The Laura Flanders show today featured bloggers @Karoli of DrumsnWhistles and Micah Sifry of TechPresident as well as Geoff Berman, deputy director of OFA for New York, on GritTv. Yet there was no definition of the foundation for the debate. Without a common definition Berman and @Karoli were talking about one topic and Sifry another.

@Karoli participated via Skype video. Micah Sifry was in studio. Berman was also in studio on tape.

The video begins with Berman’s taped interview with Laura Flanders about the role and participation of OFA with the administration. Sifry began the live debate with Karoli by saying that the grassroots had been promised a role in specific policy making. He said that many people were disaffected by not having a larger policy role. Unfortunately not part of the live debate, Geoff Berman, deputy director for OFA in New York, had earlier made the point that if you have a thousand or millions involved in policy creation that you would have chaos. No coherent policy could be created. (I’m paraphrasing his words the way I would have used them.)

Sifry has too much political experience to honestly believe that a committee of thousands could be involved in specific policy creation. His presentation was based on a false premise.

The reality that wasn’t discussed was that Sifry was talking in terms of political dreams and Karoli was talking about political reality. She talked about local organizations and the work being done on health care reform. She defended the charge that the grassroots were being ignored with specific examples. He talked about the sense that the grassroots were being ignored at the White House. Previously Berman had specific examples of instances where that was untrue.

Given that the foundational difference between political reality (Practical Politics) and political dreams was not specifically discussed and defined as the basis of the debate, here’s the video from this morning. [I wish I had the opportunity to interview Micah Sifry. Whether on Skype video or audio it would be very interesting.]