Netroots Rising

Jon Henke was George Allen’s netroots coordinator and currently is a manager at New Media Strategies in Arlington, Virginia. This interview was completed on April 25, 2007.

Feld: What do you think were the most significant elements that came together to produce such a strong grassroots/netroots movement for Jim Webb?

Henke: I believe the dominant factor in the strong netroots performance on the left was the fact that Democrats have been out of power for so long. The base was able to put aside ideological differences because they had a single, unifying frustration: Republicans. And the solution to that frustration was more practical than ideological: get Democrats of any stripe elected.

When Democrats have held power for awhile, ideological differences will become more important to the Democratic base; in the meantime, the Netroots are more worried about how to storm the castle than how to govern it.

Feld: How would you describe the grassroots/netroots movement for George Allen?

Henke: George Allen had a small cadre of supportive bloggers, but there was not a “grassroots/netroots movement”. The campaign didn’t do anything to develop a movement in advance, and by the time the importance of the new media became apparent – mid-to-late August — the only option left was to hire somebody to engage bloggers and spread the campaign message within the new media. That is when and where I came in.

Feld: What do you think were the greatest successes and greatest failures of the “Draft” and the grassroots/netroots Webb movement in general?

Henke: I believe that Webb netroots team did a very good job selling Jim Webb as an electable candidate with a real chance of winning. Rallying the national netroots around his campaign did a great deal to enhance his stature in the media and with potential donors. The LeftRoots was also very successful at surrogating the Webb campaign and DNC oppo research to the media.

Feld: How valuable/effective do you believe the pro-Webb blogs and online groups were.

Henke: I’ll just quote something I wrote at QandO.net:

Make no mistake, without the netroots, Webb would not have won. He may not even have been close. It was a long-cultivated activism/outreach/media-hounding New Media campaign that brought Webb to the attention of the institutional Democrats, sold him to the activists and shaped the narratives of both Webb and Allen for the media.

Feld: Same question for the Allen campaign.

Henke: The Allen campaign had only done minimal outreach to the blogosphere and had never really integrated blogs into its messaging, communications and strategy before late August. In the final couple months, I believe we were much more aware of the problems and better capable of addressing them within the same medium….but by that point, the narrative was set and we were forced to play defense until the end.

Feld: Do you believe that the Democrats “got” the power of the netroots better than the Republicans in 2006? Or not?

Henke: I believe the Democrats “got” the Netroots in 2006, while Republicans did not get it at all. In 2007, Republicans are just now at the same place Democrats were in late 2002/early 2003: they know this whole “new media” thing is important and they know they should try to figure it out, but it’s still a bit of a mystery to most of them. It will take some time for the establishment to grow comfortable with the new communications medium.

Feld: The Allen campaign got a relatively late start on its blogging/netroots strategy. Why do you think this was the case, and do you think it hurt the Allen campaign?

Henke: Why? I’m really not sure why the Allen campaign didn’t have a blog/netroots strategy prior to September of ’06. Perhaps they thought it wasn’t necessary. The problem was not that they missed the opportunity to develop a pro-Allen netroots movement; the problem was that they missed the events occurring in the Leftosphere – the developing narrative — which would have tipped them to the coming storm and how to deal with it.

Feld: All in all, despite the fact that Virginia continues to be a Republican-leaning state, the number of pro-Democratic blogs is greater than the number of pro-Republican blogs. Why do you think this is the case? Also, how would you describe the quality and effectiveness of each side’s blogging efforts in both 2005 and 2006?

Henke: I think pro-Democratic blogs outnumber pro-Republican blogs almost everywhere, regardless of the hue of the State. Democrats have a much more developed new media operation, and the liberal/progressive movement throws more resources at their new media effort. However, in Virginia, as in much of the country, it’s simply a matter of Democrats being out of power, frustrated and in search of new venues for their voice. Democrats gravitated to blogs for the same reason that Republicans gravitated to talk radio and Free Republic in the 90s. It gave them a place to shout – a place to get involved.

Feld: Do you believe that senior Allen strategists like Dick Wadhams were surprised at the intensity of the Virginia blogosphere? Did anyone ever say to Wadhams, “Dick, I don’t think we’re in South Dakota anymore!”

