The "Citizen's Briefing Book", the latest Barack Obama scam

The latest scam from the Barack Obama camp is a "Citizen's Briefing Book" at change dot gov: citizensbriefingbook.change.gov

It allows the citizens to submit policy ideas in one of several categories, and then others vote up or down those ideas. The categories are mostly the same as those featured in their highly similar Open for Questions.

Like Open for Questions, the current effort is designed to fail. Both efforts suffer from the same flaws common to all popular voting systems: the weakest questions rise to the top while the tough questions languish.

Certainly, Barack Obama's minions are good enough technocratic that they realize that. They know exactly what's going to happen, and they could easily use a better system if they really wanted the best ideas to rise to the top.

I do recommend submitting ideas, especially if you can start a campaign to push your ideas near the top. Or, to do as I did and compare your ideas and vote totals to the "top" ideas. I also recommend pointing out that anyone who promotes this effort as anything other than what it is has no interest in pushing valid ideas or is unable to figure out the flaws with this system.

But, at least there's entertainment to go along with this latest version. Have you ever wanted to see Tom Daschle react to something? Well, here's your chance. After watching the introduction here, others reacting and/or acting include Nancy Sutley (link), Arne Duncan (link), Steven Chu (link), and Heather Higgenbottom (link). I'm outsourcing commenting on the last to the Youtube commenters.

The good thing about those videos is that some people seem to be catching on to the fact that they're watching West Wing 2, something that's less about proper governance and more about putting on a show.

Fri, 01/16/2009 - 00:39 · · Importance: 4