Category: Politics

Howard Dean is still confused about his big flame-out, having just posted this to his blog:

Today my candidacy may come to an end–but our campaign for change is not over.

“May” come to an end? Howard, your campaign came to end weeks ago in New Hampshire. The people have spoken, it’s over, face the music and move on.

Apparently, Dean can’t stand the prospect of going back to private life and will try and put together some sort of an organization that will make him a permanent nag of all Democratic Party candidates, kinda like Nader only not as destructive at the polls. It’s hard to say what Dean’s organizational or policy contribution really is, however. It’s not like the Internet candidacy was his idea or even that good an idea in the long run, and on the policy front he’s just a standard issue DLC guy with a little post-Vietnam pacifism thrown in for flavor.

Maybe he’s going to train future candidates on public speaking (rimshot).

UPDATE: New York Times blogger Matt Bai thinks Dean has a legacy.

Lots of blogging people have sustained elbow injuries from patting themselves on the back over how inclusive and tolerant they are with respect to gay marriage since the City and County of Frisco has been issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. This exercise generally involves quite a bit of sneering at the religious right and is generally most intense on feminist and/or libertarian blogs such as Reason Magazine, and on the sorts of blogs that were in favor of tolerating the marriage of Saddam Hussein with the people of Iraq a few months ago. And yes, I can see that this development is good for many gay people and not at all destructive to normal marriages, but the latter is because we’ve already paid the price for normalizing gay relationships and demonizing straight ones.

This process started in the US and the UK in the mid-seventies when the movement to provide shelter and support to violence-prone women was hijacked by a group of people who made a conscious decision to tear down the image of the traditional family in order to achieve a set of goals that included gay marriage, a permanent women’s rights movement, and an anti-male emphasis in most aspects of social engineering.
Continue reading “Del Martin’s Mission”

I’ve been travelling for a couple of weeks, and not posting much, and now so many bodies have floated to the surface it’s hard to know where to start counting. We got your latest JFK sex scandal:

Here we go again?

The worlds of politics and the media were all atwitter yesterday over a report on the popular Internet site, the Drudge Report, that Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry – the Democratic presidential front-runner – may be brought down by a sex scandal.

Six years ago, it was a similar item on the Drudge Report that brought the world’s attention to the affair between then-President Bill Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky – sparking the scandal that led to Clinton’s impeachment.

It doesn’t surprise me that stories like this would turn up, but I don’t much believe it because Kerry looks like a failed experiment in taxidermy. So maybe it was planted by his campaign to make him look more human as he starts running against Bush and not just a Martian, a lunatic, and a robot. But Kerry’s campaign language has always been quite sexually suggestive, so maybe the boy has a secret life for real. It’s interesting that the British tabloids are all over the story, as you can see from the links Drudge Report’s assembled. The American media has too much invested in Kerry to tear him down quite yet.

Comcast is going after Disney, which has created big buzz in the newspapers (Los Angeles Times — San Francisco Chronicle — San Jose Mercury — Los Angeles Daily News — Wall Street Journal — Washington Post) but not that much on the blogs, except for Tim Oren’s savage attack:

Let’s keep this short and sweet. Anyone thinking they are going to merge a content business and a network transport business and add value hasn’t been paying attention for at least ten years.

Tim’s stating the conventional wisdom, of course, but at some point the technology and the marketing will be advanced to the point that a merger like this one is actually going to work. Comcast has a vehicle for delivering pay-per-view, customized programming that the satellite companies and the Internet can’t match, and Disney’s got content, so if this merger goes through and Comcast promotes new services, it may actually turn out to be something. Comcast has a former Disney guy on board, and I suspect he’s got some more specific ideas in mind than the loons at AOL had when they scooped up Time Warner. I’m not ready to poo-poo this deal myself.

Personally, I had a great time in Austin and did some good work in Hillsboro, so life is good.

