A short while before the Foley story broke, I was putting together a post about a contest the Sunlight Foundation is running called Congress in 30 seconds. They have a series of web gizmos at the site that allow you to splice together your own 30 TV spot, with film clips and sound and text on the screen. The idea is to create an ad showing what you think members of Congress spend their day doing.
The point behind the exercise is something they call their ‘punch-clock campaign‘. They’re trying to get members of Congress to agree to make their schedules available to the public. So you could go online and look and see what Senator Jones was doing last Thursday. Well, he was in this committee meeting, then he met with Jack Abramoff and then later he went over to the party committee office and called up contributors to pony up money for next year’s reelection campaign.
You get the idea. And if you know how Congress works you know that this is pretty much like getting vampires to sign up for daylight. But you’ve got to start somewhere. And they’ve already gotten 42 candidates to sign up. So far no one who’s actually in office, as far as I know, has signed on the dotted line. They’re actually giving bounties to members of the public who can get officeholders or candidates to sign up. Actually a thousand bucks if you can get a rep or senator to sign on the dotted line.
Anyway, as I was saying, when I started writing this post it was just before the Foley business hit. And then after, well … somehow the idea of what congressmen spend their days doing just took on a whole new light. As far as I know none of the sample clips they have that you can work with is of a fifty-something horndog jamming away at his blackberry on the floor of the House as the sweat trickles down his brow. But who knows. Maybe they’ll add that. Or, actually, I think you can upload your own clips.
Anyway, it’s fun, so give it a try. The entrant in the 30 spot contest gets $5000 and there’s only like a week or so left before they choose the winner.
