My Communication 217 Beat – Politics

So here I am blogging. This is something I never thought I would do, but that has been said of many different activities – most of them involving new technologies. First RSS, then Twitter (shameless plug: www.twitter.com/grahamelesh), and finally a blog of my very own. Thanks to my Communication 217 class at Stanford, I have taken the leap.

I am here to blog about politics – specifically national politics and the dysfunctions of surrounding many of the politicians and institutions in Washington D.C. Of a particular interest to me is the dysfunctions of Congress, particularly the Senate, and the difference between what the White House is expected to do and what it can actually accomplish. I plan to be opinionated, as I have a pretty solid set of beliefs about the current political actors, trends, and situations. I voted in my first national Presidential election last year (I was a month too young in November 2004) for President Obama, and I got bitten by a bug. I follow the horse-races, the policy debates, and just about anything else that comes out of D.C. So this blog will be about the things I find interesting about politics in the capitol of the United States. My audience is going to be young, engaged adults. I hope to find a public around my age who want to know more about politics and engage in discussion about it with me.

I am very opinionated, but I try to respect intelligence and legitimate difference of opinion, and on this blog will try to engage in these debates that I may find myself in (or purposefully put myself in). You never know, I may come away with a different opinion than I entered with.

The ultimate dream for me is to engage with the writers and thinkers who I follow – the people who have shaped much of my political thinking, who inform me, and who make me think. Wait, when I say the ultimate dream, I mean besides an A in Comm 217. People like Andrew Sullivan, Ezra Klein, Bill Simmons (well, he writes about sports, not politics, but still…), and many others. These people have taken a new technological platform – blogging – and turned it into a forum for debate, a place thoughtfully engage others about political ideas. They come from many different backgrounds and have many separate specialties, and have all gotten to where they are through different ways, but they have come together online to engage each other. I would love to join into the conversation, and I believe that my ideas and my writing could add something to these discussions. It is the Internet that is has given me a way to realistically interject myself and my thoughts into these incredibly interesting and influential debates.

So this is it – the end of my first blog post. I should warn my classmates in Comm 217 – I may go off topic. Sports, music, TV shows, movies, etc. These are things I love, and I will occasionally write about these subjects. I’ll try to stay on topic, but you know how it is. A particularly good episode of Friday Night Lights (airing Wednesdays on DirectTV) might spawn a blog post. So would a ridiculous NFL game (tonight’s Packers v. Cardinals game being a good example). You get the idea. Professor Rheingold: I promise these will be in addition to the two-posts-per-week limit. Fair warning!

PS: I’m going to try an idea that I’m stealing from Spencer Ackerman’s blog: each post will have a song attached to it that I believe fits with the theme of the post. So for tonight, I’m going with Bruce doing “The Rising“