense of history, a conviction that the nature of the post-post-9/11 world - the one beyond war without end - is going to be determined by sociability and connectivity. In the globalized world of MySpace, LinkedIn and the rest, sociability is a force as strong as sovereignty.
I’ve searched in vain for a sense of this pivotal historical moment in Clinton. Her threat to “totally obliterate” Iran, her stomach-turning reference to the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy as a reason to stay in the race, her Bosnian fabrications, all reflect a view of history as something that’s there for political ends rather than as a source of inspiration or reflection.
It’s history as “Me, me, me.” That tends to be blinding.
Her most crippling blindness has been to networks, national and global, the threads that bind and have changed society. As David Singh Grewal writes in his excellent new book, “Network Power,” a core tension in the world is that: “Everything is being globalized except politics.”
Grewal continues: “We live in a world in which our relations of sociability - our commerce, culture, ideas, manners - are increasingly shared, coordinated by newly global conversations in these domains, but in which our politics remains inescapably national, centered in the nation states that are the only loci of sovereign decision making.”
The Bush administration has accentuated global awareness of this disjuncture. Connected people around the world were appalled by Bush policies - from the trashing of habeas corpus to renditions - but felt powerless to influence them.
The overwhelming global interest in the current U.S. election is tied in part to a spreading belief that America’s leader may be as important to French lives, for example, as the incumbent in the Élysée Palace.
Obama’s people get that. Connectivity means going it alone is a fool’s errand: that’s a basic lesson of Iraq. If Obama has promised to appoint a chief technology officer, to open up government via the Web, and to make dialogue rather than war a centerpiece of policy, it’s because he knows he must speak to a 21st-century world.
Grewal writes: “Politics is the only effective countervailing power that we have with which to refashion the structures that emerge through sociability.” Accumulated personal choices expressed through networks fashion sociability. Short of global governance, only sovereignty can channel that will.
In concrete terms, you won’t make globalization more equable in its distribution of income without politics. But first you must see sociability for what it is: a form of 21st-century personal sovereignty that rivals national sovereignty....
Asia’s Republican Leanings (NYT):
Europe votes Democrat, but Asia tends Republican.
That’s the headline from the fastest-growing part of the world where, as throughout a shrinking globe, the U.S. election is arousing passionate interest. Many a Shanghai dumpling gets slurped to the accompaniment of chat about superdelegates.
Eric John, the U.S. ambassador to Thailand, told me the campaign was “the best public diplomacy tool I’ve had in a long time.”
Democracy at work is riveting. In Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain, America has produced three remarkable candidates. It’s not surprising that a recent BBC World Service global survey showed positive views of the United States increasing for the first time in years. The rise was to 35 percent from 31 percent a year earlier. Negative views fell to 47 percent from 52 percent.
The shift is not seismic but shows the world is looking beyond the Bush administration. What it sees, however, is by no means uniform. Across Europe, the Democratic consensus is overwhelming. That’s not surprising: Bush hatred is a blood sport.
The values of the Republican Party on everything from the death penalty to the place of religion in society lie outside the European mainstream. Europe’s America is blue-state America. The rest is a discomfiting blur of churches, cowboys and electric chairs.
But in Asia, there’s a different view. The three largest powers - China, India and Japan - have all had reasons to view Bush with favor, and all have nagging fears about a Democratic administration. At a deeper level, they’ve felt comfortable enough with a United States playing power politics, while that strut-your-stuff style has appalled consensus-driven Europeans.
I don’t mean the Iraq invasion pleased Asians. It didn’t. But China and India rising see the world more in terms of classic balance-of-power equations, driven by the might and self-interest of nations, than through the post-sovereign European prism of international institution-building and soft power. Already, China and India are jostling for dominance, not least in the Indian Ocean and Africa....