Henke: I think virtually all Republicans were surprised at the effectiveness of the Democrats internet media machine. I suspect that a few years of apparent impotence had lulled them into the belief that the LeftRoots movement was just the “fringe crazies”. That misses the real power and influence of the liberal blogs, in my opinion, which is much more in narrative development and messaging to the influentials than about fundraising and GOTV.

Feld: Do you feel that the pro-Allen blogs on balance helped the Allen campaign, hurt it, or had no effect? Same question for the pro-Webb blogs.

Henke:I think the campaign blog (AllenHQ) was relatively effective in the short time it existed at drawing attention from the national Rightosphere and at pushing some issues to the attention of journalists. Most of our new media successes were behind the scenes, or things nobody would ever really know about.

I believe that, on balance, the pro-Webb blogs were successful. By the time we were able to push back, criticize and draw attention to some of the pro-Webb blog excesses and inaccuracies, the damage had been done. And as ‘feeder blogs’ working information up to the national blogs, they were always successful because the Democrats have a relatively coherent activist new media operation.

Feld: What were you guys thinking after the “Macaca” video started going viral? Did you know that this would be a huge story that could do great damage to the Allen candidacy?

ANSWER: I didn’t enter the campaign until a bit more than 2 weeks after that happened. I don’t think they thought the incident would be as big as it was – again, understandably, they missed the narrative being developed in the blogosphere – and were genuinely surprised that people thought it was somehow racial in nature. The “racism” angle played up by Democrats was very much at odds with the man they knew, so I think they were surprised that people believed that.

However, since the ‘macaca’ interpretation was consistent with the narrative that the Leftosphere had worked to develop over a long period, it was easier for the Leftosphere to frame it as they did.

Feld: The relationship between campaign bloggers’ past writings has come up numerous times, including most recently with Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan on the Edwards campaign. Do you think that bloggers will be able to operate effectively within political campaigns given the constraints on saying anything “controversial?” Also, do campaign bloggers need to share the candidates’ views and style of expression in order for the relationship to work? In your case, for instance, your libertarian beliefs appeared to conflict at times with George Allen’s stances on several issues.

Henke: In many respects, bloggers will be viewed just like any other campaign employee, and campaigns should be just as careful with the blogger they hire as they are with, for example, the deputy spokesman they hire.

Bloggers should be able to operate effectively within campaigns, so long as both the campaigns and the bloggers understand the both the limitations and proper role of a campaign blogger and/or netroots coordinator. Obviously, restrictions on the ability to be overtly snarky and controversial will limit the effectiveness of the blogger qua blogger. However, unlike regular bloggers, the role of a campaign blogger is not really to be an opinion leader.

I think bloggers will want to share the political views of their candidate in a very general sense, but it’s absurd to think that any campaign employee would agree 100% with the candidate on all issues.

In my case, I believed that George Allen was good on many issues that were important to me, and that he was orders of magnitude more acceptable than Jim Webb whose economic tendencies – e.g., opposition to free trade, gross misunderstanding of income issues – were diametrically opposed to my political priorities.

Feld: In general, how do you see the role of the netroots, the blogosphere, and “new media” evolving in coming years? How do you see this impacting the traditional media, consultant-dominated, top-down campaign structure?

Henke: The New Media will grow more professionalized and coordinated in coming years. That will disappoint some fans of the early “amateurs in the new frontier” atmosphere, and I sympathize with that. I also sympathize with people who miss the days of small-town Mom and Pop stores, but evolutions take place because people find better ways of doing things. In the blogosphere, as on Main Street, some will develop more effective ways to find and deliver content.

Of course, there will always be a place for the amateur blogger who can get good information and write with a unique voice. For the political world, this represents a new battlefield for the minds of voters and Influentials, and they’ll need to figure out how to engage it both in the short term (campaigns, political offices) and in the long term (Parties, interest groups and movements). The New Media won’t eliminate the traditional media, political consultants or the top-down campaign structure…but it does help democratize the game.

Feld: Maybe the blogosphere will evolve on two tracks?

