Articles
Youth Vote and Technology
As this seemingly endless election nears its final days, I've been talking nearly endlessly about the themes of "The First Campaign" and especially about young voters. I've given something like a dozen speeches in the last two weeks of this election, including at George Washington, the University of Florida, and Harvard Business School just yesterday.
The subject of new media seems particularly of interest to foreign political groups visiting the U.S.; I've spoken recently to groups from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Germany, and a whole host of Latin American countries.
Here are some of the articles that I've been quoted in recently:
Garrett Graff, author of The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House, believes young voters -- especially the first-timers -- are savvier and more committed than they're getting credit for.Graff pointed to the Iowa caucuses: ``Four times as many under-30 voters participated in the Iowa caucuses this year as in 2004. In Missouri we saw three times as many, and in Tennessee three times as many.''
Graff believes that outreach to younger voters using technology familiar to that age group -- text messaging and social websites such as Facebook -- will keep them engaged through Election Day.
I was also a guest on The Guardian's weekly tech podcast: "Garrett Graff of the Washingtonian told me more than a month ago that if Barack Obama won the election it would be because of his innovative use of the mobile phones. Mobile phones were part of an overall digital strategy that turned millions of supporters into an army of volunteers and donors. Even before the general election, Obama's internet strategy had already proven decisive, Garrett said. He had already defeated the most powerful machine in the Democratic Party: The Clintons."
The Boston Phoenix: "McCain is actually no Luddite.... But you wouldn’t know that from the way the McCain campaign has seemed to distance itself from technology. Though the Republican candidate’s Web site does have the nowadays-requisite Flash videos and a blog that’s updated a few times a day, 'the McCain campaign seems like it’s going out of its way to avoid using modern technology,' says Garrett M. Graff, author of The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. 'There is no documented proof that the McCain campaign has sent out a text message. I have never heard of it [a McCain text message], and I know of no one who has.'"
Now, just for the record, the McCain campaign did, after this article came out, send a single text message to voters the day before the election. One text message. Once.
Continuing my unofficial international speaking tour, I'm off to Duke next weekend for a panel and then on to the University of Missouri, Westminster College, and then, of all places, Spain to speak at the 2008 NewsXchange conference.
Bragging Rights
I called it! Back in January, the day after the Barack Obama lost the New Hampshire primary, during a TV interview for a New York show called "The Digital Age," I predicted that Obama would still be the nominee for the party and then go on to win the election:
I'm happy today that it was caught on video. On the other hand, if Hillary had won, I probably wouldn't be bragging about my crystal ball powers.
Hey Big Spender
I've got a piece in today's New York Post about the incredible amount of money that's been raised so far in this presidential election. I've been following this story for two years and even I was surprised when I dove into the numbers.
Here's the chart that accompanied the article:
Text the Vote
I've spent much of the last couple of weeks interviewing people and thinking about Barack Obama's online and offline organizing strategy. It's a very impressive operation—one that is not getting the credit it deserves (which is, I believe, precisely what the Obama campaign wants it to be: off the radar and away from the glare of the campaign spotlight).
My debut op-ed in the New York Times today deals with the Obama campaign's innovative use of text messaging for offline organizing:
"Sometime between now and the convention, Barack Obama, just like the cool kid in study hall, will surreptitiously send a text message announcing his pick for vice president. The ploy may seem silly — the fad candidate adopts the latest tech fad — but it’s an important part of one of Mr. Obama’s most under-recognized campaign efforts."
Read the whole thing here. I have to say: It's pretty cool to be published on the same page as Thomas L. Friedman.
Happy Birthday Macaca!
My latest Capital Commentary today celebrates the 2nd birthday of the "Macaca video" that doomed George Allen with my roundup of the best, most influential, and groundbreaking political videos of the 2008 election.
My favorite is still the Chuck Norris facts ad:
The Ultimate G-Man
I've spent much of this spring and summer working on a giant piece for the magazine about the FBI Director Robert Mueller and the Bureau post-9/11. It was a fascinating story to write and research—I was really surprised at how little institutional attention had been paid to the Bureau by the media.
Here's the story, "The Ultimate G-Man: Robert Mueller":
The sun had just come up when Robert Mueller and James Comey walked up to the West Wing of the White House shortly after 7 am on March 12, 2004. Mueller and Comey had been up for much longer. Neither the FBI director nor the deputy attorney general had slept much in the previous week, and that was before al Qaeda terrorists killed 191 people in train bombings around Madrid. It was windy and cool; the thermometer hovered at 40 degrees as the two men prepared to brief the President.It was, both fully expected, the last time they would enter the White House. In their desks at the FBI and Justice Department were letters of resignation they expected to submit; they would be joined by a dozen other Justice and FBI officials. The only reason the letters hadn’t been submitted already was that the men, at the request of the attorney general’s chief of staff, were waiting until John Ashcroft had recuperated from gallbladder surgery to the point where he could resign as well.
To understand that day, you have to go back to the 73-word oath that kicks off every federal career.
If you read it for nothing else, read it for the final story about the hospital incident with John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales.
Tweeting Democracy
I spend a lot of time trying to cajole Republicans towards understanding and better using technology and so I wanted to give credit where credit is due: John Culberson and other House Republicans are really doing some ground-breaking stuff in their energy protest in the House.
