Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Presidential politics and weblogs

Moderator: Dave Winer, Berkman Center for the Internet & Society, Harvard Law School.

Participants:
1. Matthew Gross, Howard Dean campaign.

2. Joe Jones, Bob Graham campaign.

3. Cameron Barrett, Wesley Clark campaign.

4. Eric Folley, Democratic National Committee blog Kicking Ass.

• Matthew Gross: I came to this thinking of a blogger as someone who had a weblog. Then we started the Dean weblog, and people writing in the comments were referring to themselves as bloggers. At first I thought, they’ve got the terminology wrong, and then I realized being a blogger is in how you define yourself.
• Dave Winer: Well, I know I was a blogger long before I started writing in reverse chronological order.
• Eric Folley: There are 18 people able to post on the weblog. To post a story, you circulate it to all 18, and if you get a majority of “yeses”, it gets posted. If Legal says no, the story is breaking the law, it doesn’t get posted. The only other rule is that iCommunications or Resources has to be one of the yeses–they’re our fact checkers. How many stories have been rejected? Zero.
• Cameron Barrett: I see my job as first blogger as a go-between connecting supporters who read the blog with the campaign itself. I read all the comments we get. We gathered comments after Clark’s first speech, what people said he could have done better, andwe sent that information to the speech writers.
• Joe Jones: The average Joe on the street doesn’t care about policy. Graham has the best policy of anyone and he’s at the bottom of the poll.
• Matt Gross: We collect all that information, the comments, whether it’s on policy or “Howard Dean needs to wear a looser collar.” Before weblogs, you could send a comment to a campaign–send an email, or write a letter–and the person who would decide what happened to that suggestion would be the lowest staffer, the one who opened the mail.
• Matt Gross: If you don’t engage in that online idea exchange, all you have is reverse chronological order press releases.
• Eric Folley: We studied carefully what Republicans did on the web in 2000. They didn’t use the web to inform voters, they used it to get people angry. They were sending out regular emails to supporters aimed at getting them angry with Democrats. Our audience is pretty much our base. The most effective audience we can go after is committed Democrats.
• Matt Gross: We don’t delete if a Kerry supporter comes over and argues. That’s democracy. One of the things our supporters did to discourage “trolls”–people who try to be disruptive, post obscenities–was to respond troll posts with $10 donations to Dean. This is not what a troll wants to see, so it does discourage them.
• Matt Gross: DeanForAmerica is not a candidate’s weblog, it’s a campaign weblog. One of the things about blogging is that it really has to be authentic. That’s why Howard Dean doesn’t blog often and he doesn’t blog much–because when he does, that’s really his writing. You know if you get a letter in the mail signed by Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton didn’t really write that letter. If you want a president who has a weblog, you’re going to get a weblog by a ghostwriter.
• Eric Folley: It’s up to these guys to compete in the primary, and it’s up to the DNC to raise as much money as we can. Once we have a nominee, it’s the job of the candidate to get out the message. The job of the party is to get people to the polls.
• Jim Moore: The Democratic model seems to be that government is like a nurturing mother. The Republican model is that government is like a stern father. My position is that I don’t want government to be my parent.
• Josh Marshall: I find myself here defending all the presidential candidates. I hear people asking why the candidates don’t take time to blog every day, to answer individual questions. I don’t think you have any idea how busy a presidential candidate is.
• Phil Wolff: There is a digital divide. I live in Oakland, California and when I go to the Meetups for Kerry or Dean, they’re all white. To reach out across the digital divide, you’re going to need money–traditional campaign tools–people reaching out into the community.*

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* Several people said that no candidates were spending enough time on the web. Candidates should blog in person. Candidates should answer questions online just the way they answer questions for the press. Candidates shouldn’t raise money on the web and spend it on TV ads.

I love my web-brothers and web-sisters, but face it we’re mostly white and even more mostly middle-class. I want my candidate (Dean, if you don’t know) to reach out to the other 98% of the electorate, to share his excitement and views as broadly as possible. To do that he needs money–and when I donated money over the web I sure didn’t mean for Dean to go plowing the money back into “the web.” I wanted my money to help Dean become president.

End rant, I’m beat, skipping the cocktail party to catch some zzz, then on to have dinner with Halley at Dali’s.

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