I was thinking of writing this last night (for the record, before I heard Dean's announcement, which I knew was coming), but Joe Trippi's endorsement just clinched it.
I'm throwing my considerable (read: nonexistent) weight behind Simon Rosenberg to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee. Not because I share his politics -- his background is as a centrist New Democrat -- but because he fundamentally gets it when it comes to the future of political organization and communication, in a way that I'm not convinced Howard Dean really does.
I have enormous admiration for Dean, and for many of the bloggers and activists who are gunning strongly for him as DNC chair. But I think it'd be good to consider what the job entails before deciding that Dean's the man for it. Though the chair does get to do a fair bit of press interviews, his primary responsibility is not to be the public face of the party -- it's to be the chief strategist and fundraiser, providing institutional support to candidates around the country. Republicans understand this, which is why they choose lobbyists and other political pros for the role.
Which gets me back to Rosenberg, who has this to say about the GOP's' institutional advantages:
The Republican/conservative alliance has built a superior information-age political machine. By investing billions of dollars over 40 years in a vast array of powerful institutions and capacities, the Republicans have changed the national political playing field. Their combination of mature and modern intellectual, political and media capacities is simply bigger, better, more coordinated and more strategic than the arrayed set of institutions on the progressive side. We like to think of it as an information-age Tammany Hall.Even at the campaign level they have a much more modern model for reaching voters. They began investing heavily in databases and direct one-to-one marketing in the 1970s, and have built a campaign communications system that has much greater ability for “smart” narrowcasting – personalizing messages to specific groups and individual voters and reaching them through specialized communication. Though we made great strides in the last two years, our campaigns are still built around an aging “dumb” broadcast model that blasts a more generalized message to a larger and much less differentiated audience ...
As an intellectually-based movement born when the Republicans were a true minority Party, their infrastructure is built on a foundation on the need to persuade. At the very core of their collective institutional ethic is that they must persuade, persuade, persuade. The institutions and leaders were born and grew when few listened to them, let alone agreed.
A look around his website, and the fantastic New York Times Magazine cover story from last Summer, shows that Rosenberg has a lot of very innovative ideas on how the Democrats can begin building their own "information-age Tammany Hall", many of which involve working more directly with the grassroots (including bloggers). I want him in a position where can implement them.
Which is not to say that there doesn't continue to be a fundamental ideological problem with much of the Democratic Party -- i.e., acting like Republicans without the (faux) populism. But that's fundamentally a problem with elected officials (especially the congresscritters) and policy leaders, who the DNC chair has little sway over. Fixing it is a whole different ballgame (involving better politicians, think tanks, and labor unions), and it's a moot point if we don't have the organizational infrastructure to win elections in the first place.
Oh, and let's find a way for Howard Dean to be on TV a lot more often. If for no other reason than to make the editors of The New Republic cringe.
UPDATE:
Just stumbled into this very cogent endorsement of Rosenberg at the Gadflyer. In particular:
It is not the role of the party chair to develop the Party's core themes and policy agendas; that job falls to the party's top leadership, even if that leadership presently consists of congressional minority leaders and two dozen governors. It's also why blaming Terry McAuliffe for failures of theme or message during the past four years is misguided; that ire should have been directed at Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt, among others.
Meanwhile, Zephyr Teachout has a beautifully written piece on MyDD endorsing Dean without saying anything about the DNC. This is exactly what I'm talking about...
I recently heard a fellow Seattle native who lived in D.C. for a few years remark that one of the things he disliked most about it is that it's filled with so many talented, politically effective people who don't give a damn about the city itself, which is one of the poorest and most decayed in the nation. And that includes a lot of Democrats.
Today, Josh Marshall provides us with a case in point, pointing with apparent approval to Drop Cropp, an effort to recall the city council president for her role in stopping the recent baseball deal there. Or, more precisely, insisting that at least half the funding for a new stadium come from private sources.
Good for her. Washington D.C. lost its only public hospital three years ago for lack of funds. Its library system is among the most underfunded in the country. The size of its homeless population is a national shame. The infant mortality rate there (14.2 deaths per 1,000 live births, according to the CDC), is the second-highest in the country and higher than much of the third world. Much of the most valuable real estate in the city is federally-owned and hence exempt from local property taxes, which severely limits the city budget (which, as with all city legislation, is subject to amendment by Congress any time it chooses); sales tax in the city is already 10%. This is not a city which has a half-billion dollars lying around to spend on a new baseball stadium, of all things. For a fuller argument covering the specifics of the deal, see former-mayor Marion Berry's recent op-ed in the Washington Post.
"Drop Cropp" is a project of Grassroots Enterprise, a Democratic web firm headed up by Mike McCurry, Clinton's former press secretary. So there's no doubt this is a serious, well-organized effort (likely by a bunch of affluent white Democrats) to flood Councilmember Cropp with outraged e-mails.
Here's the appreciative e-mail I'm sending her (lcropp@dccouncil.us, if you'd like to join in):
I'm writing to offer my congratulations for your courageous actions regarding Major League Baseball in Washington D.C. Though I do not currently reside in Washington D.C., I recently spent several months there, and am simply baffled by the notion that a new baseball stadium could be the highest fiscal priority for a city struggling with so many pressing social problems.I'm from the "other Washington" (Seattle), where taxpayers in the '90s were forced to pony up billions for two brand-new sports stadiums. While both are beautiful additions to our city, I hardly think either could now be considered justified in a time of record-setting budget deficits at all levels of government.
I'm sure you are now under a great deal of pressure to cave into the demands for a half-billion in corporate welfare for Major League Baseball. I urge you to stand strong in defense of the hard-working citizens of our nation's capital.
From a AP article on a Cahill-Mehlman forum at the Kennedy School:
Both sides also agreed that the Internet and other emerging news technologies have transformed the political process by making it more democratic and encouraging more people to become involved.
I certainly hope so, but you couldn't tell that from how they ran their campaigns. I got nothing but a constant torrent of lame fundraising asks from Cahill and/or her candidate via e-mail, and while I never successfully subscribed to the Bush list, my understanding is that they excelled in distributing tawdry attack ads they didn't or couldn't broadcast. Yawn.
Political pros, particularly at such a high level, are concerned with precisely two things -- raising money and winning votes. Which is fine -- it's what they're paid to do, and they do it well (well, at least Mehlman does). What drives me nuts, however, is when they try to fashion themselves as elder sages focused the health of the republic by repeating vague conventional wisdom.
The internet has significant potential to turn highly-motivated partisans into donors and door-knockers, and both campaigns did that with some success. But there's nothing particularly revolutionary or democratic about that. Neither of them showed any real interest in using the internet to invite meaningful participation in the campaign process, which is revolutionary (and seems to pay off in fund-raising in a big way, if the Dean campaign is any indicator).
Maybe I'm sleep deprived and reading too much into a single paragraph in a wire story. It looks like archived video from the forum in question will be available online (last week's forum with Joe Trippi already is), so I'll reserve final judgement until then.
Micah Sifry just wrote my Div III. And in The Nation, no less.
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.
Chris Bowers has some fascinating analysis contrasting how the right and the left are using the blogosphere. I haven't really looked at the traffic patterns enough to comment, but if true, it suggests that the growing conventional wisdom about blogs being naturally friendly to the left isn't quite valid.
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.