Timelines Might be the Next Big Thing in Congressional Advocacy

As congressional advocacy campaigns go, Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., may have struck gold when his staffers hit on the idea of using Facebook’s Timeline feature to gather and display evidence of wrongdoing.

Carper’s chosen topic, though -- the House’s failure to vote on postal service reform -- may not do the format justice.

Reporters, advocates and politically-engaged citizens are deluged with news stories and press releases about issues such as postal reform. It’s easy to lose track of all the twists and turns and big, overview articles tend to roll over a lot of the quotidian minutiae. Getting the full, chronological story on your own is also complicated, especially because Google favors newer results over older ones.

At its best, timeline could be an accordion-like über press release. Visitors could pop in for just the latest news or expand the timeline to dive deep into the issue’s history.

The Wall Street Journal did something similar to cover Facebook’s own initial public offering. A political action committee called Rethink Brown, which aims to unseat Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., in the upcoming election, is using timeline to show “the precise chronology of Brown's misleading rhetoric and his voting record in Washington.”

The postal reform timeline, though, suffers from a major flaw: It’s designed, first and foremost, around the House’s inaction rather than any sort of action. Online audiences rarely check back to see if someone’s still not doing something. A name like “Priority Fail: Tracking House Inaction on Postal Reform,” is unlikely to change their minds.

To be fair, this is partly a political bind. Carper’s goal is to push the House to act, not to advertise or revel in the implosion of a federal agency. Most of the articles linked on the timeline are about the postal service’s hemmhoraging budget, but Carper has highlighted sentences such as: “NATIONAL JOURNAL: House leadership ‘has repeatedly refused to comment on the timing for postal legislation in the House.’ ”

Carper’s office launched the timeline Tuesday. It had 125 Facebook likes by Wednesday afternoon.

Whether or not traffic picks up, it will be interesting to see if the timeline format will be used again by members of either party -- to track developing legislation, show progress on a set of priorities or, most likely, to trace the other guys’ bad news stories. Timeline’s chronological character might be ideal to trace scandals such as Obama’s Operation Fast and Furious or the Bush-era U.S. attorney dismissals that unfold over time through months of investigations, leaks and hearings.