Some of the issues I was discussing in my recent post about Barack Obama’s web based strategy and its potential for both further political hay making and for keeping an electoral coalition together are neatly encapsulated in this article from The Boston Globe. Worth a read.
You can pick almost any American liberal blog at random for signs that Barack Obama is already disappointing “the base” – that is, if the netroots actually constitute or represent his base. I’m still a tad surprised by this phenomenon – I guess in the partisan heat of the election campaign, no one took Obama’s “post-partisan” rhetoric seriously. It was pretty obvious, I thought, that he meant what he said. It may also be that large swathes of the American liberal blogosphere are stuck in permanent negativity mode. After all, the thing didn’t exist in any meaningful form last time there was a Democratic President, and it’s always harder to write a political blog when your mob is in power.
But this probably predictable development is not the most interesting aspect of the interactivity Obama’s campaign encouraged. I’ve previously commented that Obama has a potentially powerful political weapon to wield with the ability to mobilise supporters he’s identified online from the primaries onwards. But there’s a flip side to this sort of openness, and Henry Farrell has a cracker of a post at Crooked Timber on it. Farrell riffs off the huge volume of comments left on Change.Gov:
This goes to the heart of the contradictions that the Obama people successfully managed to straddle during the campaign, but are (I think) going to have increasing difficulty in dealing with going forward. The Obama people combined very tight top-down message control and campaign coordination with a fair degree of openness at the bottom to independent initiatives by volunteers. As long as everyone agreed on the same underlying goal (beating the Republicans), this worked. But as that overwhelming imperative recedes, people are going to start pursuing their own objectives – and the ‘open’ architecture that the Obama people have constructed provides them with plenty of opportunities to do this.
Image of spontaneous street celebrations in Harlem courtesy of matt semel at flickr – reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.
No doubt one of the big stories about the US election will be the influence of the blogosphere and the netroots. In many ways, the rise of the intertubes in politics was an unintended consequence of the Rove approach to politics, as Publius perceives:
The bigger story is that this same anger – this same frustration – has led liberals to organize in more numerous and consequential ways. In the last few years, we’ve seen new think tanks. We’ve seen blogs flower. We’ve seen the rise of media sites like TPM and Huffington with real journalistic chops. We’ve seen unprecedented efforts to register and canvass voters.
In short, we’ve seen a new energy driving liberals back to politics.
In an opinion piece at ABC Online, Barry Saunders sums up the changes that net based activism and citizen journalism have wrought:
The impact of social media on this election has been enormous. Whoever takes office will have to deal with widely available factchecking data, embarrassing videos, rabid wingnuts, opinionated bloggers and TV hosts, and a massive number of new voters and donors who feel they have invested in the American political process – as well as two wars and a collapsing economy. Here’s hoping they know what they’re doing.
Some US states which were influenced by the Progressive direct democracy movement in the early years of last century (which also saw direct elections to the US Senate and the beginnings of the presidential primary) have “propositions” as part of their electoral system – basically legislation or constitutional amendments which can be put on the ballot by direct voter iniative. Californians know how many bizarre votes you can cast in one go (and California also has the recall procedure for state officials – which is how Arnie became Gubernator). It’s largely in the South and the West, though a lot of municipalities also allow direct votes (for instance on bond issues and other local fiscal matters). Since the 1970s, when both anti-gay referenda and the famous Californian “tax revolt” (which incidentally, Murdoch’s Australian tried to transplant to Australia with negligible results), highly ideological measures have often featured on state ballots. Ann at Feministing has a partial list of some of the more egregious ones around the states tomorrow.
The most prominent has been Proposition 8 in California, which would remove the rights to marriage same sex couples currently enjoy. There’s been a vigorous No on 8 campaign in the blogosphere, and here’s a vlog from Riese and Haviland, who some may know and love from Riese’s L Word recap blogging (or maybe that’s just me!):
If Proposition 8 is defeated, there really would be some sign of a shifting cultural climate in the States. A complete list of ballot initiatives and propositions is at CNN, where voting figures will be posted as they become available.
So, the netroots thing has its role to play in inspiring enthusiasm and turnout, combating stoopid talking points, etc, etc, but what future for the liberal/left blogosphere in the States in the event of an Obama win?
