Ben Tribbett Part 1: The Beginning of Draft James Webb
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: Thoughts on the Draft James Webb movement?
Ben: One of the things that worked so well about the draft was how when the first few hundred people signed up on the blogs they got it out to a broader audience that doesn’t normally read the blogs. It created this pressure especially when it was noticed by a lot of military people who knew Webb. Getting people that actually knew Jim was huge, that created a pressure in itself with Webb getting calls from his friends, from people that he respected. I think that really helped to get him into the race, because he was a very uncomfortable candidate at first. Asking him to take the plunge in February of a November election year with a primary facing him in June was asking a lot.
Lowell: Watching the draft, did you think it was going to work?
Ben: I was excited about it. I was just linking to it every time you put something up, saying ok people, we need a candidate who can beat George Allen because Miller sucks. But I didn’t know much about Jim Webb. The momentum kept growing. I don’t know if it would work for anybody. I don’t know if it would work for a candidate whose name was out there and bad stories started hitting.
Lowell: Do you think there are certain types of candidates who are optimal for the internet…that just fit. Harris Miller was a tech guy, yet he had almost no blogging or blog support. What was the deal with that? What type of candidate appeals on the internet?
Ben: The people who populate the blogs are generally not the people who are running the party. I have been involved in politics almost 10 years and my biggest surprise was the disinterest within the party of getting more and new people involved. People who are running the party are not generally interested in getting a lot of these people involved unless it’s October and they’re doing a lit drop. Otherwise, it’s a threat to them to have a few hundred people show up to a meeting. That is not the personality of people who are on the blogs, who are encouraging people to get involved. It’s generally the party outsiders who populate the blogs, saying here’s how we can improve things.
And so, in a lot of ways, what worked so perfectly with Webb was, Miller had decided to come in and run an insider campaign, and just call the top 250 people you have to call…but none of those people are the blog people. And so, I think then he was waiting for those people to tell their soldiers to get in line. Maybe as blogs move into this hierarchy this will change so you can’t do this. For example, if a blogger were employed by the party, they could put them in line. We had this audience, but we were not controlled by the party. The insiders were all sitting there saying we need to be for Harris Miller and the bloggers didn’t care because they had no leverage with us.
It was partially the national blogs that pushed this as well, we needed 6 seats to pick up the Senate. At that point, we had a likely pickup in Pennsylvania, Ohio was still marginal…Montana, the netroots candidate wasn’t even a sure nominee at that point, Tester was still the underdog to Morrison. People didn’t expect to win that seat. From a January/February perspective, Montana’s off the board, Missouri is a possible, Ohio is a possible, Rhode Island is a distant possible, we might get 3 or 4, so we need a couple more seats in play to even have a chance at 6. Can Harris Miller win and get us to 6? Of course not.
The bottom line- did people want to kiss ass in the party or did they want to win the Senate? That was the split.
Lowell: Is that the issue, we didn’t need anything from Harris Miller, we didn’t owe anything to Harris Miller, so we could think clearly about the situation
Ben: That’s right. I think especially, a lot of the party hierarchy in NOVA…all of those people who had gotten money from Harris, they lined up immediately. I see a difference though at certain levels. For example, someone like Don Beyer, who was a close friend of Harris and had gotten major cash from him when he ran statewide, I totally understand why he needed to support Harris. On the other hand, all the Delegates and Senators who had gotten $250 or $500 from Harris- or even hoped to- and then endorsed him… those are the cheap whores. It’s hard to respect someone willing to sell out the future of their country and troops overseas for $250.
Lowell: Once Webb got into race, pretty much everybody on the blogosphere got behind him. Why was this?
Ben: I don’t think it was electability alone, because I don’t believe people thought Webb would beat Allen. But they wanted someone who had a chance. It’s important to remember too, Allen did everything wrong in his campaign, but only lost by 9,000 votes. He sort of was invincible in restrospect- he made disastrous mistakes and they still came within a handful of votes statewide of winning.