Type for America

Wrap-Up and Final Thoughts

2006-05-11T23:56:00.000-04:00

In this post, I plan to offer a summary of the arguments in favor of the Type for America thesis. The goal is not to raise any new points but to highlight the major points of dispute (along with our biased opinion on them, of course). The Type for America thesis can be broken into three basic arguments:

1.) The Dean campaign changed campaigning.
2.) The change is significant, not just a novelty that can be ignored.
3.) The change will be substantive, in the sense that it is not merely new technology used by the same people in the service of the same old politics.

On Point #1, it seems that both sides agree that the Internet is more important to campaigning--specifically to fundraising, information sharing, and organization of rallies and get-out-the-vote events--now than it was before the Dean campaign. I think the main dispute is causation. Hype for America argues "it was not Howard Dean doing the changing, but simply Dean who rode the wave of technology most successfully." As we've conceded below, Dean did not invent online campaigning; John McCain and Roh Moo-Hyun of South Korea got there first. But Dean used the Internet for fundraising, conveying information, and communicating with his supporters on a scale that was unprecedented, at least in American politics. Dean proved that the Internet could propel a little-known candidate into frontrunner status, against the will (initially) of much of the party establishment. Dean's campaign certainly was not the only cause of the changes we're describing, but we believe that it was more important than any other single factor except the development of Internet technology itself.

On Point #2, Hype disputes the significance of the Internet, writing "Even if the internet did lower the barriers to participate in politics, real world factors will always be crucial. Real world resources (i.e., cash, connections, etc.) buy influence and power in the real world." At Type, we don't argue that the Internet will entirely eliminate real world factors, but we reject any notion that the Internet is merely some kind of novelty add-on to the usual business of campaigning. In 1996 and even 2000, the Internet was a novelty add-on, and candidates could afford to have a weak online presence. Thanks in large part to the example of the Dean campaign in 2004, this is no longer true. The Dean campaign has demonstrated that the Internet can be the source of millions of dollars, millions of votes, and millions of eyes to see your message, and no candidate will be able to afford to ignore it during the coming election cycles. As more people become regular Internet users, the Internet will become the "real world" in a sense.

On Point #3, Hype contends that even though the technology has changed, the nature of campaigning--particularly the participants and the outcomes--remains basically the same. As Hype puts it, "My argument is that Internet Democracy is faster, cheaper, and easier--that is to say, procedurally superior. But substantively, Internet Democracy is precisely equivalent to Pre-Internet Democracy." They add that the Internet will be dominated by an elite class (as suggested by the claim that a small number of bloggers already wield extraordinary influence in the blogosphere) and that this elite will consist of the same forces that are elite in the real world.

We have basically two responses to this: one empirical and one theoretical. The empirical response is that the Internet-empowered grassroots have had a measurable influence on politics since the 2004 campaign, at least in the Democratic Party. Dean is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, thanks partly to blogosphere support (not to mention blogosphere willingness to dig up dirt on his opponents), and many powerful Democratic politicians make direct appeals for support from the hordes of anonymous readers of Daily Kos. Of course, these are just hints of the importance of the Internet. Hype says that the real test is "whether someone will one day be able to rise from the blogosphere and rally enough support to win a national election." This could have happened with Dean in 2004; we'll have to wait until future elections to see if anyone passes this test. The theoretical response is that the Internet, by its very nature as a decentralized and low-cost medium, will necessarily loosen the grip of the traditional elites on politics. As Yochai Benkler argues, the economic structure of the Internet is fundamentally different from that of traditional mass media. It's much less costly than before for a no-name candidate to get attention. It's now possible for a group of anonymous people to find each other and work on a common political project, whether that be electing a candidate or (to use Benkler's examples) neutralizing the actions of major corporations like Sinclair and Diebold. It's possible that the traditional elites will take over in the end, of course, with the complicity of people who hear only what they want to hear. But the theoretical potential for substantive change is greatly expanded. We will see in the next few years whether this continues to become reality.

Unanswered Questions...the Online Campaign as Collective Political Project

2006-05-11T23:33:00.000-04:00

Throughout the Internet Law & Politics course, a recurring question that has arisen in different contexts is whether the internet will change personal and political habits for the average American. We've suggested that the internet may be transformative by creating a whole new (or at least dramatically expanded) way for individuals to influence a campaign's politics. If in fact some candidates are open to new and creative ideas when shaping and refining their stances, and individuals in the society generate useful new ideas, the internet may offer a much more efficient and far-reaching way for a candidate to gather these ideas and to sharpen them through dialogue with the public.

Newspapers, radios, and television are about absorbing packets of candidate information and then choosing amongst products; a cyberspace campaign may include a powerful additional interactive element of actually helping to create the "product" that is the candidate and his or her political positions. The internet is already a way to cast support: with donations, with online buzz, with "meetups." Will it also become a place where new ideas from far-flung corners of the country and world are solicited, incubated, and debated? Based on some signs (such as Dean's participation in Larry Lessig's blog), might we view the Dean campaign as having taken first steps in this direction? Or will the internet fail to usher in new and more sweeping ideological online populism? Will any attempt to do so lead to unproductive re-affirmations of old convictions? I think these are open and important questions.

Blogs and Wikis Compared

2006-05-10T14:20:00.000-04:00

One issue mentioned briefly in our seminar was the relative merits of blogs and wikis for presenting the issues in a debate. Our four debates have been presented in four online formats--blog, wiki, parody news site, and parody congressional testimony. Three of these are wiki-like in the sense that they lay out sets of arguments instead of carrying on an ongoing dialogue, so I'll restrict the basic comparison here to blogs and wikis.

