Perpetually.com Aims to Keep Track of Politicians’ Promises

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/10/15/website-aims-to-keep-track-of-politicians-promises/

by jeremymims • 16 years ago

72 22 16 years ago

blogs.wsj.com

jeremymims• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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...

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• 16 years ago

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.

atomical• 16 years ago

"Politicians have a tendency to present their positions differently depending on who's listening."

VoteSmart tracks candidates positions. They recently released VoteEasy (VoteEasy.org) and they have an API as well.

davidw• 16 years ago

I wonder if there'll be substantial differences or if we'll see that "they're all full of shit" and people will simply become more jaded and cynical.

fleitz• 16 years ago

I think you underestimate the value of telling people what they want to hear.

marklabedz• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

cool-RR2• 16 years ago

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...

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.

hugh32• 16 years ago

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-RR2• 16 years ago

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

RickHull• 16 years ago

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

SkyMarshal2• 16 years ago

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.

hugh32• 16 years ago

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.

SkyMarshal2• 16 years ago

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.

quellhorst• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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/

JeffJenkins• 16 years ago

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.

AlexBlom• 16 years ago

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?

barrkel• 16 years ago

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.

stretchwithme2• 16 years ago

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.

stretchwithme2• 16 years ago

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!"

Perpetually.com Aims to Keep Track of Politicians’ Promises

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