This piece about Lessig’s new Change Congress movement articulates the difference:

The vast majority of interest groups in Washington, from the Sierra Club to the AFL-CIO to Planned Parenthood, are pursuing what Edsall calls “substantive reform”–attempting to push legislation and enact policies that will provide public goods, protect citizens from harm and redistribute benefits, rights and privileges away from the powerful and toward middle-class citizens and disenfranchised minorities. Then there’s a small cluster of about a dozen groups–Public Campaign, the Center for Responsive Politics and the Sunlight Foundation–that focus on procedural reform.

Moveon.org placed an open call for 30-second ad spots supporting Obama’s run for the presidency, soliciting over 1000 entries from across the country. They then created an Am-I-Hot-or-Not-style interface to allow people to jump in an vote for handfuls of spots at time. After nearly 5 million votes, the pool has been narrowed to 15 finalists. This was crowdsourcing at its best.

Here are two of my favorites:

I’m not sure why the cheesy all-American nature of these appeals to me. Maybe because I know it will appeal to those whose minds can still be changed.

Some more notes:

Sarah Deborah Scranton: Scenes from “The War Tapes”

Filmer of the war tapes, a personal look into the lives of soldiers in Iraq. The presentation achieves this intimacy not only through clips of the documentary, but also through the personal stories of Scranton herself. Wouldn’t it be cool if every polarized political debate be given this context, first?

Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict

Moral development, History has a direction. “Non-zero-sum-ness” as the driver for these trends, but also as the thing that links us in negative outcomes as well.

Deborah Gordon: How do ants know what to do?

Contrary to popular belief, ant colonies don’t have any central intelligence. The queen doesn’t control the behavior of the colony through chemical signals. In a series of experiments over the last 20 years, Gordon has demonstrated that colony behavior is fully emergent. Each ant, operating on a small set of rules (e.g. rate of contact with other ants), contributes a tiny part to colony-wide phenomena that ensure the survival of the whole. The experiments she describes are very cool, as are her descriptions of colony life. Ants seem to blur the line around what we designate an individual organism of a species.

Ben Dunlap: The story of a passionate life

In a talk that is more stage performance than lecture, Dunlap weaves a tightly knit story of his mentors. The experiences of all these men (coincidentally, all Hungarian) draw a picture of life well lived, an emergence from suffering with an unshakeable faith in people and a insatiable desire to learn and create.

Pangea Day looks amazing. Trailers for it have been playing after every TED talk for months, now, and I finally clicked over to check it out.

Starting at 18:00 GMT [Note: 11AM on the US west coast] on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

Here’s a provocative example:

There will be public and private viewings all over the world, including about twenty in San Francisco:

I’ve been having a running Clinton vs. Obama debate on Facebook (login/connection required.) Our latest sparring match was around the significance of the fact that Obama doesn’t take PAC or Lobbyist dollars. I thought I’d paste some of the conversation, here.

Said Joe:

Maybe you just aren’t seeing the big picture, Eric. If Obama is taking money from all these Lobbyist heads, and their families and their secretaries, et al. What’s the difference? In actuality, Obama is trying to hide the Lobbyist money he receives, which is more of a problem then being transparent and letting people know you take it. Right?

So, until Obama stops trying to hide the bundles of lobbyist money he gets — I think he’s the one to fear with special interests — don’t you?

And, on another note: Read this, maybe you’ll start to understand how Obama is really dealing with the special interests as well as veracity in advertising. It’s kind of sad to me that he is this desperate, even while ahead. Does he know something in his closet we don’t yet? Never saw a man on top so scared out of his mind of losing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4J2u3PHk5A

My response:

The difference is significant. People in any industry have personal beliefs. Someone who works for an oil company doesn’t necessarily believe in the political agenda of their company. Their contribution is like anyone else’s: colored by their circumstances for sure, but reflecting a whole spectrum of human experience. A lobbying operations or PACs in the employ of an oil company behave in a completely different manner: their interests are purely for the bottom line of corporations they represent. Lobbying operations and PACs are also much, much more skilled at turning their contributions into face time with the candidate and his aides. That is their job, and the money wouldn’t be flowing if they weren’t doing their job well.

So yes, I believe there is a big difference between a lobbyist contributing as an individual to a campaign and a lobbyist actually lobbying that campaign.

You’re right that there is a bigger picture, though. As I said, there is a more subtle signal to be discerned simply by looking at the industry that a personal contribution comes from. If I work at an oil company, I’ll make a contribution to a campaign for much more complex (and better, IMHO) reasons than the oil company itself, but my employment with the oil company will still skew my perspective.

To get at that signal, you can break out campaign contributions by industry:

http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/select.asp

You’ll find that Clinton generally out-raised Obama (which reflects the fact that a more substantial proportion of Obama’s contributions come from Americans not affiliated with any major industry) but that aside from that, the differences for most industries aren’t huge.

The places where there are differences, however, are telling. For example:

• Oil and gas: Clinton out-raised Obama by 40%
• Health Services/HMOs: Clinton out-raised Obama by 40%
• Tobacco: Clinton out-raised Obama by 210%
• Casinos/Gambling: Clinton out-raised Obama by 240%

And, the kicker:

• Lobbyists: Clinton out-raised Obama by a whopping 7500%

On the other hand:

• Education: Obama out-raised Clinton by 50%

I don’t believe that any one industry affiliation is worse than another, of course; everyone contributing in these figures is an American participating in the political system on his or her conscience. However, the aggregate numbers do tell us what industries expect to better and which worse with each candidate. Given the industries that I believe are over- and underrepresented in politics, today, Obama is the clear choice for me.

