Gitmo Is Killing Me

Re:Gitmo Is Killing Me by rhizome on Monday April 15, 2013 @09:26PM (#5555616)

I've lobbied. A fair amount for an amateur. We had some small victories, but mostly lost ground.

Obama is not an amateur.

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Re:Gitmo Is Killing Me by specialist on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @08:29AM (#5557672)

I've been chewing on what you said.

Absolutely.

I make no defense of Obama, or any other elected. I just want to understand the game better, to play it better. So I'm more curious what it'd take to close Gitmo.

Not my issue, so I haven't looked. But key policy makers (blocking no votes) would have to be identified and moved. And that would take sustained years long local action, eg me and 100 of my friends camping in my Senator's or Representative's office. Ditto probably 40 other local groups. Hard to pull off.

Sen. Henry Waxman's book The Waxman Report relates how his office has worked on some issues for decades, what it takes to move the needle. Very pragmatic, so in a way very optimistic.

I'm currently chewing through The Politics of Attention, which melds Stephen Jay Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium with social influence (power ranking). The basic idea is that policy makers have limited attention and stuff changes all at once when an issue rises above the noise.

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Re:Gitmo Is Killing Me by rhizome on Tuesday April 16, 2013 @04:23PM (#5560642)

And that would take sustained years long local action, eg me and 100 of my friends camping in my Senator's or Representative's office. Ditto probably 40 other local groups. Hard to pull off.

Yeah, Obama doesn't have to do any of this. Maybe the "sustained years" part for some issues, but that's the limits of commonality between your tools and Obama's.

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