Skinner recently wrote, “For years the three admins have tried to figure out how to harness the massive potential of a place like this, and we have repeatedly found ourselves frustrated.”
That got me thinking about an experiment/project using DU as intellectual and creative resource. (As a kid I spent a whole afternoon trying to trisect an angle just because the books said it was impossible.) The basic idea is to put a little of our creative thinking out there is a form that’s sufficiently focused and concise to maximize our exposure and influence.
We are all smarter than DU because DU can’t act or even make up its mind about anything. We are all dumber than DU in that the combined entity of DU would kick our ass in trivial pursuit or a history exam. DU’s chief asset is intellectual diversity. DU cannot come up with THE right answer but DU can generate a list that
contains the right answer. That’s significant. Multiple choice questions are a lot easier than essay questions. And any end-users of our suggestions will be picking what THEY think is the best approach. (Ideas are always more influential when people feel they came by them themselves.)
So here’s a proposal. This isn’t the last word on the topic. It’s a starting point. DU is a complex dynamic system so none of us can predict where anything here might lead. The key is to get this little thing rolling so that it will be tested in the DU mindspace and be free to evolve into whatever it evolves into. As a certain Vermont governor is fond of saying, “
don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.”
DU Talking Points Project: Take a narrow very specific question or RW talking point that Democratic surrogates do not handle well (ideally something taken directly from a transcript) and open it up for suggestions of how it should have been answered.
The subject line should begin TPP: (for talking points project) so that anyone who wants to try this can recognize the threads, and so they’re easy for people outside DU find(and hopefully be influenced by)Here’s an example:TPP: KERRY’S HEALTH PLAN AND MALPRACTICE REFORM
Wolf Blitzer said to Jane Democrat, “If Kerry’s healthcare plan is so great, then why do rich trial lawyers support it?”
Jane Democrat said: “The politics of failure have failed. It is time to win again.”
Please reply to this main post only with a better answer of 50 words or less. In this context “better” means politically better; more likely to help Kerry win. The only limitations are brevity and political value. Political value is different from academic or scientific value. We all know that just because a thing is true doesn’t mean swing voters will believe it, so answers should be both true and plausible. Sometimes questions are best answered by other questions. Humor is sometimes an important part of effective communications, so zingers are okay if they would appeal to average swing voters.
This post is part of an experimental project to try out a way to maximize the potential impact of our collective wisdom. If we junk up this thread too much it will be less useful to everyone, so in this particular thread please stick with this voluntary format. The cleaner we can keep this thread the more likely it is to be read by people in a position to do some good with it. Constructive critiques to individual answers should be posted only as replies to that specific answer. The idea is to generate the most effective answers not the most original, so it’s cool to borrow language and arguments from other people’s answers. Bush Must Lose!
The idea is that we will naturally accumulate some of these TPP threads that an interested outsider can find quickly and read easily. It’s not that Tad Devine is going to be spending all his time checking on what DU thinks he shoulda said. At first our best hope is that bloggers and alternative media people and low-level campaign workers might find the threads interesting. People might pull them together and post them on their own sites. They might fax TPP threads around. If the information is easy to use they can absorb it and be influenced by it and use ideas gleaned here to influence a wider circle of people, etc..
And perhaps someday soon a person who will be interviewed on a small talk radio show might spend a few minutes beforehand to take a look at DU to see what the TPP posts say about a particular issue or controversy that her DNC fax doesn’t cover adequately. And so on…
I don’t want ego or personality to play a role in any of this, so I am NOT going to post an actual TPP thread myself until other people have gotten the ball rolling. The format of TPP threads should be consistent, but that doesn’t mean it should be what I say. This isn’t my project. I’m just tossing one little pebble in the DU pond and stepping away to see what the ripples look like.
Bush… Must… Lose!