I think the greatest strength of blogs as a forum for debate is also their greatest weakness, depending on what you're looking for. This strength/weakness is the fact that they resemble a conversation instead of a statement of position. This is a strength because, in theory, it facilitates a more in-depth discussion of the pertinent issues. You don't have to predict from the beginning exactly which issues will be important; you can let it develop based on commentary from the opposing side. This is also a weakness because it's a lot harder for an observer to follow. If you click into the middle of an ongoing blogger debate, you essentially have to start from the beginning, which involves searching through archives and clicking back and forth between two (or more) blogs. (This is slightly easier if the blogs have tags.) In contrast, on a wiki, the two opposing sides are likely to be clearly written out and organized. Generally a blog is better if you want if you want to see a back-and-forth debate and you have the patience to retrace it to the beginning and follow it, and a wiki is better if you want a more static (and probably easier-to-follow) statement of the issues.

Of course, I'm generalizing. It's possible to post arguments for two sides of a debate very clearly on a blog, and it's possible to have an ongoing dialogue on a wiki. But blogs are designed to be organized by time, whereas wikis are designed to be organized by theme. I don't think that either format is necessarily "better" for a debate; it depends on what kind of debate you want.

Comments on Peter Beinart

2006-05-10T12:05:00.000-04:00

On October 25, 2005, Peter Beinart delivered The Theodore H. White Lecture at the JFK School of Government, followed the next day by a Seminar with a panel of speakers. Beinart was the editor of The New Republic until March 2006 and continues to write for the magazine. Some of his comments during the lecture and seminar are relevant to the Type for America thesis, so I will discuss them here.

In short, Beinart comes close to agreeing with the Type for America thesis. He argues that the Dean campaign caused a profound change in the nature of campaigning. He does not agree, however, that the change is permanent, nor does he believe that it is good. As background, I should mention that Beinart's relationship with the leading figures in the liberal blogosphere is not entirely friendly. His article "A Fighting Faith", arguing that liberalism has not taken a strong enough stand against America's enemies in the post-9/11 era, was not received well at Daily Kos. (On the other hand, the Daily Kos site proudly displays a quotation from Beinart praising the new book by bloggers Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, so the hostility obviously isn't too serious.)

Beinart has this to say about the changes generated by the Dean campaign in 2004:

. . . Howard Dean experienced this meteoric rise and, like in 1972, it wasn't only because of war, it was because of war and a change in the way campaigns were run. This time it wasn't because of changes in the party rules, it was because of the Internet. The Internet did for Howard Dean what the change in party rules between 1968 and 1972 had done for George McGovern: it created a huge opportunity for a grassroots, decentralized, activist campaign to run against party insiders and to rewrite the rules of presidential politics. And I think it's clearly done that. Howard Dean lost the battle for the nomination, but he's won the war, or he's at least winning the war, for the soul of the Democratic Party. When party insiders tried to put their candidates, earlier this year, in as head of the Democratic Party, they were defeated by this surge of new Internet activists, many of them, like Daily Kos, the Web site, or Mydd.com, or Moveon.org, with close ties to the Dean campaign.

On the surface, this is an emphatic endorsement of the Type thesis. But there are two important qualifications. First, Beinart may agree that things have changed, but not that they have changed "forever." He speaks elsewhere in his lecture of a "pendulum" shifting and of "cycles," implying that just as control of the Democratic Party shifted from the McGovern "outsiders" in 1972 to the DLC "insiders" in 1992, things may shift once again from the blogging "outsiders" back to the insiders. On this point, I'm not sure I agree. Although I'll readily admit that I'm not as well-versed in the history of the Democratic Party as Beinart, it seems to me that the Internet represents more of a fundamental change in the structure of communication. Party rules can be changed, as they were in 1972, but they can be changed back to give more power to the insiders. The Internet cannot be changed back so easily. It's a decentralized medium that makes political participation easier for the average person. It also makes easier for "outsider" candidates to attract attention, organize, and raise money, simply by eliminating most of the costs of communication. As Hype for America would surely point out, it's possible that the "insiders" will figure out a way to control this new medium with their superior resources, especially if the "Babel objection" turns out to have force. Nonetheless, I doubt that it will be easy to reverse the Internet-induced changes that Beinart describes.

The second and more important qualification is that Beinart does not think that the changes in campaigning wrought by the Dean campaign are good--at least, good for the Democratic Party. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that liberal bloggers are a hyper-idealistic crowd, Beinart argues that they are obsessed with tactics to a fault:

What's striking to me about this new generation that you're seeing emerging on the Internet is how focused they are on tactics, how focused they are on process, how quickly they assume that what's good for the Democratic Party is what's good for liberalism. . . . The achievement, I think, of the Clinton and the DLC generation was, in fact, to think about first principles, to think about the relationships between state and civil society, to think about the ability of the market to achieve traditional, liberal ends. . . . The bloggers are helping to create a journalistic culture with too much focus on what will help Democrats win, too much interest in the short-term. And it's producing cramped, small-bore, predictable, and perhaps worst of all, dull political writing.

This depiction reverses the average liberal blogger's self-image. Based on my reading of liberal blogs, it seems that most of them see themselves as the visionaries who are standing up for principles while the DLC is obsessed with focus groups, polls, and triangulation. I think there's some truth in Beinart's observation about the tactical focus of the liberal blogosphere, however. There is sort of a "winning is everything" attitude that pervades much of the dialogue. I attribute this, at least in part, to the fact that Democrats have spent half a decade with very little power in the national government, which tends to generate an obsession with winning control above all else. The conservative blogosphere can afford to spend more time talking about policy, because there's some chance that the ideas they discuss will be implemented in the short term. In short, I'd argue that Beinart's observations might not reflect anything inherent in post-Dean campaigning as opposed to pre-Dean campaigning, but it might reflect instead the current political climate.

John Leo, one of Beinart's fellow panel members, made the point more emphatically:

There are a lot of bloggers on the left, but there's nobody like Beinart on the liberal blogs, and I like Josh Marshall a bit, but most of them seem, I don't know, brain dead. The [author of the] Daily Kos--I checked in with him yesterday, and he used the term "wingbat" nine times in the first four paragraphs. . . . The party is being taken over by a new youth cult, whose names you don't know, and who have no new ideas. I think this should concern us.

