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TechnologyDaily Mobile
Awaiting The E-Politics Revolution
by Ted Leventhal
The Internet made its greatest impact on politics to date during the presidential primaries, helping campaigns net record amounts of cash and empowering grassroots supporters of upstarts like Vermont's Howard Dean. But while the campaigns of both Republican President Bush and Democrat John Kerry are committing staff and resources to the Internet, it remains to be seen to what extent the Internet will revolutionize the 2004 campaign.
While the Internet has influenced presidential politics since 1996, Democrats and Republicans claim that a revolution is at hand. Each historical leap forward in media technology -- from radio to television to direct mail -- has altered presidential politics, and now both sides are preparing for the Internet revolution.
"Whichever party or whichever candidate masters the latest political communications technology has tended to be the party or candidate that has been successful and been dominant," Ken Mehlman, a campaign manager for the Bush-Cheney team, said at a conference on the Internet and politics earlier this month. "I believe that the Web is a similar trend in that long line, which is why I'm so committed to make sure that the Bush campaign and the Republican Party are working hard to master and utilize the Web."
Has The Internet Moment Come?
The Internet is at the level where television was during the 1960 debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, said Joe Trippi, the former campaign manager for Dean. Radio listeners thought Nixon won that debate, and television viewers gave victory to Kennedy, a moment that Trippi said people now realize as the time when it became clear "television would dominate our nation's politics and dominate the social fabric of the country in terms of its influence."
Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Foundation's Internet and American Life Project, downplayed talk of an imminent Internet political revolution, noting that the record sums Dean raised online ultimately paid for television advertising that yielded little payoff in terms of electoral success. "The day we know the Internet really matters in politics is the day money matters less," he said.
But Rainie added that Pew research shows more Americans are turning to partisan Web sites for cues on political subjects, so the Internet is helping to shape the electoral mind. "Every political group should think long and hard about using the Internet," he said.
Mehlman said the Bush campaign is using the Internet to help deliver the vote and get the campaign's message to the public. It has Web-enabled the entire national voter file, allowing supporters to work on voter registration from home, including online registration and absentee ballot forms.
The campaign's Web site feeds news to 2,200 affiliated sites. Another feature matches visitors' ZIP codes to local talk-radio shows, listing hosts, airtimes and talking points for the day. A similar tool generates letters to the editors of local newspapers. Mehlman said that during the congressional debate on late-term abortion issues, Georgewbush.com generated 9,000 letters to various editors in three days.
And in a nod to political "block parties" used by the Dean campaign and the liberal online organization MoveOn.org, the Bush campaign is planning nationwide "Parties for the President" on April 29.
Innovation From E-Mail To Online Video
The Bush campaign also has compiled a list of 6 million e-mail addresses that it contacts regularly. The list was compiled from various places, according to sources, including aggressive list-building efforts by the Republican National Committee in recent years.
"Everyone on that list opted in to receive messages," said Chuck DeFeo, the Bush-Cheney campaign's e-manager and previously a Web leader for the Republican National Committee. DeFeo said that with the Democratic primaries over, site traffic has grown significantly over the past month. "We now have an opponent," he said. "The president sent a message to the grassroots that the political season has begun, and we're excited about it."
DeFeo said 290,000 volunteers have joined the campaign online and pledged to conduct grassroots activities. "Being a volunteer is not just someone who's getting e-mail," he said.
The use of online video also has proven an early innovation in the 2004 campaign. Airing political advertisements online has rallied supporters and created "buzz" in the traditional media while sparing campaigns the cost of buying television airtime. DeFeo said Bush commercials have been viewed 2 million times online.
The Kerry campaign has been more tight-lipped about its plans, and declined to be interviewed for this article. Moora Aarons, a former executive with the online advertising firm iVillage.com is the campaign's director of Internet communications. Sanford Dickert, the Kerry campaign's chief technology officer, has held roles at Accenture, Cray Research and IBM.
Online fundraising is one of the site's strengths. The campaign disclosed last week that it has raised $20 million online since Jan. 1.
Victory Trumps Revolution Any Day
Some analysts predict that the classic top-down, tightly controlled campaign model will be the first casualty of Internet-age campaigns. With the nation politically divided and the election expected to be close, victory in November will come down to which campaign motivates its activists the best. But it is unclear if the campaigns will willingly cede power to activists.
"The grassroots has tremendous power when left alone, and it has exponentially more power now than it did four years ago," said John Hlinko, who led the online effort to draft Gen. Wesley Clark and later became the campaign's Internet director. Today's online political activists have hundreds to thousands of e-mail addresses of likely supporters, Hlinko said, and are eager to evangelize on behalf of the campaign.
Grassroots supporters conceive ideas and innovations and help shape the candidate messages in ways unknown to the campaign leadership, Hlinko said. Working with grassroots supporters is messy, time consuming, "a lot like herding cats," he added. "You don't want anarchy, but you don't want to stifle them either. It's a lot easier to stifle them, but that's a losing strategy."
In marketing politics or products "the extremes of either side don't work anymore," said Jonah Seiger, an Internet campaign consultant and founding partner of Connections Media. "You can't have a completely centralized campaign anymore because the medium doesn't let it happen," he said. But with an open campaign style such as that run by Dean also untenable, Seiger said, "hopefully one legacy of this campaign season will be how to find the sweet spot."
William Greene, however, said too much is at stake in the general election for the campaigns to abandon the traditional model. While both campaigns will use the Internet to feed information to supporters, control will remain at the top, said Greene, the director of Rightmarch.com, an umbrella group of conservative online organizations.
"Both parties are not as interested in empowering people as much as getting out the vote," he said. "Bush and Kerry are both trying to use the Internet for top-down grassroots activism. You won't see uncontrolled grassroots campaigning in a presidential election anytime soon. There's too much at stake. For the presidential campaign, it's all about winning."
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