People Powered Politics

Last night I saw a flurry of emails blanket my inbox with a series of "unbelieavable", "still in shock" and the not so occasional "I'm angry".

I had spent most of the afternoon trying to sort out my thoughts fast enough for an Op/Ed, and I would always come back to the misgivings I've had since he took office a little over a year ago. That Eliot Spitzer's problem and weakness has always been his success because he never really needed anything other than a vote from you or me to get elected.

Eliot Spitzer didn't really need a million New Yorkers giving $5 or $10 donations to his campaign to get elected. He never needed to learn how to get people out on the streets to support his campaign to get him elected. He never needed to swallow his pride and shut up and take criticism from his own base in order to gain political influence. And he certainly never had to pound the pavement and get people out on election day to make sure people would get out of their homes and offices to cast a vote.

Metro newspaper just published Voices: Spitzer floated on air, but lack of roots did him in, my Op/Ed on the Spitzer debacle.

Here's the money quote :

For netroots activists like me, who have had the chance to take a peek at the mechanical beast, the New York State Democratic Party, Eliot Spitzer was nothing but a political insider’s rock star that only needed “The (little) People” to vote so the “politics as usual” could rock New York and roll into Albany. Yet there’s a reason why “politics as usual” is losing the fight in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary.

Eliot Spitzer’s weakness has been the lack of a true grassroots base. He never had his feet held to the fire by his own party base, by The People who ended up voting for him. The Republicans have known this all along, and it’s not a coincidence that they tried to scare him last year by astroturfing the Internet with fake attack blogs.

Go read the whole thing.

What if you could ask any question to the presidential candidates? What if the candidates could answer at any time before the primaries with the caveat that you could mark their answer a WIN or FAIL?

This is what 10Questions.com is all about.

This is a project brought by the fine people behind Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident. Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry have gathered an amazing a non-partisan brain trust of technopundits and geeky wonks for their politics and technology shing ding. Amazing people like Morra Aarons, Zephyr Teachout, Patrick Ruffini, David All, Spencer Overton, Ruby Sinreich, Michael Bassik are part of the gang. Am an occassional bomb thrower there as well.

Out of the group's conversations came out the idea of 10Questions.com, an experiment we believe is the first one in people-powered online democracy :

Unlike television debates, the 10Questions Presidential Forum makes full use of the web's potential to expand participation in politics. Everyone has an opportunity to ask a question, and to rally support for their question being in the top ten. The candidates have plenty of time to formulate their answers, and can post in-depth replies. Finally, the community will be able to grade the candidates' answers. With large numbers of people participating, the candidates will have an incentive to pay attention. Who knows, maybe we'll even change the course of the election!

I running late with some of my posts today, so let me point to you to one I have been remiss in talking about. Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation has done an excellent presentation on how The Cluetrain Manifesto for People Powered Politics is happening right here, right now.

Here's an example of what you can find at People Powered Politics or People Powered Governance? :

Citizens are online using government information to do their own watch-dogging, to make their voices heard on important legislative issues, and to create new ways to understand legislative and government information that not only aids other citizens but aids the governing process as well. One example connects directly with one of Sabater’s points:

“76. We’ve got some ideas for you too: some new tools we already use, some better services we’ve already produced. Stuff we’d be willing to pay you to use. Got a minute?”

Created by 20 Daily Kos users, the DOJ Documents database allows users to search through the enormous amount of e-mails relating to the Attorney purge investigation handed over to the House Judiciary Committee by the Department of Justice. This was made possible by the House Judiciary Committee posting the e-mails in large pdf files on their Web site. The committee understood that opening up the oversight process to citizens would provide additional labor at no cost while simultaneously making citizens feel like they have power to act in their government and can make a difference.

Dozens, if not hundreds or more, of citizens perused the documents and commented on them at blogs like TPM Muckraker and Daily Kos. The information that they uncovered enabled new conversations and new information to reach into the mainstream of American politics. The only problem these muckrakers discovered was the inability to search the documents. But this is the Internet and now we have a searchable database of these e-mails; a resource that is used by bloggers, journalists, and I presume could and has been used by staffers on the Judiciary Committee.

Paul has more examples of the work happening online from both ends of the political spectrum but also within government itself.