Why the 2008 campaigns will keep the netroots at arm's length...
Or, at least the A-listers (maybe a few B's as well.)
Matt Stoller wrote yesterday:
Here's my sense of where the campaigns are. I'm no fan, but Hillary Clinton's announcement has been handled perfectly. The blog outreach was well-done, and it seems that calls went out to the right people at the right time. I have a well-placed friend today, a state operative not in a primary state, who got a call from a top Clinton strategist to tell him that Senator Clinton was going to call him in the next few days. Meanwhile, he can't get a call returned from either the Edwards or the Dodd camp despite having closer ties with both. This is consistent with what I know of the various operations.Though I'd probably back Edwards if you forced me to pick someone, the Edwards team is just not competent. They don't return calls. Despite being very good listeners, they don't play well with others, they are quite ineffective at coalition work, they are very top-down, and they are slow. On announcement day, their Plus Three website was down for at least part of the time, and they accidentally slipped up and released it early. You can smell that the progressive position Edwards is taking isn't quite real - he's trying, but he's not generating a crop of activists, the way Dean or Clark did in 2004. He could, but there's no sense of empowerment - it's all about Edwards, and there are two other superior quality narcissists in the race.
I'm going to ignore the purported slight against Matt's "well-placed friend", who I assume from context is from Connecticut, as I think it's only rational that Clinton would look for allies in neighboring (and wealthy) Connecticut, while Edwards' people have their hands full elsewhere.
But this overall critique frankly smells of, well, sour grapes. The big "activist" bloggers feel they earned their political operative street creds on the Lamont race, and are now rather peeved that the 2008 candidates don't jump through their hoops. But I can't be the only one who saw this coming, even last summer in the height of Lamontapalooza.
If I were the political director of, well, let's say Senator Edwards' campaign (since I have such a long term affinity for the man,) I would do exactly what they now seem to be doing - appealling to the readership of big blogs like dKos/MyDD/FDL through ads, diaries and properly-placed, well-informed supporters, but keeping the bloggers themselves at arm's length. The nature of their blogs, or at least their blogging style, require nothing less.
The big-box blogs have made their names (and traffic) mostly on red meat and controversy. Part of that comes at the expense of Democrats not deemed pure enough at any given time, for any given reason. There's no way a politician might know if s/he is next on the hit list, for whatever perceived crime or slight. At times, they appear to be nothing more than random drive-bys. And more and more, readers are left to wonder if the offenses are real, imagined, or the result of a personal feud, for not being "properly respected" by the campaigns.
But respected for what? Having a big soapbox? Being able to generate a few dozen phone calls and emails to villified Congressmen over some peeve of the hour? This is not to say that there haven't been excellent issue-specific campaigns run from blogs; the rubber stamp and network neutrality come to mind.
I read what I'd written so far, and asked Eric to comment on the idea of 2008 campaigns keeping big-box "activist" bloggers at arm's length; the discussion was very productive, so I requested he write down his thoughts, included in the box below.
The big box bloggers aren't doing electoral politics, there is no end, no point at which their reason for existence has been realized, and they can cease operations. They are not able to win and move on, as hacks must, to the next set of races in the next cycle, up or down ticket, or even in other political systems, for pay, but also for passion, and to some extent (disproved by the number of floaters we know personally) means tested for professional or avocational competency. They can't see any point at all in Africa or Africans or turn south and drop the I'm too sexy for the Americas attitude. Like the print and broadcast media market monopolies, they can't "leave town", and they can't live with peace, with the absence of controversy, contrived and the occasionally genuine, so they are "equal incumbency critical" and predictably, of necessity, must bite any hand.
The other issue which came up in our talk, which has also appeared in similar discussions on other blogs, is that there is are incentives, including financial ones, for controversy and red-meat; this is a significant concern, as most big-box bloggers are dependent these days on ad-revenue. And under the current model, controversy/red-meat equals traffic, even the spike of mere one-time rubberneckers. Thus, if there's a status or financial incentive to toss a particular candidate under the bus, even as they claim they're trying to "to help diagnose and address problems", the best course for any presidential campaign would be to keep a polite, but safe, distance.
Frankly, a safer, and more productive avenue for campaign-netroots interaction is on the policy blogs, or even in the big-box diaires. But that's another post.
Comments
Nicely said, MB and EBW. I kinda think Stoller has it backwards: the professional political operations are responding to the big bad-ass bloggers as they are not because they don't yet understand the power of the internet, but rather because the blogger honeymoon is over (I guess that would be the Dean and Lamont phenoms) and they're figuring out what's good for their candidacies, not what's good for red-meat-grinding controversy-generating advertisers. I mean, what's the lesson of Lamont? FDL got what it wanted out of Lamont, not vice versa. I suspect it's the bloggers who are lacking sophistication in this picture, not the professional campaigns.
