micah.sifry.com

Isn’t it amazing how the topic of race has all but disappeared from the national radar screen?

I don’t think it’s stretching things at all to suggest that one reason is that people of color are vastly outspent in the campaign money game. After all, candidates are far more responsive to donors than non-donors. And a new analysis by my colleague Nancy Watzman for the Color of Money shows that both Bush and Kerry drew most of their money from the same non-diverse pool.

Only about 10 percent of their more than $475 million in private campaign contributions during the primaries came from neighborhoods that are predominantly of color. Meanwhile, about 30 percent of the population is of color. Details here.

Nothing like a visual depiction to explode the silly notion of America being radically divided into blue vs red states. See this county-by-county map by Princeton prof Robert Vandebei, which shades counties by the actual vote distribution (red=Bush, blue=Kerry and green=Nader). And check out the little green patch in Utah!

I’ve been busy lately and thus haven’t had much time to blog. On top of that I just bought a PowerBook G4 to replace the IBM Thinkpad that died on me over the summer, and I’ve got a lot of files to move over, mail programs to synchronize, and new tools to learn. Luckily, lots of people have been very supportive, including brother Dave, Britt Blaser, Doc Searls, Andrew Rasiej, and the good folks at Technorati.

Speaking of Technorati, one of the high points of my trip to San Francisco last week was attending their “hackerthon.” I came with a project that I hoped someone might want to code: to take a list of the urls of Members of Congress and create a ranked list of who the blogosphere was talking about. Much to my pleasure, a young man named Aaron Swartz walked up to me after I made my pitch and quietly said, “I’d like to give it a try.” I then watched as he banged out a very workable first whack at a solution in less than an hour. (Only later did I learn that three years ago, at the tender age of 15, Aaron was the de facto IT manager of the Creative Commons site.) I don’t know about you, but this sort of thing doesn’t happen every day, at least not back in NY!

We’re working on some issues with the code, but hope to have it ready for the re-launch of the Personal Democracy Forum site in about a week. The big problem is that while bloggers mention Members a lot, they don’t tag them with their website url very often. I think that is because it’s relatively hard–compared to clicking over to Amazon to get a book url–to find politicians’ web addresses.

We could do the same ranking by keyword, but it won’t be as accurate (think of those Congressmen Adam Smith and Jerry Lewis, for example, if you want to see how sloppy a keyword search can be). So we’re going to make it real easy for bloggers to tag Members of Congress. Hopefully, that will improve the data stream for all. If you have any ideas on this front, let me know. Or just stay tuned for the re-launch.

For more details, go here.

This is something I posted on the Well.com book discussion site earlier today:
On the VP debate last night, I actually thought Edwards missed a lot of opportunities to really make an important point. Take Halliburton. Yes, its no-bid contract in Iraq is a convenient lightning rod, one which has gotten a lot of attention. But it really ought to be talked about as emblematic of the closeness of the Bush Administration to the energy sector (oil and gas companies, coal, nuclear and electric utilities like Enron).
No one brought up the Cheney energy task force, which basically took proposals wholesale from the energy lobby and wrote them into the Administration’s energy bill. Cheney’s task force report recommended drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, weakening regulation for air pollution controls at power plants, increasing oil and gas exploration on public land; repealing a Depression-era law preventing national utility monopolies; expanding nuclear energy; building new refineries; and increasing reliance on coal. And all of these recommendations have made it into policy or pending legislation.
How did they come up with these policies? Cheney is still refusing to release all the pertinent information. But we do know that his task force was predominantly focused on listening to energy lobbyists and not environmentalists. As we write in our book, Is That a Politician in Your Pocket?

Over all, from January through September 2001, according to an analysis by NRDC, task force officials had 714 direct contacts with industry representatives and only 29 with non-industry representatives. What organizations were represented? They included the National Association of Manufacturers, the mammoth trade association whose members include ExxonMobil, Marathon Oil, and Arch Coal; the Nuclear Energy Institute; the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association for the utility industry; the National Mining Association; Westinghouse; the American Petroleum Institute, the lobby group for the oil and gas industry; and yes, Enron, among others.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bush has raised over $4.2 million from the energy and natural resources sector for his re-election campaign; by contrast, Kerry has raised just $560,000.
Edwards could have made these points and connected them to things that really matter to people, such as the alarming rise in childhood asthma rates that is occurring while Clean Air Act regulations are weakened.
Likewise, I think it would have strengthened Edwards’ points about the administration’s Medicare prescription drug program, which is indeed an enormous boon to the pharmaceutical, insurance and HMO companies, if he had mentioned how much money Bush-Cheney have raised from those interests.
Campaign Money Watch is hard at work doing those things, including running some tough ads in Wisconsin. Go here to find out more.

Can anyone remember when a vice presidential debate mattered? I can’t. This one will just confirm that axiom. On points and on style, it’s a draw. Cheney is unflappable, and appears knowledgeable. Edwards is more attactive, but landed no knock-out blows.
Thinking about it a little bit more, it was again striking how much Iraq and terror dominated this debate, like the first one. So you might score that a subtle win for Bush-Cheney, since Kerry-Edwards have a much better case to make for themselves on the economy and domestic issues, but that segment of the debate came later and never really hardened around a particular exchange.
The attack on B-C for making us less safe may be accurate, but people relate to this on an emotional level, not a factual one.
P.S. Cheney’s mention of “factcheck.com” to defend himself against the Halliburton charges may be a debate first, but he got the url wrong. It’s factcheck.org.

My spouse will hate me for posting this, but this site–KerryHatersforKerry–is funny. And it might tip the election!
Favorite slogan: “Why Not the Long Face?”

Nancy Watzman and I are in the midst of a two-week conversation on the Well about our book, Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day. Come check it out and join in–you don’t have to be a member.
For some reason, our Amazon ranking has also just shot way up, almost hitting #1000, though we’re drifting down again. As far as I know, my relatives and in-laws have bought all the copies they were planning to buy. So the sudden jump in sales is most mysterious, though of course welcome.

The Democratic blogosphere is hot these days. The night of the first debate, Kos’s online visitors went through the roof, over 30,000 per hour, he reports, and 500,000 in all last Friday. The DNC also experienced a surge in online visitors, donations and volunteers. (Meanwhile, Sanford Dickert, formerly the Kerry campaign’s CTO, told me at a party that night that the Bush-Cheney campaign server crashed several times that evening.) Atrios leaked a Bush-Cheney call-in number for post-debate spin from Ken Mehlman, and several Kerry supporters hacked into the call. Now a couple of the biggest bloggers–Kos, Atrios, Jerome Armstrong of MyDD–have formed their own political action committee to raise and spend money on line, appropriately named BlogPac.
Of course, high-intensity activity doesn’t necessarily translate into changing voters’ minds, as anyone who lived through 2003 can attest. But at least the energy and creativity levels are up.