meta-roj

as super tuesday winds down, we find kerry in a strong position, and set up to begin the general election campaign in march. that means months of hardcore campaign ahead. it’s an unprecedented situation, and maybe calls for an unprecedented strategy. i’m going to suggest one: run the cabinet.

bush has more than $150 million on hand, and is reportedly planning a quarter-billion-dollar campaign. that’s more than $1.3 million dollars per day. personally, i think that is obscene, but i’m not talking about campaign finance today. this is strategy.

the democratic field represented an amazing array of committed, involved people, many of which campaigned on particular issues. now that the race is [essentially] over, it’s time to demostrate diversity as a strength and contrast it sharply with the binary-thinking bush approach to politics (with us or against us).

the cabinet comes with these jobs: vice president, attorney general and the secretaries of agriculture, commerce, defense, education, energy, health and human services, homeland security, housing and urban development, interior, labor, state, transportation, treasury and veterans affairs.

we also have nine current and former presidential candidates from the democratic party, many of which made significant contributions to the political debate: john kerry, john edwards, howard dean, wesley clark, al sharpton, dennis kucinich, dick gephardt, joe lieberman, carol moseley braun.

i suggest that kerry approach the candidates – his former competitors – and ask them if they would commit to serve in the new administration. there’s some wiggle room about who should be in which office, and some won’t do it at all, but if the kerry campaign can establish a good chunk of the cabinet now, they could run several people on particular issues with a unified vision of a new administration. build some or all of a cabinet now, and create multiple issue-focused fronts that the republicans have to address.

if kerry picks a vice president (perhaps edwards), a secretary of defense (perhaps clark), a secretary of education (perhaps sharpton), a secretary of labor (perhaps gephardt), a secretary of housing and urban development (perhaps braun), health and human services (perhaps dean), then each of these committed individuals can engage particular points of the bush administration record. if the democrats can find a few more non-candidates that are willing to commit to the cabinet, i think it would go very far in changing the nature of the campaign and, even more important, give the voters a person that speaks to some issue they consider important.

maybe a former clark supporter with a particular interest in isn’t convinced that kerry is the best man for the job, but if it’s on the record that clark has a place in the new administration and will play a significant role in both the campaign and the future government… well, that might be enough.

do that six more times, and the kerry campaign can give most voters someone to pay attention to (even if they disagree). if the republicans decide to go negative, the assault is greatly diluted.

what i don’t know is how well these people get along – if they can move past competitors and pull a unified campaign together – but if even a few people (beyond the president/vice president positions) are willing to continue to focus on some of the issues they brought to the primary campaign, i think it becomes a whole new kind of election.

a uniting, not dividing, election (to borrow a phrase)…

just a thought…

just a thought… if this flies, it will (i think) only be the second time the united states constitution is amended to restrict the rights of americans.

(that first time was the 18th – prohibition)

while i’m picking on the administrations misuse of intelligence to drive an agenda, it just seems appropriate to throw in a brief mention of the union of concerned scientists and their report [pdf] on the bush administration’s misuse of science.

this was news itself a few days ago, but it picks up a little more traction when it becomes apparent that the pentagon is planning based on severe climate change scenarios.

white house press release, june 11, 2001

no one can say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided.

president george w. bush, bush disses global warming report [cbs]

I read the report put out by the bureaucracy

it seems that some people at the pentagon have some idea what “constitutes a dangerous level.” it seems that the president didn’t read that report from that bureaucracy. (to be fair, maybe it wasn’t ready in 2001…)

climate science is one thing (and it takes some serious crunching to even have a decent hint), but the ucs report outlines concerns in a number of fields. anyway, the white house got a question about this report…

white house press release, february 18, 2004

Q Scott, a group of prominent scientists, including some university presidents and Nobel laureates, signed a letter today complaining that the White House has systematically skewed science to fit its policy agendas. In particular, they accuse the administration of stacking federal advisory panels and suppressing EPA studies that don’t agree with policy objectives. Have you seen the letter, and can you respond —

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I haven’t, but I can assure you that this is an administration that makes decisions based on the best available science. And I would point to what we are doing in terms of the President’s Clear Skies initiative as a prime example. We’ve seen the success from the acid rain program of this market-based approach. And the President has put forward a Clear Skies initiative to cut power plant emissions by 70 percent. And that’s an initiative that is based on the best available science. And that’s what we do with all our policies in this realm.

surely the administration wouldn’t lie about that, so maybe it’s not really a political agenda, it’s just that scientific papers simply aren’t available in the white house.

the finalists are up

doing a little scratching around the surface, i get the distinct impression that the recently-pass “medicaid prescription health benefit” is a great example of betting on stupidity.

if you’ve been with me for a while, you know i don’t think that’s a great plan for business – does it still work in politics?

will the electorate recognize it before the next election? “you’ve been had” is a pretty functional soundbite, but it really takes more than that to realize just how had we’ve been.

george w. bush (abc)

“There’s a sense that the people in America aren’t getting the truth, ” Bush said recently

really?

larry lessig has given us yet another interesting compare-and-contrast perspective on what is important in america. the comparison is not, i think, something most people would put together, so this is an interesting insight into how mr. lessig thinks (at least, it’s interesting to me).

i originally thought i’d have some thoughts suggesting this was yet more evidence that we’re all in the wrong business, and crime does pay, but then i ended up thinking a bit more (dangerous thing to do…)

i’ve followed larry’s writing, and occasionally chimed in with random thoughts, but this gives me a hook to hang some of my work on…

finally, one thought that struck me was the “actual damages” from the my.mp3.com concept should be, by my calculation about negative $750,000. this is based on the assumption that the 50,000 cd’s purchased by mp3 were purchases that would not be made if the service did not exist (see larry’s post for an explanation of the mechanics of my.mp3.com), and a very reasonable $15 per cd average price.

i can’t begin to tell you what i’d do to the music industry with $750,000….

dennis kucinich apparently has a proposal to create a department of peace in the united states federal government.

is ‘peace’ compatible with ‘bureaucracy’? is this a case of creating a bureaucracy, because that’s just what politicians know how to do? or is there value buried in this somewhere?

update 2007.06.12: title changed to avoid distributed blog-spam attack