Posted by: Kai | January 21, 2007 03:33 PM
I'm think the same as you and Kai. As long as campaigns can not control the message then they must disassociate with blogs. I'm glad that campaigns can't control the message in fact. I do think the Clinton blogger lunch was an attempt if not at control, then at toning down the anti-Hillary message of many of the larger blogs. I think campaigns would do well to be friendly to blogs while not specifically associating themselves, the Clinton blogger lunch would have been a brilliant example of this if they hadn't limited themselves to the big WHITE blogs. That controversy made sure any message was lost and so was much of the positive feelings towards the Clintons that could have come out of it. Another idea along these lines would be candidates that accept or initiate interviews with bloggers or pop in to comment from time to time.
Posted by: Donna | January 21, 2007 05:45 PM
Well, Stoller may not get responses to his calls because the sophisticated web people in various campaigns have made careful choices as to which bloggers to cultivate and which to ignore and Stoller is not on theri list for various reasons, including their need for their candidate to actually win an election, not win Stoller's approval (and Stoller does not like being ignored). There are plenty of bloggers that get instant responses from Edwards campaign - sorry Matt for not being on the list.
Posted by: coturnix | January 22, 2007 12:52 AM
Great post MB. Ironically, it seems that the Clintons (and others, like Edwards?) walked away from the Blogger lunch & the Lamont campaign meltdown (and it seems obvious, that Joe's campaign figured out how to play the bloggers--and more importantly the commenters--so that they became more of a liability to Lamont than to Lieberman) having learned some important lessons about blogs. You know that all of the campaigns are reading blogs carefully. And have learned that a "close" relationship with bloggers can do much more harm than good.
Even if there had been a fair representation of bloggers of color and the resulting controversy had not occurred, I don't think that the Clintonista's would've been successful at toning down the anti-Hilary rhetoric. That would've become clear to them. But as it was, they completely lost any ability to manage the subsequent PR, in fact it is interesting that the meeting was never ever mentioned by Peter Doua (& what the hell happened to the promised transcript?) I feel certain that staffs of both Clintons were paying close attention the the subsequent brouhahas.
My guess is that they are going to quickly become very savvy at driving traffic to their web sites --often, ironically, via the blogs-- where they can massage the "conversation.' But they are not going to rely on the internet to win elections.
Posted by: Sunrunner | January 22, 2007 10:35 AM
It may be relevant that few of the big box bloggers do much original work. For the most part, they're an echo chamber. They report or comment on the mainstream news, with occasional dollops of sloppy analysis. Every once in a while they'll pick up information or an idea from a B or C lister, usually to bash the news media for failing to cover the story.
Didn't pay much attention to the Clinton blogger lunch controversy at the time, but what struck me was that of the bloggers present whose work I know, none of them do any serious digging or add anything unpredictable. They mostly just quote each other. Were any truly original, tough-minded bloggers present? Was anybody of the stature of Robert Parry or Laura Rozen there, for example? No, it was just an occasion for Bill Clinton to chat up people who are eager to be taken seriously.
The big boxers are more about posturing and self-promoting, than about muckraking, shining light into dark corners of the government, providing a megaphone for the voiceless, organizing principled opposition--or anything involving real action beyond words.
So while I agree that many campaigns are going to be wary of linking themselves too closely to the pouters and the ranters among bloggers, I also think they'll suppose a lot of big box blogs can be coopted and tamed relatively easily...at least, once a Democratic nominee has been selected. Before that, blogs won't matter much. As a group they probably won't get behind a single candidate, and even if they did their influence in the real world would be minimal. Journalists and donors aren't going to take their cues from bloggers.
And once the nominee is selected, the big boxers aren't going to cut themselves out of the deal, however much they may cavil about details.
Posted by: smintheus | January 27, 2007 02:59 PM
I think that local blogs will also play a large part in the 2008 race. Blue Hampshire will be watching everyone very carefully and Blue Jersey may also have a chance to observe the candidates. The large blogs may link to these local blogs for information.
I also thought that blogs are an excellent avenue for candidates to say something beyond what EBW called the "Ameri-Moron shtick" IIRC. In the 2004 Missouri primary all three candidates gave the Jewish Light exactly the same message. It would benefit candidates in a state like New Jersey to realize that Jewish voters have been hearing this a hundred times and at least some are too smart for it. Jewschool would make a good venue for such an interview IMHO.
In contrast with Kos MyDD seems to me to be impossibly civil and reflective. Chris Bowers is what I want to be when I grow up.
Many, many thanks for splitting up Wider Recognition. Although I would call DovBear a "consonant blog", after last year I could not go back and tell the same 50 people DB had a shot to win. I thought at the time that although Echidne probably had the best blog among the finalists, it was sad that the blog world has become so centralized that the avalanche of voters would think she needed that particular award.
Posted by: 4jkb4ia | January 28, 2007 09:53 AM