Politics is about kissing babies and winning votes. So, it comes as no surprise when I come across a pie-in-the-sky, idealistic set of prescriptions from any political candidate. That’s what politicians do! They come up with plans that won’t be followed up on.
I kid. But, I am also somewhat serious. So it’s not unexpected that Mitt Romney’s “Believe in America” plan seems to be somewhat lacking.
Make no mistake, I’m not qualified to judge his proposals. They might even be what the country needs. But, they aren’t presented in a form that reflects what they are; politically motivated sketches that have been crafted, no pushed, during a Republican Party primary.
Case in point: the file is available online in .pdf format and through Amazon as an e-book. It looks slick. It contains lots of charts. It even references 127 endnotes. On the verso it provides copyright information and notes that this is its “first edition.” Romney’s plan is, in every sense of the form, a traditional publication.
Except it isn’t.
Though the plan reads like a book and looks like a book, it’s not one. It’s a slick, self-published document. And, that is something very different from what politicians have produced in the past. To my knowledge anyway.
No doubt, similar material has been produced by other presidential candidates. But, Romney has done something different… and potentially misleading. His campaign has produced an plan that takes full advantage of digital publication tools. It presents the facade of procedural rigor without the underlying requirement of it.
That is to say, his plan has not been scored by the Congressional Budget Office. It has not been peer-reviewed. It has not jumped through numerous procedural hoops. And, it did not get approved by an editor who had to take into account if it’s conclusions would reflect poorly on the publishing organization. In a sense, Romey’s plan has gone directly to “go.” It has collected $200 without rolling the dice.
Thanks to Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word, and other tools the Romney campaign has created something that, once upon a time, would have required a formal process. Self-publishing is so pervasive, so cheap, so convincing, today that it doesn’t require a critique of content anymore. Now anybody can make their document look like a formal publication.
Therein lies the problem.
Because Romney’s plan is stamped with the “Paid for by Mitt Romney for President” identifier, we can tell it’s not an objective set of prescriptions. We can tell it was put together using campaign dollars; likely in-house.
Objectivity may only be something to aim for, but it a world where anybody can make a plan look well-reasoned the processes used to create it matters most of all.
