

Perpetually.com Aims to Keep Track of Politicians’ Promises - jeremymims
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/10/15/website-aims-to-keep-track-of-politicians-promises/

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SkyMarshal
For people interested in this kind of thing, also check out Politifact
(<http://politifact.com/>) if you haven't already. It's very good, and has
been doing generally the same thing for years. Won a Pulitzer for it.

It looks like Perpetually might aim to be a more comprehensive database/search
engine of _all_ politicians, and will be a nice complement to Politifact.

~~~
hugh3
Unfortunately you quickly run into who-watches-the-watchers problems with
these sorts of things.

The format of politifact, for instance, is quite open to being abused for
political bias; all you'd need to do would be to pay more attention to the
falsehoods coming from one side of politics than the other.

I'm also not convinced by the many shades of truth they have from 'true' to
'mostly true' to 'barely true' to 'false' to 'pants on fire'. While I concede
the need for middle grounds between true and false when dealing with vague
statements, I'm not sure how "barely true" differs from "half true" or "false"
differs from "pants on fire". It would be interesting to run through the
archive and see if you could pick up any clear bias in terms of who gets what
ratings.

~~~
SkyMarshal
A few thoughts:

1\. While I haven't read every claim, they explain all the ones I have, giving
their reasons for 'barely true' and the other gray areas. It usually makes
sense, and is a refreshing change from binary, accusatory nature of most
political discourse these days.

2\. I haven't picked up any clear bias, otherwise I would have ditched them a
long time ago like I do most other politically biased publications. But an
experiment on their data would certainly be interesting.

3\. I was going to suggest the site might be a little harder on the current
president, but actually Obama is doing alright on the promises scale, so I
don't know.

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barrkel
People individually are (usually) reasonable; but the mob is stupid, prone to
fads, shallow thinking, and at worst hysteria and social panics. It's part of
the reason nobody does direct democracy: it doesn't work.

Instead, we elect representatives who have a balancing act: they need to help
create policies with some depth - at the very least, thinking about second-
order effects - without alienating their core constituencies.

Not alienating your core constituency is very different from upholding every
promise you make to different segments to your core constituencies; most
importantly, because these promises are often contradictory. I believe
politicians make those promises because they need to overemphasize group
membership with each individual segment, so that they can win enough support
for office. But it's one thing to tell your friend you back them 100%; it's
quite another to do something which destroys the friendship.

What would happen if every politician were held to account, to their promises?
I can think of two scenarios in extremis: every politician in the field acts
honestly (i.e. doesn't break their promises), and thusly cannot gain enough
support to be an effective legislator; or every politician acts dishonestly
(i.e. breaks their promises), politics becomes ever more infected with
cynicism, and legislators are made weaker by this cynicism and perceived lack
of legitimacy.

In both cases, I think it's corrosive and damaging to democracy. I'm not a fan
of sites like this.

I think it would be better to keep track of donations / campaign contributions
(and including organizational affiliations of personal contributors, etc.) and
actual votes, and how these votes affect these individuals and organizations.
In effect, build a performance-measuring tool with the assumption that
politicians are paid shills; make the bribery of contributions obvious,
ultimately to try and reduce their effects.

~~~
stretchwithme
Switzerland gets a lot closer to direct democracy than most and is somewhat
successful at it.

But their system is designed so people have more sovereignty over their own
lives, rather than everybody being able to decided everything for everybody.

The Swiss government has to get the people's approval for most major things.
And people can leave their canton if they don't like it.

The key is having mechanisms that keep the power decentralized.

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jeremymims
I'm very excited by this project. Politicians have a tendency to present their
positions differently depending on who's listening.

If it keeps only a few politicians a little more honest, we'll all be better
off. And considering the qualifications issues we've seen with Mark Kirk,
Christine O'Donnell, Richard Blumenthal and others, a little more honesty
wouldn't hurt.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Not only that, but many of them probably tweak their websites after their
proposals reveal things they didn't want revealed.

Consider this episode: Obama (briefly) proposed requiring people to perform
unpaid labor [1]. When the blogosphere caught on, the language was immediately
changed to obscure the proposal ("set a goal", not "required").

This link includes a screenshot before, and the full text after:
[http://overlawyered.com/2008/11/community-service-yep-
mandat...](http://overlawyered.com/2008/11/community-service-yep-mandatory/)

Perpetually can help the world learn about stuff like this.

[1] Not interested in discussing the actual policy - only the nature of the
website tweaking is relevant for this conversation. _This thread is about
perpetually.com._

[edit: as suggested by jamesaguilar, tweaked language to focus on the part
relevant to this discussion, rather than language used back in 2008. I put the
footnote in because the last time I pointed out this example, people accused
me of comparing Obama to Stalin.]

