Netroots Rising

Tim Tagaris is a former U.S. Marine, netroots superstar, and a main character in our book “Netroots Rising.” Tim’s most recent gig was as internet director on the Chris Dodd for President campaign. According to OpenLeft blogger Matt Stoller, ” Tim is a brilliant organizer, a dedicated progressive and a fantastic blogger and visionary…a netroots pioneer.” Here are excerpts from an interview that Nate and I did with Tim back in April 2007. Tim explains how he got into netroots politics.

Tagaris: It was the end of 2004, I was at school at Southern Ill. Univ, working in a bar, decided I wanted to at least explore a combination of the two things I enjoy the most - politics and mass media. I set out to work for a candidate named Jane Mitakides in Ohio’s 3rd Congressional District. I was working on my Master’s thesis, but never completed it because of all the campaign work. My thesis chair, Dr. Tom Johnson, is now teaching a class at Texas Tech on intersection of blogs and politics. The thesis was on late night talk shows.

I was hired as a staffer on Mitakides’ campaign. I originally thought it would be a press secretary job. I started doing gopher work for the campaign. Soon, I had my own ideas about using the internet on a campaign. When I started opening my mouth, I was told by Jane that my job was not to think but just to do as I was told, literally in those words. That was when I said tonight’s gonna be my last night on the campaign. I finished up some work I was doing for them.

Wilcox: You’re skipping the story of [Markos' infamous] mercenary remark.

Tagaris: That happened right after I left, when I joined Jeff Seemann’s campaign. Those were the two campaigns it affected the most. I had left Jane, who pulled her advertising [from Daily Kos after Markos' mercenary remarks] and joined Seamon, who advertised on Daily Kos.

[...]

Wilcox: How long had you been with Seamon when that happened. He placed the ad on his own?

Tagaris: He placed the ad on his own. After Mitakides, I went back to Chicago and looked at Seamon’s FEC reports. He obviously didn’t have a lot of money. I thought, maybe he will let me go and do some traditional and nontraditional media outreach, be a press secretary, answer questions from the press. I wanted to play West Wing. I emailed him, and he said he couldn’t promise me anything except for a roof over my head and maybe $100 a week to work for his campaign. I said, “done, deal.” I ran upstairs and told my mom I had accepted a job for a roof over my head and $500 a week, just so she wouldn’t freak out. I packed my stuff, left for OH about a week later.

We were definitely the first campaign to put our candidate out there online, on the blogs. You would often see Jeff at Daily Kos and MyDD. Jeff was one of the first candidates to interact with local bloggers, on the Yahoo groups. This was with the candidate himself, not just a surrogate or staffer. It was literally Jeff, he liked [the netroots stuff] so much he wouldn’t participate in call time. [Fortunately], we were making enough money online to keep operation afloat. Jeff never thought he had a real chance to win, [so he believed that] online money was enough.

The most revolutionary thing we did was the whole idea of “campaign manager for a day,” which people seemed to enjoy. They got to choose Jeff’s schedule for a day. People voted on the ideas, the next day we sent him out to do these things. We live blogged it, with pictures, etc. It was a success; people loved it, really appreciated it, felt like they were really involved, enjoyed following what Jeff was doing.

Feld: How did you come up with this? Did you just stumble on this? Conscious strategy? Knew it would work?

Tagaris: Oh yeah, we knew it would work. In those days, it was like if you had “4 congress” at the end of your username, it was a huge deal.

[...]

Wilcox: What was the final turnout, results?

Tagaris: We got our asses handed to us, 66-33. We didn’t do any better than the people before us did. We were the first campaign to run a TV commercial in that district. It was on cable; I produced it with students at Kent State Univ. I shot the commercial and edited it, all in 24 hours. We did the buy the next morning. We spent $30 on the production of that ad, but it looked pretty good. It was a small ad buy in a small market. With the commercial, we showed people a return on their investment. Rep. Ralph Regula (R) was running for Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, was out raising money for other candidates. We forced him to come back, forced him to campaign. He had to build a website. At some point, there were some old men in a room drinking some fine whiskey or fine scotch, thinking to themselves, do you think we got anything to worry about with this internet thing going on with this character Jeff Seamon? No, no, but let’s go back to Ohio more often, put up a website…

Feld: How many people in that district were online?

Tagaris: Most of our support came from people outside the district.

Wilcox: Did you have any volunteers?

