What's your Point?
Malcolm
Gladwell lifted the phrase "tipping point" from epidemiology
and ensconced it in the cultural lexicon:
| If you talk to the people who study epidemics--epidemiologists--you
realize that they have a strikingly different way of looking at the
world. They don't share the assumptions the rest of us have about how
and why change happens. The word "Tipping Point", for example,
comes from the world of epidemiology. It's the name given to that moment
in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It's the boiling
point. It's the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight
upwards. AIDS tipped in 1982, when it went from a rare disease affecting
a few gay men to a worldwide epidemic. Crime in New York City tipped
in the mid 1990's, when the murder rate suddenly plummeted. When I
heard that phrase for the first time I remember thinking--wow. What
if everything has a Tipping Point? Wouldn't it be cool to try and look
for Tipping Points in business, or in social policy, or in advertising
or in any number of other nonmedical areas? |
 |
Gladwell's 1996 Tipping Point explained his,
well, point by showing the similarity in the mechanisms behind the drop in
NYC crime, sales of Hush Puppy shoes, contagious yawns and
Paul Revere's ride.
Morris Less
Dick Morris is
another visionary and Bill Clinton's indispensable political guide until he
was forced out of the White House by his
own Clintonesque
scandal, got religion, went on Fox News and started vote.com.
As you'd expect from a Clinton confidante, he understands the detailed history
of what works and fails in Presidential politics. In the current Chris
Lydon interview,
Morris tells us that the Internet is bigger than we have imagined in politics
as in everything else, and that the Dean campaign has changed politics
forever by routing around the cynical mechanisms the DNC designed into the
primary system this cycle...
...and that Howard Dean is dead meat.
Listen
to the interview and come back for more revealing insights
and colorful graphics. Now.
Go.
Later...
You can hear the shock and dread in Lydon's dulcet
tones as Dick Morris tells
him
that
Karl
Rove
and
the Republicans
have been gathering 20-30 million email addresses while Dean's grabbed
a half million or so. Lydon's summary:
"The essence of the Internet," he said, "is
not that it provides a new set of eyes and ears, but that it gives the
voters a mouth, which they've never had in the media. The impact
of that is absolutely historic."
But Morris makes it a mighty Republican tool in 2004,
especially in the hands of Karl Rove, a direct-mail master. With
email, Rove simply saves the postage. "Let's remember," Morris
observed, "that the
Internet is more male than female, more right-wing than left-wing, more
upscale than downscale." The vast right-wing conspiracy which
grew up outside the mainstream media is savvy now about spontaneous on-line
community
building. Not all the grassroots on the right are Astroturf. "The
Republican base is seething with activity," Morris said. "Also,
c'mon, you can't think of any community that is better connected, and better
wired to itself, than the religious community. There are all kinds
of prayer groups around the country, and the fact is that people who attend
church regularly vote Republican by 2 to 1, and those who don't vote
Democratic by 2 to 1. The gay marriage issue is going to accentuate
that divide. So I think this kind of viral bottom-up growth (which
is what the Internet is all about) will be as much Republican as Democratic."
... and that it will be a battle of the extremists the presumptive
Dean "liberals" vs. the real rightists.
We Deaniacs, according to Dick Morris, are living in a naive
echo chamber where bad news is unwelcome and our breathless enthusiasms insulate
us from the harsh realities of the political marketplace.
He's saying that the Dean campaign is Netscape
and the Republicans are Microsoft. Done deal. Next question.
That doesn't
mean that old-time politics will carry the day because the Internet is
irrelevant, but that
the new tools
are agnostic
and that the Republicans understand them as well as or better than the
Deaniacs. When
Chris asks him
how he responds
to people who don't get it, who don't know what a blog is, he turns Rosenesque:
How do you think Bill Clinton survived impeachment but
blogs and MoveOn and all of that? Where did the anti-globalization get
its strength from? Certainly not the mainstream media. Where did the
right wing get its strength from and the anti-Clinton stuff? Where is
the Dean candidacy from?
If you just read the New York Times and the
Washington Post, you get blind-sided by all of this stuff. It's the
new age in which everybody is the publisher of a newspaper, and they
can
circulate it to anyone who's interested in reading it. And that period
of freedom - that free exchange of ideas, unmediated by who has the
station license or who can afford paper and ink, is the essence of the
Internet
era.
Pointing the Way
So Morris agrees that this election cycle is a tipping point
and that some sort of smart mob has formed around the Dean campaign and that
there's an analogous Second Superpower waging peace around the globe. But
we're still not giving up and letting the force take us where it will.
But what are people fighting for? Let's look at our available tipping points:
My work for the next year is to take the Green Line, and anything
else will be a sorry disappointment, since it may be the only way to win
the presidency. This is far more possible than it seems, if the Dean revolution
does what it
would
in any
earlier
age,
which
is to
form a new political party with a broader political spectrum. Thanks to the
Internet, we don't have to go to all the trouble to form an actual party,
with offices and budget and staff and cronies and a cigar box. What we can
do is form a virtual party and give a hat and a kazoo to every American who'll
hold still.
If we succeed in forming the GCP–Great Centrist Party, we
can reduce the Rs and Ds to mere labels, as irrelevant to politics as your
hair color. I'd like to see those tired allegiances useful for one thing:
keeping congresscritters from all sitting on one side of the room. As Dick
Morris says, the politicians will follow the voters, who are their food
supply. He describes how true democracy is on the cusp and how he imagines
politicians will interact in a seemingly 1 to 1 way with voters, but his
is a technical contrivance, a parlor trick of indexed sound bites.
It's the Community, Stupid!
What people want is to reach out to their neighbors and have
an agreeable conversation. A real connection with a human trumps Morris'
vision of mechanical intermediation by his own Internet startup, vote.com.
His analysis is spot on, but his vision is a business plan. I'm searching
for the web applications that, like meetup.com, connect me with you so we can
find agreement on the issues that matter and discover how trivial are the things
that seem to divide us.
The Revolution will be Engineered
Tomorrow I'll suggest some web applications so the experts
can have some specifics to dismiss out of hand.
9:08:20 AM 
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