(I'm assuming he means "wingnut," which is the preferred insult of choice among liberal bloggers to describe conservatives; conservative bloggers use "moonbat" to describe liberals, so Leo's term looks like a conflation of the two.) Anyway, he has a point; many bloggers focus on anger and insults toward the other side. (The Washington Post had an article about this, although I think it is a bit of a caricature.) This kind of anger tends to draw an audience, which perhaps explains why some of the most popular bloggers aren't very policy-focused. Still, to the extent that Beinart and Leo argue that Dean-induced developments in political communcation are a net negative, I disagree. Although there is more "noise," this is an inevitable side-effect of giving more people a noticeable role in the political process. Ultimately, I think that the effect of the Internet, and the Dean campaign's use of it for campaigning, will be to enrich the political marketplace of ideas and provide ways for ordinary people to feel like they have a voice in the decisions that affect their lives. Even if this also requires giving a soapbox to angry people with no ideas except hatred of wingnuts/moonbats, I think the price is worth it.

Take our Poll

2006-02-11T18:42:00.000-05:00

Making an Impact

2006-02-11T18:08:00.000-05:00

While the ability of individuals to make a difference for the Dean campaign through monetary contributions has been much discussed, we shouldn't neglect to discuss a bit more the ideological contributions that were also made online. Howard Dean had a certain number of well-established positions that, at least on a broad level, were not going to change. Howard Dean opposed President Bush's policy towards Iraq (though the details of his position were still open to discussion). Howard Dean vowed not to cut social security benefits. But on many subjects, Dean was not confirmed in his views and solicited viewpoints online. Blog for America included daily open threads where visitors could post on a variety of topics and often made suggestions. Himself a "technophobe" prior to his campaign, Dean was not well-versed in intellectual property issues, and he personally and actively solicited opinions on Larry Lessig's blog while he guest-posted there. Dr. Dean may have been somewhat unusual in his willingness to say that he didn't understand or have a set opinion on an issue, but for those candidates who are open to ideas, Dean's blog and the others he engaged with opened a huge pool of creativity from which his campaign could draw fresh, energizing ideas. Admittedly, there are few examples of drastic changes in Dean's policies inspired by Dean's online community. But the internet provided new access to the candidate, opening nearly instantaneous exchange between Dean and his supporters and critics and giving the public a new way to engage in the process of a political campaign.

Online Elites

2006-02-11T15:23:00.000-05:00

Over at HFA, Ryan and Megan are arguing that elites are starting to dominate the online world, which undercuts our argument that the Internet promotes democracy. I'll take each of their posts separately.

Ryan argues that there is an elite class within the blogosphere:

Certainly blogs and podcasts are more democratic and open than TV or radio, which cost an arm and a leg. But even in the blogosphere we have an elite class emerging. Matt Stoller gives a great history of the beginnings of the 2004 campaign blogging. Reading it, you see two names repeat: Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Dailykos.com. "kos" started draftclark.com and helped Armstrong redesign MyDD.com; Armstrong in turn was pushing Trippi to use Meetup.

As usual, Ryan makes some good points. Armstrong and Moulitsas have been very influential, and Daily Kos is now the undisputed leader of the liberal blogosphere. Indeed, the list of major blogs in 2006 resembles the list in 2003--with Daily Kos, Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, Atrios' Eschaton, and Talking Points Memo still near the top of the list. But these sites gained popularity not because a corporation promoted them, but because people were drawn to what they were saying. Moulitsas and Armstrong had no power in politics before they began blogging. Matt Soller's history describes their sites as "what two political amateurs started as a hobby." Only after they had established themselves did they begin to help the Dean and Clark campaigns. I view this as the success of bloggers in a meritocracy, not the creation of a permanent elite.

Megan responds to an earlier post of mine regarding the Trent Lott affair:

The Trent Lott story of information flow from the blogosphere to mainstream media is clearly the exception, not the rule. TforA concludes by commenting, "The Lott affair showed that a few individuals--mostly outsiders with no budgets--could kick the national media into action and shake up the U.S. government." But the "outsiders" were already part of the blogosphere elite! And their power to "kick the national media into action" is overstated by TforA: Traditional news sources still dominate internet news while blogs function as the backwater, out of which occasionally comes a story wrongly ignored by the mainstream.

I think Megan is correct that mainstream news outlets continue to dominate Internet news. Part of the reason for this is that newspapers have budgets large enough to send reporters to cover events and conduct investigations. Bloggers meet a different need--to cover stories that are being ignored by the mainstream media (e.g. Trent Lott, the Killian memos, and the early Dean campaign itself), and to collect information from a broader base of sources than any single reporter can access. I don't think that mainstream media will be overtaken by blogs anytime soon. But blogs will continue to be an influential supplement to mainstream media, correcting its errors and picking up the stories it misses. Nothing like this existed before the online era. At best, people could try to write letters to the editor, organize public protests, or hand out pamphlets if they felt that the news that matters to them was being ignored. Now they can gain a worldwide audience from their living rooms.

Calling all 800 Pound Gorillas

2006-02-11T15:05:00.000-05:00

One of the major political impacts of the Dean candidacy was Howard Dean's willingness to address whatever issues were on his mind. As he put it, "To my detriment and to my credit I don't often think about the political consequences of what I say." From the start of his campaign, Howard Dean was very outspoken in his criticism of President Bush's Iraq policy, and he was not often forgiving of what he considered to be his "beltway" Democratic opponents' complicity in that policy. Many of the other major Democrats, such as senators Kerry and Edwards, preferred not to discuss Iraq or to hopelessly muddle their positions, as John Kerry infamously did when he said, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion [supplemental military funding] before I voted against it". Iraq was an 800 pound gorilla in the room that it seemed nobody really wanted to talk about. Dean put the Iraq issue on the table and kept it there through the support he got from voters across the nation who voiced their approval with blog comments, e-mails, and $50 donations. While starting one's own anti-war blog might have a minimal chance of getting one's views wide exposure, as Hype argues, support for Dean was for many a way for individuals to help secure a national voice to air concerns about this issue. Without his online fundraising and organization, it seems unlikely that Howard Dean could have had the prominent place in the campaign debate that he did, and without Howard Dean, important but uncomfortable issues would not have been thrust into the center of the debate.

