Perpetually.com Aims to Keep Track of Politicians’ Promises

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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

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.

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.

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!"

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.