Internet Age

I never imagined that I would feature the thoughts of David Axelrod in a neutral to positive light, but that's exactly what I'm going to do here. Axelrod spoke about his time at the Chicago Tribune Monday night at The Week magazine's "Sixth Annual Opinion Awards Dinner":

"When I began reporting, the news cycle was 24 hours, not 30 minutes. There was no cable or Internet. The pacing was different, as were the competitive pressures. Reporters were not asked to file five and six times a day; on three or four platforms; to blog and tweet.

"Don't get me wrong: the Internet and the availability of the latest news when you want it has enormous value. But it has also contributed at times to sloppy journalism and a dumbed-down public debate. It's become a carnival where every day is Election Day; where we're consumed with who's up and who's down; where we book people on TV to do nothing more than argue with one another, generating more heat than light; where we allow ourselves to be caught up in the trivial tempest of the moment. And I know my profession is not blameless. Folks in our end of the business often feel compelled to play along, feed the beast, and help contribute to an atmosphere of cynicism."

If journalists are not totally blameless, who else is to blame? Has it consumed leaders, thinkers and wanna-be leaders/thinkers on the Right (as well as the Left)? There's no doubt that the Internet has shortened everybody's attention span. Specifically for the Right, I think journalism's new negative effect on public discourse has hampered the Republican Party's ability to dramatically change for the better.

As Jon Henke points out in the last post, "repackaging the status quo is not how the movement and the GOP will be renewed." One of the reasons why the GOP might be sticking to repackaging the status quo is that often times going the "easy and lazy" route seems like the only option in a "30 minute news cycle." Axelrod provides another thought on this subject:

"That's why, more than ever, we need the true public thinkers. People who take the time to ponder and reflect and examine issues in a usefully provocative way. Serious people, with serious ideas."

Unfortunately for Axelrod, he works for a President who is a pretender, someone who isn't following the advice given above. Obama's version of "bipartisanship" is giving the visual of reaching out to conservatives, and then ignoring them when it comes to substantive matters. And Obama's ideas aren't new and provocative in any way: more government spending, more government involvement in the market, more government involved in energy, education, health care, etc. For now, he has successfully duped much of the public into thinking his ideas are "new" just because he himself is "new."

So unlike Obama, can the Right successfully take Axelrod's thoughts into practice? Can we produce serious people with serious ideas and fight the "dumbing down" of public discourse? Yes ...

• First, let's look outside of Capitol Hill for serious people with serious ideas. As I mentioned yesterday, a lot of great ideas on government transparency are coming from state legislatures.
• Second, lawmakers and other leaders on the Right should use the Internet more for promoting ideas than promoting themselves. (I know that this is a long shot.) For a Congressman to get a lot of Facebook friends and Twitter followers is fine. But when will that Congressman start a Facebook group about the need for more nuclear power plants in America to reduce our dependence on foreign oil instead of a Facebook message about how Democrats are bad? When will that Congressman tweet prolifically about immigration and become the go-to-guy/gal on that issue instead of only tweeting his/her office's press releases?
• Third, the Right should let ideas lead to movement instead of the other way around. Jon also comments on the recent formation of the National Council for a New America as a group that says "let's start an organization, then figure out why later." As he says, this does not inspire confidence. The Tea Parties showed a glimmer of hope for the Right after Rick Santelli rant; I just wished that there was more public discussion on the core substance of Santelli's message: moral hazard.

An overarching theme for a good public debate, as I have mentioned several times before, is the principle of an "equal opportunity society," where it becomes a discussion about whether government's job is to guarantee certain outcomes by picking winners and losers in society or to provide everyone the equal opportunity to determine their own success. Just as liberals want an active government that promotes specific outcomes, we have to be for an active government that promotes choice and freedom instead of just relying on the "less taxes, less government" message.

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT: Let's take time to think about how we can get ahead of the strategic curve in the long term while coming up with tactics to win in the short term.

Hat tip to Katie Harbath for tweeting this news item: "Three-Quarters of the World's Messages Sent By Mobile"

"According to TNS Global, 74% of the world’s digital messages were sent through a mobile device in January 2009, a 15% increase over the previous year.

