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December 15, 2006
Campaigning in the 21st Century Part 1
Where will it take me? Why am I waiting?
It hasn't even been a month yet, and already the self-referential circle jerk that is cable news and the blogosphere is talking about nothing except the 2008 election. People, it isn't even 2007 yet! But this does make for a good lead-in to a conversation about how campaigning is very different today, even from just a few years ago. It has been said that the McKinley campaign was the prototype of the modern campaign (a statement with which I concur), but what will be considered the first campaign of the Internet age? How do we define a modern campaign? How is running for office, from dog catcher to supreme overlord, different today than it was 10, 20, or 50 years ago? What must a campaign do in this new era to be successful? How can technology help improve voter data, voter contact, and GOTV efforts? These questions and more I hope to address in a few pieces starting now. Today I'm going to talk about those series of tubes that we love so much, the internet.
There is no question that the internet has completely revolutionized...well...everything. But the truly successful campaigns have recognized that the net is useful for more than just the pretend punditry of bloviating morons. The brilliance of the early Dean campaign was the use of very unorthodox techniques to achieve very traditional goals. 2 words: Voter Contact. Everyone speaks of how the Dean campaign was all internet and blogs, but the reality is these tools were used as a means to an end - getting people to speak to other people about the campaign. 2004 used "meetups" & house parties extensively to create grassroots momentum. I myself was drawn into supporting Howard Dean via a friend's house party. My first real political activism quickly followed - volunteering at the Dean meetup, writing postcards, talking to friends, registering voters, etc. The Kerry campaign very wisely co-opted this model, and it was at a Kerry meetup that I met the Central Florida Kerry Field Director - my good friend Tony. From this I was drawn into actually working on the campaign, making a little bit of money for a lot of hours. A little bit of activism brought about a major life change.
Certainly the mass communication factor of the blogs cannot be dismissed or ignored. Hell, I'm writing this in a blog, aren't I? The blogs of 04 served as the same sort of echo chamber in the same way that right wing talk radio has for the last 20 years. Want to get something out about your opponent without having it be directly connected to you? Dump it to a blog. Yet the blogs also served to engage people in the political process in a fashion never seen before. Regular people started donating money. People who'd never volunteered a day on a campaign before were suddenly compelled to put in the same amount of hours volunteering as they would at a second job. The activities themselves were no different than before, only there were many more people involved. The banal rantings of self-proclaimed experts, of which there are many, is only a side effect.
This last cycle showed the completion of the transition into a new era of campaigning. The internet was used to shed light on "cocktober" and macaca. Certainly both of these scandals would've emerged without the internet (Allen's gaffe would've been seen on the news, and Foley would've used other methods to try to fuck high school boys). But the net broke the stories, and kept them alive.
With the plethora of information now available to research directors, candidates will be vetted even deeper and only the squeakiest of the squeaky clean will attempt to run for office. I don't consider this to be a good thing, actually. Would Bill Clinton have run for Governor of Arkansas if his womanizing was all over the internet? Could FDR have been elected if his paralysis was common knowledge? I feel that too much emphasis is placed on the personal character of our elected officials, and the presence of a information network that saves anything and everything you ever do will keep very well qualified people from running for office in order to protect their privacy. I feel that our first loss in this particular department is Mark Warner. Why would anyone want to live under that kind of microscope? There's a small part of me that would love to be a lawmaker. But what little stomach I may have once had for putting myself out there as a candidate is long gone thanks to the internet. Sacrifice my personal privacy for a thankless job that will make me vilified with half the population? No thanks - I'll stay behind the scenes.
In Part 2 I will talk about the how technology has revolutionized the campaigns themselves - voterfiles, databases, methods of mass communication. Cheers!
Posted by MikeSager at December 15, 2006 12:00 PM
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