Technology in politics: Obama deploys health care database

09:25 AM Jun 23, 2009

It's no secret that the Obama campaign-cum-administration has been forward-thinking in its use of technology.

Today, the president's Organizing for America online operation is set to deploy a "health care story bank" -- "perhaps the most ambitious test case yet determining whether the technological apparatus that fueled Obama’s campaign can succeed in driving Obama’s governing agenda."

Thousands of personal stories of the health care crisis that have been collected online will be available for lookup by state and congressional district, the better to whip votes.

It's an impressive technological undertaking in obvious service to the old maxim that should be near and dear to every web communicator: lead with the heart and not the head.

The health care discussion slides easily into wonkishness, but the insurance industry bought the past 15 years of parasitism withsome personal storytelling of its own.

(n.b. -- health insurance at $3200 a year is the nightmare scenario in the Harry and Louise ads.  In inflation-adjusted terms, that's around $4700 now, which is exactly what the average individual premium runs nowadays. Thank god we were saved from the big government plan.)

The fact that this kind of bad-faith drivel won a serious policy discussion would have to suggest the possibility that when the rubber hits the road, there was more to the legislative sausage-making than storytime. Like, millions and millions of dollars in lobbying by a massively entrenched economic sector. And a fainthearted reformist proposal where boldness was demanded.

Much love to databases, but those seem like higher cards in the game.

Apart from efficacy and traction, it'll be interesting to see how the collateral issues play with this toy:  privacy (inevitably some stories' details will be enough to track down the authors), authority (some will be false, exaggerated, unreliable, or merely susceptible to counter-narratives), gamesmanship ("troll" stories of varying degrees of sophistication will be submitted; how will they be policed, and how will those that get through be used?).  But nobody's ever used a tool quite like this, and any variable that puts focus on the individual victims of health care rather than Max Baucus is a welcome one.

One way or the other it should be worth the poking and prodding when it launches later today.  After that ... who knows?

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