Tagaris: The campaign was such a mess. The only things we had going for us were the internet piece really. We were never raising any money offline, not really using e-mails so mobilization of online supporters was minimal at best. We used the internet to generate a lot of earned media, a lot of stories about Jeff, many process stories for sure, that was because of the web. [With the campaigns I worked on], Seamon was all blog, [Paul] Hackett [in Ohio in 2005] was just brute force (put out the call, dozens or hundreds of people swarmed in). With Ned [Lamont in Connecticut in 2006] we were able to do it in a systematic, effective and targeted way where we were mobilizing people. You can see the difference between the three campaigns.

Wilcox: Election night, Seamon got only 33% of the vote…were you surprised?

Tagaris: No, I had hoped we could break 40%. We knew we were going to lose, there were a lot more important things going on in Ohio.

Wilcox: Did the Kerry campaign do anything to help Jeff?

Tagaris: No. They let Jeff speak at an event. We had an adversarial relationship with the County chair. He wanted to run for that [House] seat, but he’s a coward, waiting for Regula to retire. Jeff spoke at a Kerry campaign rally once. There was grassroots support, whether that came from the blog or from Jeff’s history as a peace activist in Canton, OH. Our website cost $600, we had the worst frickin’ campaign website in history. The picture of Jeff on front made him look like a child molester. It was just awful. He had sideburns, he was balding. Our website had no tools for meaningful participation.

Feld: Were there bloggers in the district?

Tagaris: The real emergence of local bloggers came with [Paul] Hackett [in Ohio in 2005]. This was pre-Hackett. There were a few bloggers that had very small readership. I was writing at Grow Ohio (an Ohio-centric blog). I was a front page writer at Swing State Project, with posting privileges at MyDD. It was a great synergy of local and national [blogging].

Wilcox: So, election night, you get your ass kicked, what do you do?

Tagaris: I drank and watched the Ohio election returns come in until 4 in the morning. We recognized we had done some cool things. At the peak, we had 8 people. They were volunteers, with two full-time interns. There were no [longtime campaign] professionals. I was working in a bar, and all of a sudden I’m communications director. The campaign manager was a member of Democracy for America in Cleveland.

Feld: Could this have happened 10 years ago?

Tagaris: The two people that ran before Jeff didn’t even raise the minimum $5,000 to report.

Feld: I mean in terms of all these people who came from regular life experience…

Tagaris: As far as I know, I’m the only person who came in through the internet. So that part could have happened. The money we raised could not have happened. The next morning, after the defeat, I packed my stuff and drove back to Chicago. I hung out for a month, got the itch, decided to go to Philadelphia and help out Chuck Penacchio. Someone wrote something about him on Daily Kos, my glorified job board at this point. Penacchio was a potential [Democratic] challenger to Bob Casey, Jr, who was a mess.

So we are going to challenge the most crazy wingnut [Rick Santorum] in the US Senate with either an ex-Republican or Bob Casey, who shares many of the same beliefs as Rick Santorum on social issues and the war. I’m thinking to myself, there is no way that this should happen. I thought Casey would lose up to a month before the election. On the stump, Casey was as inspirational as a warm bag of vaseline with crushed valium inside.

Feld: The conventional wisdom was that Casey would win.

Tagaris: He hid in the shadows and he won. I worked for Chuck from end of January 2005…for four months. We did a lot of great things. We wanted to turn the campaign online into almost a reality TV show. We shot footage everywhere, made it so that people really had a window into the campaign. We went down to Drexel one day and met up with [national blogger Chris] Bowers. At a Social Security event, they sent Sen. Santorum out to promote privatization. All of a sudden, the College Republicans were chanting, “hey hey, ho ho, Social Security’s got to go.” I didn’t even notice it, but Bowers brought it up to me later. Inside the event, Bowers actually confronted Santorum and asked him to drop the Frank Luntz talking points. We had Santorum on video waving to supporters, being serenaded by supporters chanting “hey hey, ho ho, social security’s got to go.” This was before YouTube; imagine if YouTube had been available at the time, it would have been crazy.

The next morning, we were launching Chuck’s website. We didn’t even have a website at this point. We put this out with the launch of the website, pretty good freakin’ launch! Bowers linked to it on MyDD, Duncan linked to it, Josh Marshall [of Talking Points Memo] linked to it. The next thing you know, it’s in a MoveOn email, on CNN later that afternoon. It’s in [NY Times columnist Paul] Krugman’s column the next day. All from this little video. Granted, noone except for Bowers mentioned Chuck Penacchio. We didn’t know how to put a Chuck Penacchio [label] on the video…

Josh Marshall referred to Chuck as a Pennsylvania political candidate. They all linked to the wmv files, not to the website. Noone knew who Chuck was. Chuck Penacchio could have been a figment of my imagination at that point. Noone knew.

Feld: Why wasn’t Penacchio going on Daily Kos?

