Confessions of a Dot-Com Delegate

I signed on as a dot-com delegate last week. I was nosing around the official GOP convention website (duh:gopconvention.com) and the offer was irresistible. “Register now,” I read, “and you will immediately receive: Your own virtual credential and screensaver; special behind-the-podium pass; your very own convention photo album.” I think the credential and the podium pass were decisive for me. I’ve never had a podium pass. And of course the whole thing is interactive: I was invited to donate money to the party, for example, and I had the chance to send a personal message to Governor George Bush himself, or to his wife Laura, or to both of them together. There were several messages to choose from, each punctuated with an exclamation point to convey enthusiasm. I clicked on “Congratulations, Governor Bush, on becoming the party’s presumptive nominee!” and sent it off into cyberspace. And I meant it. I still haven’t heard back from him.

Now Jan Larimer, who identifies herself as Director of Dot-Com Volunteer Operations, has started sending me e-mail. As if being a dot-com delegate wasn’t enough, she is urging me to become “one of the first ever Virtual Precinct Workers on the Web.” This entails telling everyone I know about the “adventure” of being a dot-com delegate, which of course I have just done. But be warned: The adventure can be frustrating. For example, I still haven’t got my credential or my podium pass. Every time I go to the site and sign in, I click on the button that says “Your Credential.” This takes me to a sign-up page again. I sign in again and click on the credential button again. Then I’m taken back to the sign-up page again. It goes round and round, like a nightmare in a Hitchcock movie. I haven’t complained yet, but I want that credential.

It is possible the Republicans have figured out that I’m not completely sincere in my commitment. The truth is, even as I’ve labored as a dot-com delegate to the GOP convention, I have been writing the Democratic Party Platform — not by myself, of course. (If I’m going to blow my journalistic objectivity, I’m going to blow it in a bipartisan way.) In collaboration with something called SpeakOut.com, the Democratic National Committee is inviting “netizens” (this is the cyber-unctuous term used for people who visit political websites) to comb through the party’s 1996 platform. The ’96 document appears on your screen, then you add, delete, or rewrite as you wish. Then you submit it via e-mail. Joe Andrew, the DNC chairman, writes in an opening letter: “Don’t be surprised if the ideas you and other Democrats have shared are included in the Platform adopted this summer at our Convention.”

Actually, I would be surprised. I spent several minutes writing the Democrats’ platform for them, and for the most part I played it straight, with a heavy reliance on the phrases Democrats thrill to: I wrote stirringly (I thought) of Opportunity and Challenges and the Future and so on. I mentioned children more often than Captain Kangaroo. But that tone is difficult to sustain. When the section on “Ending Domestic Violence” popped up, I wrote a kind of hymn to Juanita Broaddrick, and under “Strengthening Our Military” I demanded mandatory diaper-changing tables in basic-training barracks in a manner that may have been too obviously cheeky, and at the end, by the time I got to the final platform plank, “Community,” I was typing in long quotes from Ayn Rand, whom I despise. When I had finished my platform I clicked the button anyway, and off it went, to wherever the DNC platform committee works in cyberspace, and suddenly, instantaneously, my screen filled with typescript. It was a letter.

Dear andy:

Thank you for contributing your time and your ideas toward making the 2000 Democratic Platform truly reflective of Democratic ideals and America’s values. Your input is very important. . . . Together we can construct a platform that reflects the principles of America’s working families!

Sincerely,

Al Gore.

That would be Vice President Al Gore — as in presumptive nominee Al Gore. Never before have I felt so participatory, so interactive (and he hadn’t mentioned a word about Mrs. Broaddrick). Doubtless throughout the country Republicans and Democrats by the score, tapping their keyboards and clicking their mouses, must be feeling the same. But will they together, surfing boldly round the Web, from political site to political site, be enough to turn conventions away from the road to certain oblivion?

The tragic arc of the modern political convention is easily traced; it is the story of a double-cross at the hands of television. TV discovered conventions when they were still messy, raucous affairs. The first network gavel-to-gavel coverage aired in 1952, and, like the saturation Internet coverage this year, the moment was boomed as the medium’s coming of age. Eighty percent of television-owning households — 65 million viewers — tuned in for an average of 10 to 13 hours that week. Total broadcast time for each convention stretched to 60 hours. Ratings dipped slightly for the subsequent conventions in 1956, however, and by 1960, network executives were complaining that the conventions should conform more closely to the demands of good TV. In a fascinating monograph, The Rise and Fall of the Televised Political Convention, the historian Zachary Karabell quotes Sig Mickelson of CBS News. “We believe in live coverage where live coverage is warranted,” Mickelson declared in the late 1950s. “But we will not waste the viewer’s time with hour after hour of deliberations in which the significant developments are only a small part of the proceedings.” In other words: Don’t bore us.

