Larry Lessig has decided not to run for congress here in the 12th Congressional District, recognizing that an attempt to beat Jackie Speier is only going to end in a blowout defeat, which doesn't further the goals of Change Congress.
This only redoubles my respect for the good law professor. This first decision was a right one, I only hope there are many more to follow!
[Update Feb 21, 2008 11:31pm PST: Shelly Powers has a much more negative response to Lessig's run for Congress. She makes some good points about the Change Congress plan, and raises some important substantive concerns about Lessig's proposed candidacy. ]
Professor Lawrence Lessig, in conjunction with his recently announced "Change Congress" effort has announced that he is contemplating running for Congress from the 12th Congressional District, recently vacated by Tom Lantos' surprising and unfortunate death recently. Thats my congressional district. A chorus of netizens have cheered loudly about the prospect of a Representative Lessig, and have begun a Facebook group and a web site to encourage him to run.
I have been a supporter of Jackie Speier, a local public servant who has a long and magnificent history serving this area in a variety of seats, from county supervisor to state senator. She announced her intention to run for this Congressional seat and everyone I talk to enthusiastically supports her. She's got deep grassroots as well as establishment support. We've got a special election coming up April 8th (to fill the remainder of the term) where she is certainly going to win a plurality and very likely to win 50%, thus heading off a "runoff" in June. She'd have to run again at the end of the year for the seat as well (for the next term). Its too bad that we have to choose between Lessig and her - neither of them are your run-of-the-mill "hold your nose and vote" candidate!
I'm deeply torn because though I have been (and continue to be) a Jackie supporter, I, like many of my fellow netizens, am deeply moved by Lessig's attempt to change congress through the severing of the ties between election-driven fundraising and legislative activities. Its a sincere effort to kill the corrupting systemic influence of money on politics. I was moved by the video on Lessig's exploratory site:
I must also admit that I also feel a tinge of resentment to the chorus of calls for him to run. He would be my representative, not yours. He's never been to local community events or been involved in local political activities or causes, as far as I know. Other than living in the district, I'm not clear what ties he has to to the community. He's got to deal with issues in the district first and foremost, and not just the reform agenda. Also, being a legislator means practicing the art of compromise. Being an effective legislator is about sausage making. Is this really the best way to push forward the Change Congress agenda? I really am uncertain and am eager to be convinced.
In addition, I have very little idea about what his policy positions are outside reform. We have a tendency to support similar candidates (notably Ro Khanna's challenge to Lantos in 2003/2004, and now Barack Obama), but I've heard NOTHING about his view on local issues where someone in this position has quite a lot of influence. To be clear, I think these deficiencies are "curable" (not sure if thats possible in the 6 or so weeks we have until the election), but they definitely need to be addressed if he is to be anything other than a footnote candidate. I'd invite him to come, for example, to a meeting of San Mateo County Democracy For America and discuss face to face why he wants to be our representative - at least one other candidate already has.
Finally, I want to share an email I sent personally to Larry Lessig. I've actually grown more positive towards his run since I wrote this, but I think it probably reflects the sentiments of many of us locals:
Prof Lessig-
I have rumors that you are considering a run for
the 12th CD congressional seat recently vacated due to Tom Lantos'
untimely passing. As a fellow resident of the 12th CD, I urge you *not*
to run for this seat, both because I think you can be more effective in
other roles, and because I believe Jackie Speier will win and will be
an even more effective representative.
I believe I share many of the same values with you, judging by
your past and current political and other advocacy positions. In 2003,
I actively supported Ro Khanna in his primary challenege to Tom Lantos
(in addition to supporting the Howard Dean candidacy). In fact, I
attended a fundraiser at your house for Ro. More recently, I have been
actively supporting Obama - another candidate you have been vocal in
supporting. I am also an active supporter of Creative Commons and all
the work you've done over the last 10 years - I first heard your name
while at Boalt in the mid-90s, and you've clearly inspired a whole
generation to focus on legal and policy issues unlike others before.
I am enthusiastic about your recent change in focus towards
political corruption and the influence of money - while I've been a
huge supporter of Creative Commons and IP reform in general, I believe
your attempt to tackle systemic corruption is so much more important.
However, I believe you can be more effective in this role as an
independent voice, not as a member of Congress. Even a position for you
in an Obama administration (lets hope!) would be more conducive to your
message, I would think.
In closing, let me also make a pitch for Jackie Speier. She has
deep roots in northern San Mateo county and southwest San Francisco.
She's shown her ability to be an effective legislator and has a record
of leadership on privacy and consumer protection legislation. I would
hope that you could build a relationship with her to pursue your goals
rather than trying to challenge her in the primaries. If you aren't in
communication with her, I'm sure should would be more than excited to
talk with you directly - I'd be happy to help facilitate that in any
way I could.
