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Sunday, January 25, 2004
Blogging of the Blogging of the President, Live 
| | Richard Reeves: Teddy white would tell Ferdinand & Isabella "What have I done?" Teddy focused on what do you do to become president. Everybody since then has adopted the narrative style of Teddy White. The difference: Teddy knew how it ended. Those since haven't. Candidates learn that the only requirement for the presidency is wanting it. Kennedy took the lead there. He began the rules change. You can get to be president by becoming well known. Hence, the rise of the media as kingmaker. |
| | People who want to reach high office need to use the technologies available at the time. TV found that football was more interesting to people than politics. People no longer needed the conventions, for example. The Superbowl replaced them. Television was so new in 1960 that Kennedy said Time Magazine was the most important medium to the presidency. The point: TV will decline, inevitably. TV was centralizing. The Net is decentralizing....I tend to think blogs will matter most in 2008 or 2012. They matter this time around, but they're still new. The Internet is certainly decentralizing the process of disseminating information. |
| | Chris is now setting up Josh Marshall. I couldn't begin to do what the wire services (etc.) do. Bogs mix in political commentary. Color commentary. "A certain intimacy." |
| | There are no space limitations... I can go at length in an interview... Traditional journalism has half a dozen kinds of features.... Blog journalism frees you from the false boundaries that keep the writer from communicating in the first person, both literally and figuratively, with the reader. |
| | Reeves: I love being on the bus... I'm too hide-bound to be part of (blogs)... It's much harder to write short than long. As Milton Glaser once said, the tighter the medium, the better you are. You don't want to run on at the mouth until you lose people you've gathered. |
| | Marshall: I get edited by myself... that sense of liberation from genres ... makes pieces shorter sometimes. |
| | Chris to Josh: Who is the new Henry Luce? Are we looking for the new bigfoot? |
| | Josh: Richard (Reeves) was right. Television was a centralizing medium. |
| | Chris to Josh again: What's happening in New Hampshire? |
| | Josh: Edwards and Clark's crowds were large and excited. Edwards especially has a mesmerizing effect. Kerry event much larger than the first two. Gives the feel that he is already in some sense the nominee. |
| | Chris to Ed Cone: Are you saying that when the market falls the fundamentals are solid? |
| | Ed: Kerry and Edwards have been using the tech too. You've got to have a good product. Maybe Howard Dean as a product lacks the Q rating or some other factors that you need. That's the bubble that popped. (The candidate, not the movement or the methods.) The Edwards campaign has been building and rebuilding. They're ready to accept a lot of traffic...As Josh was just saying, he is a mesmerizing speaker. If you meet him in person, you want to go home with him. |
| | Caller: I want to go home with (Dean). I am interested in this whole "angry guy" thing. He was funny ... and showed an incredible amount of intelligence. I'm a boomer with 4 college age kids. |
| | Caller: I've been a political professional -- I'm a satrist (?) now. Going to bulletin boards now (more than blogs). One thing that strikes me is that personal charisma is the overarching theme that carried the day. You can excite people with images or fancy words on a screen, but that is not going to carry to the voting booth. The story of blogs this year will be more hype than reality. |
| | Ed Cone: Once again, your two callers mentioned tools that were more than blogging. There are many other methods other than blogging. The whole point of online is to motivate people offline. People aren't going to vote because of a Web page any more than they'll vote because of a newspaper editorial. |
| | Josh: Fifty or a hundred years ago, people had clubs, much like social clubs, around politics. I agree with Ed that meeting online cannot replace personal contact, but it has brought back a certain kind of political contact that is verymuch about meeting people. It's not just about thinking about policy. It helps make politics very dynamic. The net has recreated something that we lost over a period of decades some time ago. |
| | Caller: Recently the media watchdog group did a survey that found that the U.S. had the 31st freest media in the world, tied with Greece. How do you see blogs affecting this reality, if it is a reality? |
| | Ed: We have a large degree of consolidation in corporate ownership. Meanwhile blogs let people talk back, and talk to each other. What's different about Dean is that the nodes on the network were allowed to operate autonomously. Whether that can be replicated... Who came out of the ecommerce bubble really strong? Wal-Mart. |
| | Caller: TV analysis is shallow and annoying anyway. It's been very handy to log on, find information, plus respond. There's an increasing amount of right wing (stuff) on sites (e.g. Dean's and the NY Times) that seems a bit organized. |
| | Ed: We live in a country that has a healthy and strong conservative population and they have computers too. We see some smart and interesting conservative blogging, and some rote (stuff) too. On both sides. |
