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Monday, January 26, 2004
A full house 
| | The metaphors of horse races and sporting to describe the run for the White House are so tired as to make one want to puke. A far more useful analogy of the current campaign is poker. The best campaign cardgame is Texas No Limit Hold-em. It takes 5 minutes to learn and a lifetime to master.... |
| | The players are the candidates, the chips are the dollars available. The cards are the voters. |
| | There are two tables. George's and the Democrats. The finest example of this point is the current administration, who bluffed their way into the White House. In Campaign poker the cards are important, but the size of your stack, how well you can bet and bluff is a far more important factor in determining if you can go the distance and win all the chips at the last table. One of the things that you can do is raise the other players past the chips they have causing them to fold and loosing the game. This is the current Bush Strategy. George Bush has the most chips on his table and is waiting for the winner of the Democrat's table. |
| | Right now, the first hand is over. Kerry won this hand, Dean came in third, Gephart had the loosing hand and is out of the game. Among the Democrats Dean has the big stack. He has the most money, but the people behind him do not understand how to use this power. Having the most chips is no guarantee of winning the game. To be able to win one must have good cards and play them well. |
| | Remember I said that the cards were the voters. The Deaniacs carpeted Iowa, but like a lot of other things they missed the the voters. Running around with www.deanforamerica.com T-Shirts and telling folks without an internet connection about all the wonderful stuff on the website is as useful as explaining Fucsia to the Blind. |
| | As Mitch said, read the whole thing. |
20/200 foresight
| | The other candidates have appropriated Dean's outsider themes. It remains to be seen if they believe them, if they embody them, or if they can sell them. But they all sound like Howard Dean now. They¹re all talking passionately about special interests now. He won, in a way, but the victory may belong to someone else in this crazy race. |
| | Speaking of probing (of the for-real sort), Declan McCullagh's Dean should come clean on privacy piece on CNET this morning should give the governor's policy people something to do. Fast. |
| | ...does Dean still want to forcibly implant all of our computers with uniform ID readers? |
| | Unfortunately, Dean's presidential campaign won't answer any of those questions. I've tried six times since Jan. 16 to get a response, and all the press office will say is they've "forwarded it on to our policy folks." And the policy shop isn't talking. |
| | Advice to the policy folks: Get your thinking and talking points from Lessig and the EFF. You're at risk of losing some core support if you don't. |
| | That goes for every candidate, by the way. Not just Dr. Dean. |
iCal question
| | Another question from my kid's school: What's the trick with publishing to-do lists with iCal to the Web? They have the box checked for publishing the to-do list, but the list doesn't show up in the published calendar. |
J blogging, cont'd
First business, then politics, then education, now religion...
Confusing the partisans for the whole
| | Online political discussion has become so fragmented so quickly that some public policy scolds warn that the Internet is in danger of narrowing the spectrum of debate even as it attracts more participants to it. The same medium that allows people to peruse a near- infinite number of news sources also lets them pinpoint the ones they want and filter out the rest. |
| | John O'Brien, a business consultant who attended a recent meet-up sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, said he enjoyed mingling with other conservatives. The only reason he would attend a Dean meet-up, he said, would be to heckle. |
| | Blogs - or Web journals - are also more about monologue than discussion. President Bush's re-election campaign blog, for instance, does not include a largely standard feature that most online journals have: the ability for readers to reply to the posts. |
| | But if Internet users tend to seek out people and information that reinforce the views they already hold, they are following a law of human nature that social scientists have observed for decades. |
| | "Everything we know about psychology and political communication says people look for stuff that confirms their views," said Michael Cornfield, research director at the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. "It would be a surprise if the Internet doesn't accelerate the trend." |
| | A pretty narrow piece. Stay out of the echo chambers, Amy, and there's plenty of discussion to be found. |
If you want the heat, get into more Kitchens
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