The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy: Consensus Statement to Presidential Campaigns

by CKR

I sent our consensus statement to the presidential campaigns today. Or most of them. Interesting way to check out the candidates’ attitudes toward input.

The cover letter was pretty much as follows, with alternatives in brackets:

Dear --- :

I represent a group of bloggers who span a range of political views from left to right, hawkish to dovish, and who have come to a consensus on nuclear weapons policy.

You have said very little on this subject.
[Kucinich: You have addressed some of these issues in your Counterpunch article.]
[Obama: You have addressed a few of these issues.]

We believe that your presenting a strong nuclear weapons policy along the lines of our consensus would add to your popularity. A recent poll by the University of Maryland shows that large percentages of Americans agree with our consensus. Explicit adoption of such a policy would improve America’s standing in the world.

Further, we believe that the process we used, which can be traced through links in the consensus statement, is something that your campaign should make more use of. Certainly if you become president, we would hope that you choose to build consensus for your policies. We believe that our project is a good example.

[Your website is geared to broadcasting your message, but the “Contact Us” link is almost hidden at the bottom of the page.][Delete for Edwards blog.] We believe that it is important for citizens to be involved in policy development for all issues.

We believe our consensus statement will work for Republicans or Democrats. Therefore, we are sending it to all the presidential candidates. If you decide to use it, we would hope that you choose to acknowledge our contributions.

We recognize that you are extremely busy. So I’ll paste our consensus statement of nuclear weapons policy into this message. [And then the consensus statement follows.]

All but one (John Edwards) of the candidates seem to be pretty much indifferent to input. They are using the internet as another way to get their message out and contributions in. The big megaphone. “Contact us” is in small (sometimes tiny, sometimes faint) print at the bottom of the home page.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Fred Thompson have boxes into which you can insert a message, along with required fields for information about you. (I suspect that I will be seeing emails and more stuff in the standard mailbox. The sacrifices I make for this project!)

John McCain, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney have limits on what can be inserted into the box: 1500 characters for Paul, 500 for Romney, and I suspect that this was the reason I got an error message from the McCain site, although no limit was given. So I didn’t manage to get our consensus statement to them. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and Dennis Kucinich all want you to email them, so I did.

None of these candidates seem to see input as primarily the kind of thing we’re doing. Some allowed for “comments,” but mostly they assumed that you had a question that couldn’t be answered by their FAQs, which they helpfully linked, or that you were so excited you wanted to volunteer with a personal note.

So, like J., I am dubious about any real response, let alone their taking up our consensus.

Clinton and Obama provided autoreply boilerplate email responses. Huckabee sent an “Out of Office AutoReply.” That’s what it said at the top.

The Edwards campaign was the campaign different. It has a blog to which you can submit a post which is then subject to some sort of vote that I didn’t understand, and diaries, for which the posts show up immediately. So I chose the diaries. As I write, my post is second from the top. Here it is in all its glory. We shall see what happens.

There are some other folks I hope to hear from, too.