Matt Welch’s article on child support and paternity is on-line now, at Reason: Injustice by Default. This system really is the major civil liberties problem in America today, in terms of numbers of people affected and the severity of the injustice, so please check it out.

My post on Dean’s Deaniac problem (The Stupid Campaign) has made the rounds, and I’ve encountered some predictable push-back from Deaniacs who don’t like my claim that they’re basically nuts. So let me clarify the claim and then back it up. I’m not saying that everyone who ever thought about voting for Howard Dean is a loon, and I’m sure there are many people who approve of his policies and background who’ve thought through all the implications and simply prefer him to the alternatives, on balance. But these don’t seem to be the people who’ve formed the core of his volunteer effort. The first to jump into the Dean campaign are apparently the purple-haired loners who lack social skills and emotional balance, and these first movers effectively built a wall keeping the others from taking volunteer positions in the campaign.

This is evident when you read the following account of Caucus Night in Iowa on the Daily Kos, a notorious far-left blog, by Dean supporter Tom Schaller:

At Precinct #63, which caucused at the same, East High School as Precinct 37, there were ample Dean signs. The precinct captains had the super-looking yellow T-shirts that with blue lettering that read “Dean Precinct Captain, January 19, 2004.” On the back it read “It starts here, it starts now.” The Dean campaign had not one, not two, but three observers in the room. Amazingly, Kucinich had two, but neither Kerry nor Edwards nor Gephardt had any. But so what? What counts are the people in the caucuses, not the ones watching from the sidelines.

More damning, the Dean precinct captain on the floor was ineffective and diffident. I watched with amazement as a more-motivated, more-mature Edwards captain named Susan Voss (sans T-shirt, sans sideline coaches) went over to the Gephardt folks in Precinct 63, who at that point had only seven members but needed nine for viability. Susan sat down at their table, looked them in the eye, appealed to them about how Edwards is an “articulate, bright, caring person.” You can tell not only that she meant it, but that she could personalize it. She didn’t have any training, and it showed – it showed as authentic, that is.

Then, with grace and aplomb, she got up and said she would make room so a guy named Arturo, from the Kucinich group (also non-viable, and hoping to move Gephardt’s people to them to achieve viability), could have his turn.

Meanwhile, the Deanies are sitting with their hands folded. They are not even talking to each other. No comity, no motivation. The precinct captain eventually comes over, unsure of what precisely to do with himself or how to speak to people. The Geppies are still sitting at the school library’s tables at the far end of the room.

The Dean captain meanders over, stands over the Geppies, providing physical distance that is conveyed in a non-verbally and dismissive way. Worse, his main message is little more than, “C’mon, don’t you want to join us?” or “Are there any questions or issues you have about the Governor?” The Geppies are literally staring at his navel, because it’s hard to make eye contact with somebody whose head is three feet over your own with craning your neck.

There were six delegates to be assigned by the 60+ people who turned out at Precinct 63. Dean had 16 of the caucus-goers at the start, and ended up with 14. Kerry didn’t budge much, but Edwards gained strength. Gephardt managed to cobble together the two defections from Kucinich he needed, and got one delegate, as did Dean and Kerry. But Edwards left with two, and he can thank the dynamism, assertiveness and tact of Susan Voss for that second delegate.

No training, but none needed.

Of course, you can’t teach basic social skills to your volunteers in a couple of hours, so perhaps the final lesson about the Dean Campaign was that it was always an illusion, built on a foundation of overblown promises, wild claims, and ferverish expectations, like the Dot Com Bubble.

Howard Dean looked to me like a much better candidate before he met the Internet than he ended up being after he was Trippi-ized, so it’s kinda sad that he’ll go off into the sunset as one of those “we hardly knew you” guys. But don’t blame the media for this, blame Howard and the Internet, where nobody knows you’re a dog.

The Internet campaign story gets better and better. Now that it’s been revealed that their fired campaign manager had his fingers in the till, they want their money back. Here’s what one Deaniac has to say on Dean’s Blog for America:

WHERE IS OUR MONEY? TRIPPI SHOULD GIVE IT BACK.