Tagaris: Markos will tell you…it’s amazing Chuck Penacchio had the following he had. I left the campaign in early May 2005. That was a crazy decision, I left a nice young lady behind in Philly. It literally was that close to me being done with politics. I left, moved to Ohio to work for Congressman Brown. Jerome [Armstrong] e-mailed me one day. I was frustrated with Chuck at that point. We got Chuck a front-page story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, they were writing stories about this guy who could have been anonymous. I think we were first with Santorum making the Hitler comment about the Democrats. Chuck had a political advisor in New York, aka his best friend. It was slowing everything down and the internet is built for speed. If we were going to do anything to Bob Casey we had to be quick.

Feld: Were they holding you back?

Tagaris: Yeah, they were holding me back, wondering why we hadn’t raised $1 million online yet. They wanted LESS video on the website because people with dialup were having a hard time. Jerome e-mailed me, said there was this job. Blue State Digital (BSD) had offered me a job as well. Markos e-mailed me and said you’re crazy, with Jerome you’ll have a ton of latitude, at BSD you’ll be buried on an organizational chart. I had decided to accept the BSD job and sent an instant message to Joe Rospars at Blue State to ask one more question and then accept the job. He was away from his computer and 20 minutes later Jerome said something to me that made me say, “ok, let’s do it.” That was in early May 2005. Jerome said something along the lines of “what we’re going to do, nobody’s ever done before.” So I took the job with Sherrod Brown.

I went to Canton, OH, wrote for Grow Ohio. It was a Scoop [based software] blog, statewide, allowed people to drill down to the county level to find out what was going on. It had a map of Ohio; you could click on map and read stories from those counties. Jerome put it together. Congressman Brown was funding it, because he was considering a run for governor (or possibly Senate). At that point, there were not a lot of local bloggers. GrowOhio quickly became the largest trafficked blog in Ohio. I did it full time, I can write a little bit, other bloggers had full-time jobs. It got hundreds of visits a day, with the vast majority being from Ohio. The site launched in June 2005, in July the Paul Hackett campaign [exploded], so during [that] we were probably getting thousands of visitors per day. That was more national. After Hackett, a lot of the traditional media recognized, if I’m going to do my job properly, I’m going to have to read [the blogs to know] what’s going on…

Wilcox: How did the Hackett thing go?

Tagaris: Jerome and I recognized that one of the first organizational opportunities was going to be in southwestern Ohio, because there was a special election between Paul Hackett and Jean Schmidt there. It as an opportunity to build traffic in the southwestern part of state. Initially, Sherrod Brown didn’t want to send me down there. Essentially, what happened was that [Democratic political operative] Dan Lucas said “f*** it, go down there, we’ll get approval for it later.” The way it started was that DavidNYC from SwingStateProject said let’s test drive some things in Ohio in the special election. We didn’t test drive any specific piece of technology, just a different way to tell the story about a campaign.

Chris Baker (Ohio 2 blogger) was doing a great job of laying a foundation locally. Then, GrowOhio was talking with the campaign. The first real moment was a story I wrote about one day in October 2004, when Paul Hackett was being flown from Falluja to Ramadi, and Jean Schmidt was being wined and dined by lobbyists at a Cincinnatti Bengals game in a luxury sky box on the same day. It was great imagery, I decided we’re gonna do something with this. I talked with Joe Rospars, who at the time was at the DNC. We talked about this post I wrote, “What a Difference a Day Makes.” [Daily Kos blogger] David asked me to post it on Daily Kos. I did, and David put it on the front page. Donations started just flying in. The campaign had no idea this was going on. I had never met or spoken with Paul Hackett at the time.

A few days lader, there was blogosphere day (July 19). We talked with a bunch of people, a lot of this was run out of Swing State Project by Bob Brigham. Chris Bowers and I talked, decided to make blogosphere day a celebration of Paul Hackett. A Democracy for America email went out that day raising money for Paul Hackett. Hackett was still not aware of this. Then, money started coming in and it really hit them over the head. Money came in over ActBlue.

At this point, the netroots was behind Paul Hackett and it was obvious he was going to be a big thing. I talked to Dan Lucas a lot more in depth about going and helping out with Paul Hackett’s campaign. I drove down to Batavia, Ohio. The first post I wrote is that the campaign headquarters for Paul Hackett and Jean Schmidt were across the street from each other. What we ended up doing on the Hackett campaign nationally, was really to make people feel like they were in Batavia, Ohio, literally there sitting next to me at campaign headquarters. To do this, we used video, pictures, colorful text, with the most colorful of candidates. You know, when Paul Hackett calls the President a son of a bitch, there’s really not much I can’t write. It’s blogger heaven. And he couldn’t fire me because I didn’t even work for him.