Netroots Rising

Nate and I had a good time last night at Busboys and Poets in DC. Thanks to everyone who turned out, it was a fascinating discussion!

For more, see here for a live blog. Also, see Jaybird’s Jottings for some thoughts:

Feld and Wilcox make for a formidable tandem. Feld knows people and is more out-going. During the talk, he worked in getting his colleagues take on some of the things that happened during the campaigns. Wilcox knows the technologies and was well-versed on those issues and what might happen in the future for bloggers. (Stay tuned.)

Feld spoke most passionately about the Webb-Allen race in 2006. History has recorded Macaca-gate as Allen’s undoing. Feld takes exception, noting that it wasn’t a collapse as portrayed in the media. Credit should also be given to the changing demographics in Virginia, the mistakes Allen made afterward including blowing up at a reporter who asked him about his Jewish heritage, and the “rag-tag army” of netroots activist.

On Saturday, Nate and I will be at the Bowery Poetry Club & Cafe in NY City for another reading/book signing. If you’re in NY City, come on by! Also, if you know anyone who might be interested, tell them to check it out. Thanks!

Ben Tribbett is the founder and editor of the Not Larry Sabato blog. Ben is best known for breaking the “macaca” story and helping to build up a frenzy on his blog over the weekend, prior to release of the video in the Washington Post on Monday, August 14, 2006. The following interview was conducted on April 17, 2007 in Springfield, Virginia.

Lowell: A key turning point in the primary, at least according to people like Steve Jarding, was the St. Patrick’s Day Gerry Connolly event. In some ways, this was the first major victory for Jim Webb.

Ben: I don’t know if that was a turning point. It may have hurt Webb a little bit among party insiders. Gerry was going around trashing Webb. Typical Gerry being totally ungrateful to a couple hundred people who showed up and wrote him a check. But Gerry telling others at the event the Webb supporters were all people he didn’t know and were probably Republicans swung some organization to Miller.

I’m skeptical that there was a turning point, when we did our automated poll of Northern Virginia for NLS in March, Webb was leading by 21 points, in the primary he won by 22. That poll was before any word had gotten out to the broader public about the St. Patrick’s Day event. One thing I told Jarding…what I was hearing from people in NOVA, people who populated the Federal government wanted a candidate who was more qualified to be in the Senate than they were personally. Miller - totally private background, no federal experience, in totally over his head. Secretary of Navy, Asst. Sec. of Defense…people up here understand what that means. They don’t necessarily understand how important it is to be a Deputy Secretary of Defense in other parts of the state. I think in Northern Virginia you need to have been Governor, or in Congress, or significant Federal experience… to get support to the Senate.

Lowell: How was the race playing out on the blogs during the primary. We were getting outspent 3:1 by Harris Miller, we didn’t run TV ads, we didn’t have much of anything except for the blogs.

Ben: It was such a disappointment during the primary. So much money was wasted on consultants by the Webb campaign. Clearly what happened, [there was] a campaign manager from out of state, clearly didn’t know what she was doing. [There were] paid consultants to run the rallies even, which cost a lot of money. In a primary…that money was just going out the door. The Webb campaign was overconsulted but understaffed during the primary. The little money they had going to things other than voter contact was beyond pathetic.

Lowell: Did the grassroots save Webb? For instance, the petition drive was completed by the grassroots.

Ben: It was a frenzy effect. Everything on the blogs was that Miller can’t win, “this is outrageous, we gotta get Webb in there.” [It was] motivating OUR people to get out, working them into a frenzy, national people as well. The average Miller supporter wasn’t doing anything. [It was] starting to look like maybe we can get to 6 (pickups in the U.S. Senate). That was working our people into a frenzy. We are not going to get there with Harris Miller in there. People would get on the blogs, it was motivating them. Webb has turned out to be pretty ungrateful, I don’t think he understands the difference between his campaign and other normal campaigns…this isn’t how campaigns usually go. He’s acted like this was normal or something.

Lowell: How did you see the netroots working with the campaign?

Ben: I thought it was better in the primary than in the general. In the primary, we just kind of ignored the staff. They were so in over their heads. It was in the general election, they were like, “we won the primary, we won the primary, you have to do this or you have to do that.” I’m not good at getting in line, when they say get in line, my attitude is “FU.” The primary gave them a measure of confidence that they had really done a good job on the campaign.

Lowell: There was some feeling that the campaign should ditch the netroots…certain Virginia politicos felt resentment, threatened by netroots.

Ben: That’s hilarious. We were having so much fun in the primary…bashing local officials who endorsed Miller. They turn on the blogs and everyone’s going nuts, saying things like “you traitor.” They weren’t used to it. It had a huge impact on a number of them.

