This time, it wasn't about the candidate at all. It was about the people. This was never about him. It was about them. An amazing thing happened in the presidential contest of 2004: For the first time in my life, maybe the first time in history, a candidate lost but his campaign won. ... This was nothing less than the first shot in America's second revolution, nothing less than the people taking the first step to reclaiming a system that had long ago forgotten they existed. This was democracy bubbling to the surface, flooding the landscape, and raising all of us -- an obscure Northeastern governor, his inexperienced supporters, and a handful of old political warhorses -- along with it.
(Joe Trippi, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything)
It was something more than just finding ideological soul mates. It was learning how to act: how letters got written, how doors got knocked on, how co-workers could be won over on the coffee break, how to print a bumper sticker and how to pry one off with a razor blade; how to put together a network whose force exceeded the sum of its parts by orders of magnitude; how to talk to a reporter, how to picket, and how, if need be, to infiltrate - how to make the anger boiling inside you ennobling, productive, powerful, instead of embittering. How to feel bigger than yourself. It was something beyond the week, the year, the campaign, even the decade; it was a cause. You lost in 1964. But something remained after 1964: a movement. An army. An army that could lose a battle suck it up, regroup, then live to fight a thousand battles more.
(Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus)
The New York Times Magazine needs to stop co-opting my Div III. Seriously.
On the whole, it was a good article for what it was. Of the three bloggers profiled in-depth, the only one that came off particularly positively was Josh Marshall. Strangely, though, after reading the article I couldn't seem to shake the nagging feeling that this could be a case of blogs jumping the shark.
A few thoughts:
I was rather shocked to see the piece being quoted approvingly on Daily Kos, given how the man himself comes off in the article:
When I reached the blogger section the next day, Moulitsas was still pumped up. ''Did you see my epic battle?'' he yelled over to me. Armstrong turned around, grinning his head off. ''The D.C.C.C. has never been challenged,'' Moulitsas said when I got over to his seat. ''It was a shot across the bow.'' ...Moulitsas said: ''I told him: 'Don't yell at me. The rules are changing. You gotta adapt. You gotta wake up and realize your role.''' (I talked to Bonham later, and he said he didn't get why Moulitsas thought the D.C.C.C. was slighting bloggers. After all, Bonham said, the D.C.C.C. had paid for the very top-drawer blogger bash where the fight broke out.)
Arrogant much?
Obviously Kos deserves a lot of credit for innovation and effectiveness in fundraising, but he's in danger of moving from occassionally shrill and smug to downright obnoxious. And while the recovering Green in me relishes any challenge to the party establishment, Kos frequently picks downright idiotic things to pick a fight over. The DNC cartoon brought up in the article is a case in point:
He told me the story of a flash advertisement that the D.N.C. had posted on its Web site. Moulitsas hated it. ''It was horrible, the worst thing I'd ever seen,'' he said. ''So I blogged a post saying, 'That's the biggest piece of garbage I've ever seen in my whole entire life''' (although he used stronger language than that). ''What the hell were they thinking?'' he asked. ''I was embarrassed to be a Democrat. ... I'm like, Here's the way it goes. O.K., from now on, keep this in mind: whenever you put up anything on this site, think, How are the blogs going to react?'' He was smiling, but all the veins were pulsing in his neck. ''You can pout all you want,'' he said, ''but I'm not here to make friends with you guys and go to your little cocktail parties. And that piece of garbage is going to lose us votes.''
A dorky flash cartoon on the DNC website?! Stop the presses! Storm the barricades!
Seriously, I remember the cartoon in question, and while it was amateurish and kind of stupid, it wasn't losing anybody any votes. Next time Kos is looking for an axe to grind with the party, try going after them for slavishly toeing the DLC/Wall Street line for over a decade and being left with no coherent message.
It's one thing to exalt bloggers for taking on the powers-that-be. It's another thing to decide that any time a big-name blogger throws a hissy fit, he's displaying great political intelligence.
I've never read Wonkette regularly, but I really think it's kind of a shame for her to get this much attention. Her blog contributes little or nothing to serious political debate or to online activism. What's even sadder, though not exactly her fault, is that her presence as the only woman amongst the A-list political bloggers only serves to further stereotypes of women as political lightweights.