"As for developed countries, the PC e-mail remains the most popular message method, but its use is waning.

"In Japan, 40 out of 100 e-mails sent are from a mobile device. In North America, 69% of those using e-mail on their mobile phone use it daily, high compared with 43% worldwide."

I've written previously about the Pew Internet & American Life Project's "Future of the Internet Report," which has two interesting observations: (1) the mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020, and (2) the divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations. The National Taxpayers Union put things to practice recently, launching a text messaging advocacy service, a creative tool to enhance that organization's grassroots operations.

Rebuilding our party doesn't only mean taking an inventory of every tool that's available and seeing how those tools fit campaigns and party organizations today; it also means seeing what the trends might be 5, 10 or 20 years from now and creating tools that can put us ahead of the curve. I do not have the proper fusing of sufficient technical skills with amazing creativity that many programmers and coders do ... which is why Code Red has been launched.

So despite my relative technical ignorance, I think a few observations need to be made about how campaigns might be affected, and where can campaigns might go, with increased use of mobile messaging. Yes, all parts of the campaign will be affected from communications on down. But increased use of mobile devices by voters to get most of their information will have a special impact on GOTV operations:

• Voter identification, persuasion and GOTV efforts will have to be more integrated. With personal and work time being merged as well as physical and virtual reality, campaigns and party organizations will have to embark on a long term, on-going voter identification efforts to see when and how often they receive messages and Internet content.
• With social networking sites and programs going mobile, GOTV messages will have to balance simplicity with engaging material. GOTV messages won't only come in the form of SMS and MMS. These alerts will come via Facebook and Twitter as well, where more and more this social networking activity takes place on iPhones and BlackBerries. Sending simple information on polling locations as well as early and mail-in ballot voting will have to become more easily searchable on any mobile device. Voters will also want a quick and easy way to engage with the campaign or party organization if they want to: a mobile version of an "action center" will have to be developed.
• As more and more messages are sent via mobile devices, the tools developed by campaigns and party organizations might need to expand horizontally to include different versions for different devices. The Obama app for the iPhone has somewhat started this thought. As the web will play a greater role in helping campaigns organically enhance their grassroots activism, those with different devices will need different versions of tools to suit their personal needs when receiving GOTV messages and spreading those messages to their neighbors, co-workers and family members.

Those are just some of my thoughts. I may be right. I may be way off base. How do you think campaigns will change with increased use of mobile devices?

In the meantime, RebuildTheParty.com reminds us all about the basics of GOTV ... Go Tedisco! 

A few weeks ago I joined the Open Debate Coalition, an effort to make the presidential debates more accountable to voters and in touch with the Internet Age.

The effort kicked off with a letter from Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig, who also founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and asks two things: 

1) Debate footage be authorized for public use.  Currently, it’s owned by the media and prohibited for reuse or repackaging by the public.

2) Townhall debate Internet questions be chosen by the public, and not solely the media.

Signers include political and new media enthusiasts from both sides of the aisle, mostly the Left (Arianna Huffington, Craig Newmark, MoveOn, Roger Hickey), but also right-leaning friends (me, Ruffini, Henke) including latest signer Grover Norquist.

While both candidates (McCain and Obama) blessed the letter with their endorsement of its principles, the debates did not change.  The media and the commission took minimal steps to support the release of debate footage and no steps to reform the debate format.

It’s too late to address the latter problem in this election, but the Commission does have a chance to make right the debate footage issue.  As Norquist said today:

If the Commission wants to show any bit of responsiveness this year, they'll make sure that debate footage is put in the public domain so people can put clips on YouTube and otherwise share key moments without being deemed copyright lawbreakers.

Nonetheless, both presidential candidates’ public endorsement of the open debate coalition principles set the standard for future presidential debates – and hopefully down-ballot debates in the interim. 

Democratizing the debate process -- something the Internet makes more possible -- goes beyond party or ideology.  It's about making the debates more accountable to those it's intended to serve -- the voters.

The candidates updating their approaches in response to the changing force of interactive media isn’t enough.  Debates matter.  And unless the presidential debate commission embraces reform, 2008 could well be their last year sitting on the debate throne.