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Tuesday, August 8, 2006
Officer, I seem to be chief of something 
| | ... it would be totally out of character for me to accept this completely at face value. To be honest, it's kind of hard to read it without blowing hot coffee out through my nose - but I don't want to be ungracious. It's just, well... I mean it's hardly scientific, is it? |
| | I'm not even a CMO, for starters... |
Also the most surreal
| | I have a book somewhere called 4 arguments for the elimination of television; this is three arguments for the elimination of the net. |
Case your states
| | No, it's not the all-GOP USA. It's where I've been, statewise. Not sure how I've missed the Bluegrass State, but... well, I've never been there. |
| | In my case, China is something of an exaggeration. I've been to Hong Kong. That's it. Oh, and I've been at Norita Airport in Japan. I don't count that as enough of a visit to redden the whole country. |
Attention Sports Tracers
Newer politics
| | At Wikimania and the Citizens Journalism Unconference, however, I've been hearing about lots of interesting citizen-led political work, mostly toward binging the light of day to facts that have been, in the words of Micah Sifry, hiding in plain sight. Gotta know where to look for it, Micah says. And people are looking. Betsy Devine, for example, bulldogging facts on the New Hampshire Phone Jamming affair. Organizations are helping, too. The Sunlight Foundation and Congresspedia, for example. Britt Blaser and company are at work on some interesting stuff too. |
| | A mountain of email greeted me when I got back to the hotel. The first item I opened was a pointer to The Revolution Is Not Being Televised, by Stirling Newberry. Back in the last election season I loved reading and listening to Stirling. I didn't realize until I saw this email that I missed him. And sure enough, his latest is full of sharp observations about deeper trends hiding from mainstream political sports coverage of Connecticut's Lieberman-Lamont primary. It concludes (forgive the length of the quote, but the whole thing is just sooo good), |
| | The new politics is about people who are driven by the same core set of values - integrity and connection and coherence of community - only one group began with in-person connections and has been searching for a way to reach out, and the other began from the world of words, rhetoric and fluid debate, and has been searching for a way in. This has created a new class of political operative, and dramatically expanded the reach of an old kind who was, previously, regarded as mere foot soldier in the top down world. These people are early movers in the campaigns of the future. It was Matt Stoller who helped light the Lamont bonfire; it was Draft Clark veteran Lowell Feld who helped launch the James Webb for Senate campaign; it is Tim Tagaris, not that long ago a political novice, who is now a key player on Lamont's Internet team. They are as yet not widely known, and there is as yet little honor for the prophet of this kind of political work, Joe Trippi of the Dean campaign, to whose book the title of this article refers. |
| | They believe in confidence, competence, community and coherence - and it shows in how they campaign. They have a basic faith in this new world of Internetworking, a world where people find jobs, dates and houses on the Internet. These citizens of the netropolis believe in the new world, because it has created opportunities for them which are a matter of life and death. To take an example, one veteran of the Draft Clark movement recently began an online campaign to persuade Aetna to cover an experimental treatment for Tay-Sachs disease. Josh Margulies reached out to America to save democracy, and now he reaches out to save his son. Once upon a time, this would have been something handled by frantic appeals to a congressman or local politician. Instead, the new politics, instead of being a consumer of power, produces power by directly appealing to others, believing that the stories are out there, waiting to be threaded together into one narrative that makes a movement. |
| | While there have been occasional articles about this new class of political player, as with the nature of the new kind of candidate, there has been a vast void of understanding as to what makes them successful in this new political environment. As with the candidates they support, the crucial quality is the ability to understand where the present political environment has reached a point of gridlock, and then the ability to leverage the very pressure that has brought about stalemate to burst out in a lateral direction with great, and unexpected, force. It is a pressure that journalists like Christopher Lydon, with decades in and covering politics, could feel and smell, but which the major outlets at first denied, and now decry, being dragged kicking and screaming into a world where politics is a conversation, and not an ad campaign. |
| | That, then, is the real lesson of the Revolution of '06: namely, that it was there all along, and it is merely being unleashed this year to create its first wave of victories in electoral politics in the US. It has awaited messengers to carry its message, and with each passing battle, it grows more immune to the deceptive smear-driven attacks from the mass media world. These messengers are not starry-eyed dreamers, but instead people who began in the system as it is, and have crossed the aisle based on an intimate understanding of the failures of the old system. They have gathered around them a new breed of political operative on the Internet, and have made more effective an old breed that had been pushed aside by the old politics of the airwaves. This politics has faith in a different world, it values different kinds of politicians, and it is developing an increasingly cohesive political philosophy, |
| | And while in 2004 this politics merely made a splash, in 2006, it has already won elections. But don't tell anyone, because the old politics still believes that if it isn't on television, it doesn't exist. |
| | Even though Stirling is a lefty, I don't think this is just lefty stuff. The roots are deepening and spreading under grass that's ready to grow and is tired of being crapped on. By anybody. |
| | [Later...] A friend writes, the lamont campaign is not so much about some realization around community, grass-roots and the power of the internet --- its much more about bigotry and anti-semitism disguised as anti-war sentiment. I don't think that's the case this link makes, but it's still an issue, so I decided to pass the pointer along. |
| | [Later still...] Lamont defeats Lieberman, who will now run as an independent. |
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