Henke: Actually, that’s a good point. I think the “professionalized” track will take over a lot of the muckraking, gotcha, aggregation and information-dispersion, while punditry will be split between hobbyists and professional journalists/pundits/etc. There will probably never be a professionalization of the “cranky independent” or “nonpartisan” punditry zone – who profits? – so you’ll end up with a lot of good, indy/hobbyist bloggers there.

Feld: I remain puzzled at the lack of urgency and seriousness on the part of the Allen campaign with regard to the blogosphere.

Henke: …They probably didn’t realize the political winds were shifting, and underestimated the Leftosphere. My impression is that the early failure of the Leftosphere to win races, combined with the over-the-top rhetoric had made the establishment believe that the Leftosphere was more of a “far left fringe” that was (a) generally incapable of turning out voters, and (b) making the Party look bad.

I think the first assumption is correct – the blogosphere doesn’t really GOTV. That’s not its function, though. The latter assumption was probably incorrect, because the vast majority of the public didn’t know/care about the overheated rhetoric that sometimes occurred/occurs in the ‘sphere. However, they failed to understand that blogs are very effective at framing things for the Influentials, and that’s where they lost track of progress being made in the Leftosphere.

Right after the “Confederate Prick” story came out, I sent an email to somebody at the Allen campaign, suggesting they think about how to deal with that narrative and fast, because it was very clear that the Left/Webb/DNC people were busy building a ‘racism’ narrative against Allen and if the Allen camp didn’t address it soon, it would be too late when they had it built. It was a bit depressing to see them ignore what seemed so apparent to somebody who paid attention to the blogosphere, understood how the “progressive infrastructure” worked and how it saw narrative development/framing/etc.

Feld: As to the pro-Allen blogs, I’d actually say they hurt Allen’s campaign rather than having no effect.

Henke: Perhaps. I try to distinguish between the tiny pro-Allen bloggers and the AllenHQ blog. I agree that they were, er, inexpert.

Feld: I think their attacks at the end on Jim Webb’s writings backfired badly.

Henke: That entire episode was a relentless embarrassment. I don’t know if you noticed at the time, but I never criticized Webb for writing what he did. I had zero problem with it, and thought it should have been a total non-issue. What I DID write was that (a) it’s not “unfair” to reproduce work Webb has published and cited as part of his resume as a politician, and (b) a lot of Democrats previously argued that such sex-fiction was bad. (I referenced the criticisms made of Scooter Libby, Olbermann saying a Democrat would have their head on a pike if they wrote something similar, Shakespeare’s Sister arguing that Libby’s book indicated how sickness he really was, etc)

I’ll stand by those two, narrow statements. However, I don’t agree in the least that his writings were ‘bad’ or relevant to the campaign. And the over-the-top way some people argued that, I agree, may have been detrimental.

John Rohrbach was Tim Kaine’s Internet Director and official campaign blogger during Kaine’s 2005 run for governor. Rohrbach currently works for Moving Virginia Forward and the Democratic Party of Virginia. The following is from an interview that I did with John on May 3, 2007. John discusses the impact of the netroots on the Kaine for Governor campaign.

