In the spirit of not wanting to kick a dog when he’s sad and ailing, I have avoided saying anything unpleasant about Unity ‘08 in quite a while. But an email today from its founders endorsing Michael Bloomberg has forced me to reconsider that silence and lean back into a fighting stance, prepared for some Chuck Norris-style ass-whoopin’.
2 comments January 15th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Listening to NPR while packing boxes and emptying closets this weekend, I picked up a juicy political-technological morsel indeed: during the 1970s CB radio craze, President Gerald Ford’s wife Betty apparently campaigned over the citizen’s band. She was a big CB lover (her handle: “First Mama”) and apparently used some of her radio time touting her husband’s 1976 campaign. A Google search turned up a handful of references to her CB fandom, for instance this CBS Evening News story summary and an acount of a campaign trip that included an airport meeting with a local CB enthusiasts’ club. I couldn’t find details of her actual on-air comments — if anyone knows more, I’d love to hear about it.
– cpd
Add comment November 26th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Since that series on the 2008 online challenges is taking a just a bit longer than planned to pull together, let’s whet your appetites with a little history lesson. I wrote this next article back in the Spring of 2000 for the website PoliticalInformation.com, then a targeted search engine for politics and policy I was helping to start but now a ghost site six years dead. The topic? Using the Internet for politics (crazy talk!), with a panel discussion by several experts as a hook.
What’s particularly interesting how is how little the basics have changed even as the tools evolve. Well before widespread broadband adoption, Web 2.0 and social media, we still needed to integrate online and offline communications, put out good content, give people a way to take part, and create mechanisms to keep in touch with them and encourage activism. Sound familiar?
(more…)
Add comment September 12th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Sunday’s fascinating Post profile of Fred Thompson’s wife Jeri contained a little glimpse of the Good Old Days of the early political Internet. Turns out, when they were first dating and her last name was still Kehn, she pitched him on a personal political website separate from his official Senate site:
On Aug. 5, 1997, Kehn sent Thompson’s Senate office a 12-page proposal to “design, develop, host and maintain a world-class multimedia Web site” at a cost of $45,000 per year. As her qualification for the contract, Kehn cited her job at a small Nashville firm that provided daily news summaries to health-care companies.
Two weeks later, Thompson’s staff sharply rejected the proposal, according to memos located by the Memphis Commercial Appeal in the Thompson Senate archives, stored at the University of Tennessee. “I consider this project technically vague and stunningly overpriced,” a staff member wrote.
I remember those days! When people threw around “multimedia” and “interactive” without the slightest idea what they were talking about — but every proposal needed those magic words.
1 comment August 6th, 2007 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
We made it! The 2006 campaign season is dead (well, mostly), and it’s already time to dig up the bodies and see what they can teach us. Here are some lessons I’ve taken away from the last few months of online political frenzy.
This year, YouTube and online video really came of age: a slew of campaign ads, embarrassing candidate gaffes and satirical commentary pieces ended up on the web and some were seen hundreds of thousands of times. Online video could highlight a candidate’s troubles, provide an outlet for supporters’ creative enthusiasm and even raise the profile of an otherwise obscure campaign.
6 comments November 8th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
[Update: Mike Cornfield writes in to note that an expanded version of his and Lee Rainie’s article, complete with more predictions for the future, is available online at the Pew Research Center.]
Ah, the good old days, back in the late ’90s, when the internet was going to transform politics, bring power to the people, lay low the mighty, cure static cling and otherwise spread goodness and light over the land. Writing in Sunday’s Post Outlook section, Mike Cornfield and Lee Rainie, two Very Smart Guys, talk about what we’ve learned from a decade of actually using email and the web for political communications. The conclusion wraps it up well:
Add comment November 6th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Thinking more about William Saletan’s piece today, it does strike me how often ‘net politics seems to be a force “whose moment has come.” Remember when Bob Dole mentioned his campaign site’s URL in a 1996 presidential debate? Or when a significant number of Americans started getting political news online in 1996 and AGAIN in 1998? Or when a certain commentator (i.e., me) led off an article about online politics using Jesse Ventura’s 1999 website as a hook? Skip ahead five years: Howard Dean uses blogs, organizes meet-ups and raises a shit-ton of money online, only to be eclipsed by John Kerry’s general election web/email fundraising juggernaut.
In all of these cases, outside observers were blown away by the internet’s ability to transcend traditional geographic divisions and organize (or inform or persuade) people regardless of where they live. Maybe, just maybe, this train has long since arrived at the station. Blogs and social media are neat and groovy, but they’re just new cars hitched to a very long and established line of tactics.
Not to take anything away from Saletan’s piece, since I think it’s excellent, but we need to stop talking about online politics as a “new” force. The locomotive pulled up to the platform a long time ago, and only the losers and the also-rans have ignored the whistle.
– cpd
Add comment August 10th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Last week’s launch announcement for Hotsoup.com, particularly Howard Kurtz’s profile in the Post, cast my mind back to some other erstwhile political portals that have come and gone in the past 10 years.
Kurtz mentions Grassroots.com and Vote.com, each of which is still with us but as a much different (and infinitely less ambitious) proposition than it began. But remember Politics.com, whose url supposedly cost a cool $1,000,000 back around 1999? Voter.com? Votenet.com? Policy.com?
These sites, and I’m sure a lot more whose names escape me, foundered in part because they tried to be THE online destination site for politics and/or policy, following the classic dot-com-boom-era portal model.
1 comment July 17th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
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