Netroots Rising

Lee Diamond is a long-time Democratic and progressive activist who, In January 2006, co-founded the Draft James Webb movement. Diamond was crucial to the success of the “draft,” and also played a central role in getting the Webb campaign off the ground during its first few months. Diamond had never blogged prior to the Draft James Webb experience, and considers himself more of a grassroots than a netroots person.

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

Diamond: There are at least two big aspects to this:

1. The sophistication of our initial group: technology, where to blog, knowledge of local politics, knowledge of the local grassroots network, and our connections in the blog world and the political world.

2. The deep well of grassroots energy for Democratic victories that continues up to this moment as evidenced by Obama’s and Clinton’s fundraising totals. This resulted from Democratic losses in terribly run campaigns, Bush venality on almost everyday basis, governing a divided country like he had the biggest mandate in modern times, the emergence of IT as an incredible force (first with MoveOn, then McCain, Meetup, Dean, etc). On Bush, Cheney venality, I’d like to pay special attention to the way they used fear to manipulate the public and start a war that continues to devastate Iraq and kill innocent children among others. This makes me incredibly angry and depressed. I am quite sure that this made a lot of my friends as angry as or even angrier than me. I did channel it into something positive with our campaign to elect Jim Webb.

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

Diamond: We won. We built [Webb] a bridge to the Democratic Party. We cut the path. We knocked down the trees. We held his place for him. We also innovated all year long, from Draft Webb to Real Virginians For Webb. Our looseness was a virtue in the way great people came in and were accepted for the skills and contributions they brought.

I don’t at this moment see any failures…The danger of grassroots is that it cannot be controlled or it is difficult to control. That is why bottom up makes politicians nervous. (I think it played some role in undermining the Dean campaign, although the candidate made some serious mistakes and it is hard to know what would have happened had Dean not made his mistakes.)

The Webb campaign was all about grassroots from the very beginning…The reason it was a grassroots campaign was because of the grassroots, not the top-down. Everything came from the grassroots…all the initiative, people like Mary Detweiler, Jan Lars Mueller, etc. Webb is Senator today because of the grassroots.

Feld: How valuable/effective do you believe the grassroots pro-Webb blogs and Yahoo groups were?

Diamond: Early on they made our organizing much more effective. Susan Mariner came to our attention because of Raising Kaine or another blog. This area is a great example of how online meshed with traditional shoe leather organizing. It was synergistic. Later, of course, it became a means of sharing info with a somewhat larger segment of the population.

There should be something about the website as well. This was not a blog, but it was the key to our initial organizing. It kind of made everything else we did possible. We could email the link to our friends (in addition to blogging) and get the viral thing going. While I did not blog at this point, I probably knew the largest number of activists and I emailed everyone I know and some of those folks became part of our volunteer corps. Others helped spread the word.

Feld: How would you describe the meeting between the “bottom up” draft and the “top-down” professional campaign people after Jim Webb announced? Specifically, how do you believe the grassroots/netroots was integrated - or not - with the “professional” campaign.

Diamond: Ultimately, integration did occur. Walking into the field office in the fall after not having been around for some time was a Rip Van Winkle experience. I very much suspect, however, that it happened because of Josh [Chernila] and people such as Mary Detweiler and Sarah John. Harriet [Hirsch] is another one, but a lot of people came in after I left and so I cannot speak so much to their roles. I met a number of terrific people in late fall, election night and after the election.

Volunteers were crucial to the campaign throughout, but at times their presence was sort of invisible.

Feld: Why do you think the Webb campaign achieved the success that it did, in contrast to the Clark and Dean campaigns, both of which ultimately lost.

Diamond: This was a statewide race so it was immediately a manageable thing for us to undertake. The areas we worked in initially were the areas that won the primary for us. We had a candidate who was compelling before he said a word in public. This goes to both the candidate and the climate at the time. It goes to his disillusionment with the Republicans on the war (because that is what we knew about when we started) and the truly awesome force of personality he brings to the table. It is like firepower. It is like a coiled spring ready to smash someone standing nearby.

Feld: What lessons should the netroots learn from the Webb experience?

Diamond: Grassroots activists should continue to work on participatory leadership models. We should spread skill development, knowledge, etc so that we can exercise greater discipline while having people involved and understanding what is going on. It seems that progress is being made on this score in Virginia.

Feld: What did you do exactly during your time on the campaign?

Diamond: My position was volunteer coordinator. I coordinated the search for office space, obtaining furniture, recruiting volunteers to help us with all that. I coordinated the early petition drive and later helped Pete D’Alessandro. I staffed events, organized phoning when we had only 4-6 phone lines, built crowds.

One of the most significant things I did was serve as the fallback for our petition drive. I went out for a week to coordinate…obtaining the lion’s share of our signatures in the three districts in the western part of the state. In Blacksburg and C-ville, I ran into paid Miller workers. Of course, Pete and I were the only people the Webb campaign paid to work on the petition drive. We had hundreds of volunteers doing this tiresome, grinding work for us. It made us a lot stronger as an organization and as individual activists. We showed what we could do.

Feld: To what extent did you take action on your own initiative?

Diamond: Of course, with the Draft most of what I did was on my own initiative.

Jim announced on February 8. I fronted the money for a table at [the state JJ dinner]. I pushed for him to go and for him to have extensive contact with his grassroots supporters during that time period. We had some success with this. His appearances at DFA and PDA , local parties, etc. who I networked with was quite important in getting us over the hump of resistance from some people. Kate Wilder and others initially had questions. I was the one who answered those concerns.

I facilitated the initial petition drive which other people obviously ended up taking an enormous role in.

I had a very hard time with this initiative question during the campaign because the previous campaigns I’d been involved in were kind of command and control, top down operations.

I eventually encouraged people to go ahead and work some of the City Council elections held in 18 jurisdictions around the state on May 2, 2006. I sent out the professional grip cards to some folks around the state despite [the campaign] declining my requests to support this effort with campaign resources.

Feld: Anything else you think is important, interesting, funny, relevant?

Diamond:…it was a deeply moving experience to be part of something so important. We did deliver the Democratic majority in the Senate because WE put a race in play that was totally unanticipated. Not only did we put it in play, we won! We destroyed the Republican plan for ’06.

We also took out an expected Presidential candidate…