Michael Bérubé recalls the wonders (ahem) of the Clinton administration, and has some advice for the collective(ist) tubes:
But perhaps the left blogosphere could be of some use in this regard, no? It needn’t be consolidated fully into Obama Enterprises Inc.; it could serve instead as a forum for writers dedicated to things like “hope” and “change” and “arguing that Obama was wrong to cave on FISA and better not do that kind of thing as President.” Of course, it could also serve as a forum for charting and mocking all manner of Ace-of-Confederate-Red-State-Yankeespade wingnuts as they venture into new realms of sheer barking lunacy that even the world’s sheerest barkingest lunatics have hitherto been unable to imagine. That might be fun. And it could do “shorters” and cat blogging and Theory Tuesdays and Friday Random Tens too. It’s a blogosphere. It’s a big place, with many many tubes.
Although aspects of his critique are tentatively sketched by his own admission, Jay Rosen has hit more nails than he’s missed with his analysis of the significance of the Sarah Palin veep selection by the McCain campaign. Rosen’s article is rightly getting a lot of attention. It’s “personalities, not issues” as McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis said, and the dark divisive arts of Karl Rove are being revived for the umpteenth time, and to date, are apparently working. Though in an somewhat problematic article in Salon, problematic because of the gender stereotypes it re-enacts while purportedly criticising them, Gary Kamiya provides some hope for thinking the Democrats might turn things around. But the controversy over Palin’s claims to have opposed the infamous “bridge to nowhere” illustrates the double bind the GOP have the Democrats in.
At least the turf this issue – the purported opposition to earmarks and pork that Palin is supposed to share with McCain – is being fought over is a public policy issue rather than all the personalised stuff which just puts the Democrats and the media where the GOP want them. But Obama’s reluctance to use the words “lies” and “liars” shows he knows the score. He’s being criticised for that by liberal bloggers, who are cheering on the media “fact checking” exercise.
But all this truthiness is also at great risk of playing into the GOP’s hands – because it reinforces the equation of the media and blogosphere with the Democrats Rosen identified as the tactical positioning the Republicans want – and which George W. Bush reinforced with his claims about “the angry left” in his RNC video link. The culture wars schtick works – because the America of Wal-Marts and small town “values” has more electoral power in the swing states that count than the wonky redoubts of the blue staters. And a lot of those voters – who don’t source their news from the internet but from cable tv – and get their analysis from others of like mind in their own circles rather than bloggers, commentators and wonks – are seeing what McCain wants them to see – a feisty outsider being beaten up by the Beltway elite. Hence McCain’s polling gains, among other demographics, with white women.
As a bit of a follow up to the discussion on this post of the familial scandals confected or exploited about GOP Vice-Presidential nominee and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, here’s two excellent and thought provoking pieces. First, Feminist Philosophers asks why folks might be more interested in all this stuff than, well, actual issues:
Why is the front page of the NY Times full of Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy and New Orleans near miss, when the second major political convention is about to start and there are extremely important issues facing the United States about health care, clean energy, poverty and others?
She points to the importance of citizens – and by implication bloggers – trying to refocus debate on the issues, and on the necessity of a critical education in cultivating habits of mind which place the emphasis where it should be.
Secondly, the uniformly fantabulous Rebecca Traister at Salon writes:
How we got from the dispiriting political and ideological record of Sarah Palin — that she is adamantly pro-life and anti-gay marriage, that she is a lifetime member of the NRA, that she has no foreign policy experience and supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in schools — to the uterine activity of her family, makes perfect, human sense: Who wants to talk about boring policy when we can talk about teens and sex and pregnancy?
Sean Tevis’ innovative method of raising internet funds in his venture to oust and replace his current State Representative (basically equivalent to one of our State MPs?) in Kansas is an online comic strip.
When Sean Tevis decided to run for a seat in the Kansas Legislature, he faced a serious problem: money. Local political advisors warned the campaign novice that he would need a war chest of at least $26,000 to compete against his entrenched Republican rival.
Having calculated that if he could get 3000 people to donate $8.34 each, he would reach that target, he created the comic strip to garner attention from potential online donors. He’s sort of a one-man Get Up! campaign.
Apparently, no other candidate for State Representative in Kansas has ever had more than 644 donors, so there was a built-in news narrative if he could make it work. So did it? Well, there’s a bunch of news coverage online, as well as many bloggings.
How many similar efforts are we going to see in election contests in the immediate future, do you think?
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