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The Internet, Media and Politics
Several people submitted an interesting column on Davenet about the differences in methodologies of the Dean campaign and other primary campaigns. Of course, the analogy doesn't have to be strictly Dean - it can apply to any candidate who breaks from the traditional norms of campaigning. and while I think people have been saying since 1996 that this is the year of the Internet in politics, for me this is the first *real* use of the Internet in a meaningful way. In any case, the question of productization in politics is a very real one, and should be discussed.
Apart from the horrid word, it's hardly a new process. Every electable official since the days of... well, since there were elections, has been a product shaped to win a constituency.
Dean did well using the Internet was because his constituency was one that relies on the Net for news and views.
But he failed for the same reason: he still spoke to a minority. For the majority, presidents have to be Presidential. In todays' world this means good looks and charm and political skill.
Expect future party machines to use the Internet much more, yes, but don't expect future presidents to be any less chosen on their ability to look good on television.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Howard Dean may have been the internet candidate. But i doubt it. Unfortunately, his campaign is parralleling the dot com bust of the late 90's. The internet is a great way for candidates to construct platforms,and for voters to learn of candidates. It just so happens Dean turned out to to have a self destructive, insane quality that turned folks off. Dean is toast. I just wish he would get out the race, because I feel pity for his futility.
Dean is now looks like he has an alein in his head and the alien has decided to binge on cheap wine, and LSD. He is out of touch with reality. Well at the least the architect of his campaign jumped of this ship before it went down.
"On the Internet, this card will confirm all the information required to gain access to a state (government) network--while also barring anyone who isn't legal age from entering an adult chat room, making the Internet safer for our children, or prevent adults from entering a children's chat room and preying on our kids...Many new computer systems are being created with card reader technology. Older computers can add this feature for very little money," Dean said.
Source. Scary... the man is looking to displace Bush, and he's more Orwellian in thought. Read the article.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
It wasnt always like this. Bill Clinton for example only sent three email address in his entire term in office ....
"In any case, the question of productization in politics is a very real one, and should be discussed."
In a couple of years or so, we should be able to bid for our representation, much as goes on with the corporate sponsors, although I think they should wear badges to make such things obvious.
As for Dean, he was doing quite well until Trippi advised him that big, nasty lockdowns on personal PCs was the way to go, coincidentally somethng that Wave Systems (Trippi's company) would have cleaned up on. Palladium/DRM from a Democrat?
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
I won't bother getting into a political shootout over this so here's my two ^*. The last place I would want to look towards when thinking of the pResidency, votes, voters* (and any variation of this) would be online. How many articles have you seen on Diebold, and all of the quirks associated with things political.
Wait before you shoot some quick response, I know this has little to do with voting so let me shift. Using the net in the fashion Dean has, is nothing new, he's probably the only one smart enough to publicize it though. Remember, many Americans aren't that literate when it comes to computing as it is, so think about this... Who are his real followers, and one has to know these numbers the Dean camp or whomever can be tweaked.
E.g.: Dean2004.com or whatever sites associated with them show 1,000,000 visitors for February. Oh really? How many unique visitors, etc. Don't throw out numbers without backing it. Secondly, when it comes to computing, for all you know, there could be some 13-17 (under the voting age) kids playing around with Dean & Co. No you say? Prove it. Who in Dean or any camp can say with a straight face "We've attracted 1,000,000 legal aged voters that live in America" that would be a flat out lie. Even if say "cache.bigcompany.com" (where Big Company was a Fortune 500 co.) connected to someone's party, how do you know it's not a misconfigured proxy allowing anyone to connect.
Dumb users spread viruses. Irrelevant? I definitely think not. I would not look to the net for the next best thing "politically" for a long ass time. Now when someone decided to post "this is the first *real* use of the Internet in a meaningful way" ... They should have thought up something more meaningful like medical studies or something similar. My personal "REAL USE" of the internet would be the sharing of information on the educational level a-la MIT's Open Course Ware, and other projects similar to that. However I think medically it's underdeveloped and could rock. Think distributed dna sequencing type stuff.
Oh well my ramblings for the day
MoFscker
As a platform for political wheedling, the net could change the dynamics of voter behavior very much, but only in conjunction with REAL online voting.
What happens when, like telephone proliferation in the US, reliable net access is in the hands of vitually all americans and unique, verifiable online identifiers are adopted for users? Online voting is just the first - and most obvious - step. Politicians (and PACS, grassroots orgs and radicals as well) could cheaply distribute and track effectiveness of their messages. Most importantly, they could more easily gather vote paydirt from the largest (and previously unreachable) voting majority in the US - the non-voter - who I argue is just too damn lazy and busy to walk to thier local elementary school and push a button.
What if there was a link from Dean's blog to a "voting proxy" system which would cast your vote online for you on election day - even if you forgot? take away unidirection persuasive material and physical polling places and you'll have voting weirdness the likes this country has never seen.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
How much of this is true, and how much Dean being an unattractive, unsympathetic dipshit of a candidate had to do with the lack of campaign coverage for him, we'll never know.
