EdCone.com

Another shot at a strawman.

David Appell voted in New Hampshire for Howard Dean. "I didn't vote for Howard Dean because he has a blog or because he used MeetUp.com or because his supporters were somehow more wired than anyone else. For crying out loud."

For crying out loud, indeed.

Who ever said, thought, or believed that online campaigning is supposed to attract voters simply because it's done online? It's about making campaigns more effective, not making a campaign issue of being able to use a computer.

The big lie about "weapons of mass destruction" wasn't the Bush administration's insistence that Iraq had banned weapons -- a widely-held belief, albeit one pimped and politicized by hawks.

The big lie is in the term itself.

Rafe Colburn nailed it in June: The initial bait for getting people to discuss going to war with Iraq was nuclear weapons. The fear was that Iraq would go nuclear, supply nuclear material to terrorists, and the next thing you know, we'd have a smoking hole where a US city once was. As it became obvious that Iraq's nuclear capabilities weren't what they were purported to be, suddenly chemical and biological weapons came into the picture, and all three types of weapon were lumped together in the "weapons of mass destruction" category. Scam.

Now Josh Marshall applies that meme to David Kay's rhetoric to help "outline the ridiculousness of Kayís judgment." (T)he catch-all phrase ëweapons of mass destructioní obscures much more than it clarifies. It groups together things like mustard gas, which is really battlefield weapon, with nuclear weapons, which really are weapons of mass destruction.

The White House was well aware of this. And for that reason it repeatedly pressed the argument that Iraq was close to creating nuclear warheads --- a point over which there was very real disagreement within the Intelligence Community.

Halley: Levitra letdown.

A cool network map of book-buying patterns yields this insight to Valdis Krebs: "(P)olitical books are preaching to the converted...if you are working a 2004 political campaign what do you do with this information?... All you can do is focus on the edge nodes and the bridges."

Wait, if online campaigning is over, why is Kerry hiring?

Why bother refuting Andrew Orlowski?

For one thing, it's just so easy.

Some lowlights and howlers from his latest rant:

Nothing against Jerome Armstrong, but calling him "Howard Dean's Net architect" is an enormous overstatement at best.

Zephyr Teachout and Joe Trippi told me that Meetups for Dean predated the campaign's discovery of the service. "Nonetheless, more than 400 individuals had signed up for Dean events by February, when Trippi seized on the Meetup service as a way of jumpstarting interest in Dean nationally." (Baseline, Nov. '03). Of course the campaign then ran with Meetup -- but they did "just happen" in the beginning, contrary to Orlowski's article.

In direct contrast to one of Orlowski's main points, Trippi and other senior staffers told me that books relevant to the campaign included Small Pieces Loosely Joined and The Cluetrain Manifesto, along with Smart Mobs, Moral Politics, Bowling Alone, and Emergence. "We've read all that stuff," says Trippi. " (Baseline)

Orlowski overstates the importance of blogging to the campaign, or at least spends too much time talking about people blogging about the campaign -- a common enough mistake to be sure. Blogging has been important to Dean, but other online tools are equally or more important. "I can imagine the campaign without the blog, but not without Meetup," (Zephyr Teachout, senior Dean staffer, in Baseline.)

And yes, I am involved with the Digital Democracy Teach-In he trashes....which means I know that some interesting campaign insiders may indeed be onhand.

Erskine Blogs: "Stop treating the South like a foreign land."

Step one to losing a contest: assume you are going to lose.

I wasn't sure about accepting an anti-NRA ad -- I don't like the hardline politics of the NRA, and the enemies list featured in the ad is just creepy, but I am at the same time protective of my 2d Amendment rights...then I got another ad submitted via BlogAds, this one for Democratic congressional candidate Ben Chandler, and he boasts an "A" rating from the NRA, to go along with his Sierra Club endorsement...so I accepted them both.

A Dean supporter on the campaign weblog, commenting on the first post from Trippi's replacement, Roy Neel: "we can do this, but you have to trust us as much as weíve trusted you."