You can read my full Capital Commentary on the subject here.
McCain and the Internets
I'm really concerned about the extent to which John McCain has checked out of the technological era and so spent this week's Capital Commentary talking about it:
There was a time back in 2000 during his maverick, Straight Talk Express-debuting run for the White House when John McCain was the master of online technology. It was, after all, his surprisingly strong online fundraising haul that allowed him to stay competitive after a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary. The Web back then was a different place. In the parlance of the Internet, it was Web 1.0—brochure-like Web sites focused mostly on e-commerce with little to no interactivity. It was a one-way medium.Over the last eight years, there’s been an explosion of innovation online as the Web moved into what is now known as Web 2.0—highly interactive and engaging Web sites characterized by information sharing and collaboration on projects, as well as sites like Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, YouTube, Flickr, and Digg that allow users to network, create content, and build communities. John McCain seems to have missed this movement—an oversight that may have profound implications both for his campaign and the entire nation if he is to become president.
You can read the whole thing here. This has been an issue I've been following since last fall (here's my Washington Post op-ed on the subject) and that I explore in much greater depth in "The First Campaign."
Politico Props
Thanks to Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej for including "The First Campaign" in their roundup of the best "Politics 2.0" books for summer reading.
Netroots Nation
I'm starting to write a weekly political/Washington column for the magazine website entitled "Capital Commentary," playing off my section, Capital Comment. The first column deals with the Netroots Nation convention in Austin, Texas, where I spent the last week. It's certainly come a long way since the first convention two years ago in Las Vegas.
The blogger convention in Las Vegas, then called YearlyKos, was fiery and filled with the tensions of a new power base emerging in the party. Columnists like Maureen Dowd trooped out to the Riviera Hotel, on the seedy end of the Las Vegas strip, and Democratic leaders like Harry Reid spoke, albeit warily at times.The environment this past weekend bespoke a new level of maturity and acceptance among the blogging crowd. This year’s location, the glassy and professional behemoth that is the Austin convention center, is best-known as the setting for tech’s biggest confab, the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, and the national press corps was mostly elsewhere. The bloggers are not news anymore.
You can read all my future Capital Commentary columns on the Capital Comment blog.
Wired: Picking the Next President
I achieved one of my mini-career goals this month with the publication of my first Wired article. In the article, which was part of their cover package on "The Petabyte Age," I look at the Democratic firm Catalist, which is trying to build the most comprehensive political database ever imagined:
"Want to know exactly how many Democratic-leaning Asian Americans making more than $30,000 live in the Austin, Texas, television market? Catalist, the Washington, DC, political data-mining shop, knows the answer. CTO Vijay Ravindran says his company has compiled nearly 15 terabytes of data for this election year — orders of magnitude larger than the databases available just four years ago. (In 2004, Howard Dean's formidable campaign database clocked in at less than 100 GB, meaning that in one election cycle the average data set has grown 150-fold.) In the next election cycle, we should be measuring voter data in petabytes."
Teaching and USNS Mercy
Just wanted to give a nod to one of my star students from the spring semester, who does public affairs for the Navy and just returned from helping to set up the public affairs portion of a hospital ship's trip to Southeast Asia. She even got her ship's captain blogging:
"It has been a busy time here aboard Mercy. Our scheduled four day stop in Pearl Harbor was cut to a two day stop in order to get us headed west sooner. I’m sure that many of you are asking the question, “With what has happened in Myanmar, will USNS Mercy be going to help?” As of right now, I have to say, “I just don’t know.” With this early departure from Hawaii, the powers-that-be are certainly positioning us to do that – provided, of course, the government of Myanmar would let us in. Too many unknowns at this time to know what the outcome might be."
I'm really proud of Rosie and how much she's internalized and evangelized the stuff that we learned this spring. Go Navy!
G4
Here's my debut on G4's "Attack of the Show" from last night, talking about YouTube and the 2008 election:
Hunter Allen
I found out this week that one of my colleagues from Dean for America passed away. Hunter and I worked really closely together during my first months at the campaign before he shipped out to Iowa. He'd come to the campaign from LA because he really believed in it and Howard Dean and he was always energetic and lots of fun.
The only team photo we ever took on the campaign was when Peter Jennings came to visit the headquarters:
One of my funniest memories of Hunter was that during the campaign Friendster was really big and he didn't want any ambiguity about his photo—so he had me take this one in front of the restroom:
Anyway, we'll miss you Hunter. I'm sorry that I'll miss the memorial service on Saturday.
The Audacity of Hope
So an email just arrived from Hillary Clinton thanking me for all of my support: "I want to personally thank you for all you've done to support our campaign. Your continuing commitment over the past months to the values we share means so much to me."
As a special thank you gift for my undying, unending, unyielding support for All Things Hillary, she wanted to send me a Hillary for President bumper sticker.
The catch? If you go to the website, it says the bumper sticker will arrive in six to eight weeks, meaning late May or early June—or roughly three to five weeks after the North Carolina primary, which is widely seen as a possible end to the primary season. I guess she's planning on winning the nomination—or sending out a lot of bumper stickers a couple of weeks after losing.
