The site didn’t get fleshed out nearly as much as I thought it would, both because I had anticipated having more time to contribute to the wiki, and because I thought I would get far more user contributions. (Strangely, more than half of the people who registered for an account made no changes to the wiki.)

Now that Obama is the Democratic nominee, the primary purpose of the site is no longer there. I don’t think many people comparing Obama to McCain will be worried about Obama’s level of experience, and if they are considering McCain in the first place, then Obama’s reformist resume will probably turn them off anyway. (oh wait, McCain used to stand for campaign finance reform… I guess that’s over with).

Anyway, I’m tempted to just take it down. I don’t have time to contribute to it, and no one else seems to either. It’s the first hit on Google for “Obama’s Resume”, which is a good and bad thing. Good because, in theory it is being found very quickly by exactly the people who would be looking for it, bad because there isn’t much useful info on there.

What do you, dear reader, think I should do with the site? Leave it? Hype it more? Take it down?

Anyone want to take it over?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

http://yeswecanhas.com

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

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.

Check out this list of people in technology I respect who also support Obama:

• Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google
  

  He is the most inspirational, he has the integrity to stand up for what is right and admit when he was wrong (a quality that Clinton seems to lack), and he is honest in answering questions where other candidates are political.

  Most importantly, Obama is willing and able to work with everyone, not just with his base. Clinton wants to reach out to republicans and others who disagree with her, but the level of animosity that many others have towards her may make it difficult for her to do so. McCain and Romney seem to be intent on playing towards their base, and have not shown how they will reach out. Obama has shown he can do it — he can be the president that brings the whole country together and leads us in a new direction.

• Greg DeKoenigsberg, über geek, Fedora community leader, something or other in Red Hat communications, OLPC evangelist
• Lawrence Lessig, intellectual property guru / free culture messiah
  

  … I believe in the policies. Clearly on the big issues — the war and corruption. Obama has made his career fighting both. But also on the issues closest to me. … Obama has committed himself to important and importantly balanced positions.

• The XKCD guy, (makes this comic)
  

  Obama has shown a real commitment to open government. When putting together tech policy … others might have gone to industry lobbyists. Obama went to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons … and longtime white knight in the struggle with a broken system over internet and copyright policy. Lessig was impressed by Obama’s commitment to open systems — for example, his support of machine-readable government information standards that allow citizens’ groups to monitor what our government is up to. Right now, the only group that can effectively police the government is the government itself, and as a result, it’s corrupt to the core…

  Obama stands against bad governing not only in his support of specific practices like open data standards and basic network neutrality, but in his work against corruption from day one. He’s sponsored legislation to restrict gifts to Congress by industry representatives (which also carried a whole slew of anti-corruption measures that were a breath of fresh air). He’s fought against vote fraud. He’s been pushing for election and lobbying reform from the start, and in his campaign he’s refused to take lobbyist money.

  Clinton has done nothing of the sort, and when questioned seems baffled that anyone would have a problem with what is, by any reasonable standard, bribery. I find her basic lack of integrity troubling, and I think as president she would continue fighting to maintain the status quo.

• Tim Wu, intellectual property guru, coined the term “Net Neutrality”, professor at Columbia law school
• Karl Fogel, software engineer, open source software community leader, copyright reformer
  

  Barack Obama is exactly what he seems: terrifically smart, well-intentioned, utterly free of the personal insecurities that drive far too much of the decision-making in the current administration, and eminently electable. He stands a much better chance of winning against McCain than any other Democratic candidate would have. The canard that he’s light on policy simply confuses a primary-season tactic for a general electoral strategy. There’s no point trying to out-wonk Hillary Clinton, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t done his homework: when the time comes, it’s there in reserve.

• Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, very successful entrepreneur/investor/visionary, down to earth and fun blogger
  

  Smart, normal, curious, not radical, and post-Boomer.If you were asking me to write a capsule description of what I would look for in the next President of the United States, that would be it.

  Having met him and then having watched him for the last 12 months run one of the best-executed and cleanest major presidential campaigns in recent memory, I have no doubt that Senator Obama has the judgment, bearing, intellect, and high ethical standards to be an outstanding president — completely aside from the movement that has formed around him, and in complete contradition to the silly assertions by both the Clinton and McCain campaigns that he’s somehow not ready.

Some readers of this blog who know me personally might know that I voted for Nader in 2000, was a Deaniac in 2004, and became completely disengaged from the process and campaign when Kerry was nominated. Some might also know that I’ve been conversationally enthusiastic about Ron Paul for the past few months. In other words– I’m sick of the two-party system (sometimes to the point of pragmatic detriment, I admit), and it takes a very special candidate to get me interested in actively supporting the Democratic party.

Why does Obama interest me so much? This is a big topic, and I admit my familiarity with his policies and history is a bit superficial in areas. And I also have to admit, there is a significant Not Hillary factor influencing me. But all my impressions have come together to form a consistent impression that he is a genuine person who cares about improving our country and government, which is not only Not Hillary but also Anti Hillary.

In subsequent posts, I’m going to explore and explain what I think is so great about Obama.

Meanwhile, for those of you who are already Obama supporters, I urge you to donate to the Obama campaign. I just gave by far the most I’ve ever given to a political campaign. If you believe that Obama is truly competent, genuine, and has a chance, then please, consider making a significant donation. Ask yourself: what is more important?

(I actually don’t know where he is speaking– I found the video on Obama’s ethics policy page).

http://www.barackobama.com