Pandering at a new level

The most recent comment from the Howard Dean campaign staff at the Lawrence Lessig blog reaches a whole new level of pandering: We’re all big Lessig fans on the Internet Team, and it has been, as many have said, an historic week. Lessig quotes EFF founder Mitch Kapor as saying “Architecture is politics.” For me, … Continue reading “Pandering at a new level”

The most recent comment from the Howard Dean campaign staff at the Lawrence Lessig blog reaches a whole new level of pandering:

We’re all big Lessig fans on the Internet Team, and it has been, as many have said, an historic week. Lessig quotes EFF founder Mitch Kapor as saying “Architecture is politics.” For me, what is so powerful about this campaign is how the Internet is completely changing the architecture of politics. We talk alot about how the energy and momentum is bottom-up, but I think what sometimes gets lost is how the innovation is bottom-up and person-to-person as well (or e2e as Lessig might say).

So we see that technology now enables politicians to do the same sleazy things in entirely new and innovative ways, and that’s progress.

In the last election, voters were asked by exit pollsters whether they were regular users of the Internet. Here’s how they answered:

Regular User of Internet All… Gore… Bush… Buchanan Nader
Yes 64% 47% 49% 1% 3%
No 36% 51% 46% 1% 2%

It appears that George W. Bush is our first Internet president.

One thought on “Pandering at a new level”

  1. Uh, no… by his actions relative to actually using the various technologies available to us (and I’m using the classic definition that includes language as a technology) GWB is very much a television president in a grand tradition that harkens back to Kennedy.

    While I realize that you are being facetious (Bennett facetious? Nooooooo…..) we do have to remember that the famous Kennedy-Nixon debate marked the point of inflection, before which radio was the dominant political medium in America, and after which television was the king-maker.

    Will Dean be the first Internet presidential candidate? (and I mean the one who doesn’t get kicked off the Island in that TV sit-com called “Survivor Primaries”) By “Internet” presidential candidate, I mean one whose engagement of a significant segment of the electorate via the Internet made a considerable difference in the outcome. We will know this by a shift in the demographic statistics of those who actually vote, much in the same way as President Roh in South Korea won their last vote.

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