Lowell: Why do you think Harris Miller didn’t even really try to court the blogs/netroots?

Ben: It’s funny because in my case I was supporting Webb but was staying a little neutral at the beginning because we wanted to do a blogosphere debate. I had to stay a little neutral. The Webb campaign agreed, the Miller campaign never got back on it. If they can’t even get back to the blogs, I’m not going to feign independence. That’s when I just started bashing him every day.

Lowell: Did the Miller campaign decide they weren’t going to deal with netroots?

Ben: Yeah. If you can’t get NLS or RK, there are other ways to go about it. Their attitude was once RK went against them, they blew off everybody. [That showed their] lack of knowledge. Their whole campaign was so based on party hierarchy, party structure, and they didn’t think they could do that with the blogs. They were such a hierarchy-based campaign, the attitude was if we can’t have the big blogs, we can’t do anything.

Nate and I will be discussing and signing “Netroots Rising” at Busboys and Poets in DC on Wednesday, August 20. Check it out!

Date: Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Time: 6:30pm - 8:00pm
Location: Busboys and Poets
Street: 2021 14th St
City/Town: Washington, DC

6:30 PM - Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox discuss and sign Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics. The 2006 elections will be remembered as the year when the center of power in American politics shifted from traditional “top-down” central broadcasters to new “bottom-up” decentralized activists in the blogosphere and netroots. The authors give firsthand accounts of the burgeoning power of the netroots to determine the outcome of political contests, most notably as when the national balance of power was tipped by Jim Webb’s “rag-tag army” of bloggers and netroots activists who provoked and exposed the gaffe that proved fatal to George Allen’s senatorial bid. Free and open to all.

I was on XM Radio (POTUS show with Tim Farley) this morning, talking about “Netroots Rising.” Check it out here.

This is good to see, courtesy of Amazon:

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Two years ago today, George Allen pointed his finger at a young, Asian-American “tracker” on the Webb for Senate campaign and called him a “macaca.” For the entire story, check out Netroots Rising. For a taste of what you’ll get in the book, see here.

A few points about the “macaca” incident, since there are so many misconceptions.

1. According to Webb campaign pollster Pete Brodnitz, the downfall of George Allen didn’t really begin with “macaca.”

…Some have said that Allen lost the campaign because of a series of missteps that began with this incident.

While that’s true to some extent, that’s not really what made Allen vulnerable. In fact, we always believed Allen was vulnerable for two reasons: despite being well liked, his Senate record was not well established and, more importantly, he was failing to articulate a message about the leadership he would bring to bear on the challenges facing the country.

Democrat Jim Webb decided to run for the U.S. Senate when he concluded that Allen was not providing leadership on the challenges the nation and the Commonwealth of Virginia face. Throughout the campaign, Webb’s strategy focused primarily on describing how he would do just that, and this strategy was not materially affected by the Macaca or other subsequent incidents.

In contrast, the Allen campaign—perhaps not appreciating the weakness of their position—ran a campaign that focused on attacking Webb and did not address the central leadership question of the campaign.

2. Also according to Pete Brodnitz, the polling did not change dramatically after “macaca.”

On August 11th, the Macaca incident occurred. It had some impact on the dynamics of the race and set back Allen’s attempt to reintroduce himself to voters in the Washington, D.C., media market but it did not create the conditions that would enable Webb to win. Between June and mid-September, the ballot closed from a 7-point Allen lead to a 4-point lead.

During this period there was also improvement in awareness of Webb and a small decline in Allen’s standing. As the table below shows, a month after Macaca, Allen’s favorable ratings had declined slightly (from 61% to 57%) but, more importantly, Webb’s favorability had risen by 6 points and his name ID (the percentage of voters who knew him well enough to rate him) had risen by 14 points.

3. The netroots played a key role. According to Pete Brodnitz again, “most people are not aware of the impact of the blogs but clearly they had a big role in pushing stories like macacca and if not for the internet fund-raising the race would not have been winnable.”

4. My own view is that “macaca” was largely a “forced error,” as in tennis. I say this for several reasons. First, George Allen had never intended to even BE in Virginia during 2006. Instead, he had hoped to be in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina running for President. Unfortunately for Allen, the entrance of Jim Webb into the race - with the strong encouragement and support of the “draft” movement and the netroots in general - flushed him out and forced him back to Virginia. Second, the strategy of the Webb campaign was to constantly needle Allen - calling him “Felix” for instance - in an attempt to get under his skin and cause him to snap. Apparently, it worked. Third, the Webb campaign put out a constant stream of materials setting up the meme that George Allen was NOT who he appeared to be, certainly not a nice guy. When “macaca” occurred, it played right into that strategy. Fourth, the Webb campaign has been grossly underestimated, particularly the candidate himself but also the 10,000-strong “ragtag army” of netroots volunteers. The traditional media likes to say that “macaca” just happened, and that was the end of George Allen, but that’s simply because they are too lazy to look into the real story.