Let me be clear - I understand the enthusiasm that many have for
the possibility of being able to say "Representative Lessig". It gives
me goose pimples too! But the realist in me believes that you would be
more effective in other roles, unencumbered by the day-to-day
sausage-making that is the House of Representatives.
Thanks for listening, and I look forward to hearing more from you on this topic soon!
Because the Democratic primary race looks likely to go to the convention, and that the Democratic Party super delegates may swing the nomination one way or another, there's been a lot of interest in the last few days about who exactly these super delegates are. My friend and fellow netroots junkie, Rick Klau, announcedSuperDelegates.org today:
In an attempt to shed some light on this process, I built a site over the weekend – SuperDelegates.org. Starting with a terrific list provided by the guys who maintain DemConWatch,
I started filling in a little info about the super delegates and
linking to their endorsement (if given). After finding a great
extension to MediaWiki (KMLExport,
in case you’re interested), I was also able to add in geo coordinates
(latitude and longitude) to the delegate pages, so that you can see the
delegates in a Google Earth layer.
The data is far from complete, but that’s by design: this is a wiki,
and the site will succeed only if others decide to contribute to it. It
takes just a couple minutes to do some quick searches on Google to find
basic info about the delegates, and entering in the basic info on a
delegate is simple:
{{Endorsed Barack Obama|Latitude|Longitude}}
I'm helping Rick with this, but with the California primary coming up, I'm quite busy for the next few days helping out my candidate, Barack Obama (Super Duper Tuesday primary election is this coming Feb 5th!). However, if you'd like to help with SuperDelegates.org, please contact me and I'll get you started.
I don't think its any secret for anybody who knows me that I'm a very big and active supporter of Barack Obama for President. Perhaps even more than I was a Howard Dean supporter 4 years ago. There's so much that that I can say, but I want to make sure that readers of my blog understand that he is the only candidate with a technology issues statement on their web site.
In addition, Don Park created this logo which I think is distinctive, inspiring and catchy:
If you want to get more involved in the campaign, or just want to know more, please do not hesitate to contact me directly.
Doc Searls has recently been talking a lot about Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), the user-centric business concept that a potential customer of several vendors can express their interests to a set of vendors (in the form of a RFP) and have the vendors respond to the potential customer with competing bids for their business. He's even convinced the good folks at the Berkman Center to house ProjectVRM, where this idea can grow.
In a session at IIW2006B on politics and digital identity, we discussed the concept of Candidate Relationship Management (or Campaign Relationship Management) "CaRM" - a concept inspired by VRM that takes a person's political interests (as opposed to product or service-oriented interests) and invites campaigns or candidates to bid for their attention, time, money, or opinion. Just as in the consumer retail space, political campaigns spend a ton of effort trying to reach out to those who are willing listeners and can be turned into active supporters (at whatever level of support). CaRM lets me express to candidates and campaigns what issues and topics I'm concerned about so that I can have a more meaningful two-way exchange with the campaigns seeking my support. It seems really obvious to me that this is just like VRM...
I'm curious what other people think, and whether the VRM discussion should be expanded to include non-monetary intention harvesting (i.e. political intention harvesting)?
Kintera runs the web presence (a CRM system, essentially) for many grassroots and politically-oriented organizations. This is a great start - OpenID is well suited for dealing with the many-username/password problem that especially afflicts net-enabled grassroots activists.
Because local grassroots organizations are usually independent and operate "bottom up", a grassroots activist usually visits several web sites on a regular basis in the course of their political activities, many of which require authentication. A great example of such a site is PrecintCaptains.org - setup by the Democratic Party grassroots here in California to generate and manage contact lists for Democratic grassroots activists. Many people using this site are also members of the State Democratic Party Central Committee, or of a local Democratic club. Each of these roles requires a separate login and password, managed by a separate entity. But why should this be? If the user and the grassroots sites inherently place their trust in the Democratic Party (maybe thats a stretch...), why should that party be trusted as an OpenID ID provider?
I'd really like to see the state parties provide OpenID authentication so that the local organizations can leverage this user base for things like contact management, local blogging, and even fundraising. The state parties are in a unique position to provide this service because they are usually trusted by the local organizations that would rely on their OpenID authentication assertions. And for those organizations not affiliated with the state political parties, other issue organizations, such as environmental organizations, could agree rely on logins from OpenID IDPs run by each other or other common trusted providers. And local groups could also agree to rely on those assertions from the national orgs.
In short, the existing "real-world" relationships between political organizations, large and small, could be leveraged as an answer to the complaint that OpenID makes the relying party place blind trust in the IDP (party to which a user authenticates). This solution may not necessarily be the long term solution for all scenarios, but it could have immediate impact in the near term with relatively little effort on the part of the trusted (IDP) and trusting (RP) organizations involved.
And of course, everyone should be using inames, because its a heck of a lot easier to use than URLs ;-)