The Rules Have Changed

2006-02-11T14:49:00.000-05:00

I think that John makes some excellent points, and I just want to reframe the question a bit to expand on what he says. The Dean campaign was fundamentally new, with events organized online and ideas and inspiration drawn from bloggers and the online community. Other candidates have since utilized these strategies to varying degrees, and it will be seen how widespread they will be in the 2008 presidential campaign, for instance. But based on Dean's experience, we know that these techniques are not only possible, but effective.

As more people gain access to the internet and engage with the online world, online campaigning will only become more prevalent, and the importance of individual as material and philosophical contributor has great potential to grow. Meghan at Hype argues that the reduction of political "transaction costs" will benefit all demographics, including the wealthy and privileged; our point is that these costs are more prohibitive for those who lack substantial money or special access, and it is these people who will experience a relatively greater in access and influence through online campaigning. Once everyone has access to the internet, what has changed? The power of a campaign to rely upon everyday Americans, and with that reliance a meaningfully expanded and more populist funding and idea base.

What is Change?

2006-02-11T14:40:00.000-05:00

At HFA, Megan asks an important question--what exactly does it mean to say that Dean "changed" the nature of campaigning?

Megan correctly states that the question is not what happened to Dean, but what will happen in future races. She argues that Dean's success in part the result of his technological edge over other candidates, but wonders if the dynamics of campaigning will be any different once all candidates and all voters have equal access to the Internet.

I have two responses. First, I think "change" includes a major shift in technology, even if the same types of candidates continue to win. Thus, if the success of the Dean campaign induces all future presidential candidates to make heavy use of the Internet, it's fair to say that he "changed" the nature of campaigning even if the results don't change.

Second, I believe that the Dean campaign's innovations will change the results of elections in the coming years. The biggest problem with traditional media is barriers to entry. The average person cannot have any influence on television. At best, they can get a letter to the editor published in a newspaper or call in to a radio show. The odds of gaining any control over the media are virtually nil. As this illustration shows, most media outlets were controlled by ten large companies in late 2001, and my guess is that there has been even more consolidation since then.

In contrast, starting a blog costs nothing. (We wouldn't be blogging here today if there were any barriers to entry.) Getting your blog noticed is trickier, but the blogosphere resembles a meritocracy--if your posts are consistently high-quality, someone will begin to link to them. Although some major blogs today owe their existence to existing media outlets (e.g. National Review publishes The Corner, The American Prospect publishes Tapped, Andrew Sullivan was a former editor of The New Republic), many were started by nobodies. If starting a blog is too difficult, posting on an existing blog is another option. Any diary posted on Daily Kos has a chance of making it to the "Recommended Diaries" list, where it will be seen by literally thousands of people. The Internet is the only medium today that allows someone with no resources except time and good ideas to transmit their statements around the world.

What does this mean for campaigning? Once financial resources are less of a barrier to participation in politics, people who were previously excluded from the political process will become involved. People who posted on Dean's blog knew that thousands of people around the country, including higher-ups in the Dean campaign and perhaps Dean himself, would read and respond to what they had to say. When Internet access is nearly universal, there will be more room in our system for candidates who are not beholden to the wealthy. As Joe Trippi points out in The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a candidate who can get $100 each from two million Americans will be able to compete with candidates funded largely by the wealthy. The Dean campaign demonstrated that a more egalitarian system of campaigning is possible.

On Egocasting

2006-02-11T14:02:00.000-05:00

Megan and Ryan at HFA discuss "EgoCasting," for which Megan provides the following definition:

An important psychological consideration in assessing the merits of the Internet as a campaign tool is the concept of “egocasting.” Christine Rosen writes, egocasting is “a world where we exercise an unparalleled degree of control over what we watch and what we hear.” She continues, “We can consciously avoid ideas, sounds, and images that we don’t agree with or don’t enjoy.

They go on to argue that Internet users seek out only the information they want to hear. In contrast, they argue, television viewers can't control what they see to the same degree. If an anti-Bush or anti-Kerry commercial is aired during the evening news, you'll see it whether you want to or not, whereas on the Internet you can just avoid clicking on it.

They have a point, but they exaggerate the difference between the Internet and traditional media. A glance at the blogosphere seems to confirm their argument. Liberal bloggers link almost exclusively to liberal sources, and conservative bloggers link almost exclusively to conservative sources. Also, because most commenters on a blog agree with the blog's ideology, anyone who posts a dissenting viewpoint will be quickly shouted down. That said, however, Internet users are not quite as insulated from dissent as Ryan and Megan think. Unlike television, the Internet allows opportunities for genuine interaction. When you see a statement on television, you can't challenge it and have the television respond to you. When you see a statement on the Internet, you can challenge it and argue back and forth as long as both parties to the debate are willing. Whenever anyone makes an error in logic or fact on a blog, a dozen commenters will immediately point it out. On television and in newspapers, any corrections are generally buried at the end of a program or in small print on a newspaper's back page.

Furthermore, television, newspapers, and radio increasingly allow the same EgoCasting opportunities as the Internet, without the countervailing benefit of interactivity. First, the rise of TiVo may signal the beginning of the end of televised advertising, because viewers will be able to skip past commercials. Second, television stations and newspapers are increasingly appealing to niche markets. Want a conservative viewpoint? Tune in to Bill O'Reilly or read The Washington Times. Want a liberal viewpoint? Watch Keith Olbermann or read The Nation. Many mainstream media outlets claim to appeal to the center (e.g. CNN, The New York Times), but they are under fire from both conservatives and liberals who want to hear something that supports their views. I don't think that Fox News's rise happened despite their ideological leanings, but rather because of them.

In short, Egocasting is a phenomenon that affects all forms of media--but only the Internet allows the kind of real-time, uncontrolled communication that could interfere with a carefully packaged message.

For Those who Think Winning IS Everything...

