Slashdot Mirror
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.
Just wait until they start spamming us.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Internet was looking for a candidate
Really? I didn't know the Internet like to be anthropomorphised.
-Colin
Those who used to research candidates before can now hit their website and get a quick summary instead of digging through newspapers and mass mailers.
Those who never really cared, pretty much still don't care, even if all they have to do is click on a website and read.
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.
It's gotten to the point where non-internet enabled members of political organizations are starting to feel left out because they miss 90% of what goes on in their group.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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
me this is the first *real* use of the Internet in a meaningful way
Well the Blair Witch Project, back in 1999 used an internet-based marketing approach to rack up 140 million dollars. Not only that, it set the standard for how movies are marketed online.
Just because this is about entertainment and art and not politics doesn't make it less real. There's a lot of money in movies.
"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
"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.
...for me this is the first *real* use of the Internet in a meaningful way.
Step back from the keyboard for a bit...you need a good slap.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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
No, looking at a candidate's website is a good way to see what they want you to think they think is important.
0 83 5.asp
4 01 261431.asp
Take a look at John Kerry - http://www.johnkerry.com/about/
His dad was a volunteer, he was a volunteer, but he was in the wrong war! Then he went on to be a senate stud.
But that's not accurate, not really, and I think it's important to look around the web to learn what is important.
http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york20040122
"The publication Congressional Quarterly examined 119 recorded votes held in 2003 in which the president had taken a position. CQ found that Kerry was present for just 28 percent of those votes. In contrast, Kerry's colleague from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, was present for 97 percent of the votes."
As for his voting for war, he voted against the First Gulf War, then voted for the Second Gulf War, but he claims he didn't really understand what power that vote was going to give the President. And in the 1990s he called for an end to the Iraqi government as it was.
http://www.nationalreview.com/document/kerry200
Speech by John Kerry, delivered on the Senate floor on Nov. 9, 1997, as recorded in the Congressional Record.
"Plainly and simply, Saddam Hussein cannot be permitted to get away with his antics, or with this latest excuse for avoidance of international responsibility."
"We must recognize that there is no indication that Saddam Hussein has any intention of relenting. So we have an obligation of enormous consequence, an obligation to guarantee that Saddam Hussein cannot ignore the United Nations. He cannot be permitted to go unobserved and unimpeded toward his horrific objective of amassing a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a matter about which there should be any debate whatsoever in the Security Council, or, certainly, in this Nation. If he remains obdurate, I believe that the United Nations must take, and should authorize immediately, whatever steps are necessary to force him to relent -- and that the United States should support and participate in those steps."
This is just a single example and I used a single source for my rebuttals. The point of this is, if you use the canidate's sites and ther suporters and organizer's sites, you won't learn anything real about the canidate.
Don't believe me? The news on Dean was pure shit nonsense right before the primaries. All they covered was crap like "ohhhh, he has a temper!" "oooh he's angry" "ooohhh, he looks like a groundhog!" (seriously, does anyone give a damn if he has a temper? he'd have to deal with generals and foreign leaders on a daily bassis, he'd better have a damned temper!) And then, Kerry wins the 'popular' vote for in Iowa and New Hampshire, and everyone declares Dean dead-in-the-water. Except, wait, he won more delegates than Kerry, which, in a delgate rate, put him in the lead.
People talk about how Dean isn't presidential enough, or Dean is too liberal, or whatever nonsense. The fact of the matter is that the media played those parts up at the expense of his other traits, and the Grand Ol' Internet didn't change any of that.
Fox News vs CNN This gives the news networks the appearance of political in-fighting, just like several of the democratic presidential candidates.
No exhaustive analysis to see here! Move along!
The second article quotes CBS pres Andrew Heyward, "Cable thrives on repetition and, let's be kind, exhaustive analysis, which has to constantly be freshened." Saying ANY of the news networks engage in "exhaustive analysis" is indeed charitable. They replay and replay without ever showing much success in giving context to the newsworthy items they cover. Almost any clip can be made to look wonderful or ridiculous if taken out of context.
The value of the Internet as news media is you can get the context you need to make sense of the news clips. Good print media is also useful for that, but it's often frustrating to wait for your weekly delivery of the Economist.
ANY media gains an advantage when the editors can help provide unbiased reporting AND context for the events they cover. The trick is finding editors you can trust.
From a CNN interview conducted by Wolf Blitzer:
Wolf: "Who are you looking for in a candidate?"
Mr. Internet: "I want Howard Dean. He makes my routers and hubs happy"
Wolf: "Do you have anything more to add, in our discussion of politics?
Mr. Internet: "I took the initative in creating Al Gore"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Dean's principal problem was not the hostile media. The media is hostile to all candidates--after all, when was the last time you heard a Campaign talk about how happy they are with the coverage of their candidate? Dean's problem was he got stuck in a feedback loop with his base--while his base loved everything he said, the rest of the electorate didn't, and the base was all that Dean's campaign managers listened to. The internet makes it much easier to for minorities to organize and be far more vocal than in the past, but a vocal minority is still a minority. The organization capabilities of the internet made it far easier for Dean to get crowds to his speeches, which made it appear his support was far broader than it was. It used to be three hundred people at a speech early in the campaign was indicative of far greater support, but in Dean's case is simply meant that there were three hundred people in that area who supported him.
All the things about Dean that his base loved--his irreverence, his red-faced speeches, his jokes--many other voters found annoying and un-Presidential. Some of Dean's policy proposals just made him look silly (like the campaign finance reform proposal where you give $100 to a candidate, the candidate gets "matching" funds of $500 from the Federal campaign funds, and you get to take a $100 credit against your next income tax bill. Net result: $600 flows to the candidate from the Federal coffers, and you don't lose a dime). It didn't help matters that his base could literally see no wrong with their candidate. I read the Dean Campaign blogs for a while, and they were a scary place. When a campaign becomes incapable of criticizing their candidate, a bad ending is almost ensured. Dean's decline in the polls came not so much from voters deserting him, but from all of the "undecided" voters who made up their minds right before the election all choosing other candidates, mainly Kerry.
I suspect Dean's die-hard supporters will find comfort in the "media assassination" and "Democratic Establishment was scared of us" theories to explain the collapse of their candidate, the fact is in elections, there are winners and losers, and it really doesn't matter how "right" you believe your candidate is, because the other candidates also have supporters who utterly believe they're "right" as well. In the end, the winner is the person who does the best job of persuading other people to support them, not the person who may be right. Just because Democracy doesn't produce the outcome you desire does not mean it isn't working. You win some, you lose some, move on to the next battle.
As you know, we just had our primary here in SC last week. Some of my friends said they had robo-call messages left on their answering machines from the Kerry campaign that said something like, "If you want to hear more about John Kerry's economic plan, press 1. If you want to hear about his military service, press 2..." and so on. I can't help wondering how many people stood there listening to their voice mail, hitting numbers on their phone and wondering "Why doesn't this dang thing work?"
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
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.
Agree. I'm the original poster, and I thought I was actually being objective. Calling it as I see it.
In reality, the true old-school definition of Liberal should be applied to Newt Gingrich Republican Revolutionaries because they were trying to rock the boat and change the status quo. Old-school meaning how Liberal was defined 100 years ago.
Today, Liberalism, has been usurped by Socialists. In America, there are enough people that associate Socialists with Communists. And slowly Liberal is being connected to Socialism, which is connected to Communism. Whether this be fair or not.
Simple fact, Liberalism basically means more state control of the economy. Who disagrees with that statement?
It's no secret that several of the more liberal leaning congressmen and women are members unapologetic socialists.