My Quick Sheet

As PCO (Precinct Committee Officer) for my precinct, I've created a "quick sheet" to hand out to my neighbors as I canvass for Obama, Gov. Gregoire, and Lands Commissioner Challenger Peter Goldmark.

We all already get tons of mailers from so many campaigns, that I hate to add to the paper - so it had to be small, informative, and cover issues people might not know about.

I decided it would be excessive to yack on about every single Democratic Candidate, so I focused on the races I felt are most important, and give out web site URLs where recipients can start their research for those, and for those important "non-partisan" races and initiatives, for which I'm not lacking an opinion.

Attaining brevity is my biggest challenge, but I managed to fit readable type on a half sheet (though you'll have to click on the image below to make it a readable size), and stuck my modified version of the Washington Post graphic showing the impact of the tax plans of our two Presidential candidates on the other. I print two to a sheet, and cut them down the middle.



Flip side rotated:


The Washington Post image while very informative at a glance, unfortunately has the potential to reinforce some of the faulty stereotyping that the free market fundamentalist right (and libertarian) elements in this country do of liberal policy. Because the graph shows CHANGE in taxation after the Bush tax cuts to the very wealthiest individuals expire, some will look at it and wrongly interpret it as radical wealth redistribution. In the original image, the problem was exacerbated by the width of the lines showing tax increases for segments of the population representing 1/1000th and 1/100th of the total population being just as wide as the lines showing the tax reductions for much larger portions of the population. So I made those lines much thinner and widened the other ones to partially make up for this visual misrepresentation. I also highlighted the salient summary points in circles to the side. Finally you should note that the totals at the bottom show averages as a mean, heavily weighting the tax increases for the very wealthy rather than giving the median tax cut for those families that fall in the middle in terms of income. What's interesting about that, is that shows that Obama's plan is much more fiscally responsible in providing revenue, while still advantaging a huge percentage of the population in ways that will really help them.

Because I'll be handing these out, I hope to make some of these points as I go. You should feel free to make your own quick sheet for your own district and use this graphic if you like in your own canvassing. There is a 2-up pdf of the graphic here.