2006-02-11T13:27:00.000-05:00

It seems like everybody’s first reaction when you say that Howard Dean’s strategies changed politics is, “Well, he lost.” While Dean’s journey from a virtual unknown operating out of early 2003 to a major Democratic contender is remarkable, the fact remains that Dean didn’t, after all, go all the way. However, it is interesting that major political candidates in other countries have utilized some of the same tactics as Dean and have won, sometimes in surprising upsets. A great example is the current South Korean President, Roh Moo-Hyun. Roh challenged the establishment party in the 2002 election with a campaign that targeted young voters and made extensive use of online campaigning and used e-mail and text messaging to communicate with supporters. Roh used feedback from the blog to shape his message and, much like Dean, he relied heavily on small donations made online. On the day of the elections, exit polls showed Roh trailing in a tight race, and campaigners furiously blogged and used online lists to e-mail and text message his supporters to encourage them to vote. Roh moved ahead late in the day and narrowly won the presidency.

American candidates like John McCain had already made some use of online resources, but in many respects President Roh set a new standard for the way that online campaigning could be done and the results that could be achieved. Dean has proven that an American presidential campaign of humble origins can thrive by energizing and responding to the people through blogs and shake the addiction to big donations through online fundraising. President Roh’s success demonstrates that these same themes can not only make a candidate viable, but even help propel him or her to victory.

Dean Lost - Does This Mean Nothing Changed?

2006-02-11T13:00:00.000-05:00

In this post I'm going to respond to Ryan's post Beginning at the End over at HFA. First, Ryan argues that the Dean campaign's collapse in January 2004 shows that not much had changed:

First, it may be a bit circular to make this point, but Dean's campaign couldn't have been all that much of a revolution if he didn't win. He didn't even make it out of the Democratic primaries. He didn't even get the consolation prize of the vice-presidential nod. A lasting revolution usually has something you can point to, some kind of victory... but his campaign does not seem to have that.

Dean did get a consolation prize--chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. He won this position despite the opposition of many prominent Democrats. In contrast, liberal bloggers strongly supported Dean and attacked his opponents--for example, emphasizing Martin Frost's support for many of Bush's policies. Furthermore, through grassroots fundraising, Dean has raised more money than any other DNC Chairman in a similar period. This looks like strong evidence that Dean's campaign was more than a blip.

Ryan continues:

Second, traditional media -- TV and newspapers -- played a large role in Dean's undoing. Look at Joe Trippi's book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and you'll see the role that negative TV ads (those relics of an ancient world) played in destroying Dean in Iowa.

It's true that Dean's last-minute collapse in Iowa was fueled by negative television advertising. As long as Americans watch television and read newspapers, the traditional media will remain important in campaigns. But I think it's worth asking: How did Dean become a contender in Iowa at all? The explanation is that his ability to raise money and support online made him the national front-runner. Dean was getting pounded from all sides in January 2004 and his inexperienced staff did not respond effectively. (It also didn't help that Dean had been videotaped bashing the very caucus he was attempting to win.) Future campaigns, however, will be able to combine Dean's innovative Internet strategy with expertise in traditional media. Any campaign that focuses entirely on traditional media will likely be at a disadvantage.

Ryan's third point:

Sure some people might say that yearrgh actually represents how powerful the internet can be. There's certainly some truth to that, but winning the White House is such an unbelieveably difficult challenge that it takes a coordinated message and a clear plan. TV changed campaigns because it had immense reach, but the high barriers for entry made it controllable. The yearggh shows that the internet may be too uncontrollable for a major, national campaign.

Ryan raises a good point here. The chaotic online world is not the ideal medium for message discipline. But I think that future candidates will not have much of a choice except to embrace the Internet. Witness the number of major Democratic politicans who have been posting on Daily Kos over the past year. Consider the fact that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid will be a keynote speaker at the YearlyKos convention in June 2006. These politicians have apparently decided that online outreach is important enough to outweigh the risk of being associated with the uncontrollable blogosphere.

If all we are arguing is that traditional media is still important, then Ryan is right. But I think the real argument is not whether people continue to be influenced by television and newspapers, but rather whether the Internet is an indispensable element of future national campaigns. I believe that it is--with one caveat. The Republicans, as both the party in power and the party that has traditionally relied less on the "grassroots," have greater leeway to skimp on their Internet efforts. They are not rushing to embrace the blogs as quickly as the Democrats are. Still, Dean demonstrated what a low-budget campaign can become by using the Internet, and I think we will see plenty of candidates from both parties trying to copy this formula--and succeeding.

A Little More on Money

2006-02-11T11:11:00.000-05:00

Without dwelling too much on this subject, we should note that Dean's innovation in fundraising strategy not only means that small donors can have more impact on a particular campaign, but that in future elections they may generally have a broader range of viable candidates to choose from. Dean's particular campaign worked on the philosophy that everybody chipped in and everybody had a voice that was valued and could be heard on the blog, in meet-ups throughout the country, and in e-mails sent to Dean and his campaign. It may be unclear how much individual supporters did change Dean's ideas: some of his best-known positions predated his formal candidacy. While we feel that Dean's campaign was uniquely open to ideas from "out there," from individuals throughout the country with an opinion and a computer, the fact that he mobilized a broad base of supporters online means that future candidates with "dissenting" messages have a model to follow for getting heard. Dean didn't win, but his successors, people with important messages and little big donor support, just might.

Follow the Money...and See the Difference

2006-02-11T09:58:00.000-05:00

We'll speak more directly to the political issues, but in a political campaign, we better address first things first: money. Is there a good reason to think that Howard Dean would be more likely to advance a "non-establishment" presidential vision than his rivals? (It's easy to forget that President Bush ran in 2000 as an "outsider", albeit one with almost twice as much money from big donors as his Democratic opponent.) As we discussed below, there was an observable, meaningful difference in donor demographics between Howard Dean and his major rivals from both parties. While Bush, Kerry, and Edwards all relied heavily on large donors, Howard Dean was able to finance his campaign from beginning to end with almost two-thirds of his funds coming from donors giving $200 or less. This shift away from the reliance on big donors that had also characterized past elections was facilitated by Dean’s online fundraising, which enabled Dean to reach more people and for more people to reach Dean-a total of 300,000 donors in 12 months. More importantly, for the first time in recent memory, economically average people had good reason to believe that a candidate was relying on them, rather than wealthy elites.

