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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Thanks to the Net, we've all got access to poll numbers, fundraising figures and endless political gossip -- and we all know exactly what the candidates need to do to win.
Sep 28, 2004 | In late August and early September, as John Kerry's campaign for president hit one low point after another, bloggers of all stripes took to the Web with pointed political advice for the candidate. They told him how he should attack Bush and how he should hone his message. They even wrote sample speeches for the candidate.
On Sept. 13, for instance, "Zackpunk," a regular contributor to the political junkie Web site Daily Kos, wrote in his "diary" (a kind of miniblog within the larger site) that while listening to Al Franken on the radio, two disparate facts about the Bush presidency fused together in his mind. One was the story, first reported by Bob Woodward, that when Bush told his secretary of state, Colin Powell, that he planned to invade Iraq, Powell had warned the president that "you'll own it all." The other was Bush's campaign promotion of an "ownership society."
These two facts, Zackpunk said, left a "huge opening for Kerry," with an ideal speech from the senator looking something like this: "Mr. President, Colin Powell told you about this war that 'if you break it, you own it.' And now you're going around talking about an 'ownership society.' Well, Mr. President, let me tell you what you own. A million jobs lost. You own that. A thousand soldiers lost. You own that. 1.4 million new people living below the poverty line. You own that. 1.2 million less people covered by health insurance. You own that. A seventeen percent medicare increase. You own that. Health care costs skyrocketing. You own that. The tax burden increasing amongst the middle class. You own that. Mr. President, if you want to talk about an ownership society, let's talk about what you own."
The speech was a powerful, specific, fact-filled indictment of Bush. And on Daily Kos, when someone writes something as brilliant as that in a diary, other readers begin noticing, and if it's good enough the post can land on the Kos front page. That's what happened in this case, and Kerry's campaign seemed to notice. In a speech two days later, Kerry said, "At that convention in New York the other week, President Bush talked about his ownership society. Well, Mr. President, when it comes to your record, we agree -- you own it." Kerry went on to enumerate Bush's mistakes and label his term the "Excuses Presidency," "never wrong, never responsible, never to blame."
It's possible that the Kerry people came upon their speech independently of Daily Kos, but Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the site's owner, says that he suspects Kerry is listening. "It's not that they're listening to Markos," he says. "They're realizing that there's this huge community out there that has good ideas. There are 400 or 500 diary entries a day. If one in a thousand diary entries has something of value," that's a good idea every couple of days.
Today, it seems that every political junkie online secretly (if not openly) believes he's James Carville, a strategist possessed of such uncontested political genius that a particular candidate would be crazy not to listen to his advice, especially if that particular candidate is John Kerry. It's possible to find people on the Web who'll claim that they could do at least as good a job in winning political races as the veteran consultants on the inside. So what if these people have never worked in any actual campaign? At least some of them were warning, months ago, that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth would be a problem for Kerry and that he should respond hard and fast -- an idea that Kerry's team would have been wise to consider.
How is it possible that amateur political junkies are potentially having an effect on actual campaigns? The answer is that the Internet has fundamentally changed politics as we know it. There is just so much out there that we didn't have access to four years ago: polling data, fundraising data, media-buy data; instant access to every TV ad and press release and unguarded gaffe and well-timed leak to jolt the campaign; insider dish on what the media's covering and what it's not covering and why; and perhaps most fun of all, there are massive online communities in which hundreds of thousands of people submit their mostly corny, often silly, and sometimes unimaginably brilliant ideas for how this candidate or that should run his campaign. "As a political junkie," says Moulitsas, "this is heaven for me."
"I don't think that most people delude themselves into thinking they're actually James Carville," says Michael Cornfield, senior research consultant at the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "But for many of them it's gratifying to pore over the poll data and all this other data and think about what you would have done. You know what I'd compare it to? It's like fantasy football. I don't mean to suggest that people are trivializing it -- but politics does have these gamelike aspects to it, and it can be gratifying in a number of ways to play the game."