But for those of us cynical about politics, it's a good mini-conspiracy theory that campaign ad money could, in the worst of all possible worlds, buy news coverage for a candidate.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
The biggest affect has been that communication within groups of like-minded individuals has been greatly increased. Between sites like meetup.com for live meetings and email discussion lists for ongoing meetings online, if you care about an issue or set of issues, you can coordinate with others who feel the same way.
For the most part I agree (or at least agreed) with your observations, but this post-mortems of Dean's run (by a Dean supporter no less) does, I think, a hell of a job pointing out some of the shortcomings of Dean's use of the internet. The Cliff Notes version: if it doesn't generate votes, it ain't worth squat.
In the last election in Sweden there was one new party called Fria Listan (the Free List). They were depicted as populist libertarians in the media. I think that had some truth in it, but at the same time I liked some of their ideas. They said they wanted to get away from the old party politics with lots of money spent on politicians going around the country holding speeches on public plazas and so on. Very 1950s...
This new party tried mainly to spread their ideas using the web and writing articles and letters in newspapers, both because they couldn't afford traditional campaigning and because they thought this was a more rational way in the modern age. They did generate some media attention, so I think a lot of people would at least have heard of them.
So how did it go? In Sweden we have many more parties represented in parliament, if you get more than 4% nationally or a certain percentage locally, you get a minimum number of seats in parliament. This makes voting for a small party more attractive unlike countries like the US where the winner get everything and therefore parties tend to be reduced to two mainstream, close to the center parties.*
Total number of votes for the Free List in the election? About 500, from a population of 8 million. Of course, their politics might influence this more than their method of communication, but I was still surprised at how incredibly small the number was. Joke parties like The Donald Duck party have been known to get more votes. Their web page (http://www.frialistan.st/) is now gone.
* Of course, the downside of our system is the tendency for weak coalition governments with lots of internal bickering, and special interest parties gaining disproportionate powers because they can tip the scale between bigger parties which are evenly balanced.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
I visited deanforamerica.com last week and got rewarded for my visit with a big nasty popup window that his site put on my screen (just like an X10 ad). If they knew anything about the Internet community, they would have known how much people hate these things.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
- The Internet is not reality. Not yet, anyway.
The Cluetrain one hurts, I think, because so many on-line denizens thought it was real. But 95% of the US population, while using e-mail and occasionally surf the web, does not live its life on-line, and they probably don't want to.Cluetrain Manifesto is not reality, and probably never will be.
sPh
I still have little to no idea exactly what he (or any other Dem) wants to *do*. And I don't mean "create jobs" or "give power back to the people" or some other vapid propaganda. What PRECISELY do they think will lead to those results?
F*ck the whole lot of them, on both sides. If you think any of them give a crap about you, you are seriously deluded.
--- Ban humanity.
You know what, I had cancer too, and I showed up for school. In fact over 5 years of chemo, the majority of it carried out either 90 or 550 miles from home, I only missed 30 days of class in 5 years. The worst year of my cancer I missed 4 days of school, now the Senate doesn't meet near as often as 5th grade does, but I'd expect he could make more votes, as he was able to campaign at the same time and his treatments took place in D.C.
The cancer card doesn't get my sympathies for Kerry, if he was really into serving the country and carred for his family, he would have retired from the Senate to get treated.
When the Bush administration decided to treat the White House like a football stadium and sell the naming rights to Halliburton.
Ok, to be fair, so far only the names of certain exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution (that's America's museum ) have been sold to corporate sponsors. According to an editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette That's right, billions for Iraq, millions in no-bid set asides for Halliburton, but the premier American public monument to science and scholarship have to go hat in hand, selling off its reputation and impartiality piecemeal, as advertising for the same companies making millions off corporate welfare.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
No, widespread candidate spam isn't going to happen. Here's why: when you get viagra spam and chuck it, you do no harm to the spammer. It's not like you're going to go out the next day and boycott viagra. But if you have a choice about a product you see heavily spammed and one you don't, the choice will be clear.
If anything, I'd expect candidates to spoof spam from each other.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Don't dismiss the internet as unable to support a political campaign just yet - I have begun my own political party here in Australia, based largely online:
www.neteffect.org.au (be gentle and mirror if you can; I have 8GB monthly quota right now and don't want to get it completely slashdotted)
Whilst it's early days for my idea, I'm hoping that I can generate enough support to get a senate seat in our upcoming federal election at the end of the year. We don't have the money politics you have in the States, nor do we have primaries and the like. The only stipulation to getting on the ballot here is to have 500 members. There are lots of disenchanted people out there who are fed up with the current climate of politics, and don't feel they have a say anymore. I hope to fix that by being truly representative of the people's choices.
As a party, we are aiming to be completely open in everything, from software, to policy formation, to financial disclosure etc. We have an active forum where we will hopefully gather ideas from all around the world on how to best serve the people of Australia (which can have flow on effects elsewhere). You are welcome to take our documentation and use it as the basis of your own political party - I want to encourage others to run for politics, so as to try to reduce the current two party system that operates here in Australia, as well as the US etc.