Ryan at HfA points out that the winner of the 2004 election, President Bush, raised only 5% of his money online. Ryan is right that using traditional fundraising strategies and relying primarily on larger donors (over $200), Bush was able to amass plenty of funds for his campaign. However, the fundraising contrast between Bush and Dean only further underscores what Howard Dean said all along: his campaign was about standing up to Bush and the establishment and doing things differently. Dean didn't win, but he showed that a serious campaign can be fueled by many small donors through online fundraising and through fundraising facilitated by other online tools: meet-ups and e-mail lists, for example. With a popularly funded campaign, Dean was able to make his voice heard and actively challenge the other candidates.

Just as Dean's politics contrasted with President Bush and other Democratic Party candidates, so too did his fundraising. Coincidence? I think not.

Dean Leads, His Rivals Follow - 2004

2006-02-11T07:02:00.000-05:00

This will be the last of my "background" posts before I get into the thick of the debate over whether Dean's campaign really changed everything. Over at Hype for America, they're starting to make the case against us. We'll hit 'em back soon enough.

Below, Johnny described Dean's unprecedented success with online fundraising, social networking via MeetUp, and connecting with people through blogs. Naturally, when Dean's efforts began to pay off, other candidates decided to jump on the bandwagon. In addition to Dean, at least six other candidates created blogs--Bush, Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark, Bob Graham, and Joe Lieberman. (Some argue that Bush's blog was not really a "blog" in spirit, because it was the only one that did not allow readers to post comments.) Although donation patterns varied significantly by candidate, the trend was a significant increase in online donations.

Aside from Dean, Wesley Clark made the most effective use of the Internet among Democratic primary candidates. The "Draft Clark" movement, largely organized online, provided a solid base of Internet-savvy supporters for Clark's campaign. Clark's Meetup support was second only to Dean's. Clark's campaign also pioneered the use of E-Blocks, which allowed supporters around the country to contact potential voters.

Independent blogs played a role in fundraising and organization during the 2004 season. By 2004, Daily Kos had transformed itself from a mere blog to a full-fledged community of thousands of users. Members of Daily Kos contributed $500,000 to fifteen Democratic candidates whom Markos Moulitsas Zúniga had identified as neglected by traditional sources of funding. Although all of these candidates lost, Moulitsas defends the effort by pointing out that they were chosen because they were underdogs and unlikely to win, and that a few of them came very close to achieving major upsets.

During the primaries, most liberal bloggers supported Dean or Clark. After Kerry won the primary, most of these bloggers transferred their support to Kerry, although some were less than enthusiastic about him. Some members of Daily Kos were irritated with the Kerry campaign for removing the DailyKos.com link from the official Kerry blog in response to some insensitive comments posted by Moulitsas. But Kerry could not shun the site forever; by early 2006, he was posting on Daily Kos, joining Democratic heavyweights such as Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold, Barack Obama, and Jon Corzine by appealing directly to the "netroots." In 2005, Boxer credited the Daily Kos community with helping her question Condoleezza Rice during her Secretary of State confirmation hearings, and with helping to delay the appointment of John Bolton as UN Ambassador.

But I'm getting ahead of myself--back to 2004. Conservative bloggers were almost completely united in their support of Bush, given his lack of a primary opponent. Some blogs (such as Blogs for Bush, created in November 2003 and still updated regularly today) were originally created with the specific goal of helping Bush win reelection. During the general election, a few prominent conservative bloggers--notably Andrew Sullivan and Daniel Drezner--reluctantly defected to Kerry, but they were a tiny minority.

The biggest victory for conservative bloggers during the 2004 election season resulted from the Killian documents controversy. Dan Rather presented a 60 Minutes report regarding documents allegedly from the 1970's that criticized Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. Only a few hours after the story aired, a member of Free Republic claimed that the documents must be forgeries because the font could not have been produced by a 1970's typewriter. The blog Power Line and others pushed the story aggressively and collected information from readers. CBS was soon forced to admit that it could not prove the memos' authenticity. When Dan Rather retired shortly after the controversy, conservative bloggers took credit. They now had a "scalp" of their own to match Trent Lott. Some liberal bloggers believe that this was a set-up, because the Free Republic member who first questioned the memos was a Republican insider with no apparent expertise in typography who posted shortly after the 60 Minutes story aired. Even if they are correct, however, the incident did demonstrate the ability of bloggers to collect and share technical information rapidly.

The above is not intended to be an exhaustive review of online activity during the 2004 election. Almost no event related to the 2004 campaign escaped scrutiny from bloggers, and the online fundraising and organizing efforts were vast. Cataloguing everything that happened online in 2004 would be nearly impossible. The point I am making is that 2004 represented something largely new in the world of politics. Never before had so much information been exchanged online. Never before had it been so easy for supporters of a candidate to find each other in cyberspace and in the real world. As we will argue in subsequent posts, 2004 marks the beginning of a fundamental change in the nature of campaigning.

The Explosion of Political Blogging - 2000-2002

2006-02-11T01:09:00.000-05:00

Blogging as we know it today was born between the end of the 2000 and 2002 elections.

In November 2000, a journalist named Joshua Micah Marshall created a blog Talking Points Memo to discuss the disputed 2000 election. Andrew Sullivan, a former editor of the New Republic, reportedly began blogging in late 2000; the first posts in his archive date from January 2001. "Atrios" (a then-anonymous professor named Duncan Black) created Eschaton in April 2001, pondering with his second post "I wonder how long it will be until literally dozens of people are reading this on an almost monthly basis." Jerome Armstrong created MyDD in June 2001 to discuss a special congressional election, and expanded it in 2002 to cover a wider range of political topics. Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, created Instapundit in August 2001. An army veteran named Markos Moulitsas Zúniga started Daily Kos in May 2002 with the defiant statement "I am progressive. I am liberal. I make no apologies."