Neel at the Dean blog: "Iím not here to do Joe Trippiís job."

Oliver Willis is comparing the Dean campaign to Enron and says "his campaign and its managers took several thousand of us for a ride."

Geez, people are really taking this personally.

So I guess that Edwards endorsement is on the way, O-dub?

AP: "John Kerry's front-runner status helped him raise more than $500,000 over the Internet in the two days since his New Hampshire victory."

Wait, didn't Kerry and all those donors hear that Internet campaigning is like, over?

There goes Dave, just beating the crap out of a strawman.

Dave Winer: "Here's the epitaph on Dean's of the Internet. It was 98 percent hype, two percent substance." He also asks, "What edges did they push the decisions out to?," and says "pundits" like me are hypocrites and liars for going along with the campaign spin about empowered volunteers.

As I told him, "The control at the edges was always about freedom to help the Howard Dean presidential campaign. That's why the Baseline article was called 'The Marketing of the President,' not 'Power to the People, Right On.'"

Interesting that Trippi seems to have messed up less in online strategy than on established stuff like TV ads, spending, and office politics.

UNC 68 - NCSU 66

We had my cousin's good seats, just left of midcourt opposite the benches (lined up more or less with Charlotte on the big state map at center court), 20 rows up. The usual crowd of prosperous-looking white people in light-blue clothing. My vestigial fear of State, formed during a childhood terrorized by David Thompson, will never truly die. Thus was last night's game especially satisfying. 

Bonus: the crowd booed Dick Vitale. Lustily.

I don't dislike him for being Dookie V, because I remember that he couldn't go five minutes without calling Dean Smith "Michelangelo." That, in fact, is the basis of my loathing -- he says the same dumb things, over and over and over and over and over again. Every kid is a great kid. Freshman are "diaper dandies" hoping for "PT -- playing time, baybee." He even trotted out his fetish for Dante Calabria's great hair the other night during the Maryland game, so he could remind us that he's bald and has one eye.

My cousin Annie and I agreed that we would prefer UNC students to say "We respectfully disagree" rather than booing the refs, but booing Vitale seemed fine to me.

Double bonus: Dinner at Acme in Carrboro.

My next-door neighbor in the old Wrangler building on S. Elm is evangelist Alex McFarland. He recently attended a Florida screening of Mel Gibson's move, The Passion, hosted by Gibson himself.

"Did you feel an urge to come burn down my house after seeing it?," I asked. No, Alex said, he did not. He said that the Jewish authorities in the movie are indeed enthusiastic about condemning Jesus, but that the Romans are shown as the willing perpetrators of his punishment, which is of course how it is written in the source material. I asked if he would write a brief review of the film for this weblog, with some attention given to the concerns that it could spark anti-Semitism.

Here is Alex's review:

Last week in Florida, I had the opportunity to attend Mel Gibson's screening of his new film, "The Passion of the Christ." Among the audience, there was a clear sense that we were about to experience something special.

Without giving away too much, and without breeching the confidentiality agreement that I signed going in, I will simply say that I consider this to be the best movie I have ever seen. "The Passion" is something historical, powerful, and personal that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

As the movie unfolds, pre-release speculations and cautions will probably be the farthest thing from your mind. I believe that those who see "The Passion" will conclude that its detractors need not have worried.

The "Passion" is about God offering Himself as the Passover lamb for all of humanity. That premise alone is the most riveting and relevant plot line in history, hands down. I feel that Mel Gibson's telling of it is the most striking, yet uplifting treatment of this story that I have seen. You will definitely leave the theater thinking- not necessarily about the movie, but about Jesus. Some people apparently find that prospect unsettling. The film broke my heart and warmed my soul. I can virtually guarantee that you will be glad you saw it.

Howard Dean: "What we need is decision making that's centralized."

 

The fall of Joe Trippi is not the end of online campaigning. Candidates at all levels will continue to use the Internet for fast, cheap, multiparty communication and organization.