I don’t frequently agree with the right-wing blogosphere, and I don’t agree with everything in this book review by Renaissance Ruminations either. Having said that, “bwana” is one of the best writers in the Virginia “rightosphere,” and his review of Netroots Rising is generally excellent.

The bottom line? If you want to stay on top of Virginia politics, you need this book. Likewise if you are interested in politics in general, use of technology, demographic shifts, communications, media relations…the list goes on. The book scores as history, manifesto, and analysis…but it also serves to tell the story of people who wanted to make a change and got in the fight to do so…and that is the kind of book we should all be interested in.

FYI, we would have loved to put in more material on a number of topics, but as anyone who’s published a book knows, there are many many constraints you’ve got to deal with. In general, we wrote what we knew best, but we were still forced to leave out a great amount of excellent material. In part, that material is available on this website, but there’s a ton more stuff that we could have gone into if we had had unlimited time and space. With specific regard to the “rightosphere,” that’s not primarily our story, but we certainly would be interested in reading a Republican version of “Netroots Rising,” perhaps penned by a fine writer like “bwana?”

C-ville Weekly, which covers “Charlottesville News & Arts,” has an account of Nate’s and my speaking gig last week to Tom Perriello’s summer fellows:

What can a blog do? Feld said that it wasn’t about persuading millions directly, but about influencing the thousands of “influentials.” He talked about a blog’s use in raising money. And he also discussed one of the biggest assets of a blog—the ability to relentlessly ridicule your opponent. The mainstream media is limited by column inches, noted Feld, but “a blog, you can just keep doing it and doing it and doing it.”

The approach leads to a strange hybrid, says Feld: “We’re sort of journalists. We’re sort of activists. We’re sort of operatives.”

Also, Nate says that if he had been in charge of the Webb campaign, he would have fired me, but then Webb would have lost. Ha, I’m glad that didn’t happen!

Anyway, check out the story here. Thanks.

This Thursday, Nate and I spoke to/with the “ground troops” - actually “Common Good Fellows” - of Virginia 5th CD Democratic congressional nominee Tom Perriello!. For a great report by Virginia blogger “aznew,” see here.

Nate made a wonderful point about how de Tocqueville’s depicted America as a country in which people of all classes regularly discussed politics in the public square all of the time, but that it was lost with the rise of the mass media, and the divergence of interests between those of the corporate media in which political discussion occurred (revenue, viewership) and the average citizen (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) for whose benefit, presumably, that discussion took place

[...]

…For negative campaigning to be effective, it has to be truthful and credible. Lowell, again, pointed out that the reason the allegations of racism resonated against George Allen in 2006 was because there were legitimate incidents from his past that raised these issues. There was the macaca tape that all could see. On the other hand, Allen’s efforts to brand Webb a pedophile based on some passages from Webb’s books about what he witnessed in Vietnam were absurd from the start, because there was not a grain of truth to them.

Thanks to “aznew” for the report, and go Tom Perriello!

I guess I hadn’t really thought of Netroots Rising as “beach reading,” but some people apparently do:

If your taste in political reading is more down in the trenches, where campaigns are actually fought and won, two books are worth your attention. The first, “Mousepads, Shoe Leather and Hope: Lessons From the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics,” was edited by Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter, two veterans of that seminal 2004 effort. It features first-person essays from nearly all of the key players on the Dean campaign, and it is a must for anyone who wants to understand the nuts and bolts of merging a classic long-shot bid with the heady madness of the nation’s first Internet-powered presidential candidacy.

The second is called “Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics,” by Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox. Drawing on their own experiences in 2004 (with Dean and the Draft Wesley Clark movement) and the 2006 rise of Jim Webb, the authors update the story told by Teachout et al. Its core is a firsthand description of the Virginia Senate race, where Feld was Webb’s director of online fundraising, but the authors use that microcosm to make larger arguments about how politics is being upended by a combination of grass-roots activism and do-it-yourself technology.

Actually, I was Webb’s netroots coordinator, although I certainly helped raise money online. And one more minor disagreement; it’s not really “do-it-yourself technology” but people using the technology that’s available to empower themselves as citizens in our democracy. Overall, though, it’s pretty cool to be put on a beach reading list…maybe Karen at AIAW concurs since she says it “reads almost like a novel?”