Their Pros vs. our Poetry
Jim Moore gives us a great sense
of what's important about people power by sharing his experience with insider
politics:
I saw this problem up close and personally in the Gore campaign. I
remember being at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, and having
the sinking sense that the Gore campaign was moving farther and farther
away from connecting with the exciting, vibrant, fresh ideas and people
and groups making up the new American polis. I was not alone. Many
others at the convention had a similar sense. But we were not able
to access, much less influence, the small group of pros who had encircled
Al Gore. These pros were exquisitely attuned to the traditional interest
groups who make up the old Democratic demand environment. I remember
voicing this concern personally at the convention to a friend who is a
pillar of the party. He replied in a very nice way, “Jim, campaigns
are best left to the pros.”
Well, I don’t think campaigns are
best left to pros if those pros can’t
understand and accept the reality of the new landscape, and can’t
related to the new people, processes and issues raised by the new politics.
More importantly, we need to encourage the evolution of a new political
landscape
in America, freed of the narrow interests that tend to define politics
of both left and right. We need to use the web to bring together
large groups, focused on large issues, who can counterbalance the small,
well-funded
and more self-centered players who currently hold the stage. I believe
this is what the blogosphere is capable of helping to enable, on both left
and right. This is what I personally want to work toward.
When people raise their voice in concert, it's poetry, as
Walt Whitman taught us, transcending the prosaic, petty messages of the
"pros" in any field. The galvanizing effect of the Internet is just now kicking
in, having completed its mandatory 10-30 year gestation described by
Paul Saffo (we over-hype new tech in the short run and underestimate it over
the long haul). The Internet encourages, even requires the collective, human
voice of we the people to drown out the self-obsessed mechanical trivia of
the pros,
whether
they're navel-gazing on Madison or Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, is there
any discernible difference between marketing soap, politicians or pre-emptive
war? Andrew Card doesn't think so.
Jim is writing about the remarkably visible struggles in the
Clark campaign and escalates the issue to where it belongs: Closed-source
campaigns can't compete with open source movements.
The highest hope for the emerging role of the blogoshere
in politics is that we can increase the concentrated power, activation
and activation speed of citizen groups with broader, higher minded interests. The
web allows millions of people to come together easily and inexpensively.
Web discourse on blogs enables the co-evolution of facts and arguments
that results in thousands of people becoming more aware of the stakes
in any given political decision, and thus more activated to try to be
involved. And the web enables swarms to come together in minutes
rather than days. Our hope is to improve the adaptability and openness
of our democracy.
The Clark case is not just a story about a group of
Clinton and Gore advisors who are consolidating power over a campaign. My
sense is that the professionals who have taken over are attuned to the
former demand environment, but are not
appreciating how much the new demand environment differs from the old. They
are attuned to traditional Democratic interest and donor groups and power brokers,
but are missing out on the new, more broadly constituted groups that are swarming
across the blogosphere. The professionals running the Clark campaign
do not understand the new emerging topology of Democratic politics in America. Most
profoundly, they do not understand that the leadership of our nation requires
that candidates help reshape the topology of politics—and that the
Dean campaign is deeply involved in that process.
Further, the Dean campaign enjoys a classic "first mover"
advantage. They are offering the one thing that every campaign needs to offer,
visibility into the campaign and its staff, a product that bears up under
scrutiny and is more comforting with use, and a sense of community
that forms a kind of gravity well attracting more participants. People sense
that a campaign so open and responsive is likely to operate a similarly open
and approachable White House, a kind of Jacksonian reformation, without the
korn likker. They know what the pros don't, it's about the governance,
stupid!
Where Google offers the search results you've always wanted,
the Dean folks have built the
responsiveness people never thought was possible. It's the Google of Presidential
campaigns, so it's hard for a later entrant to get traction, and impossible
unless they embrace the new algorithms.
11:38:14 AM 
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