New political game creative way to follow elected officials
One of the newest online fantasy sites has nothing to do with leather. And while the site's members keep a close eye on what's being passed every week, those passes have nothing to do with football.
We're talking about the new online Congress fantasy league (see Page 3 in today's State Press).
At first glance, the site could be just another political novelty on the Internet, like the Web site of Johnathon "The Impaler" Sharkey, who claimed to be a satanic vampire running for governor of Minnesota.
However, upon further investigation, it's clear that the site is for real, allowing users to draft teams of legislators and compete against friends and Internet acquaintances to see whose team can rack up more points.
Points are accrued from actions that normally fly under the public radar. After all, it's a rare day when we hear about our representatives' bills on allocations for agriculture getting shuffled into a subcommittee.
Typically, the passage or failure of a bill only makes headlines if it touches on a particularly hot-button issue - especially if the debate around it involves potential presidential hopefuls.
This isn't always a bad thing. The legislation required to keep our country running smoothly can be vast and oftentimes boring for all but the most addicted C-SPAN junkies.
And so, it is a fairly safe bet to say that most Americans know more about the inner workings of the team their city sends to the football field every Sunday than the political actions of the team they send to the Capitol every two years.
While knowing the exact number of times your representative missed a vote on the floor isn't exactly essential to being part of an informed democracy, an increase in the number of Americans who have a better grasp on what their senator or representative is up to can only help.
It may be unlikely that the site vastly increases the number of Americans who take an interest in how the legislative actions of their representatives potentially impact their lives.
However, we're hopeful that it just might have the potential to turn a few heads toward political awareness, sucking in latent political junkies by sheer novelty and capturing them for the long haul.
Either way, it should be interesting to see who is crowned King (or Queen) of the Political Addicts when the league's first season wraps up.
