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The question everyone was asking about the Obama’s online campaign is what happens when he is elected? What happens to his online army of a million or more? Change.gov, the new and unprecedented website of the office of the President-elect, begins to answer that question. The domain name tells us that this is an official US government website, rather than a candidate website. My hunch is that no previous president-elect in the Internet age established an official website, but then no previous candidate put comparable emphasis on his online campaign.

Change.gov still has some of the look and feel of the Obama campaign website. It includes a full agenda of the reforms Obama plans to introduce (though according to news reports the agenda mysteriously disappeared during the weekend of November 8-9, but has now re-appeared). It contains videos of the latest Obama speeches, as well as videos of people playing major roles in the transition and the new administration. Under the rubric “America Serves,” it mentions Obama’s plans to establish service organizations in education, health care, energy independence, and support for veterans, as well as a proposed educational tax credit for college students.

Like the campaign, the site invites involvement. It provides forms for people to indicate their interest in service or in applying for political appointments. It also encourages people to share their stories and their visions. I would expect the Obama campaign is getting a lot of helpful feedback from the site, but none of it has yet been posted, and I don’t know if the campaign has any intention of posting any of what it receives.

Quite literally as I was writing this post, I received an email from the Obama campaign asking me to complete a survey about experience as a volunteer and interest in volunteering in the future. (Personal disclosure: I signed up some months ago on www.mybarackobama.com not to volunteer but simply to observe the operation.)

I also had a look at www.whitehouse.gov, the official site of the President. Under George Bush this site is completely out-of-date. It’s primarily small-print text, with a little bit of video, and little apparent interest in feedback. Obviously, when Obama takes office on January 20 next year, www.whitehouse.gov will have major changes. The question I’ll close with is how much opportunity Obama’s White House site will provide for citizen input. Will the input simply be in the form of one-way feedback, or will the site permit feedback to be visible in some way, therefore encouraging dialogue among citizens?

Last weekend, I participated in an extraordinary academic gathering in Ottawa, a conference to honour Carleton University public administration professor Bruce Doern on his retirement. In his prolific writings, he has developed what could be referred to in brief as the 5i theory of public policy, namely interplay among institutions, interests, ideas, and individuals. Doern was also recognized as a builder, playing a key role in establishing Carleton University’s School of Public Administration and establishing the annual review How Ottawa Spends.

One of the topics discussed was policy instruments, and in this context Michael Prince examined the use of exhortation. Prince’s University of Victoria colleague David Good suggested a new annual review: How Ottawa Talks. Picking up the point, a participant from the federal government’s Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions described the federal government’s response to the credit crisis as mainly talk and messaging. This is not intended as criticism, but rather a recognition that Canada’s major financial institutions are in much better shape than those in the US and Europe.

Continuing this line of thought, here are three propositions about Talk Politics.
First, the Internet has become the agora, the meeting place, where a great deal of talk politics happens. While governments have access to the mainstream media (e.g. press conferences) their press releases and documents are all, in the first instance, posted on line. For civil society, particularly individuals, participating in talk politics the Internet is the place because it is accessible and inexpensive, and has the possibility of getting responses.

Second, there are many different kinds of political talk. Governments particularly use the “you do the math” approach, appeals to financial self-interest, often accompanied by online calculators. Examples would be tax cuts or energy conservation programs. There may also appeal to voters’ interest in future generations, the world our children will inherit. I’m surprised that governments don’t use this approach more often, given their acknowledged role as representative of the interests of future generations. Individuals’ political talk is often sending an emotional message (Will I Am’s “Yes we can”) or a satirical one (Michel Rivard’s “culture en peril” or Sarah Silverman’s “great schlep”).

The third proposition is that if political talk is just talk it fails, because talk is intended to lead to people taking action. The action might be voting one way or another. Or in the case of public sector messaging about financial institutions, the intention is to discourage investors from panicking in ways that strain the financial system.

Yes, this is an area ripe for research, and one of the real payoffs of this conference would be if it leads to more thinking about this unexplored side of public administration.

On this Remembrance Day, two episodes come to mind. I made my donation to receive a poppy and the elderly veteran who pinned it on my collar thanked me. We should be thanking him for what he did for us.

At the request of one of my students, I ended today’s class at 10:45, rather than 11, so we could attend the Remembrance Day ceremony at UTSC. We spent the class discussing Errol Morris’s brilliant documentary The Fog of War, which focuses on Robert McNamara’s ambivalent reflections about the Vietnam War and, as Secretary of Defense at the time, his responsibility for it. After a morning of sitting and thinking and talking about war, it was appropriate to stand silently to pay our respects to those who fell.

