Live-blog post from Cleveland Debate: Make them play war games
They are all here – David Axelrod, David Wilhelm. Jesse Jackson, Ted Strickland. Andrea Mitchell, Candy Crowley. On and on. I’ve got lots of video and pictures that I feel confident no one else got – particularly the video.
But what I’m also certain you won’t hear is anything that isn’t spin. You can hear it as you walk from cluster to cluster, how each politician or strategist’s candidate did. It’s all “we’re winning” – would we expect anything else?
And yet do we really learn about leadership from these debates?
As I sat in the audience, really able to hear the questions, the specific wording of the questions, it occurred to me:
War Games. Simulated political candidate war games.
How would Hilary Clinton behave if faced with a real situation where her words and her past experiences could be combined to run in a simulation that could show us the outcome if she were the president during a crisis – of any kind. Or make it just good old health care.
What about Barack Obama? How would a simulated Obama, in a game programmed with his words and actions, manage a crisis that demanded the president to decide and act?
And how would we compare outcomes of the simulated sequences?
If computer science students can develop programs that show us the devastation in Darfur, why not the success of failure of a President Obama or a President Clinton when they are forced to deal with some similarly difficult, or even easy, dilemma?
On your mark, get set go.
4 Responses to “Live-blog post from Cleveland Debate: Make them play war games”
I wish we could do what you suggest. Unfortunately, a true big picture question such as, what would happen in Iraq or what would happen to health care are all just far far (did I say far yet?) too complicated a system to model with any statistical accuracy. Just modeling climate change is enormously complex and even that isn't as bad as an economy or society. You probably could get a set of very limited simulations done, that would only be one component of the big picture. It wouldn't solve the true problem, but they might help you understand the levers a little better.
Thanks, Pacatrue for the comment. The other issue is that, although it would make a great Phd thesis project, would it affect how we vote? That's the bottom line. Of course, since Drew Westen is pretty much right re: how much emotion figures into our voting habits, we can assume that such a simulation might have no impact at all. But I do think someone or group could meet this challenge. Yes, they can.
We voters ARE the simulation. The variables are so complicated that it takes the collective wisdom of millions of us to calculate the optimal course.
This is the heart of why so many of us are passionate about making the process work better through: transparency, freedom of speech and media, Campaign and Election reform. Each reform is like a system upgrade to improve the precision of the results.
i like that system upgrade concept – but I still like the idea of simulating with outcomes. Did you ever see the Save Darfur game that won a serious contest related to applied gaming?