When the Dean campaign created Blog For America in March 2003, as Johnny discusses below, it was the first blog of any presidential campaign. The political blog had its precursors in sites like The Drudge Report and Free Republic, but political blogging as we know it was created after 2000.

Blogs had a major impact on national politics for the first time in December 2002, after Trent Lott commented that if the country had voted for segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond in 1948, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years." Lott made his comments on December 5 with minimal reaction in the mainstream press (with a December 7 Washington Post story as a notable exception). By December 7, Josh Marshall was reporting that the mainstream media seemed to have little interest in the story. During the following week, Marshall, Atrios, and others uncovered Lott's other pro-segregation statements throughout his career. Within a few days of the bloggers' coverage, the mainstream media picked up the story, and Trent Lott was forced to resign by December 20. Although this incident is repeatedly cited as the first "scalp" claimed by bloggers, they did not take Lott down alone. Their real contribution was to dig up incriminating evidence and keep the story alive long enough for the mainstream media to gain interest.

The Lott affair showed that a few individuals--mostly outsiders with no budgets--could kick the national media into action and shake up the U.S. government. Perhaps it was no surprise that a bunch of outsiders with a small budget would become the first presidential campaign to use blogging to force the media and government to pay attention.

Before the Dean Campaign - 1996-2000

2006-02-10T23:12:00.000-05:00

Johnny has done a good job summarizing the innovations of the Dean campaign. In this post, I'm going to discuss the online strategies of some of its predecessors.

The 1996 presidential campaign was the first with significant use of the internet. Both major parties--along with the Libertarian, Green, and Reform Parties--created websites for themselves and their candidates. These sites look primitive by today's standards, but they contain a sizeable amount of information. There are also some interactive features (e.g. a chat room on the Republican Party site) but nothing comparable to what we take for granted today. Books proclaiming the significance of the Internet for the '96 campaign were published. ("The Net . . . will be the voice and the lightening rod of the '96 Campaign!") But overall, the Internet was a sideshow, and the real 1996 campaign was conducted through traditional media.

By 1998, the Internet had become more sophisticated, but it was still not a necessity for a congressional campaign. One study reviewed 1,397 congressional and gubenatorial races in 1998, and found that the majority of candidates had neither a website nor an email address. There was no significant difference in the overall pattern of internet usage by the two major parties. Although not all national politicians used it for their campaigns, the Internet affected the 1998 race in another way--through Matt Drudge's January 1998 release of information about Monica Lewinsky that would lead to President Clinton's impeachment after the election. Groups used the Internet to distribute petitions for and against impeachment. For example, Arianna Huffington (who opposed Clinton at the time) collected 13,303 names on a petition calling on Clinton to resign. MoveOn.org led the drive against impeachment, collecting 250,000 signatures against impeachment.

The websites from the 2000 campaign were much more sophisticated than those from four years earlier. The Bush, Gore, McCain, Bradley, and Nader sites not only look like today's modern campaign sites, but also have features such as state-by-state resources and frequent press releases that resemble primitive blogs. Of the candidates, McCain's internet efforts received the most attention. McCain held the world's first "cyberfundraiser", and collected $2.6 million over the Internet in the eight days after his victory in the New Hampshire primary. McCain's statements in 2000 foreshadow what Dean's supporters would be saying four years later:

"Even more impressive than the money is the way we can communicate with people," McCain said on the bus. "We can communicate with them eight to 10 times a day. You know how much it cost to communicate with someone eight times a day before the Internet? It's going to change politics."

...

As McCain told me on the bus, it's cleaner money, because the donor isn't shaking your hand and reminding you about a bill he wants you to vote against. "It's smaller donors," McCain said. "And clearly, it's less personal." It's new money: Thirty-nine percent of those who answer the questionnaire say they've never given to a political campaign before.

In the end, the online efforts in 2000 did not represent a revolution in campaigning. Despite McCain's success with online fundraising, about 95 percent of contributions were made offline, and 40 percent of websites could not even accept campaign contributions. Information was transmitted to voters more quickly, but this was largely one-way, with few attempts being made to interact with voters other than an unsuccessful cyberdebate. Despite the mixed success, commentators saw the extraordinary potential of the internet, especially online contributions, for the next election cycle.

In my next post, I'll discuss the 2002 elections, which coincided with the explosion of blogging that would influence the Dean campaign.

Dean Withdraws...But does his Idea Survive?

2006-02-10T19:11:00.000-05:00

Howard Dean dropped out of the 2004 presidential race after disappointing results in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries. Of the remaining candidates, many had already begun expanding online donations and started their own blogs. While the impact of these efforts for the other candidates can be debated, Dean’s campaign at least was built with an internet backbone that propelled him from anonymous also-ran to major contender. Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager, remained optimistic even in defeat that the campaign had changed the way the public can experience and participate in the political process: “People are no longer waiting for the media or the government to give information. Now they are going online and getting it, and then disseminating it. And with that information, they are gaining power.”

Meetup.com

2006-02-10T18:31:00.000-05:00

In January of 2003, the Dean campaign discovered that, although Dean was virtually unknown throughout most of the country, 423 people had signed up on meetup.com as interested in meeting up about the Dean campaign-more than twice as many as had signed up for any of his better-known rivals. Dean's site and blog linked to meetup.com, and almost immediately the number of people nationwide hoping to meet up and discuss Dean began to climb. By February there were over 1200, and by early April over 5,000 people had signed up. The number exploded over the summer of 2003, when meetups helped organize campaign stops during Dean's "sleepless summer" tour, which was also facilitated by blog and e-mail publicity. Twelve months after Dean led all candidates with 423 people meeting up, he was leading again-with over 180,000.

Dean and Blogging "Abroad"

2006-02-10T18:08:00.000-05:00

The Dean campaign frequently looked to others for guidance and help in shaping its online strategy. Jerome Armstrong, creator of the blog myDD, first suggested to Dean that he utilize meetup.com. Marcos Zuniga of Daily Kos, himself initially a Howard Dean supporter, offered blogging advice to Dean’s team. Moveon.org, a liberal political action organization the principally acts online, offered cybercampaign assistance to every Democratic candidate. Only Howard Dean accepted.