Convention planners went to work: Speeches were shortened, fewer deliberations were held, schedules were trimmed. Every element, from the colors on the podium to the line-up of speakers, was assessed according to its telegenic potential. The PR disasters (from the politicians’ point of view) of the Chicago riots in 1968 and of the Miami Democratic convention in 1972, when George McGovern delivered his acceptance speech at 3 A.M., only intensified the desire to script the conventions more tightly. And so it transpired that by 1980 the networks were complaining that the conventions were . . . too tightly scripted. Television had demanded a TV show, and then rejected the conventions on the grounds that they were too much like a TV show; “infomercial” is the current favored cliche. Coverage shrank and so did viewership. In 1996 the broadcast audience averaged 10 percent of viewing households in prime time — smaller even than McGovern’s early-morning audience in 1972.

The alphabet-soup cable channels, of course, have stepped in to fill the vacancy left by the networks. CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and the others offer gavel to gavel coverage and more — pre-gavel coverage, post-gavel coverage — in stubborn resistance to the fact that in the age of television the conventions have been squeezed dry of anything worth covering. And it is precisely at this unhappy moment in the evolution of American politics that the Internet and its well-heeled enthusiasts arrive, armed with laptops and webcams and cellphones, ready to offer saturation coverage of their own. They are late, very late, for the party, but they are not discouraged.

“There’s no point in trying to duplicate what television and newspapers do,” says Robert Vanasse of Voter.com, a political news website that will have 40 technicians, reporters, and editors at the convention. “Our goal is to use the technology’s unique ability to provide a virtual experience of what it’s like to actually be at a convention.”

Virtual experience — the phrase trips as lightly off the netizen tongue as interactivity and empowerment. “If we do what TV does, we fail,” David Bohrman, of PseudoPolitics.com, told the New York Times. “We have to do something completely different. We have to almost deconstruct the process, give users the feel of the convention.” I don’t know what “deconstruct the process” means — neither does David Bohrman, I’ll bet — but I am familiar with the feel of political conventions. Think soul-crushing boredom, mind-numbing ennui, stupefaction plunging toward catalepsy. Think severe insults to the cranium, radical head trauma resulting in paralytic aphasia. Spend two days at a political convention and you’ll be lucky to “feel” anything at all.

But Internet enthusiasts are irrepressible: The premise of their saturation coverage is that this really quite unique sensation should be more widely shared — indeed that it should be universally on offer, since so many people will want to share it. At least half a dozen Web organizations, for example, will be providing “streaming video” from Philadelphia’s First Union Center and from Los Angeles’s Staples Center. “Streaming” is Internet video: color images shrunk to the size of a baseball card on your computer screen, moving herky jerky to a muffled, asynchronous soundtrack. The pictures remind you of those gimmick books where you flip the pages to create a moving image — and even then, streaming works only if you have a sophisticated computer with a fast Internet hook-up. (That Power-Mac from two Christmases ago probably won’t cut it.)

Why then, when we can just turn on C-SPAN, should we watch this video stuttering and wobbling over the Web, given the high probability that staring at it for prolonged periods will induce a stroke? Well, because many of these organizations’ Web cameras will be doing something even C-SPAN wouldn’t dare. America Online, for example, will be sending out live images round the clock — 24/7, as we’re supposed to say — even though the conventions will recess every night at 11. If you’ve got a hankering to “participate in the process” at, say, 2 o’clock in the morning, your urge can now be satisfied. All you have to do is crawl out of bed, switch on your computer, wait for it to boot up, load your AOL program, remove your phone line from the phone, push the phone line into the modem, type in your password, establish a connection, click past the opening display ad, wait for the main menu to pop up, click through the menu to find the political coverage, click several times to get past the chat rooms and the columnists and the wire stories from Reuters, find the button for the streaming video, click on the button, wait for the video buffer to load up, and — presto! just like that! — you can watch a charwoman sweeping up the confetti in the dim light of the First Union Center or a drunken delegate from Oregon who missed his ride back to the hotel vomiting into a waste can. What could be more empowering?

But of course it doesn’t stop there. In Los Angeles, the DNC will have functionaries carrying cameras throughout its convention hall. In a video statement streamed on the DNC website, convention chairman Terry McAuliffe said that cameras would be positioned everywhere — “You can go behind the scenes,” he said, “you can go to the makeup rooms” — to satisfy the craving of those computer owners who have always hoped to see someone apply eyeliner to Jerry Nadler. PseudoPolitics.com boasts that its camera on the podium will provide 360 degree views, somehow controllable at home by mouse click, so that when the netizen gets tired of watching nothing happening from behind the podium, he can click over to watch nothing happening from, say, the vantage point of the Missouri delegation, or, if he’s adventurous, even from the Papa John’s concession out on the concourse.