For those who missed this, last Friday, Lawrence Lessig has launched the beta of his Change Congress movement. It’s a broadly-named effort, but his strategies to reduce systematic corruption in government are highly targeted. On the politician’s side:

1. Create a series of voluntary pledges (e.g. support for a permanant ban on earmarks, no PAC money, etc.) any combination of which a politician could commit to.
2. Develop online tools to centrally track these explicit pledges, as well as pledges implied by the actions of other politicians.
3. Funnel national dollars into the local races of “early adopters” of the movement, allowing them to crush traditionally-funded opponents.
4. Leverage public and media interest into a self-sustaining movement over several election cycles, as Americans make this a campaign issue at every level of government.

The Change Congress movement also has several key components that allow individuals to express their collective power (i.e. grassroots organizing/crowdsourcing):

1. Let anyone with a website indicate their support for the various pledges with a badge on the website. These badges will not only be publicly visible (and clickable, for detailed information), but will contain code that indicates the website owner’s district. That information can then be aggregated via search engine, and representatives will soon be able to see how many public voices in their districts are asking for change, and of what kind. Mine is to the right.
2. Create a wiki-like web application for people to make calls, do research, and enrich the data about the activities of various politicians and their level of support for the Change Congress pledges. I’m looking forward to participating in this effort.
3. Allow individuals themselves to pledge financial support for candidates that support the pledges. I’ve pledged substantial amounts of money to the first five candidates who take a full, four-count pledge. You can, too.

Those who know me know that I believe that systematic corruption is the root of nearly all the problems with governance in our country (indeed, anywhere.) Lessig makes a good analogy: Like an alcoholic, there are many enormous problems that out government faces, all of which on their face would seem to be much more significant than the underlying pathology. An alcoholic may be losing his job, his family, and his life. But until the alcoholism is addressed, there’s only so much that the alcoholic can do to remedy his situation. I agree with Lessig that the same holds for our government’s dependence on special interests for campaign finance.

I’m no expert on this topic, but I’m pushing in the directions that have made themselves clear to me. Support for Barack Obama was one such push. Naturally, a movement coming from Lawrience Lessig (whose previous work with Creative Commons fostered a sea change in the debate over copyright reform) would end up being another push. I urge everyone to attack this problem in any way they know how. For now, these are mine.

Links:

• The Change Congress beta site. Make a pledge! Add a badge to your site!
• A video of the CC launch, in Lessig’s trademark slideshow style.

And, for a related treat, check out Lessig’s final lecture on the copyfight, in which he intricately weaves together the work of the last decade of his life, the work he hopes to do in his next decade, and how the defeats he suffered in the copyfight have helped him create the strategies of Creative Commons and Change Congress.

It looks like the Democratic primaries will be a war of attrition, from here on out. It seems clear to me that Obama will win; his lead at this point is nearly unsurmountable. But the race is still close enough from Clinton to stay in. Unfortunately, at this point, it seems clear that Clinton has a lot more to gain from ugly campaigning than Obama does. As the Economist notes:

A campaign that degenerates into name-calling and mud-slinging will hurt Mr Obama more than it does Mrs Clinton. He has campaigned on messages of “change” and “hope” so he faces an unenviable choice in the long run-up to Pennsylvania. If he lets the Clinton team fling the brickbats without retaliation she may set the tone of the campaign. But respond in kind and his message of a new politics is tarnished. Even though he is behind there in the polls, Pennsylvania cannot come soon enough for Mr Obama.

Time to settle in. I hope Obama weathers it without having to stoop too low.

His musings in the Nation are good reading. An excerpt:

Far be it from me to question the desire of Vietnamese to share our globalized consumer culture like everyone else, or to reject their aspiration to be the next Asian Tiger, or freeze them in memory as icons of selfless revolutionaries. Gentrification and consumerism, after all, have destroyed the character of my favorite American haunts, like North Beach, Berkeley, Venice and Aspen. It seems the way of the world. As I walked through the busy Christmas streets, however, I was gripped by the question of why the Vietnam War was necessary in the first place. Why kill, maim and uproot millions of Vietnamese if the outcome was a consumer wonderland approved by the country’s still-undefeated Communist Party? The whole wretched American rationale for the war, that Vietnam was a dangerous domino, a pawn in the cold war, seemed so painfully wrong. Was there any connection between destroying so much life and causing the Vietnamese to go Christmas shopping? Would the same outcome–a one-party socialist government leading a market economy–have occurred in any event, without the destruction? Now that US naval ships were paying peaceful visits to Da Nang, this question nagged at me: is it possible that Marxism and nationalism won the war but capitalism and nationalism have won the peace?

I hesitated before putting this on the public Internets, but now that I’ve allowed it to be posted up on Flickr and on the False Profit site, there’s no longer any reason for the pretense of chastity:

It’s my submission to the EFF’s project, stopthespying.org. They are hoping to pressure Congress into throwing out legislation that will give telcos immunity for having colluded with the Bush administration in warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

Is putting half-naked pictures of yourself on the Internet a good idea, even if it’s for a good cause? You tell me.

I had good conversations with friends, last weekend. I think most are tuned into what Obama could do for our country. I think I may have even won a handful of people over.

Obama’s got a shot. He does. But as easily as I can imagine him taking the presidency, I can just as easily imagine the crushing disappointment of seeing Clinton standing up there; the last eight years have conditioned me for disappointment.

Clinton could be a perfectly competent president, but Obama could be a great one. As Devon puts it, we’ll all be kicking ourselves if history passes us by by just a few percentage points.

I’ve donated a few hundred dollars to Obama’s campaign, in the past, but today I donated many, many more. South Carolina is coming up. Super Tuesday is coming up. Now is the time.