what is (and is not) to be done

My initial prejudice against Facebook took a dent when I managed to get in touch again with Margaret Sherman, who was my best friend in Cali, Colombia when I was 13.  If the Internet (and email) had existed back in the day we would not have lost touch, but it didn't.  Both sets of parents moved frequently; we weren't good correspondents; we had no contact for (at a guess) 40 years.  

Margaret has now put up a post on influencing Congress which is largely useless to me (I'm based in Berlin, none of the US ZIP codes with which I might claim affiliation entitle me to vote in the relevant state).  I'm copying it here because, erm, I probably have more in common with the readers of PP than with my miscellany of FB friends. The post told me something I didn't know; I wish it weren't true (given my anomalous status), but I'm still glad to know it.  So I think some readers of PP will be glad to  know, which I can't necessarily assume of my FBFs.

What Margaret has sent my way:

From Damsels in Defiance: "This post is long because of all the practical information. Only those who are trying to actively speak out on the political scene need read it.

Reposting advice from a friend who knows how things work in DC. Please heed this guidance from a high-level staffer for a Senator: You should NOT be bothering with online petitions or emailing. Online contact basically gets immediately ignored, and letters pretty much get thrown in the trash unless you have a particularly strong emotional story - but even then it's not worth the time it took you to craft that letter.

There are two things that everyone opposing what is happening in DC should be doing all the time right now, and they're by far the most important things:

How Keynes would explain Iowa

John Maynard Keynes famously likened playing the stock market to judging a beauty contest where, rather than choosing the most beautiful girl, you had to choose the girl that everyone else would choose as most beautiful. "We devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be," wrote Keynes. This is, with some minor modifications, true for judging the results in Iowa, too. 

Consider a question that doesn't get asked enough: Why does it matter who wins Iowa?

In theory, the answer should be: "because whoever wins Iowa gets Iowa's delegates." But it isn't. The Iowa caucuses award about one percent of the nation's delegates. That's not nothing, but it's not much.

The real answer is both widely known and difficult to discuss. Winning Iowa matters because the outcome in Iowa governs the subsequent actions of the political media and party elites. And it matters for them because, as Jonathan Bernstein puts it, "What Iowa does is it produces information" -- information that allows them to plan their next moves, and information that thus changes the outcome of subsequent primaries.

The media doesn't like to discuss this too forthrightly because it makes our role as a political actor -- rather than a simple observer -- uncomfortably explicit. As Duke political scientist Brendan Nyhan writes at CJR, there is "a refraction effect" in which "journalists help make Iowa influential and then report on its 'effects' without acknowledging their role in the process or the often arbitrary nature of the distinctions that are made among the candidates."

Party elites don't like to discuss it because their role in the presidential nomination process can seem undemocratic. But the process is undemocratic. A democratic process would be one in which the whole nation votes today; not one in which .04 percent of the nation caucuses today. 

Ezra Klein, Wonkbook, the rest here.