Proposed Guidelines
1. Careful with using your personal opinion as a “fact”. Always dangerous ground in politics, but your own personal like or dislike of a candidate does not mean that your view is the prevailing view, even if that view is shared by every single person you’ve ever met. In statistics, that’d be called a sampling error.
2. Attempt as much as possible to refrain from needless attacks on candidates you oppose, especially those based entirely on personal feelings. These fit in the category of (People would never elect X because of Y, where Y is a subgroup the candidate belongs to).
3. Link to sources and rely on data as much as possible. I know it’s already heavily encouraged on BMG, but lets raise it to a higher standard.
4. Don’t dismiss polls, but remember that they are a snapshot taken at the time they’re created, and nothing more. That means that polls get more accurate closer to the election, but the only one that counts is on Election day.
That’s all I got so far, but I’m willing to add more, so please suggest anything you’ve got.
The idea is that if we all follow these fairly simple guidelines, our discussions won’t devolve into flame wars, but might instead turn on useful arguments and insights.
Let us hope we can prevent the “my candidate can beat up your candidate” discussions that all too often seem to prevail…
If you’re working for a candidate (especially paid work), make sure that you’re not pretending to be impartial.
I’ve already gorwn tired of “if ______ is nominated, I swear that I will never ever ever ever vote for him/her, and will vote for some other party of stay home.”
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That line is often hard to believe, and comes across as a threat. Threats don’t work well in domestic politics, and someone who speaks so childishly is rarely a loss for a campaign. It also represents a sadly close-minded approach to a candidate, 22 months out from Election Day.
oh, yeah, that’s something i’ve fallen prey to . . . (who, moi? queen of the subtle, measured response???)
On page 2 of the Boston Globe today (The Nation section) the headline was that Bill Richardson was entering the race. The big photo associated with the story, however, was not of Richardson but of a smiling Hillary Clinton surrounded by children. There is not photo associated with the story in the on-line edition, so you have to have the print paper to see it.
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The Globe featured headlines slamming Patrick on Benjamin Leguere the day after the first debate.