Looking back the morning after on Obama’s smashing election victory, I think it is clearly a result of a number of conditions, each one of which was necessary but not sufficient. It was only the entire set that was sufficient:

• In Barack Obama a superb orator and leader,

• A Republican ticket that combined two shallow candidates, one unstable (McCain) and the other inept (Palin),

• A wildly unpopular Republican incumbent,

• The perfect storm of the economic crisis during the campaign itself,

• The powerfully innovative use of web technology by the Obama campaign to mobilize its supporters, and

• The enthusiasm and energy of Obama’s supporters, particularly young adults.

The Democrats had some of these conditions in recent campaigns but it was only this time that they all came together.

On to the transition. Let’s contrast the situation in the US and in parliamentary democracies. I am reminded of the moment in 1940 in a confidence vote concerning Prime Minister Chamberlain’s handling of the war when Conservative backbencher Leo Amery quoted Oliver Cromwell’s dismissal of the Long Parliament to devastating effect: “You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!” In a parliamentary system, George Bush would have heard these words years ago, and would have been long gone.

The transition in the UK is brutally short, with a defeated PM leaving 10 Downing Street the next day. In Canada, it takes a little longer - two or three weeks — given the need to choose a cabinet and assemble the political staff of the PMO and ministers. The long transition in the US was originally based on an estimate of the time it would take a winning candidate to pack up his household and journey to Washington. The justification for the long transition now is because of the large number of political appointments the President must make.

In normal times, the machinery of government grinds slowly during the transition, with the President trying for a last time to assert his agenda through executive decisions - likely to be reversed by his successor - and planning his last minute pardons (Conrad Black perhaps?). These are not normal times, however, as evidenced by the global economic summit to be held in Washington on November 15. Clearly the most influential American voice at the summit will be that of President-elect Obama. If the constitution makes it impossible for Bush to go immediately, then the best he can do for his nation and the world at the summit is to take on the role of butler, waiting in the background and not speaking. And let’s hope that in the ten weeks of transition - having lost the confidence of the American people - he attempts to do little and quickly fades out of sight.

The double-barreled title deals with two aspects of the credit crisis, the uncertainty over whether banks will start lending out the billions governments have been giving them, and Allan Greenspan’s agonizing reappraisal of his personal role in the credit crisis.

Joe Nocera, in last Saturday’s New York Times raised the key question of whether the US banks that have been receiving billions of funding under the bailout package will hoard it, use it to acquire other banks, or actually lend it out. As can be expected of a Republican administration that is still philosophically non-interventionist, there is little desire to get involved in managing how banks run their business. Nocera notes that, in contrast, the British government is requiring that recipient banks resume lending.

Starting from first principles, there is a good case for government to seek commitments that banks will expand lending. First, if the banking system has now become, in essence, a public utility, then the government, as representative of the public, should have enhanced decision rights. Second, we’ve learned that a key reason that the stock market crash of 1929 evolved to the Great Depression of the Thirties is that governments permitted credit, aka among economists as the money supply, to collapse.

Looking ahead to the Obama Administration (and back to the Clinton Administration), here is a suggestion. The Clinton Administration had several successes in inducing high profile organizational commitments to actions in the public interest. Two that come to mind are Labor Secretary Reich’s initiative to get brand-name clothing lines to commit to a rejection of sweatshop production and procurement administrator Steve Kelman’s initiative to get government agencies to commit to the principles of procurement reform. These cases are obviously much less complex than the credit crisis, but I think the approach is transferable. Summon the bankers to the White House to a public conference to get some sort of commitment to principles regarding the expansion of credit.

In Canada one similar issue that has arisen was whether banks would reduce their lending rates commensurate with reductions in the government lending rate. The banks’ initial reluctance to follow led to public criticism which led to the banks to pass on the entire rate cut to borrowers. The overarching issue is similar: economic instability has necessarily made bankers’ decisions a public policy issue.

Finally, Allan Greenspan will be bringing his “mea culpa tour” to Toronto on Friday November 7, for an event billed as “an afternoon with Allan Greenspan.” I detect a few ironies. The “afternoon” is scheduled for noon to 2 p.m., ending early so the audience can return to their trading desks to close out the week. The sponsor is TD Canada Trust, which has distinguished itself for its shrewd avoidance of subprime loans. Finally, the ticket price is $325 or $450. Given that he has now recognized the error of his ways, it seems only appropriate that Greenspan do the right thing and donate the entire speaker’s fee to the United Way of Greater Cleveland or some similar organization helping repair the devastating economic and personal damage his decisions have unleashed.