Today I read in the news that the campaign is basically broke. It seems clear that a big mistake was made by spending large amounts in ads in the Feb. 3 states before Iowa or New Hampshire had even voted. Losing in those states, rather than winning, completely changed the landscape of the campaign. In retrospect, those huge ad buys were obviously a mistake because Dean can’t win there without having the momentum from NH. Now we find out that Trippi made a 15% commission on those ads. Assuming about $10 million spent on ads, that is $1.5 million in Trippi’s pocket. And that money is not coming from the pockets of fat cat contributors. It is coming from us on the blog giving $20 or $50 or $100 here and there. Is it right for Trippi to keep that money? If Trippi really believes in this campaign and in us on the blog, shouldn’t he give at least some of it back to the campaign to help it out of a situation — i.e., being broke — that his excessive ad buys helped create?

Posted by: BushLied at January 29, 2004 02:43 PM | Link

It sure is good we’ve got people like Trippi and Dean taking America back from those thieves at Halliburton, eh?

Just when you think that things couldn’t possibly get worse for Howard Dean, his campaign pulls Super Tuesday ads because it’s broke:

Jan. 29, 2004 | Joe Trippi, the iconic architect of Howard Dean’s Internet-driven campaign, is gone. And so are the millions of dollars that Dean raised from legions of grass-roots supporters over the last year.

Following defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire, and less than a week away from a make-or-break series of Democratic primary election contests, Trippi on Wednesday quit the Dean campaign after being offered a lesser position. At the same time, Dean announced that his high-flying campaign is broke, and he announced to workers that their paychecks will be suspended for two weeks because of a multimillion-dollar debt.

What a sad end this is to Dean’s campaign, his movement, and his political career.

Head Deaniac Joe Trippi resigns from the Dean campaign:

The Governor has asked Roy Neel to come in as CEO of the campaign.

I have resigned as campaign manager.

I’ve always believed that the most important thing was to change our country and our politics.

and bloggers scratch their heads and point fingers in an attempt to assign the blame to the once-promising campaign’s meltdown. Jeff Jarvis started the whole conversation days back when he speculated after Iowa that the “social software” upon which the Dean campaign was built was surrounding the candidate with an echo chamber that filtered out reality. Clay Shirky points out a pitfall of on-line activism wherein people confuse time spent playing computer with effective political action, Dave Weinberger blames it all on Dean’s personality, and Jarvis comes around to the fact that the Dean campaign was more about the campaign than about Dean himself and whatever he may actually stand for.

All of these guys have their points, but I don’t think any of them has actually nailed the problem, and I say this as somebody who’s used the Internet and a variety of software tools to organize political volunteers for several years, starting in 1995.

Shirky’s right that when you enable people to discuss, debate, and affirm political ideas on-line, they tend to lose the distinction between their on-line world and the actual domain of politics, which is about electing candidates and passing bills, not just about joining a group and developing a sense of belonging to a cause larger than oneself, no matter how gratifying that all may be. I’ve seen this happen before, and several of the lobbyists I used to work with refused to take part in on-line discussion groups for this very reason: they’d rather spend the time in the Capital talking to lawmakers and their staffers than engaging in non-productive e-mail discussions. Anybody with any exposure to the Net knows that it can be a huge time sink. But that’s just scratching the surface.

There’s something about “movement-oriented” on-line discourse that tends to drive groups toward the fringes. On-line discussion groups are invariably shouting matches where the point of view with the most insistent and most obsessed advocates tends to steamroll the moderate center.

Trippi evidently has a bit of the Paul O’Neil desire to rule in hell rather than serve in heaven, and he always thought he was the star of the Dean campaign instead of the stubby governor himself. At the end of the day, he wasn’t content to apply his talents to the campaign where the candidate thought he could do the most good, a position that requires equal and large doses of arrogance and hypocrisy. How can you promote someone to lead a nation if you aren’t even willing to accept this judgment about something as small as one man’s role in a campaign?