Feld: What was your title [with the Kaine for Governor campaign]?
Rohrbach: Internet campaign director.
Feld: Was that sort of like netroots coordinator?
Rohrbach: Yeah, it would be netroots coordinator, but also encompass…building the website. Hard to define.
Feld: My job was to coordinate with other bloggers, grassroots, feed them info, solicit info, get coverage from all over the state…were you doing stuff like that?
Rohrbach: Yeah, I would use it if I got it. We divided up the labor, I was doing the whole email program, any updates to the site. Kevin Druff was running the field part of it, making sure we hit the segments of our list when we were doing events, making sure field people were getting e-mails they needed for volunteer recruitment, all that stuff. It was a division of labor - he was doing field, I was doing more communications part of it.
Feld: You had been a blogger, is that how you got hired?
Rohrbach: I knew Mike Henry and Mo Eleithee from before. Had been blogging as well.
Feld: When they brought you on, what was it to do?
Rohrbach: They definitely wanted me to blog. Mike is a really aggressive campaign manager, Mo is an aggressive communications director. They are both really eager to do whatever they think they can that will give them an advantage in a campaign. If there’s a method of communication or an audience that they think we could reach by blogging or whatever, they were all for talking to those people.
Feld: How much traffic did Kaine campaign blog get?
Rohrbach: Not that much, can’t remember exactly off the top of my head.
Feld: How useful are campaign blogs?
Rohrbach: I came to the conclusion that if you wanted to talk to people who liked blogs, you needed to go where they are. They’re already parts of communities, on RK, on DKos, there are people out there who they already read. It was more useful to have the bloggers do their thing than have campaign rather than just writing stuff for the Kaine blog and thinking that was all we needed to do. What you were saying to them, what Waldo was saying to them was more important than what I was going to say to them.
Feld: There wasn’t a lot of communication between Kaine campaign and bloggers. I had decided that I wanted RK to be independent…
Rohrbach: That suited the campaign as well. We really liked the things…RK could do things that the campaign didn’t necessarily want to answer for, so we were able to do it all very honestly by not coordinating where we were pretending to be something we were not.
Feld: …For the Kaine campaign, was there a conscious decision that the bloggers were doing their thing, let ‘em do it?
[...]
Rohrbach: I think we did that a couple of times, but really tried to maintain a sort of distance…I wouldn’t call it plausible deniability. The netroots community had come of age in Virginia, we didn’t have a lot of information that you guys didn’t know about. When you think about Waldo [Jaquith]’s institutional knowledge of Virginia politics, there wasn’t a whole lot that anyone knew that he didn’t. Or the information that bloggers found out by talking to people in Richmond.
Feld: I did a lot of research and tried to nationalize the race. Did you think that was effective?
Rohrbach: We tried that, but with limited success. A governor’s race isn’t as important nationally…it doesn’t give you some big prize to pick up a governship…what we ran into with nationalizing the race, Tim got a lot of criticism from Swing State Project, he got criticism I think from Daily Kos. Kaine said somebody had asked him why he thought John Kerry didn’t win Virginia, and he said, one reason is that he didn’t really connect with Virginians…he was better able to talk about windsurfing than his faith. Then, all these people came back and said “circular firing squad,” Kaine trashes Kerry therefore Kaine is a disloyal Democrat, he’s a Republican in Democrat’s clothing, etc. But if you’re from Virginia, and you know Virginia politics, you know that there’s somethign to that.
Feld: Were you frustrated with the national blogs?
Rohrbach: Oh totally.
Feld: I was trying to get traction on DKos and I couldn’t get anywhere. We had the only race that year.
Rohrbach: …We did end up getting some traction at the end, raised some money through blog ads..people started doing diaries saying stop sniping at Kaine, he’s the man.
Feld: Then you had the incident with Michael Steele.
Rohrbach: [Former News Blog editor Steve] Gilliard took that picture of Michael Steele in blackface. We pulled the ad because…[leading Virginia Republican blogger] Chad Dotson blogged about it, might have emailed me, I can’t remember now, “what’s up with this?” We looked at it, we were like, we’re in an incredibly tight race, right towards the end, we’re not interested in…we don’t have the luxury of going to bat for Steve Gilliard.
Feld: I think the issue was the blogosphere in general.
Rohrbach: They were mad because they felt like we granstanded…we didn’t grandstand at all. Gilliard could have just pulled the ad quietly. Markos later said that he just assumed we were grandstanding. Later, maybe someone explained to him what was really going on.
Feld: Did you talk to Jerome Armstrong during the campaign?
Rohrbach: Maybe once or twice, not a lot of coordination.
Feld: I heard that Jerome was trying to get Markos to pay attention to the Kaine race.