| | Chris: An authenticity that distinguishes voices in the blogosphere... |
| | Now they're taking a break. And I'm having a hmm moment here. I really like hearing this. And knowing that thousands (millions) are listening out there. But I'm not getting much that's new to me. Okay, the break is over... |
| | Chris: The republican strategist Max Fose did McCain's campaign. |
| | Max: You're going to see the 800 pound gorilla come out of the closet ...after the dems have a candidate. Bush's email list is the largest in politics by a very long shot. |
| | Chris: who says the George Bush is bloggable? |
| | Max: Blogs are about political activism. Dean didn't lose because of the internet. He was competitive because of the internet. Bush can use the Net for the grass roots, to give them an avenue to get into the campaign. |
| | Chris: The Internet, they say, is direct mail without the postage. |
| | Max: ... with the ability to track. We can tell how many people are actually doing something with that email. Are they forwarding? Clicking through? Blogging? The Net is going to revolutionize... |
| | Chris: How many are church related? |
| | Max: I think a lot of them are. People meet at church. |
| | Chris: Want to observe what's happening on the democratic side? |
| | Max: Dean used (the Net) as an invisible tool. It allowed him to come out in first place in the first primary, around raising money. |
| | Josh: The conservatives will have a great time on the Internet. For decades they've been much better at this kind of organizing. This is a medium that clicks for a large slice of the demographic that clicks for the democratic party. The republicans have had that for a long time — with email, with talk radio... |
| | A caller doesn't know what a blog is. |
| | Anoter caller wants to know about the (Dean) bubble... |
| | The bubble line was Ed Cone's, but Ed's gone. |
| | Josh: That movement isn't just about Howard Dean. It will have a profound effect for years to come. |
| | A caller reads Josh and Atrios. Doesn't follow mainstream media. They however follow the bloggers. So they' re forcing issues into the major media. |
| | Max: The republican counter is, once the candidate is chosen on the other side, you'll see the switch turned on. It will bypass the media by going out to email boxes. It will be much more top-down. It will also be interesting to see what happens to the vast Net-activist team that Howard Dean has put together. He will have a seat at the table. |
| | Now they're taking a break at the hour. |
| | Chris is back: The inescapable new word ... is blog. How is the Internet changing culture, politics... |
| | Jeff Jarvis is the next guest. Chris calls him "A newsguy who has done it all..." |
| | Jeff: There is nothing so exciting as the new relationship with the new audience... We've only had the printing press for centuries. Now anyone anywhere in the world can publish their own story. Everybody owns one. It changes media... A buzzword in my business is diversity. You can get huge impact... Suddenly the people have a voice, and we can listen if we're smart. Everyond in power is used to a one-way street. i was trained to tell people what we thought you ought to know. In the words of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which is a wonderful book markets are conversations. |
| | Jeff talks so fast, it's hard to keep up... For bloggers to think that mainstream pubs aren't needed any more insults the memory of Danny Pearl, who gave his life to get the facts...The cream rises to the top. The truth is the first step is not for the big orgs to do it themselves. It's for the big orgs to read blogs. Now Jeff goes into the story of the persian bloggers. One hundred thousand blogs out of Iran talking about all kinds of stuff. It's a huge revolution. Now we're seeing the same thing out of Iraq. Jeff sent a camera to one blogger in Iraq and the pictures have showed up in Magazines. |
| | Chris: New and different kind of media process? |
| | Jeff: Koppel said he wanted a cultural tourguide to Iraq. And got it from Salam Pax. I now have friendly relationships with people in Baghdad and Teheran. |
| | Caller: One of the things (bloggers) seem to do best is call the major media on (their mistakes). |
| | Chris: Bloggers like to say "We can fact-check your ass." |
| | Jeff: They DO fact-check our ass. Now news truly is a conversation. It's additive. It's back-and-forth. The new public editor at the times reads blogs. |
| | Caller: Jeff Jarvis gets it. "George" Marshall doesn't. Email is the least effective tool. I don't care how many email addresses Karl Rove has... |
| | Jeff: In fairness, Josh was right in calling the Bush campaign 'top down.' (He wasn't recommending it.) You have to be able to let people speak in their own weblogs. Maybe Dean didn't hear what what happening in Iowa outside his own tent. Blogs are one part of a whole strategy. Everything is two way. The Dean weblog is brilliant. It's about getting people excited. Not about getting people voting. Can't listen just to your own press and your own blogs. |
| | Another break. Best part so far: Jeff Jarvis', even though I can't keep up with him because he talks too fast. Jeff has aided and abetted revolution in Iran and Iraq, and it's nice to hear him taking credit for it. Too few others (me included) give it to him. |
| | Chris, playing Jay Rosen: The terms of authority... are changing.... there's a kind of meritocracy there. |