 

What's in question is the campaign model Trippi championed: decentralized, with authority pushed to the edges of the network, with volunteers empowered to act on their own; a model related to, and hyped as, open source development.

 

The reality of the Dean campaign was always more complicated than that, the open source aspect romanticized, the message crafted at headquarters -- but the voice and power given to volunteers was nonetheless real.

 

It is this organizational structure that is challenged by the replacement of Trippi with an old-school campaigner. This is the moment for the media and the political pros to say, see, we told you so, the way things are is the way things will always be.

 

But the genie is out of the bottle. There is too much talent and energy at the edges of the network for campaigns to revert to a strict command-and-control model. And volunteers will demand some control from now on: You can't keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen Paree.

 

The right balance of control and freedom, the right candidate, the right race -- these elements will come together, maybe not in this presidential campaign, but soon. The results will be powerful. And Joe Trippi's experiment will be studied for years to come.

Deadline at the day job.

And Carolina tix this evening.

Ergo non blogito.

Right Wing News reviews the BoP radio show: "...really boring bloggers like Joshua Micah Marshall and Ed Cone being duller than I thought was humanly possible."

DaveNet: "The least important thing about the Internet as a political medium is its power to raise money, because over time it obviates the need to raise money. The cost of circulating ideas is dropping steadily and aggressively."

Glenn Reynolds in Wired: "Email is the dark matter of the blogosphere."

Interesting -- Dave Winer (another blogger who has appeared in Wired) has just revived his DaveNet email broadcast.

Erskine Blogs says Bowles shouldn't be shy about mentioning which White House he worked in: "It is now safer to bring Bubba out and Erskine can stand proud of his accomplishments while heading his staff."

The News & Record's Eric Dyer reports from New Hampshire (not posted) that John Edwards often mentions Jesse Helms in his speeches, although he never ran against Helms or even went head-to-head with his feared political machine.

Fine by me. Edwards is telling voters which North Carolina he's from.

Part of Edwards' appeal is that he comes from the inclusive, progressive political tradition of this state, not the cryptoracist tradition which for much of my life and his was most famously represented by Helms. And Edwards did defeat the party of Jesse Helms, which kept sending second-raters like John East and Lauch Faircloth to represent North Carolina.

David Brooks is right that Edwards would benefit if voters see he has experienced "that struggle, that sense of difficulty, which is shared by millions." I think his working-class background will serve him well on that front.

And to the extent you're known by the company you don't keep, Edwards is doing fine.

The most convincing aspect of Peggy Noonan's assertion that Wesley Clark is a nut-job: it takes one to know one.

She's also into rewriting history: "But we like our generals like Eisenhower and Grant and George Marshall: We like them sober, adult and boring." Grant, sober and boring?

Who I'm rooting for in New Hampshire: everybody.

I want the strongest candidate to emerge. That won't happen in a definitve way today, but today we'll learn more. I want to keep listening to what the candidates have to say, and leave the snark to the media and other conservatives.

I want the most effective campaign to show its stuff. If the modern campaign really resembles open source development, we ought to see campaigns feed off themselves and each other and keep getting stronger and smarter.

And meanwhile I want Bush to do a great job. I'm rooting for a little peace and prosperity, regardless of the brand name on the party in power. I want a choice in November, not the lesser of two evils.

So today I'm for (in alphabetical order) Clark, Dean, Edwards, and Kerry.

Being a man, I'd guess that there is a good 8" of snow on the ground, but the authorities say it's more like 5". The roads are still covered in residential areas, and Elm Street between the hospital and downtown was still unplowed as of 2 PM. Nothing close to a thaw on this cold day. Lots of sledding, though. No school tomorrow, either.

Tomorrow's UNC blogs-and-journalism conference has been postponed due to weather. They're looking for a new date.

The National Republican Congressional Committee has a page with some bloglike attributes, dedicated to covering competitive House races, but calling it "Blog Across the Nation" seems to be mostly a marketing hook -- an attempt to piggyback on the popularity of blogs without actually writing one. It's essentially a daily newsletter that offers no room for comments and boasts no personality of its own. The page is also distributed via email.

