Presidential blogging
One of the highlights of the sessions here at Bloggercon yesterday
was the panel
of presidential-campaign bloggers. Here we had lead bloggers for the Dean
campaign, the Clark campaign, and the Democratic National Committee --
along with a bright-faced 19-year-old volunteer for the Graham campaign.
These folks are all central figures in the struggle to drag the world of
political campaigns, in some cases kicking and screaming, into the Internet
era.
In their own camps I have no doubt that these folks are the resident
idealists, pushing their colleagues toward a better understanding of how
online tools can make the political process more open, direct and engaging.
But at this conference, surrounded by people who passionately believe that
blogs are changing the entire universe, I think these campaign bloggers
were a little surprised to find themselves cast as the pragmatists, the
realists.
When Esther Dyson asked
whether the campaign blogs had any impact on, or even discussions about,
actual policy as opposed to campaign news and promotion, Joe Jones of
the Graham campaign declared, with charming bluntness, that no one cares
about policy, and of course blogs were all about PR and buzz.
The panelists were asked, what real-world impact is the Net actually
having? And Mathew Gross of
the Dean campaign reported that, while George Bush is raising millions in
big-denomination contributions from well-heeled supporters, Dean is raising
equivalent millions in small donations from a much, much larger number of
supporters.
Money raised is usually considered the ultimate yardstick of campaign
success. But conference organizer Dave
Winer pushed the speakers: Weren't they just using the Internet to
raise money to buy TV ads? Why take money from the bright new distributed
world of the Net only to feed it back into the Big Media machine? Why
couldn't the candidates commit to responding to one question from blog
visitors every day? (Josh
Marshall gently told the crowd that they simply didn't understand how
crazed the candidates' schedules were.) The candidates were taking from the
Net, but what were they giving back?
I think the panelists were all flummoxed by this line of questioning;
they are used to trying to justify their seemingly quixotic online
techniques by pointing to hardnosed results. Instead, they were being
charged with playing the same old political games while paying lip-service
to the notion of online participation.
I consider myself about 60/40 on the idealism/pragmatism scale, but all
I could think was, get real. TV still controls American politics. No
one is going to get elected in the U.S. today without spending millions on
TV advertising. If you care about getting your candidate elected -- or you
care, as all these Democrats did, about seeing Bush defeated -- then you'd
be foolish and irresponsible to pretend that this is not reality.
It would be great to see that reality change someday, and maybe the kind
of innovation exemplified by campaign blogging will help make the change
happen. That won't occur in the course of a single election. In the
meantime, money still talks, and Dean's success raising money through the
Net is an extraordinary development, worth celebrating in itself. Dean may
be using his blog -- and the Net -- as a means to an end; he is more
interested in getting elected than in making an abstract point about online
people power. To me, the 2004 election is too important to be used as a
testing ground for a new theory. Pragmatism should rule.
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