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Politics : View from the Center and Left

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To: Dale Baker who wrote (8339)	1/5/2006 7:39:55 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) of 541791

It's a false straw-man choice designed to endorse a position that was not able to gain widespread support on its own merits, like wiretapping without warrants. Why are you so sure this is the case? I agree that it could be, but it isn't necessarily. It could also be quite legitimate. And even if the poll were deliberately deceptive, it still tells us something useful. Let me explain how I come at this. I have a background in the facilitation of consensus decision making. If I had a mixed group of people in a room the purpose of which was to come up with a consensus on how to approach the monitoring of communications between the bad guys and potential enemy agents who were US persons, I would execute a careful plan working the question through a series of steps. You try to get agreement one step at a time and you shut down any discussion that gets ahead of the plan. Let me tell you, keeping the group focused on one step at a time is a really tough job. Everyone wants to propose final solutions and rush to the end. It's a deliberate, rigorous process and it works amazingly well. (The people who trained me were with Carter at Camp David when they got that ME agreement.) One of the first substantive questions to be determined in this case is exactly what the poll question asked. By no means is that the end of the process. There is a lot more detail to work out, but that's the legitimate first step. You get agreement on first things first. Do you or don't you want the government monitoring this? Everything flows from that. So, that's how I approach this. "If you don't find that too complicated." <g> Our political processes are not conducive to strong analysis and group problem solving. If you were going to solve this problem right, answering that question would be part of the process. That's not to say that's what the pollsters were doing in this case, but it's what they could have been doing, and it's something would need to be done in order to solve the problem.

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