Kay: Hopes fade on finding Hoffa

Former weapons inspector David Kay said today that finding the remains of ex-Teamster's boss Jimmy Hoffa was "unlikely."

Kay, who recently admitted that significant stockpiles of illicit weapons of mass destruction were not likely to be found in Iraq, blamed the CIA and other intelligence agencies for overstating the case for uncovering Hoffa's remains.

"I don't think we're finding Judge Crater, either," said Kay. "Whoops."

Kay also said that despite intelligence reports to the contrary, he did not expect to locate the Loch Ness Monster, DB Cooper, Vanilla Ice's career, or your car keys.

Audio files of The Blogging of the President show are posted at MPR.

Today's sessions at the UNC J-school weblog conference have been cancelled due to the snow and ice. I feel bad for the folks who worked so hard to plan the event. We'll see how tomorrow goes...

Doc blogged the Lydon radio show.

The single most important thing discussed in terms of news about online campaigning: Republican strategist Max Fose promised a huge Internet push from Bush, who has an enormous email database at his disposal. Fose: You're going to see the 800 pound gorilla come out of the closet.

I enjoyed my time on-air with Chris and Josh Marshall, thought we had a reasonably substantive conversation about the hype and reality of online tools in politics.

The second hour of the program was less concerned with campaigns, Jeff Jarvis evangelized the medium and was especially good on Iraq and Iran, but the show eventually devolved into a slap-fight between Atrios and Andrew Sullivan, which was entertaining but not terribly illuminating.

Philip Larkin, First Sight: "All they find, outside the fold/Is a wretched width of cold."

What a brilliant ending to that poem.

Lots of snow on the ground, no school today, ice on the way -- the weather twinkies on TV keep saying we're going to have a "significant icing event" -- and we haven't even baked our cake yet.

Keep the laptop charged, hope to get to Chapel Hill for the weblog conference tomorrow, and for the State-Carolina game Weds....

Radio daze: don't forget Chris Lydon's political blogging extravaganza, tonight at 9 eastern. If it's not on your public radio station, you can listen on the Web by clicking the "listen live" link near the top of the MPR page.

What do you do when your candidate says something you don't agree with?

At Erskine Blogs, I discuss my problems with a quote attributed to Bowles about his total opposition to same-sex marriages.

Tom Friedman on the economic backwardness of the Muslim heartland: "(A)t Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley...they have this really amazing electronic global map that shows, with lights, how many people are using Google to search for knowledge. The region stretching from Morocco to the border of India had almost no lights."

The Internet is overrated as a campaign tool.

The Internet is an essential campaign tool.

John Edwards has some grit.

These and other lessons from Iowa in this morning's newspaper column. The lag time between writing and publishing for print has never seemed longer -- it's really frustrating.

Dan Herzlich, commenting at Buzzmachine, takes the popped-bubble meme to the next level: "Bottom line: blogs have done more damage to the Democratic party than most are willing to admit."

I don't buy it. Maybe if Dean runs a long, futile, draining campaign, or runs as a third-party candidate, you could say that -- but that would be less about blogs (or more properly, the broad range of Internet tools used in online campaigning, of which blogs are just one) than it would about Dean.

Thanks in large part to Dean, every major Democratic candidate is serious about using the Net, and each will continue to develop his online abilities. Clark has been strong online since he started, Kerry and Edwards are in the game. Cheap, fast, ubiquitous tools for fundraising, organization, and sharing information are now part of Democratic campaign culture. This is a bad thing?

Finally, a political point. Dean, by and by extension the Democrats, are saying to young, wired voters: we want to be your party. It may not be enough -- there are of course plenty of conservative young people, and plenty of conservatives online, and anyway there can't be many people ready to vote for "the Internet candidate" instead of the candidate who makes the most convincing case on the economy, national security, etc. But in cultural terms, Dean's campaign has helped push the Democrats in front of a new generation, and that could yield dvidends for elections to come.

