Thoughts and Policies

A person's thoughts are private. If that person is an elected official, then his official thoughts are private too. This means anyone employed or appointed by the elected official has a duty to keep their internal discussions private and not to leak any information. This provides the official room to think and to discuss issues with other smart people in the room without fear of being judged prematurely. Elected officials are people and it is unreasonable to expect them to think and speak perfectly all the time.

An elected official therefore needs a means to express thoughts to the public in a way that invites discussion and criticism. That means should be the written word, in the form of speeches, policies, and policy drafts. Speeches are usually a public reading of a written essay. Policies should be the product of a lot of thought, reason, discussion, criticism, and editing to clarify, mitigate, explain, emphasize, and revise. Policy drafts should be the product of some initial thought and discussion with some problems remaining for which the elected official is soliciting debate and criticism from the public in order to identify points or issues that need clarification, mitigation, explanation, emphasis, or revision.

Policy drafts are requests for comments. However, to be helpful those comments must be constructive. For example, a comment like "this is the dumbest idea I've ever seen" should be immediately discarded by a clerk and replaced with a single tick in a count of opposing viewpoints. Similar constructive comments should be grouped together, rephrased if necessary to capture the point clearly, and tallied.