Things have just wrapped up at the Personal Democracy Conference. Long day, lots of thoughts. I took many pages of notes, and will attempt to organize and post them all at some point in the future, but here's a few highlights and recurring themes:
Andrew Raseij opened the conference by saying we're still waiting for the "Napster" moment of politics online. Some said we've already seen it in the Dean campaign.
The other major recurring theme was the comparison of the internet and TV. Joe Trippi said the Dean campaign was just a "blink" in terms of the impact of a new medium, akin to the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960.
Raseij also said in his opening that politicians still don't get it, and the conference proved him right. Former Sen. Bob Kerrey (now president of the New School) was okay on the basic principles, but clearly didn't have any real experience with the blogosphere. Congressman Anthony Weiner made some reasonable comments about how blogs aren't meaningfully tied to any particular district or geography ("no blog represents 100,000 people in Flatbush"), but seemed determine to miss the point on the value of conversation as a component of democracy (Eric Alterman schooled him on Dewey). And Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden managed to spend a half-hour babbling about the importance of extending his bullshit "stand by your ad" provision to the internet.
And of course everyone referenced the Dean campaign, which I think it's already safe to say will go down in history more than any unsuccessful primary campaign in history. There was talk, I forgot from who at the moment, about learning the wrong lesson -- that the net is a great tool for fundraising, but all the social networking stuff is a waste of time and energy. At the same time, the question in the air continues to be whether online engagement can translate into increased voter participation.
The Bush campaign didn't get talked about enough, although Ralph Reed (of Christian Coalition fame, now southeast regional director for the Bush re-elect) was the keynote speaker, and he gave a decent overview. Everyone seems to agree that they're embracing a top-down model for organizing, but who's to say it's not working? Dean crowed about his 600,000 supporters, but Bush has got 6 million. Reed sounded much like the brilliant field strategist that he is, telling war stories of 2000 and referring repeatedly to voter ID efforts and such.
Several of the actual political pros made the basic point that campaigns are only going to start taking the netroots seriously when it appears that they translate into winning an election outcome. The refrain I learned at SIW, "if it doesn't win votes or raise money, why are we doing it?", was invoked by Sanford Dickert, former CTO for the Kerry campaign, in defending its relative (to Dean) lack of interest in online communities.
Joe Klein (of Primary Colors fame) was insightful, as usual: "Politics is visceral, not virtual." He praised the Dean campaign for successfully utilizing the grassroots power of the internet to put the war on the agenda, but said that it ultimately failed for the most traditional of reasons: voters (in Iowa) decided they didn't like the candidate.
And Joe Trippi was his usual fantastic self, though I've heard most of it before. I asked him whether the internet can be successfully used by the other side, and he went on a fair bit about how he thinks they already are, and the Dems risk losing ground. At the same time, he said that conservatives operate on a command-and-control model, and the internet isn't particularly accomodating to that.
More organized thoughts later, probably when I'm done conference-hopping.
Posted by Michael at May 24, 2004 06:41 PM | TrackBack