Blogging of the President, tomorrow night, 9-11 eastern, on public radio, although apparently not on WUNC or WFDD --  but no worries, you can listen online. Jarvis has a list of the contributors, including (as noted in his comment section) me.

Update: Here's the MPR page on the program.

AP article on blogs, complete with a photo of Josh Marshall dressed like a journalist. The focus is on blogs as media, not much on use by campaigns themselves.

Obligatory pooh-poohing by an "expert": "Larry Purpuro, coordinator of the Republicans' e.GOP Project in 2000, said many bloggers were little more than 'armchair analysts in their bathrobes (with) no serious interest in leaving their living rooms to actually help the campaigns.'"

True enough, I guess -- but by the same logic, shouldn't every article about campaign coverage by Fox News and CNN include a paragraph noting that much television news is devoted to sensational murder and rape trials with no serious interest in actually covering the campaigns?

Not now, Lumberg, I've got a meeting with the Bobs.

Bowles Blog: "Is Meetup necessary for a single state race?"

Good question. I think that in local races, a candidate can use a weblog and comments for oganization. (Hoggard might have thoughts on this.) But in a big state like NC, Meetup could still be one tool among others for getting people together. Meetup alone is not adequate, statewide or nationally.

The point is the meeting, not how the meeting is scheduled. From what I know, lots of people at Meetups find out about them offline.

Is Oliver Willis going to switch back to Edwards? Not yet. O-dub is still dancing with Dean, but his eyes are definitely wandering around the room.

And maybe it's the light, or that second glass of punch, but damn, his old flame looks nice.

Oliver bailed on Edwards last summer, in part because his campaign wasn't doing enough online.

Now Oliver is thinking electability...and meanwhile Edwards has continued to build his online capabilities...

Freda Payne: "Love me like you tried before."

Josh Marshall: "the Internet funding model which Dean spearheaded and Clark picked up, changes the dynamic in a fundamental way...it creates a much more frictionless universe of political giving where a big rush of support could be quickly harvested in the form of political cash."

Yes. This is an area where the Internet's speed and ubiquity transforms a timeless element of political campaigns. Money will always matter, that's something the Net doesn't change. But you can get money in new ways that change the rules of the game.

That's why it was so smart for Kerry to make sure that JohnKerry.com address was highly visible on Monday night. Not so people would say, oh, he's got one of those Internets, too, they're all the rage and changing politics forever. But so that anyone who wanted to could go to the address and in minutes contribute to his campaign (and find out how to volunteer, etc.)

Edwards raised a lot of money early. If he's strong in SC, he could raise a lot more money in a hurry. And then he can say on his weblog, look at how much we raised yesterday, help us raise more tomorrow.

Josh also says that Edwards is mesmerizing on the stump, but didn't leave a lasting impression. I find that our Senator is much better in person than on TV, but still better on TV than most other people, including (to damn Edwards with faint praise) Bush.

"The Think! flag was created by the writer and software developer Dave Winer in the days after 9/11. 'It's the combination of love, strength and thought, which is the best of the USA,' Winer wrote at the time on his Internet journal, Scripting News. The image is unabashedly pro-American, and the challenge to exercise our brains and our freedom to use them is bracing." (N&R column, 4/21/02).

Conservative Canadian web antics: Belinda Stronach, a candidate for Conservative Party leadership, bought Google ads keyed to the names of her opponents, and launched a website of her own that has been described as both "engaging" and looking like "porn spam."

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has a weblog, FromTheRoots.org.

Senator Jon Corzine: "I have been inspired by the success of pioneering online communities like MoveOn.org and the Democratic presidential campaigns."

I'd seen the ads -- brawny guys shot in black and white, expressing their surprise that the new Hardee's ThickBurger is so darn good. I was skeptical, just like the guys in the ads, except in color, and less brawny. Being a native North Carolinian, I know from a lifetime of experience that Hardees, well, sucks, except for the biscuits and (at selected locations) fried chicken.

