JJB Blog

Committee for a Unified Independent Party appreciates Barack Obama

Published

on 4/7/2008

. 0 Comments

Quick note: I was pleased to find that the Committee for a Unified Independent Party is ~~endorsing~~ (see update below) Barack Obama, and running advertisements for him in North Carolina. I got a call from them asking me to support their campaign, and I obliged. How great that a “fringe” group such as this recognizes that Obama is a different kind of candidate.

I also noted on their website that they seem to be pretty critical of Nader, that he is not doing constructive things for the independent movement — I agree.

Update: John Opdycke from CUIP got in touch with me and clarified CUIPs relationship to the effort in North Carolina:

The Committee for a Unified Independent Party did not endorse Barack Obama, but rather is providing political and financial support to a longtime independent activist in North Carolina, Tyra Cohen, who has initiated an organizing effort entitled “North Carolina Independents for Obama.” Several of CUIP’s state affiliates have endorsed Obama; others have chosen not to make presidential endorsements but to focus on crucial political reform and base building efforts.

Olbermann nails it.

Published

on 3/13/2008

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yeswecanhas.com in the New York Post

Published

on 3/7/2008

. 6 Comments

yeswecanhas.com was in the New York Post a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately, it was in the first edition of that day’s paper, but not in subsequent editions, so it didn’t make it onto the website. But I just found it via a newspaper archiving service, and took the below screenshots.

Why I like Obama better than Clinton

Published

on 3/3/2008

. 7 Comments

I rarely feel strong support for one Democratic candidate over another in the primaries. Heck, I can usually barely get myself to vote for the Democrat in the general election. So what makes me feel so strongly about Obama? Well, there are 3 main reasons:

His stance against the war

Obama was against the war before it began, has criticized the war since then, and is now running a campaign centered around ending the war. All the way through he has spoken the plain truth about it: (a) there was no compelling evidence that there were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (b) we should have been focusing our military efforts on quelling terrorist networks (c) we need to work on improving our reputation and relationships with other countries and cultures in order to not incite terrorism in the first place.

His meta-policies

Reading Obama and Clinton’s policies side-by-side, one will discover that they are pretty similar. I happen to think that Obama’s are presented much more clearly and intelligently on his website, and smack of greater sophistication and detail, but it is arguable that this has more to do with audience targeting than with the quality of the goals and final details of the policies themselves.

What really impresses me about Obama, and sets him apart from Clinton, are his “meta-policies”, if you will; his policies and goals about government.

Obama wants to make our government more transparent, more accessible, and more accountable. To this end he has done the following work while in the US Senate:

Introduced the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, which requires the full disclosure of all entities or organizations receiving federal funds beginning in fiscal year (FY) 2007 on a website maintained by the Office of Management and Budget (http://www.usaspending.gov/).
Put together, with Russ Feingold, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which amends parts of the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. It strengthens public disclosure requirements concerning lobbying activity and funding, places more restrictions on gifts for members of Congress and their staff, and provides for mandatory disclosure of earmarks in expenditure bills.
Introduced the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, a bill to criminalize deceptive practices in federal elections, including fraudulent flyers and automated phone calls, as witnessed in the 2006 midterm elections

(Not all have passed. Click through to see current status of each piece of legislation. Descriptions lifted from Wikipedia and slightly modified.)
Now, during his campaign, he has an incredibly impressive set of policies on using technology to improve government transparency and accessibility. I could give you an overview, or I could just direct you to Lawrence Lessig’s fantastic piece on why he supports Obama, which mostly addresses technology and transparency. In a nutshell: Obama wants to make government information and information as easy to access as your favorite blog. On top of that, he has the most sophisticated position on Net Neutrality. (quick definition of Net Neutrality: not allowing the phone/cable company to charge you more to access some websites vs. others, which is what they want to start doing.)

Previously mentioned here: this fantastic lecture Obama gave on government accountability, transparency, and ethics.

His style of politics

Obama has run an extremely long and beautiful grassroots campaign. He has established an extremely impressive network of paid staffers in most (all?) states. He has engaged his supporters using accessible and innovative online tools. He has the best website, by far.

He has not accepted any lobbyist contributions. (see extensive discussion of this topic here).

He has been able to spool up and sustain an enormous, million-dollar-a-day, grassroots fundraising machine.

Only 10 percent of Clinton contributors did not donate the legal maximum $2,300 for her primary campaign. In contrast, only three percent of Obama donors gave the maximum. The rest of the cash came from small sums from many more people. (source)

He has completely refrained from what, to my understanding, most people would call “negative” campaigning / mud slinging. As of a couple weeks ago, the Clinton campaign can’t say the same…

That’s why Obama is such a different candidate to me. I’d love to hear what folks out there think about the differences (or lack thereof) between the two candidates, if I am buying into hype, or if I am missing some important points.

What does it means for a campaign to accept money from lobbyists?

Published

on 3/3/2008

. 0 Comments

Obama’s campaign says they don’t accept money from lobbyists, and Clinton’s campaign does. Everyone seems to accept this assertion. Indeed, everyone seems to accept that it is significant and bold for the Obama campaign to have such a policy.