| | Introducing Frank Rich, the closest thing we have to a culure czar. It seems to me youv'e been a great encouragement to bloggers. |
| | Frank: Blogging used by a political campaign creates a two-way community that's a force "below the radar." The Dean Campaign was notobably different than every other campaign. The three-dimentionality of it... |
| | Chris: Dean's boldness was to the Internet what Roosevelt's voice was to radio and Kennedy's smile was to television. (Not sure I got that right.) |
| | Frank: Yes. On Iowa: While there was this large community talking to each other... in the end they were a little out of touch with the outside world... (On the media...) The cathedral media certainly are threatened... I'm a big consumer of blogs... I read almost everyone. I read Jeff. Kos. Ellis. Josh. Instapundit. I grew up as a television kid, but always loved radio. I feel that you get some of that feeling from this cross-conversatoin with blogs that you don't get from most of political talk radio where you're being lectured to all the time... You have to listen. Take calls. But there's a little bit of insularity. Everyone is so busy answering what an opposing blogger says. A kind of Inside Baseball. |
| | Jeff: If you want to arge with somebody, you end up linking to them. |
| | Frank: Sometimes with blogging it never gets beyond (its own world). |
| | Caller: I don't watch Brokaw or read Novak unless they're on the Net. Kaus, et. al. have replaced the traditional media for me. |
| | Frank: Kaus will link to traditional media... |
| | Caller: I'm a blog freak and I log on to Josh as well as Atrios, but I also (get the LA Times and the NYTimes on line). |
| | Jeff: The Times says it now has more readers online than in print. |
| | Chris: Just introduced Grant (?) Gerret? You taught me some months ago that the action was going to be on the internet... |
| | She sez: Some people have compared the Dean campaign to the dot-com boom. The Internet may have changed all our lives. We may no longer have all those dot-com companies, but we still have the same efflourescence. |
| | Jeff: The Internet won't get cooties... There is no Internet demographic... She is absolutely right. Dean has blazed a new trail.... I have changed many of my opinions because of blogs... We are not a nation divided; we are a nation undecided. Look at Iowa. |
| | Chris invokes Emerson. It seems to me we are learning through blogs... we don't like to be talked down to... |
| | Frank: After the past year I'm not going to predict anything (about) the New York Times... This is here to stay (but) we're still at an early stage... |
| | Andrew: I don't have an editor breathing down my neck... and it's huge fun. It is more heartening thatn other forms because it's instant. |
| | Chris wants to know why Andrew doesn't have comments. Andrew: I'm just one person here... Don't want to be overwhelmed by crazies. |
| | Atrios: I'm just trying to highlight some of the flaws in the media coverage. I live in philadelphia, I'm 30-something. I cannot confirm or deny (the report) that I'm a gym teacher. |
| | [Note: the following isn't in the right order, but I'm not sure it matters.] |
| | Andrew: Every writer has dreamed of this since the beginning of time. No one's monitoring me. No one's editing me... I do think that Atrios is violating a basic tenet, which is transparency. |
| | Chris to Andrew: Why flail away at traditional media? |
| | Andrew: It's supplemental. (He says more. Hard to keep up. I like his chuckle.) |
| | Andrew accuses Atrios of never attacking the left. Atrios accuses Andrew of lying. |
| | Interesting disagreement among Andrew, Chris and Atrios about whether or not the Times campaigned against the war. (I'm with Andrew on that one.) |
| | Caller: Is anyone getting rich on this? |
| | Andrew: I pay off bills and get 40-50 thousand dollars a year. And I'm very forthcoming about that. |
| | Atrios says he makes some, but not enough to replace his job. |
| | Atrios: Personal reasons. |
| | Andrew: You attack personally but can't be attacked because nobody knows who you are! |
| | Atrios: I just choose to keep my personal and professional life separate. |
| | Caller: Bloggers are consumers of news reporting, and not generating them. He's sourcing Jay and others at Davos. He suggests the big boys may buy up the bloggers. |
| | Jeff: I'm sputtering. Basically, he says no. |
| | Chris wraps it up. Runs the credits. |
| | The summary: Well done, very nicely and tightly produced. |
| | Still, I think we need a new form of radio here: one that combines the best of blogs with the best of the radio art form. Maybe on XM or Sirius. I have a feeling that NPR is going to be too standard. But... I dunno. |
| | Public Radio Show Talks about People Who Write About What's Written About People Who Do Little Else But Talk |
Tune in, turn out
| | My recommendation for those outside the coverage areas of the listed stations: tune in KUOW from Seattle. They offer a choice of MP3 (shoutcast), Real and Windows Media Player all from this page here. |
| | Not sure if I'm on the show or not. I was invited, but I don't see my name on the list. Either way, I'll be live on this channel. |
The Perfect Cluestorm
| | For awhile I've been expecting self-informing grass roots culture to spread in a converging direction from business, politics and education. |
New mourn or new morn?