~~~
jamesaguilar
Seems like if you want the thread to be about perpetually.com it might be best
to avoid language so loaded that it requires a footnote. You could just say
"required community service" before [1] and eliminate any confusion. What you
wrote basically invites a political response rather than one that's about the
service under discussion.

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AlexBlom
I might get a flaming for this one, but here goes:

Yes, politicians in general have a reputation for lying, and often some do.
Yet to me the lying is part of a bigger problem, few of the top notch people
want to work in politics. Those in that league who join politics do well and
don't lie so much. Those a few rungs below do. Instead of fixing their lying,
shouldn't we be trying to attract the creme de crem into politics, even if it
is on a shorter term?

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marklabedz
I was thinking of something similar to track the "10 Year Goals" that are
rolled out with much fanfare, only to be forgotten after that individual is no
longer in office.

The most useful part would be some sort of lessons-learned attached to each
initiative (whether failed or successful).

~~~
saki_1001
Right, I work at Perpetually and I think the coolest thing about the Public
data project is that it will only get more interesting with time... kind of
like a good wine... I can't imagine what crazy stuff we can dig up from the
archive 10 years from now.

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RickHull
Don't forget PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter: <http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/>

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cool-RR
I had an idea similar to this in my mind for years. My working title for it is
BullshitTracker. Feel free to do it.

It will basically track every famous person's promise or prediction. So for
example Steve Ballmer will have a page where this prediction will be tracked:

[http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ballmer-Google-might-
dissapea...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ballmer-Google-might-dissapear-in-
the-next-five-years-1948.shtml)

And it will be recorded that he was wrong.

You could see each person's predictions\promises, and see how many of them
came true and how many didn't.

I think this will help bring attention to which people are big bullshitters,
and which people aren't. There will be a leaderboard for the people who made
many truthful and substantial predictions, so you could easily find people
whose word is worth gold.

~~~
hugh3
I don't think it's fair to go around mixing predictions and promises though.

If I break a promise, I've done something bad. If I make a prediction and I'm
wrong... well, that's pretty much the nature of predictions. If I could be
wrong only 49% of the time I'd be much richer than I am.

~~~
cool-RR
I agree. It might be good to have some distinction between promises and
predictions on this hypothetical site.

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quellhorst
Is there a list of all the promises Obama made? I know he took most off his
website after he was elected. -- Just because you like Obama doesn't mean you
need to down vote me because I think he should be accountable.

~~~
ryanricard
Politifact keeps an "Obameter." I particularly like their 5-category system
(including "Compromise," "In the Works," and "Stalled")

<http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/>

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stretchwithme
I'm sure they think they can afford the disk space for the amount of lies that
politicians tell. Perhaps they will realize the error after a few weeks.

I can hear it now. "Help, Moore's Law! Save us!"

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JeffJenkins
While I generally like the idea of this sort of tool, I do wonder to what
degree having a database of politicians promises and positions could make it
difficult for them to make needed compromises, or even just change their mind.
It's a similar idea to how having a complete transcript of a conversation when
arguing with someone can make it much more difficult to reach a resolution.

