Hello World!

My name is Christopher Walker. I'm a computational semanticist living in San Francisco. I'm frustrated with the current political dynamic and I've decided to start today with a full-time effort to help: repair the quality of political discourse in America; contribute to a new Democratic narrative; save the American middle class from destruction at the hands of corporate America, Washington special interests and the global Super-Rich.

Although I acknowledge the importance of the ground game in electoral politics, the typical person-to-person volunteer role does not work for me. As my wife Marina can attest, I'm simply not that kind of people-person. But I am a people-watcher, a professional semanticist, a former debater, a recovering Libertarian, a poker player and a native Michigander. I have strong sense of what motivates Americans. I've applied this instinct repeatedly for the amusement of my friends--predicting, for example, the rise of Sarah Palin as early as June, 2008.

I will use this space to discuss the two major aspects of the Democratic communications problem:

1. How the Republicans use message discipline to leverage an extensive set of associative networks; and
2. How the Democrats can formulate and reinforce a clear and memorable narrative of values that will allow them to build a lasting American majority.

I have over a decade of computational linguistics experience in industrial (Powerset, Bing), academic (UPenn, Linguistic Data Consortium) and government (DARPA, NIST) settings.  Today I will start to bring those skills to bear on the Democratic communications problem. My time in middle management has taught me that the perfect is the enemy of the good.  So I'll save additional details for future posts.