Dean also tried his hand at posting as a guest on other blogs. Larry Lessig, the founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, invited all the Democratic candidates to post on his blog for a week. Only Howard Dean accepted the offer, and he posted throughout the week of July 14, 2003, rather prosaically discussing intellectual property issues as well as campaign themes such as

Iraq

and the budget deficit. Commenters accused Dean’s less than colorful posts of being the work of a staffer, leading campaign manager Joe Trippi to type, “[D]on’t you think that if we were ghostwriting this stuff we would have come up with something better than that?”

Fundraising Online

2006-02-10T17:35:00.000-05:00

Online donations gave Howard Dean’s campaign a viable way to collect significant amounts of money in usually small increments from many private donors. Since starting an online fundraising effort involved minimal startup costs, Dean relied on small donors, most of them giving online, from the very beginning of his campaign. Over 60% of Dean’s contributions came from donors who gave a total amount of less than $200 to the campaign. By comparison, only 32% of President Bush’s donations for his reelection campaign and only 31% of John Kerry’s war chest came from these small donors. John Edwards raised 13% of his money from donors who gave less than $200. Even Ralph Nader received only 50% of his campaign donations from small donors. It's also telling to look at the top donors for each of the candidates. Despite raising nearly 53 million dollars, Dean had only three donor organizations give him more than $50,000. John Edwards, though he raised less than 34 million dollars, had seven donors give more than $50,000.

Some great examples of Dean's success with online fundraising include his unprecedented integration of online and live action events. During his "sleepless summer" tour, Dean made eight campaign visits in four days, going from Virginian to Portland and back to New York, with an online fundraising goal of $1 million. With online updates of the "sleepless summer" tour and rally updates of the fundraising goal, Dean united his broad-based online fundraising with his day to day campaigning, and hit his goal just minutes before his New York rally, attended by 15,000 people, began.

Another good example of Dean's blending of his "on the ground" campaign and his cyber-campaign was an online vote he conducted as to whether or not he should accept federal funds. Those who voted "no" were then asked to make an online donation. About 80% voted against taking the funds, a preference that Dean adopted, and those people contributed over $4 million to the Dean campaign.

In total, Howard Dean raised over 20 million dollars online, about 40% of his total funds raised, and received donations from 300,000 people. Perhaps taking a cue from Dean's campaign, John Kerry ultimately raised 82 million dollars online himself.

Connecting with the People

2006-02-10T17:32:00.000-05:00

Howard Dean’s blog gave him a unique access to the pulse of his supporters and his detractors and quick feedback at each critical moment during his campaign. Dean gave a widely criticized interview on Meet the Press on June 22, 2003. Despite much criticism from pundits, bloggers were largely supportive of Dean, and they backed it up: after raising two million dollars in the previous three weeks, he raised 2.8 million in the next six days, over 2 million of which was donated online. Dean was able to use his site and blog not only as organizational tools, but as ways to channel the creativity and enthusiasm of his supporters. The campaign also started coding open sourced tools for online campaigning, the “getlocal” software. The Dean campaign thus began expanding and tailoring their online tools while relying on the knowledge and creativity of supporters to contribute to the code.

Connecting more directly with supporters also allowed the Dean campaign to learn and publicize some of the individual stories that, without the blog, would likely have never come to their attention. The two-way communication of the Dean campaign is dramatically seen in an e-mail that one woman sent to the campaign and passed along to others about how she had sold her bicycle and given the money to the Dean campaign. The message circulated amongst Dean supporters and started a “I sold my bike for democracy” theme that captured the grassroots spirit of the campaign.

Birth of Blog for America

2006-02-10T09:33:00.000-05:00

The Dean campaign started a blog after hearing about Howard Dean’s popularity on meetup.com, a site that connects people in the same geographic area who share an interest. Dean’s blog was created largely to draw attention to meetup.com, and the number listed to meet up for Dean eventually grew to nearly 200,000. Dean’s blog took on a life of its own, providing an opportunity for almost continuous contact between the campaign and the supporters and curious web surfers who visited Blog for

America

. Dean solicited policy ideas through the blog and was always open to campaign suggestions as well. It was a blogger who came up with the Cheney Challenge: Dick Cheney was hosting a $2,000 a plate fundraiser, and the Dean campaign took the blogger’s suggestion to webcast Howard Dean eating a $3 turkey sandwich while tracking “Cheney Challenge” donations. In the end, Cheney raised about $250,000, while Dean raised $500,000 online.

What We're Up To

2006-02-09T23:22:00.000-05:00

Early in 2003, longshot presidential candidate Howard Dean, who had just recently become the proud owner of his first laptop, was told by an advisor that his fledging 7-staffer campaign should start a blog. At the time, Dean did not know what a blog was. Less than a year later, Blog for America was a campaign phenomenon and incubator for campaign ideas, deanforamerica.com was the campaign’s primary fundraising tool, and Howard Dean was the frontrunner in the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. To see how Howard Dean transformed the way that candidates campaign and supporters engage with the election process, we'll first sketch a bit of Dean's bumpy but wildly successful experiment with blogging, extensive online fundraising, and creating a populist campaign through online networking.

Welcome to Type for America

2006-02-09T22:19:00.000-05:00

Welcome to our blog, Type for America. As part of the Internet, Law & Politics seminar at Harvard Law School, we have created this blog to argue that the Dean campaign's online strategies and tactics changed campaigning forever. The name of the blog comes from the name of Dean's campaign website (Dean for America) and blog (Blog for America). "Type" refers to what Internet users do--namely, a lot of typing.

We are carrying on a friendly rivalry with Hype for America, which argues that the predictions about the long-term impact of Dean's use of technology is a lot of hype. We want to hear your feedback too, so please feel free to comment on each post. The posts are arranged in reverse chronological order, so it will make the most sense if you start from the bottom and move up.

Click here to go to the main page of our blog.

Did the Dean Campaign change campaigning forever?
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