Netroots Rising

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!”