Democracy: December 2006 Archives

This was a reaction to a different race: one in a different state for a different office in a different part of the country and for a different party, but this is as good a summary of the problems of not working with the netroots early as possible:

If a campaign doesn't engage the New Media early on, there will be three major problems:

1) Unfavorable frames and narratives will be free to develop in the media seed-bed of the blogosphere. Once developed, they become conventional wisdom and are very difficult to rebut.

2) The campaign will sacrifice the opportunity to develop their own narratives, or to frame upcoming issues for the Influentials.

3) Once the campaign does enter the blogosphere, they will face an uphill battle to cultivate credibility, interest, activists and notoriety.

I doubt better netroots engagement would have been enough to save Allen. The preponderance of evidence that the guy was an out and out racist only increased over the course of the campaign. That's a tough thing to un-spin no matter how many people you have trying to make the case for you.

Similarly, in retrospect, of course it's terribly unlikely that netroots outreach alone would have been enough to overcome both the structural advantages that Schwarzenegger had (like $45M of free earned media) and the series of strategic errors and missed opportunities that Phil's campaign was unable to successfully navigate. But campaigns are complex systems: they have to hit on all cylinders to run, and this was an unwise area to neglect.

The Angelides camp's official excuse for putting zero effort towards not doing this was that they couldn't afford it. But this rings a little hollow for two reasons. First, any campaign that's willing to spend $30 million + - in a primary - on TV ads isn't strapped for cash. Netroots outreach isn't fantastically complicated: I mean, we want to be reached! Even someone part time could have pulled together a blogger list and started talking to folks. Second, this isn't captured in the above three points, but a strategic direction for a campaign that takes the netroots into account is going to be cashflow positive. A small donor base may not be enough to fund megabuck TV ad buys, but Phil (for example) could have easily sparked enough interest to get a small donor base going that would have paid the way of the netroots coordinator and then some.

Hopefully this won't be a discussion we'll have to have for future candidates in this state.

Today marks the beginning of a new legislative session and the biggest test of the impact of term limits on California's legislature. This legislative year marks an historic event. With 36 new members of the lower house (that's almost 50% of the entire Assembly) and just about the last of the truly experienced senators now termed out, the impacts of term limits have created an unseasoned and inexperienced legislature and a huge gap of knowledge and know-how. The question of the day is whether a state that represents the 6th largest economy in the world and 1 out of every 8 Americans can be effectively governed by people who barely know their seating assignments, let alone how to legislate around a state of 35 plus million people?

Of course, there is much posturing and pomp on this day. It is, as I can vividly recall, full of excitement and expectation. Family gathers from all points on the map for the swearing in ceremony. Good staff has helped generate at least one bill (usually directly affecting one's district or meeting a specific campaign promise) for each new member to introduce by "putting the bill across the desk", thereby creating a perfectly legitimate press release to send to the media in their respective districts. The new era begins with lots of hopes and dreams......and in this particular session, with alot of built-in chaos.