Rohrbach: Maybe Markos was interested in other things.
Feld: Were you trying to court the national progressive blogosphere?
Rohrbach: We invited them to do conference calls like we invited other people…it was one of those things where you do a little bit, you either get traction or you don’t, you have a limited amount of time to spend. Are you going to beat your head against the wall or not? In retrospect, it was not a bad decision, but we were skeptical that we’d ever be able to hit jackpot national money anyway.
Feld: How much money did you bring in from the national netroots?
Rohrbach: I don’t know. ActBlue wasn’t around, at least not on state race in Virginia.
Feld: For Webb, we brought in $4.2 million out of $8 million.
Rohrbach: It was nowhere near that [on the Kaine campaign]. I’d guess something around $0.5 million out of $21 million if you don’t count the $5 million from DNC.
Feld: Did you guys think of this as a grassroots campaign? Back in 2005, the blogosphere was still in its infancy…still is in many ways. Did you see this coming with RK, etc. How much impact?
Rohrbach: I would hesitate to quantify the impact. One of the things that’s most effective in any kind of communications is to be talking to people in as many different media as possible. The more sources of information that are repeating your message, the more effective it’’s gonna be. Towards the end of the race, we got a nice little financial boost from national netroots. In the Webb race, it was just at another level.
Feld: In the Kaine race, did blogs influence media, narrative? Any examples?
Rohrbach: The blogs definitely influenced the narrative. For instance, the story where Tim Kaine had supposedly yelled at a staffer in Salem or something, which was completely bogus….the story began with an erroneous report from a Republican blogger, got echoed among Republican blogs, hurt the credibility of the Republican blogs. Republicans on Republican blogs said it didn’t happen. It damaged their credibility, one of the reasons why even though blogs like Commonwealth Conservative did a lot of things that were effective in that race, in the end, I think we ended up getting the upper hand on the blogosphere because things like that damaged their credibility. I don’t think the Democratic bloggers ever got busted for pushing an erroneous story.
Feld: I got some blowback on the Smithfield Food story. It turned out Tim Kaine had received money from Smithfield as well. Did you think of this as a grassroots campaign, and to what extent? In the Webb campiagn, there was no doubt it was a netroots campaign, that there was no way Webb would have won without the grassroots.
Rohrbach: The netroots were more important for Webb, the grassroots were definitely important for Kaine. Think about some of the places where Kaine won…that was probably the result of his message but also that we really committed field resources, organized volunteers. We won Lynchburg. That was a grassroots success, maybe not a netroots success.
Feld: The blogs in the Kaine race were maybe influencing the media more?
Rohrbach: Readership was lower then. The blogs were reaching the media. We were conscious that influencing the media was very important, as a reporter can amplify what you’re doing.
Feld: I heard that Kaine was pissed at Raising Kaine, couldn’t control it, had his name on it, people coming up to him and saying they were pissed.
Rohrbach: Nobody ever said anything to me about it. Kaine never did.
Feld: He seemed annoyed at me in Tysons Corner after I had taken a little bit of a shot at the “resume padding campaign monkeys.” After St. Patrick’s Day parade, Nick Kessler didn’t have any materials, petitions…were they peeved at the blogs.
Rohrbach: If so, they didn’t say anything to me about it.
Feld: Kaine wrote after the campaign why he won, didn’t say anything about the grassroots, blogs… Were blogs important part of Kaine’s victory?
Rohrbach: They were my bailiwick in many ways. I was definitely a senior staff member.
Feld: Interesting, Josh and I weren’t really on the Webb campaign.
Rohrbach: I was definitely in that group. I think that’s at least a signal that they thought it was important.
Feld: You were going around with Kaine, right?
Rohrbach: In order to produce stuff for our blog, videos, photos…of all the people on the campaign, I spent a decent amount of time on little airplanes with Tim Kaine and driving around. The campaign gave me the opportunity to collect information and generate media for people, that was clearly a real priority. At times, it was like “who gets that seat on the plane,” and I won.
Feld: Did you ever think of inviting a blogger or two on these trips?
Rohrbach: We never really put bloggers on the plane or in the car.
Feld: I made the effort to go to the Greenbrier debate. I didn’t go through the Kaine campaign at all.
Rohrbach: On stuff like that, you probably got further without being sponsored by the campaign. There were rules about how many tickets per campaign. Did you get to go the Fairfax Chamber debate?
Feld: No. What I’m struck by is the difference between two years ago and this year. Now, everybody’s calling us, wanting to get on our blogs, get on Blog Talk Radio, it’s so different than a couple years ago….
Rohrbach: A big part of that is Webb’s success, how much he benefited from the internet and netroots organizing. People said “holy shit!”