Daily Digest | Inside Organizing for America's Ground Game
BY Editors | Friday, July 31 2009
- Faces of Health Care Reform: Inside Organizing for America's Ground Game Last week, we floated the idea that what Organizing for America was doing in collecting personal health care narratives from supporters amounted to busy work for the organization's legendary base. In retrospect, that was Magoo-ish of us. It's too easy to become obsessed with the inside baseball of how health care legislation is being hammered out and miss the work being done in the 3,537,431 square miles of America that isn't DC. Yesterday afternoon, Nancy had a conversation with Organizing for America new media director Natalie Foster that suggests that, while OFA is certainly still figuring out how to be effective from the outside, the health care stories they are collecting are one tactical carry over from the campaign that still can carry some punch...
Hutchison's Search Engine Sneak Ben Smith points us to a story out of Texas, where a reference to the sexuality of Governor Rick Perry found its way into the hidden tags on Kay Bailey Hutchison's new campaign website, nestled amongst phrases like "Travis County," "el paso gangs," "texas hispanics," and a whopping 2,300 other keyword terms. The Hutchison campaign deflected by saying that a vendor set them up with a system that dynamically generates the site's source code from what people type into search engines alongside the search terms "Rick Perry," "Kay Bailey Hutchison" and "Texas"...
- Kirk Gets Scrutiny for Tweeting on Duty Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL - @markkirk) is coming under scrutiny by the Defense Department, reports CNN, for letting his staff post some rather innocuous tweets while he was on duty as a Navy Reservist at the Pentagon's National Military Command Center. The revelation that Kirk was working at the Pentagon seems to be the lesser of the concerns; it's not as if Kirk tweeted the coordinates of a battleship sneaking into the waters off Libya. But his posting to Twitter on a campaign account while serving in the military is a tougher question...
California’s Secretary of State: Come and Collaborate! JD Lasica writes about SocialVoter, a special event earlier this week featuring California Secretary of State Debra Bowen and presented by CitizenSpace and the Social Media Club. For readers who don't know Debra Bowen, she's one of the most forward-looking public officials in the land, with a presence on Twitter (@DBowen) and Facebook and, more importantly, a commitment to bringing the public into public policy discussions. The conversation included suggestions about how to provide voters with critical information about candidates and ballot initiatives, how to crowdsource ballot explanations, how to increase transparency in the election process, and more...
- What Bugs Me About Stratcom's Social Network Blockade Yesterday, WIRED's Noah Shachtman reported that US Strategic Command--which oversees the armed forces' computer networks--is about to ban the entire military's access to social networking Web sites. Matthew Burton writes that he finds this really frustrating -- "but I totally get it." They are justifiably worried that a malicious Twitter or Facebook account would infect their entire unclassified network with malware. But it seems Stratcom is only accounting for the risks of these sites without considering any of the benefits: Take personnel morale, for one thing...