I've taken a hard line against the imperialist ambitions of the current US administration, but that doesn't mean I hate America. I've served with US forces in Japan and they are just as dedicated to professionalism as we are, with the same hopes and dreams for peace and prosperity. Sadly they're being told to do things they'd rather not do, in far off places around the globe, to serve the narrow interests of a few war-hawks in Washington.
Anyway, have a look if you are interested, and we'd especially like to hear from you if you think you can implement an open source secure online voting system we can use to allow members to vote on our policy formation. We plan on setting up such a system in an open framework so all democratic people may benefit from it in the future. If done correctly it could form the basis of 21st century representative politics - something that has been lacking for a long time now.
Visceral Psyche Films
- Use a well-established channel like Television that gives full motion video and puts you in good company with other professionally-done advertisements, or
- End up with your campaign spam sandwiched between penis enlargers, pyramid schemes, viruses, phishing, viagra offers, and "undeliverable mail" notifications?
Oh, I'm sure a couple of candidates will try this, but consider the company their campaign email will be keeping. Personally, I wouldn't want my campaign within ten feet of any of that stuff, let alone fractions of an inch away from them on the recipient's screen; I expect the net impact would be negative. Long-term I think campaign spam will have to wait until the rest of spam has been contained.In that light, I think showing up for more than a quarter of the votes sounds pretty hardworking, if not heroic.
No.
We're not talking about making cars or writing code or building houses or playing baseball. We're talking democracy.
Being elected Senator means it's your job to represent the people by voting. Yes, senators do a lot more than vote, but those are not the focus of the job. If Senator Kerry was unable to perform his duties because of cancer, I am certainly sympathetic and would wish him the best (not that he needs my wishes, since he's worth hundreds of millions of dollars). HOWEVER...he should have resigned.
Certainly, a resignation would have made it harder for him to advance his political career. It's clear to me that he chose personal advancement over representation of the voters.
I appreciate your input on this issue; I know who I'll be voting against.
They clubbed people who were obviously tourists who had just finished shopping and were trying to find the train. They clubbed everyone after charging at them and pressing them into a narrow walkway under scaffolding. The cops clubbed people because they were nervous, not because anyone was breaking the law, rioting, or endangering anyone. It was a pure act of aggression.
Take a look at the photos of the Oakland Longshoremen if you want to see what happens when you speak your mind. They were shot because "protesters refused to move and some of them allegedly threw rocks and bolts". Note the key phrase "allegedly". The police shot longshoremen who weren't even protesting. I guess being shot by the police is about as "unlucky" as you get.
What killed Dean was his negative campaigning, which works on the 'net but turns off voters.
He'd say something insane to appeal to extreme lefties ("We're no safer with Saddam captured"), then we'd all wait a few days for him to come out and explain what he "really" meant, so he could appeal to the moderates and centrists.
It was a tricky game that backfired when you had the steady-stoned Kerry (this is ignoring that he took special interest moneys in the past, of course...I'm talking appearance-wise) with his chest of wartime awards and vague, easy, partyline statements. It's amazing how much support you can get just by saying vague things like, "America is ready for a change!" Meanwhile, nobody really knows what specifically you mean by change.
[can you]Come up with any valid claims of protesters being harassed, other than:
* protesters engaged in such crimes as trespass or violence
* protesters unlucky to be caught in the middle of a riot caused by the violent ones.
Can you?
Yes. Easily.
I was there for all of the major New York protests and I can tell you firsthand that the police repeatedly slammed into crowds of peaceful protestors. No violent actions to be seen at all except for cops riding horses into packed crowds of peaceful citizens.
Same is true in D.C. The protestors were peacefully and lawfully assembling when the police blocked all exits to the park, trapping everybody within, and then pushed everyone into a too-small space. Then they started arresting people for "refusing to leave" (if they just stood there) or "assault" if they tried to get through the police lines to leave.
On Feburary 15th, as you can read about in my JEs, they also closed down the subway stations, blocked streets, and worked quite hard to force a confrontation by shoving us into ever smaller spaces and trying to force us into a clash.
Did I see anybody being flat out inciting? Yeah, two guys, both big, young, muscular, white guys in preppie clothes screaming at the people around them that we should get violent. One of them on top of a police van jumping up and down and yelling in his Long Island accent. In other words, undercover cops doing their illegal best to create violence.
The real protesters just avoided these guys, with some of us making loud comments about "agents provocateurs", assuming that they were either cops or crazy but either way they certainly were not part of any group *we* would ever support.
So yet again, I call bullshit. We were not violent. The cops were.
And frankly, from what I've now seen and read, chances are the whole damned thing was coordinated by Ashcroft's slimeballs exercising oversight from within local police offices.
Too bad, so sad; yet another right wing bit of disinformation falls in the face of actual facts. Got any Iraqi WMD documents to sell me?
-Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.