Most of the Deaniacs are clearly disturbed that Trippi’s gone, as you can see from the comments to the first post above, but some, like this commenter, are happy:

What did you do with our $40 million dollars, Joe? We got our asses handed to us in Iowa and NH, and we can’t make payroll. I’m VERY angry at you – the LAST thing this campaign needs is fiscal irresponsibility buried under feel-good hot air. There’s the door, you know the rest.

It’s awfully bizarre that Dean turns to a Beltway lobbyist to run the campaign that started on the Internet as an outsider’s bid for the White House, but that’s who Neel is. And Neel’s not just any Beltway Lobbyist, he’s the head lobbyist for the telephone companies regularly demonized by Weinberger, Searls, Isenberg and the other Cluetrainians. So the telcos have eaten the Internet, the Smart Network has stamped out the Stupid Network, representative democracy has beaten Emergent Democracy and Joi Ito doesn’t even acknowledge what’s happening.

So what is happening? Briefly put, Dean’s problem is the Deaniacs. The Internet-driven campaign has enabled him to amass a large following, but they’re primarily unbalanced people, fanatical followers, extremists, and wackos. In my experience with Internet-enabled activism, these are the kind of people most attracted to online chat and email wars, so an organization that’s going to use these tools to recruit has to prune the weirdos before they run off the mainstream people you need to get in order to reach out to the undecided mainstream people whose support you really need in the voting booth. Others have written that the orange-hatted, tattooed, and body-pierced volunteers who flew into Iowa alienated the actual voters, and that’s real.

When your core group of volunteers is weirdo, you pretty well guarantee that only wierdos will join the campaign later on, because normal people don’t want to hang out with a bunch of lost pups looking for a father figure or a messianic jihad. And when your volunteers are as large in numbers as they are loose in marbles, the constant contact the candidate has with them can’t help but rub off in the kind of mania Dean displayed in the “I have a scream” speech. And volunteers are the life-blood the campaign, doing all the indispensable phone calling, door knocking, and talking to voters one by one. Without a core group of people both dedicated and sane, a campaign can’t go anywhere. So the Kerry approach, which was traditional politics with a little technology, ramps up slower than a techno-razzle campaign, but it’s got quality control that ensures that it won’t eat itself in the long run.

So politics, even in the age of the Internet, is still about people, not about technology, gimmickry, or gadgets, and most of the people are moderate, deliberate, and fairly sensible. Dean learned this the hard way, and the only thing that can save his campaign now is the fact that few people are paying attention to what’s happening in Burlington or on the Stupid Network.

A telling fact in all this was Dean and Trippi’s failure to believe their own campaign rhetoric. They said the campaign was energizing new voters and bringing in new volunteers to work the campaign, but they obviously didn’t provide them with the kind of training and direction that’s appropriate for political neophytes. So when the volunteers said they had 40,000 committed votes in Iowa, based on whatever tea leaves the kids were reading or smoking, Dean believed them, didn’t probe, didn’t question, and when the late polls came in and said “nope, don’t think so”, he melted down. And when this happened twice, he freaked out and jumped in bed with the first Washington Telco lobbyist he found.

Yes, it’s very funny to watch these people learning the rookie lessons of Internet activism on the national stage, and my ribs hurt from the laughing.

UPDATE: Head Lemur points out that this is the way committees and other organizations work.

UPDATE: For a backup of my claims about Deaniac weirdness, see this post, Deaniacs in Action.

Here’s a nice tidbit about Bush’s approval ratings you don’t see everywhere:

Even if Bush’s overall approval rating is narrowly based, and thus potentially vulnerable, it’s still darn good. Looking back nearly a half century, only one previous president has had a higher approval rating in January of a re-election year — Dwight Eisenhower in 1956.

I don’t see how that “narrowly based” stuff really comes into it; looks like ABC’s spinning again.

Via Media Whores Online Watch.