So in some ways, I would've much rather seem a profile of someone like Zoe Vanderwolk, whose coverage of the Democratic convention for The Gadflyer was more insightful and original than anything I've read on Kos lately and who was only briefly mentioned in the article for her presence and clothing (her take is here, though she apparently misread "tank top" as "tube top").
The truly revolutionary thing about the blogosphere isn't a few rock stars talking trash and dishing gossip -- it's about literally millions of people finding a place for their own unique voice. True, most of those won't find a consistent audience far beyond immediate friends and family, but at least it's meaningful conversation, which is a more-than-welcome antidote to politics-through-television.
More later on Josh Marshall's relative humility and on Billmon's very important op-ed in the LA Times about the commercialization of the blogosphere.
UPDATE: David Weinberger, who literally wrote the book on the internet-as-conversation, has some thoughts on the article getting at a similar point.
Check out Progressive Majority Washington's new website, proudly running CivicSpace.
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.
To my amazement, I've gotten through three years at Hampshire College. I kept having to pinch myself at graduation yesterday to confirm that will in fact be my fate in a year's time. The next step is Division III, which for those if you non-Hampshire types, is kind of like an honors thesis on steroids.
I've got the crazy idea that I'm qualified to attempt to write mine on new political trends in the 2004 election cycle. The basic idea is to find a campaign internship (still haven't firmed that up yet, if anybody's got any great leads...) and use it as a jumping off point for some kind of comparative analysis.
My first attempt at a description is below (click the "continue reading" link). Feedback is more than welcome, it's urged.
Anyhow, the two practical implications of this are:
Though we are still nearly six months away from November, this election cycle has already proven to be a remarkable one, seriously departing from some previously established political practices. The spectacular rise (and precipitous fall) of the Howard Dean campaign – and the unprecedented manner in which it occurred – stands out in particular as a sign of an elections process which is being significantly altered by technology-enabled innovations in fundraising, media, and grassroots outreach, to name a few.
Campaigns which have become increasingly professionalized, television-driven, and dependent on a select group of wealthy donors are being shaken on all three points. A renewed focus on grassroots voter contact is once again placing a premium on volunteer involvement. New communications mediums are challenging and interacting with traditional paid media in a variety of ways. And small first-time donors – many of them recruited over the internet -- are a growing source of funds in the post-McCain-Feingold era.
Commentators have given this inchoate trend a variety of names – “new politics,” “high-tech/high-touch,” “open source politics,” “personal democracy,” and so forth – but few disagree that it is changing the political landscape.
Moreover, it is so far taking shape primarily as part of a revitalized progressive political movement which is forceful, committed, and angry, and in some ways autonomous from existing organizational structures, especially the institutional Democratic Party. This was most obvious with the Dean campaign, but continues with MoveOn.org, various political blogs, and perhaps even with Dean's own post-campaign organization, Democracy for America. And the techniques pioneered by the Dean campaign are now being picked up by a variety of campaigns (not all of them progressive) at all levels, with varying degrees of success.
As such, I would like to ask three basic questions:
1) What factors – social, political, legal, technological -- have given rise to these changes?
2) How, why, and by whom are they being advanced?
3) What is the impact on this election, future elections, political actors (individuals, organizations, and institutions), and the health of American democracy?
Using a campaign internship as a jumping-off point, I wish to explore these from a comparative perspective. I am particularly interested in considering the overlapping perspectives of participants (e.g., bloggers, grassroots leaders, donors), campaigns and candidates, media/political commentators, and academics (political scientists). I will expect to draw on academic literature from political science (elections, political parties, and voting behavior), political sociology (social movements and social capital), and history, but also on emerging literature about communications technology and social change.
Finally, I do not engage in these questions as a disinterested observer, but as an active-but-critical participant in the political formations I am studying. I ask them not just because I am intellectually curious, but because I believe that there is great potential for progressive political forces in the tools, techniques, and methods in question.
Rough sketch of intermediate writings/research/notes to be produced: