In several post-election conversations about the politics of tomorrow, including one with the spouse of a likely candidate for a high federal office in 2008, the topic came around to the old-fashioned, but never more relevant, value of community. Specifically, several folks wondered: In a world where digital communications can fuel collaborations of all kinds, how can the political class take the Net to the next level?
Plainly, there has been progress in theuse of the Net to serve political goals. But the real breakthroughs are still ahead of us.
More than ever in the 2006 cycle, campaigns used the Net to stir the faithful, and especially to raise money. Candidates and their staffs had seen how well this worked in the 2004 elections — everyone went to school on Howard Dean — and they jumped enthusiastically into the fray.
But from all appearances, they were either less eager to use technology to reach out to the unpersuaded, or didn’t know how. This is where we need to take Net politics in America.
How do we know that the old-style moves were the preferred ones? For one thing, by far the bulk of political advertising remained in the traditional media and methods.
And such sleazy stuff it was, a poisonous brew of lies, deceptions and other garbage. How do the candidates and their consultants manage to look in the mirror in the morning after foisting such political filth on the electorate?
Some of the most effective, or at least revealing, TV in the campaign didn’t come directly from the candidates. YouTube and other video-sharing sites were players in more than one sense of the word, most notably when Virginia U.S. Sen. George Allen’s hapless campaign ran aground on his, at best, clumsy “macaca” joke, which ended up online and helped create a tempest he never managed to handle.
One certainty next time: Candidates and their surrogates will have people videotaping each others’ public appearances. They’ll pounce on any stupidity.
Eventually, but not in 2008, candidates will simply record their own public appearances, and then post it themselves. And, if we’re lucky, we’ll remember that all people occasionally say things we regret, and that such comments don’t necessarily reflect deeper beliefs. (In Allen’s case, the subsequent evidence suggested that his racial notions were longstanding.)
If we’re really lucky, we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns when it comes to 30-second campaign TV ads, where voters believe nothing they see or hear. If so, look for the politicians to move a lot more of their advertising to the Net in the next cycle.
If advertising remained largely a broadcast phenomenon, the collaborative nature of the online medium got a workout in several journalistic ways. Perhaps the most notable was Talking Points Memo’s (www.talkingpointsmemo.com) Josh Marshall’s brilliant gathering of string on what turned out to be a last-second bit of trickery.
It wasn’t the only thing of its kind by the two parties, but it was one of the most notable: the now-notorious Republican “robo-calling” stunt where automatic phone dialers inundated voters with repeated calls that appeared, at first glance, to come from Democrats. The tactic seemed designed to annoy voters, not educate them.
Marshall, more than any other journalist, blew the whistle on this stunt. He led the charge to persuade the traditional media to wake up and cover what plainly was a big story. I strongly doubt that this story would have been in the major newspapers and on TV had Marshall not done this work.
I’m looking forward to a future campaign, meanwhile, when candidates and their organizations use the Net to have a conversation not only with their own supporters, but also with their opponents and their supporters. A campaign blog that preaches to the converted is useful, but not sufficient.
The same applies to the political blogs, which still tend toward congregations of like-minded folks. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it feels incomplete if we truly buy the idea of free elections as a conversation about our future, not just a cheerleading exercise.
Election prediction
Pundits make fearless predictions, touting the ones that turn out to be right and, um, forgetting about the ones thatdon’t. Then they go ahead and make new ones.
I got it utterly wrong in my election-results prediction, which appeared here the day before the election. I’d figured the Republicans, better organized and more willing to use unethical tactics, would hang onto Congress against Democrats who stood, and still stand, for so little.
Whoops. The voters paid no attention to the sleazy advertising or fearless, incorrect predictions. Good for them.
Dan Gillmor is a member of The Examiner Blog Board of Contributors and is founder and director of the Center for Citizen Media.
