My newspaper column looks at some of the emerging conventional wisdom about the web and politics, with cautionary tales involving (among others) John Edwards and Mitch Johnson.

The way we politick now

by Edward Cone
News & Record
2-18-07

Things happen quickly on Internet time, with yesterday's novelty becoming today's necessity. A couple of stories with local angles show how that truism applies to politics.

It's been less than five years since Tara Sue Grubb, a hitherto unknown challenger to congressman-for-life Howard Coble, earned national media attention for being the first candidate to write her own campaign weblog. And it was just four years ago that Mathew Gross (who now makes his home in Greensboro) invited himself to Howard Dean's Vermont headquarters to help create a ground-breaking online political campaign.

Today the importance of online campaigning is a given. Gross hired on as an Internet strategist with the John Edwards presidential effort before the former North Carolina senator even announced his bid for the White House. The Internet seems likely to be the same kind of game-changer in 2008 that television was in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy race, and the day-to-day business of government is starting to play out online too, as both officials and citizens get accustomed to new media.

Political rule book

But the pace of change is causing some growing pains as well -- just ask the Edwards campaign, which stumbled across its own staff bloggers not long after its formal launch. The political rule book is being rewritten, so I thought it might be helpful to jot down some of the things we've learned so far:

* If the Web really matters, treat it like it matters. Zack Exley, a veteran of the Kerry presidential campaign, said recently at his blog that for too many organizations, "the 'Internet strategy' is still something separate and still not something for which the inner circle takes full personal responsibility. They need to think about the Internet with the same intensity, curiosity and rigor that they apply to television, polling, speech writing/making and debate performance. This is the cycle when it is just complete idiocy to treat base-building through the Internet with one iota less seriousness than those other critical areas."

* Google is forever; plan accordingly. Edwards seemed to score a coup by hiring a pair of accomplished bloggers for his team. But no sooner were Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan on board than opponents dug up some incendiary stuff the women had written at their own blogs. Edwards, caught between liberal bloggers who wanted him to stand by his hires and critics who wanted the bloggers fired, disavowed the comments but allowed the women to stay on staff; Marcotte and McEwan resigned last week. In a world where people can publish their thoughts with the click of a mouse, this kind of thing is going to happen a lot. The line between public and personal statements may be redrawn, but in the meantime the campaign's failure to anticipate and plan for this is inexplicable.

* You can't win if you don't play. Greensboro City Manager Mitch Johnson is frustrated that bloggers are criticizing him without following the usual protocol of professional journalism by calling him to get his side of the story. It's good that he's paying attention, and the promise of communication with citizen publishers is healthy too, but Johnson needs to take a more active approach. He made a decent start recently, amid a controversy over payments to a contractor, by sending me a detailed e-mail that I was allowed to post at my Web site. Now he needs to consider answering comments at blogs or, better yet, starting a blog of his own. The Web is a participatory medium and a contact sport, and you can't get much done from the sidelines.

* Internalize the lessons of the recent past. Some of this stuff should be familiar by now, but the Edwards debacle shows that people aren't always playing by the new rules. You've heard this before: Use new media to influence old media, for example, and read the Web to find out what people are talking about outside the campaign bubble. Understand that the news cycle is dead and that stories don't just fade away anymore; the Web operates in an eternal present, where information gets posted in close-to-real-time and remains a click away forever. If you don't believe it, ask former Sen. George Allen; better yet, just go to YouTube, where his "macaca" moment is still playing.

* Keep up with the changes because they keep coming. Web video seemed exotic when we talked about it at the 2005 ConvergeSouth conference, but Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson all used it to announce their candidacies (and Amanda Congdon, who ran that blog-video session at the Greensboro conference, is now a correspondent for ABC News). The cutting edge of social networking in the last presidential campaign meant bringing people together via Meetup.com; now contenders for the White House are working their social networks like middle-schoolers with their first MySpace pages. That's an important shift because it recognizes the power of the Internet as an organizing tool, not just as a publishing platform and fund-raising machine.

There's something important in this litany for regular folks, too. A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project showed that more and more people are getting their political news online and participating in politics via the Web. You may be a part of that trend already. If not, you probably will be soon.

© News & Record 2007

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.

Comments

[kmr]

Nuther good column Ed.

[Roch101]

u r smart.

[coturnix]

OK, now try to predict the future: 2008, 2012, 2020, 2080?

Is this the moment of evolution of the entire campaign process with an inevitable clash between the old-style and new-style? And the old style will inevitably go join the dinosaurs?

[greensmile]

Great insights ['specially since I already had one and a half of them on my own] Mr. Cone!

Thank Coturnix for finding you another regular, albeit distant, reader.

This seems a good point to ask a question: Do the "old media" [lets say Time/CNN] "get" blogging as a channel of political news and discourse? They seemed quick to report the embarrassing mismatch of Marcotte and Edwards as if blogging were too much for campaigners to handle. Time actually has bloggers on its website but I get the feeling there is always a leash.

Blogging is too amorphous yet and may always be but your synopsis of its standards is apt. The trust Amanda's readers place in her is strongly dervives from the fact that she seems to write without a leash. But then, similar things could be said of Limbaugh I suppose. Why is there not symmetry of consequence for rabid rightwing and untactful leftwing expression?

[BrianR]

Your points are spot on as usual Ed. Bravo!

[Heather Flanagan]

It is my goal to have people recycling their TVs by 2013! Just watch me do it!