But I don’t understand what it means to accept money from a lobbyist. A conversation I just had with my friend Ryan:

John: so the obama campaign says they do not accept lobbyist contributions
John: it is my understanding that organizations/companies cannot contribute to a campaign anyway
John: how is it that lobbyist can contribute to a campaign?
John: from the human’s own pocket, in a grey-market way of getting a commercial money to a campaign?
John: or is there a separate system.
Ryan: hmm… I don’t know much about that
Ryan: I remember the whole “swift boat veterans for truth” thing from the last presidential election, where advertisements for bush were paid for by a third-party organization not affiliated with his campaign, so that is definitely one way to do it.
John: ah yes.
John: that is completely different though
John: those people were “independent”
John: lobbyist contributions go directly to a campaign, in a legal way
Ryan: Often companies will “encourage” employees to contribute to the company’s selected candidate
John: right
John: still not lobbyists.
John: (i think)

Then Ryan found this, which states:

PACs get their money not from the sponsoring group’s treasury, but from its members or employees. That arrangement neatly bypasses federal laws that prohibit direct contributions.

Which seems to suggest Ryan was right about the companies encouraging their employees. Is this the whole picture?

All money-offering lobbyists represent PACs
PAC members are easily identifiable
Obama rejects money from PAC members
Clinton accepts money from PAC members

According to this article, the answer is no:

While refusing money directly from federal lobbyists, who get their income from clients, Obama takes money from those clients.

[snip]

“If you cannot be completely pure, is it worth it to be partially pure? That seems to be debatable,” said political scientist Bruce Cain, director of the University of California Washington Center, based in the nation’s capital.

“We cannot say his policy is completely meaningless,” Cain said. “But it doesn’t insulate him from interests.”

I don’t know anything about the lobbying system — it seems that this article is saying “the lobbying system has many layers, and Obama is only opting out of contributions from the very first layer”.

The article mentions: “Obama still received 68% of his money from donations of $1,000 or more, compared with 86% for Clinton.” (this goes along with the NY Times quote I mentioned a few paragraps ago). I wish the article gave Obama more credit for running a very different campaign from Clinton, but I can see how one could say that the Obama campaign is being less than cut and dry with its “accepting money from lobbyists” language.

On the other hand– maybe the Obama campaign is doing something that no major campaign has done for decades? Is this the case? Does anyone out there know the answer?

Announcing obamasresume.org

Published

on 3/1/2008

. 0 Comments

I’ve been putting together another Obama website the past couple of days: obamasresume.org.

ObamasResume.org aims to put together a simple and complete description of Barack Obama’s career, which will be useful for Obama supporters to show their Clinton supporter friends. Anyone may edit this wiki.

The content is a little sparse right now — but that’s why it’s a wiki! Head on over and help me fill it in, so that we can start sending it around to our well-meaning-but-tragically-uninformed Clinton-supporter friends in Texas, Ohio, Vermont, Rhode Island, Wyoming, and Missouri.

Amazing statistic regarding donations to the Obama vs. Clinton campaigns

Published

on 3/1/2008

– The Democratic Take: From Top to Bottom — The Caucus — New York Times Blog

. 1 Comment

Only 10 percent of Clinton contributors did not donate the legal maximum $2,300 for her primary campaign. In contrast, only three percent of Obama donors gave the maximum. The rest of the cash came from small sums from many more people.

Announcing yeswecanhas.com

Published

on 2/10/2008

. 0 Comments

This weekend, me and my friend Jeff had an idea; a vision; a dream. We worked for many grueling minutes, between the hours of 3 and 5 on Sunday, only stopping 3 times to get more coffee, make an english muffin with fried eggs and jalepeños, and “sort my quantum mechanics pdfs” (Jeff, not me). Together, with hard work, dedication to funniness and Barack Obama, and our sophisticated software engineering skills (I pressed “install” on the web form, Jeff edited 2 lines of css), I proudly present to you:

http://yeswecanhas.com

Let me know what you think, tell all your friends, and most importantly: submit images!

Comparing the Taxonomy of the Obama and Clinton Website Issues Menus

Published

on 2/10/2008

. 1 Comment

Obama on the left, Clinton on the right:

Barack Obama campaign website issues menu
Hillary Clinton campaign website issues menu

First of all, Obama just plain covers more issues that Clinton: 21 vs. 14. Clinton has no technology section. Even Obama’s “Additional Issues” section covers some important points missed by Clinton. In this section Obama specifically covers dealing with the hurricane Katrina tragedy. (Although, to Clinton’s credit, via a google search I did find an article on hurricane Katrina policy, but it’s just not listed in the issues menu.)

Second of all, compare the language/IA of the menu itself– Clinton’s is so contrived and superficial. The menu items aren’t even consistent in tense, tone, and style. Some of the items describe what she is going to do (”Strengthening the Middle Class”), others describe what content is linked to (”An Innovation Agenda”), and then there’s an item that just says who/what Clinton is (”A Champion for Women”). This “sentence” style, and the fact that the sentences aren’t even in a consitent style, makes the information much more difficult to navigate. It’s as if the website architects forgot that they were making a menu for users to access content, and just took every opportunity to communicate the perfect “message” whenever and wherever they had the attention of a voter, at the cost of making the information easy to access in the first place.

Obama’s menu is very well done– it’s extremely clear what each item links to. Users who are looking for the platform for a particular issue can find it very quickly, and users just perusing the website see a very accessible and comprehensible top-level list of issues. In fact, the items in the menu are in alphabetical order! Be still, my beating heart!

Obama’s menu says “Education”; Clinton’s: “Improving Our Schools”. You almost don’t have to click on Clinton’s– why read her plan when she already told you: when she is president the schools are getting more better. If you do click through, you will find that Obama has about twice as much content on his page, plus links to pdfs with much more detail on subtopics. Clinton’s page does have a “Hillary’s Plans” section on the upper right, but this is a list of links to a hodge-podge of feature articles and press releasees and is not done in the thoughtful and consistently-organized platform presentation of Obama’s website.