“Breaking convention news” will be displayed on many sites throughout cyberspace, of course, and within the convention halls themselves. Congressional Quarterly, for example, plans to offer “frequent alerts on breaking convention news” to its website and on hand-held Internet devices that it will provide to 500 journalists. “Alerts” is the term they’re actually using. It is hard to imagine what these “alerts” will consist of — “BULLETINBULLETINBULLETIN: Man falling asleep in AZ delegation. MOREMOREMORE: Water fountain malfunctioning on mezzanine level, section BB14. Plumber has been called” — but here as elsewhere in cyberspace “interactivity” is crucial. The netizen himself is assumed to be an active participant; he is not, as in the days of Gutenberg, the passive puppet of hierarchical forces beyond his control. “Watching the political conventions is no longer a one-way street,” according to MSNBC and SpeakOut.com, who will offer “Ntercept Instant Response Technology” on its website. The technology apparently allows the user to “tell MSNBC what you like, and what you don’t, on a second-by-second basis. From now on, you will have a voice alongside the ‘experts pundits.'”

What MSNBC, the Republicans, SpeakOut.com, or anybody else is supposed to do with all these expressed opinions is unclear. But it is not hard to predict their tone and temper. The expression of ill-considered and ignorant opinions is as essential to politics on the Web as it is to TalkBack Live or Hannity & Colmes — even more so, if you can imagine. “Chat” echoes everywhere, unceasingly, in cyberspace; it underlies all of the medium’s populist conceits. Close your eyes and click randomly through the Internet and before long you will come upon chat. Here’s a typical exchange, plucked at random from Grassroots. com last week:

Popuppunk: who cares how thw media interprates whats going with yourth these days. Hell, the media is controlled by coroporations, the media glorifies to entertain the media can kiss my ass.

Bells34: You obviously don’t care that much about what happens in this country.

Ahdmanout: The youth are in your homes, schools, gyms, neighborhood, or even in the streets. The question isn’t where are the youth, the question should be what happened to role models.

Freedom Fighter: let me just say this: the youth of America doesn’t give a damn.

Now picture such comments scrolling endlessly down your computer screen, next to the streaming video of Kay Bailey Hutchison mincing on the podium. You begin to sense that the enthusiasts are at least partly right: Interactivity changes coverage in ways previous generations of electronic journalists could never have foreseen. We are a long way from the old anchor booth, where Eric Sevareid shook his portentous jowls at the grimly determined Walter Cronkite. Whoever could have dreamed that they would be missed?

There was a moment in the evolution of the Web, not so long ago, when a few enthusiasts hoped it might deepen political coverage — offering to the masses a vast virtual newsstand overflowing with the New Republic and the Public Interest and the New York Review of Books. And of course those stuffy old magazines are there on the Web, serving a devoted and minuscule audience. But cyberpolitics is increasingly a function of the for-profit political sites like Voter.com and speakout.com, heavily funded by delusional venture capitalists who believe someday they will see a profit. Such sites don’t emulate the New Republic, they emulate TV — and not the TV of Eric Sevareid, either, but the TV of Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly: brief, up-to-the-minute newsbreaks and tasty morsels of background information, presented in colorful formats, with frothy, clueless commentary from pundits you’ve seen, of course, on TV.

And tarted up always with populist flattery, in the form of constant solicitation: “Make your voice heard!” urges Grassroots.com. “Should the government require trigger locks on all firearms sold?” asked Voter.com last Friday. “Yes? No?” SpeakOut.com wanted our opinions on “Will the government be able to control music online? Yes/No. Vote!” VOTE.com: “Should the Republican Party Include an Anti-Abortion Plank in its Party Platform? Yes! No! We’ll send YOUR vote to the Republican National Committee!”

In these for-profit sites, as in the partisan sites offered by the political parties, the Internet shows itself indeed to be a perfect extension of democratic capitalism — a radically non-hierarchical, individualistic, anti-bureaucratic means for exploiting stupid people. The consolation is that so far there are fewer such people than the politicos and the venture capitalists had hoped. While use of the Internet increases rapidly, it still lags far, far behind television as a source of news. According to a study this spring from The Pew Research Center For The People & The Press, more than half of Americans watch some broadcast news every day. Fewer than one-third of Americans fetch news from the Internet every week. On a typical day, moreover, only one in five Internet users will use it to read the news — news broadly defined to include sports, politics, entertainment, and the weather. And of these news readers — we are whittling down the numbers pretty thin — fewer than 40 percent will look for news devoted to politics.

The Internet thus accelerates the process whereby public affairs, once a cement of the common culture, becomes a specialty taste, a peculiar fascination of hobbyists — like quilt-making or collecting eighteenth-century pewter spoons. The process has long been in train, and the political convention is one of its casualties. Is it possible, then, that the Internet will finish the job — that it will transform conventions as radically as television did? Television turned them into TV shows. The Internet might make them thoroughly virtual — which is to say that, in the real world, they will cease altogether to exist.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.