Justice Walks removed her perspective from the internets.

It’ll be sorely missed.  I hope she feels comfortable doing a public blog again, but if not, I was glad to have the chance to read it and in some ways rejoice in what it offered.   

It’s hard to control the sense of frustration and irritated anger.  I’m not going to delve further into rage and supposition, and just deleted all my frothing.  It doesn’t benefit her, and the relevant parties are already busy rejoicing in their sin against her, and would just look on any commentary as further fodder for their senses of self-import. 

Anyway, I think I’ll be posting more often than monthly just to take the edge off the sorrows racism has lately been dropping into my life, this one among many, sadly. 

I wish the lady well, and if the random good wish of an internet stranger is anything, there it is.

Process Nerding Your Way to Victory, or The Obama Ground Game

I will probably not do proper justice to it, but the title covers the basic premise.

McCain is not a process nerd. Hillary was not a process nerd. Obama is the *ultimate* process nerd. This is in fact why he is doing so well in a national presidential campaign. Usually guys like him just run campaigns brilliantly for other folks, but this time the process nerd *is* the nominee. That in some ways is more unprecendented than his being black, or about as young as Clinton.

There is a lot of talk about Obama’s ‘ground game’, but that obscures what drives it. It’s not just enthusiasm– there’s a herd of enthusiastic Palinites out there getting nothing done for that ticket. It’s not just ‘a background in community organising’– the Deaniacs did very well field organising. It’s process nerdery– the trainspotting ability to manipulate enthusiasm and direct organising in specific and precisely tailored ways. A process nerd studies processes, even down to the process of making sure your volunteers are *useful* self-starters, as an example. Or studying the process of proportional nomination for your party so well that you can actually convert your success into useful ground campaigns for the national winner-take-all process.

It’s nerdy, it’s geeky, and it’s never really been done by the guy standing in front of the cameras saying ‘I’m running for President’. It suggests some interesting things about what an Obama presidency would look like in practical terms.

The scary-wonderful thing about being a process nerd is that you build in your own vote protections. It doesn’t matter that Republicans will intimidate some percentage of voters– through process nerding, Obama’s got unprecedented levels of turnout that will completely obliterate any attempts to commit partisan-useful vote fraud. There may still be some in this election, but it will be rendered toothless and not able to alter the final tallies.

Plus the focus on process allows for a broad reach in terms of connecting to voters– even people who won’t vote for Obama increasingly might just stay home since he doesn’t sound like a bad guy, they just can’t *vote* for him is all– and that kind of ambivalent support stifles the Republican base turnout and can create a nice little margin of victory.

Ah, Obama, the ultimate political process nerd. One wonders only if anyone will ever be able to top it. I’m just amazed to live in an election year where this stuff is actually, finally a winning electoral strategy and group of tactics.