What for?

Pal o' Upper Left N in Seattle departs the friendly confines of Peace Tree Farm for the wilds of Washblog, where he reports on the efforts the 43rd Legislative District Democrats are making to open up the development of the Party's off-year platform, a process which will dominate the upcoming precinct caucuses and will culminate in the adoption of a new platform at this year's state convention.

It's a noble effort, a considerable logistical undertaking by District Chair Dick Kelley and his team. I'm a little jaded by a couple decades of involvement in this process, and I'm not convinced that having more public meetings is the answer unless you could actually have enough public meetings. Still, they're trying, and more power to them.

I hope, though, that before spending too many days and hours on what the platform is going to say, someone gives some attention to the generally overlooked question of what the platform is for. There are a few schools of thought. For the idealists among us, the platform is an opportunity to paint large against a blue sky, to describe the country we would create if we were free of political and economic constraint. Others are looking for an electoral blueprint, a calculated list of positions with general appeal that provide a partisan hook that can give candidates from disparate regions and circumstances a common appeal. Others take a conflicting view - rather than pandering to the pols with an easily digestible package of programs, the platform can be used as a scale to judge the merits of each candidate on the purity of their partisanship. The kind of document that each of these approaches might produce would be different in form and substance.

So good luck to the 43rd, and good luck to all of us, but before we set pen to paper, we need to ask "What for?"