| | Dean, of course, is not the only Democratic candidate running for president who talks about corporate power or the value of community. All the candidates have been singing from this songbook, whether its by pointing to their own common roots (John Edwards the millwoker¹s son and Richard Gephardt the son of a Teamster) or by vowing to defeat the special interests (John Kerry does this especially well on the plundering of the environment and Dennis Kucinich on the military industrial complex). Whomever ends up the Democratic nominee will be wise to continue sounding these themes. |
| | But it¹s my gut intuition that Howard Dean has vaulted from obscurity because he has sensed that a presidential campaign can be about more than a choice between two test-marketed brands called "Republican" and "Democrat" — labels that mean less and less to most voters — and more than a contest over which candidate you¹d most like to have a beer with or trust to babysit your kids. Well before the other leading Democratic contenders stuck their necks out, he realized that the campaign could be not just about ideas, but about being an opposition to the reigning ideas of the fanatics and fools who have been misruling us for the last generation or so. And not only that, he realized that a presidential campaign can also be a little bit like a revolution, in the sense that it means the people seizing power from those who have taken it wrongfully and have been abusing it for narrow, selfish ends. Not just a candidate winning power on their behalf, but the people acting, organizing on their own, to take this country back. |
| | If Dean is to somehow make a comeback in the next few weeks, my gut tells me it will be because he figures out how to return to this message and punch it through the media fog. My pal David Corn sees a few signs of Dean finding his footing again in his report today, but even there I don't quite hear the language combining an assault on corporate amorality with a call to renew our commons--the "We are all in this together" theme that I've written about before. In my mind, that's the winning package for whoever is hoping to not just challenge Bush, but beat him and vanquish Bushism. |
| | In all likelihood, the Dean campaign is the Dead Man Walking of American politics--in other words, it's incapable of winning the Democratic nomination because too many primary voters view him negatively, thanks to a combination of his own arrogance, the self-delusion of his base (which didn't realize that not everyone grokked the "perfect storm"), the attacks of his rivals, the wolf-pack workings of the press, and some deeply ingrained habits of our culture. If so, one can still hope that this message will be carried and amplified by other means as the electoral season moves forward. |
| | On the way back from Vermont, Britt and I talked about what's good and/or evil about corporations. It's around this issue, more than any other, that I find myself on the other side of the fence from my friends on the Left, including Britt, who knows what he's talking about because he has been very successful in Corporate America. The term "corporatism" especially makes me bristle, since it seems to paint a taint on every corporation, no matter how constructive and benign. |
| | See, I like business. I like markets. I like the good stuff that only corporations can do. I have what I think is a basically republican understanding of companies, about business, about the need for growth without government interference, and about the positive influence of tax cuts on economies. |
| | For me the question is about limits. And about corporate influence on political processes. What Micah calls "Bushism" seems to value none of the former and plenty of the latter. It's consistent with the "make it, take it" moral system by which strong is morally better than weak, and large is morally better than small. By this morality, the Wal-Marts and Haliburtons of the world deserve rewards, not regulations. |
| | I have a libertarian dislike for regulations in general, and a high expectation of bad unintended consequences for every "good" law we pass. |
| | But I also have a liberal abhorence for the moral strength and moral order value systems that drive so much conservative rhetoric. |
| | So, on the matter of corporate influence over politics, I agree with Micah, and with Britt, that this administration has crossed a line, big time. And that The People need to call him out on it. Especially since the mainstream press, as Dave so perfectly points out today, won't. |
| | We created a democracy of, by and for the people, not the corporations. Our challenge as businesspeople is to get in alignment with those founding intentions. I think we can do it. But not with this president. |
| | Maybe we should revisit Calvin Coolidge, who was said to have said "The business of America is business." Except that he didn't, exactly. Here's the larger context: |
| | After all, the chief business of the American people is business... Of course the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. |
| | We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction. |
Getting back on conversation
| | I had almost forgotten about it until I looked up "no market for messages" on Google. I went looking because I was getting tired of hearing about candidates "staying on message," "delivering a message" and otherwise riding or transporting this political commodity that's about as conversational as a loading dock. |
| | Looking at this old essay again (it was published nowhere other than the Web, by the way, on what passed at the time for a blog), I think it might serve as helpful advice for candidates in every democracy with even a minimally Net-connected electorate — even though it's addressed to a corporate rather than a political readership. |
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