But it was 1:30 and I'd worked through lunch again so I went to the drive-thru Hardees on Market and got me the smallest ThickBurger they would shove through the window, the 1/3 pounder, hold the bacon and cheese and prions, please.

It was good.

Not just bigger than a Wendy's single, but better -- probably the best fast-food burger around. Ample enough that you can skip the fries and convince yourself it's a healthy meal.

Truth in advertising. Decent food at Hardees. What's next? Probably Hardees switching to cheaper beef, or discontinuing the product.

Tom Friedman: "Without a serious Democratic critique of the war ó and I define 'serious' as one that connects with the gut middle-American feeling that the Islamist threat had to be confronted, but one that lays out a smarter approach than the Bush team's ó Mr. Bush has gotten away with being sloppy and unprepared for postwar Iraq."

"To the degree that local organizing capabilities matter in the caucus system, Iowa is a great test. But itís also a limited one, because most states send voters to the polls ñ so in that sense, New Hampshire and other early states will be more relevant, because they will measure the ability of the Dean campaign to translate the preliminary real-world activities we know it can generate into the ultimate offline activity for any campaign ñ voting."

That's me, quoted by Jay Rosen, last November.

Jay teased a lot of meaning out of the Baseline case study of Dean's online campaign, including this key point: "Dean is a big deal whether he or not he prevails in the end. This scrambles the brains of the press in the degree that the press believes its own story-- that winning the race is not only the point of a presidential campaign, but also the departure point for reporting on it, the base line for the political story, the thing that's really real."

Leonard Witt interviews Chris Lydon:

If in this election you had to choose between blog coverage and mainstream media coverage, what would be your choice and why?

Lydon: I read the mainstream media mainly to observe its manipulations and mistakes--it has been my world for many years and I have a lot of friends there. I would miss it some, but for information and provocative reflection on what this election is about, no question I would choose the Web, including the beloved blogs.

I'm glad I don't have to choose. Not a fair fight anyway since blogs link to and comment on big media. Blogging -- it's a candy mint and a breath mint.

Vernon Robinson is not a one-issue candidate. No, the man who would succeed Richard Burr in Congress won't stop at sneaking one-ton monuments onto public property and signing his name to the Ten Commandments. Robinson also lists "Hollywood Elitists" among his campaign issues, right after taxes and before education.

Robinson: "I think the Motion Picture Association of America should add a new movie rating to go along with the G, PG, PG-13, and R. A new rating of T for "Treason" would mean that all of the actors in this movie have given aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime and have interfered with the military operations of the United States."

Hey, Jack Kemp, good choice on the endorsement.

Salon's Farhad Manjoo: "Dean's loss in Iowa deflates, at least temporarily, the Web-conquers-politics bubble." Includes a good discussion (with quotes from Jeff Jarvis, identified not by his big-media job but, correctly in this context, as a blogger) of the dangers of campaign blogs as echo chambers.

One of the questions that remained unanswered as Dean's online momentum built was this: what happens when your empowered supporters say the wrong things and get you in trouble?

Scott Rosenberg identified one instance of that phenomenon in the MoveOn ad imbroglio.

In Dean's case, it wasn't a particular quote that hurt him. But I think the consistent stridency of some Dean supporters, on his blog and others, contributed to his image as a strident candidate. The attitude verged on cocky. And apparently his volunteers on the ground didn't do such a great job, either.

Reflecting on the way the campaign portrays itself, one woman tells Manjoo, "We should no longer be Deanies, Deany Babies or Deaniacs. We are Dean supporters."

That's an improvement, but what they really should say is this: We're Democrats, looking for the candidate who both represents as many of our personal views as possible AND has a good chance of beating George Bush.

Daily Kos: "Gephardt and Dean turned out to be Trojan horses for Kerry and Edwards. That is, they brought the bodies and the resources and the logistics to bear, which drove up the turnout. But they couldn't then persuade those turned out to stay with them once they arrived out of the cold and into the school auditoria and community centers."