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I meant to pick this up a few days ago – I’ve been too busy to blog as diligently as I’d like to.

In the Times, Greenpeace’s Joss Garman says:

“Imagine if, instead of 60 years ago, the Labour Party was trying to create a National Health Service today. The right-wing campaign to scupper the formation of an NHS would be run against the backdrop of UK media coverage of America’s simultaneous healthcare debate. Every “death panel” and “compulsory abortion” myth concocted on K Street would soon be digested by British correspondents in Washington before being tailored for a UK audience as an insight into the fallout from the introduction of “socialised medicine”.

….you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Over the coming months climate legislation will be discussed before the Senate. A vote is expected next year and a hurricane of hysteria is already forming, with Britain’s climate debate likely to be caught in the vicious tailwinds.”

I’d be interested to know how Dan Hannan and Douglas Carswell would see this issue being dealt with in the fantasy direct democracy that they would like lead us into. Everyone with a political bone in their body likes to foist the ‘worse than Hitler’ charge upon their political opponents. It’s usually inadvisable and rash.

But if the worst fears of climate change scientists come to pass, our grandchildren may well have the advocates of populism and direct democracy right up there with the brownshirts in their demonology.

Just a thought….

A sketch of anti-healthcare reform protests in the US – from Rolling Stone magazine:

“The threat of violence was thinly veiled: One agitator held aloft a tombstone with the name Doggett. Screaming, “Just say no!” the mob chased Doggett through the parking lot to an aide’s car — roaring with approval as he fled the scene.

Conservatives were quick to insist that the near-riot — the first of many town-hall mobs that would dominate the headlines in August — was completely spontaneous. The protesters didn’t show up “because of some organized group,” Rick Scott, the head of Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, told reporters…..

In fact, Scott’s own group had played an integral role in mobilizing the protesters. According to internal documents obtained by Rolling Stone, Conservatives for Patients’ Rights had been working closely for weeks as a “coalition partner” with three other right-wing groups in a plot to unleash irate mobs at town-hall meetings just like Doggett’s. Far from representing a spontaneous upwelling of populist rage, the protests were tightly orchestrated from the top down by corporate-funded front groups as well as top lobbyists for the health care industry.”

Here’s the question that’s being asked over at the Personal Democracy Forum:

Let’s see what answers we get here.

Subjecting politicians to excessive regulation discourages interactivity.

My friend Will has e-mailed this from the Washington Post to me – It may cheer Steph up a little to know that he’s not fighting a purely British problem….

“Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.”

Update: Steph’s results are up!

The FT has picked up on a couple of social media sites that are intended to bring ‘the wisdom of crowds’ to bear upon the new President’s policymaking. Both Fix This Barack and Whitehouse 2 aim to set priorities for the incoming President. Obama’s team appear to be taking steps to do this themselves by promoting some participative policymaking on the transition website.

A few quick observations:

• Unless an understanding of how participative politics can work in the context of representative democracy, initiatives like these often seem to put the cart before the horse. I’d suggest that participative policymaking works best when those participating aren’t aware that they have a political audience – a point that I will flesh out in a post here shortly.
• In promoting transparency in policy-making, Obama may – in some ways – deny himself important policymaking tools. For this reason, I’d be a bit worried that he will disappoint expectations when he decides not to deny himself those tools. And I think that there is a consensus that heightened expectations is one of the greatest handicaps that Obama is going to have to overcome in his early Presidency.

Changing the subject slightly, here is an interesting observation from the UK political blogger Freemania on Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s attempt to sell the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama.