Kossack bosshijack diaried the profile of Nate Silver in New York Times. It is a nice piece and interesting for those who, like me, were not aware of Nate's background as a baseball statistics fanatic.
I would like to draw your attention to the last two paragraphs of the article which struck a chord with some thoughts I've been having over the last few months.
One thing Mr. Silver cannot predict: what happens now. He...will continue with FiveThirtyEight, using it to predict Congressional votes during the Obama administration — if anyone cares.
"That’s the paradox," he said. "You would think that you elect this guy and you want him to effect change, and then he gets elected, and people don’t care about bills being passed."
I think this is indeed a paradox. The question is how do we go about "car[ing] about bills being passed?"
There's been a good deal of interest in change.gov, the Obama administration's transition site, as well as articles and speculation about how and to what extent the Obama administration can foster and leverage the kind of energy and organizing prowess utilized so effectively by the campaign to get people involved in governing. I am very interested to see how that develops.
Nevertheless, change.gov does not address the Congress. We've made great strides in 2006 and 2008 crashing the gate to elect more and better Democrats to Congress. How do we crash the gates to become more engaged and tuned in to the day-to-day business of legislating and governing?
To belabor the sports metaphor suggested by the Silver profile, the 2008 player draft was completed except for a few holdouts on November 4th. We're now in spring training. January 20th is opening day for the new administration. Is there an appetite for pouring over the daily doings of the government as there is for studying the box scores? It sounds like FiveThirtyEight is going to be providing some kind of tracking and predicting for votes in Congress. How much appetite would there be for comprehensive tracking of the business and minutiae of Congress? What bills have been introduced. What is the legislative schedule? Where in the process is bill H.xxxx?
In one of his very best essays Brecht envisions theater as a boxing match; in particular, for the present discussion, he envisions theater-goers who are more like boxing fans. That is, bringing to the theater the more active, informed and participatory passion one sees at a sporting event. Much the way American baseball and football fans can recite chapter and verse of statistics and tendencies, match-ups and game plans, is there any reason citizens in a dynamic democracy should not bring the same passion to the working of our government? Especially, when the actions and non-actions of that government can have such important impacts on our lives?
Finally, is Big Orange the right place for creating a legislation tracking community?