Obama, the Internet and the Decline of Big Money and Big Media
By Micah L. Sifry, 02/06/2008 - 11:14am
http://techpresident.com/blog/entry/21320/obama_the_internet_and_the_decline_of_big_money_and_big_media
I just got back home from a quick business trip to Israel, and literally
arrived at JFK at 6am this morning to learn all of the results from the
Uber-Tuesday primaries. So forgive me if this post seems like it was
written at 35,000 feet. But I think if we take a step back from the
state-by-state results and look at the broader picture, I think a bold
statement is in order.
If it were not for the internet, and all the campaign- and
voter-generated activism that it has enabled, Hillary Clinton would
already be the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, and Barack Obama
or another reform-minded candidate would be trailing badly. (On the
Republican side, it's harder to make such a clear-cut statement, mainly
because the field has been so open on that side. But again, I think the
internet and all the campaign- and voter-generated activism it has
enabled has helped keep the Republican field from solidifying, and
certainly it has helped two of the four remaining candidates, Mike
Huckabee and Ron Paul, extend their reach. For the purposes of this
argument, though, I am going to focus on the Ds, a side that I know
better anyway, and maybe one of our Republican contributors will wrestle
with this on their side.)
From the 1980s forward, the presidential nominating process--what
political scientists call "the winnowing process"--has been dominated by
two things: the money chase and the big media's power to frame the
primary narrative around the race. On the Democratic side, we've seen
the same pattern play out every time there has been an open field (i.e.,
no sitting president running for re-election). One candidate is the
favorite of the party's establishment and its major sources of funding,
and one tries to create a reform coalition to dislodge the establishment
favorite. That, in broad strokes, is the story of Mondale vs Hart in
1984, Dukakis vs Jackson in 1988, Clinton vs Brown in 1992, and Gore vs
Bradley in 2000.
In 2004, something started to shift, and we saw a semi-outsider
candidate powered mainly by small donations, Howard Dean, nearly steal
the prize, but then the voters--and the establishment and the
money--quickly solidified around John Kerry. The frontloading of the
primaries--which has been engineered by a succession of party insiders
who have wanted to insure a quick consolidation around a frontrunner
(ideally from the establishment) has always given the edge to that
better-financed establishment candidate. And certainly once Kerry won
Iowa and New Hampshire, that was the end of any reform challenge to the
frontrunner.
To be clear, I don't think the Democratic pattern can be distilled
simply down to Big Money + Party Establishment vs Smaller Money +
Outsider Reformer. As Ron Brownstein pointed out in a great column last
year, there's a demographic element to this pattern too. In each case
cited above, the victorious "insider" candidate has also managed to
appeal to the more working-class Democratic base while the "reformer"
has tapped more well-educated liberal types. Beer-drinkers vs
wine-drinkers. Labor vs eggheads. Ethnic Catholics vs Jews and blacks.
Brownstein warned that Obama, with his two best-selling introspective
books and Harvard pedigree, might simply be repeating the same
Hart-Jackson-Brown-Bradley role, while Clinton, with her base among
working women, union members and urban minorities, was more likely to
maintain the upper hand. And that may still be the story of 2008.
Now, Clinton vs Obama does have echoes of Gore vs Bradley or Mondale vs
Hart. In each case, you have a former VP (or former First Lady, which
Hillary is playing as if she was VP) against a reformist Senator. In
each case, the reformist campaigned for change and new ideas over
experience. But with Obama, two things are different.
One, and it's almost ridiculous to have to state it, is his obvious
charisma. Compared to Obama, Bill Bradley and Gary Hart had all the
charisma of a Brookings Institution policy paper (though perhaps Donna
Rice felt differently about Hart). It often feels like the Obama
campaign is selling us a rock star (tell me if that isn't the case with
his main national TV commercial, when it zooms in on him on some giant
stage surrounded by thousands of adoring, screaming fans). But time and
again Obama delivers an arena-level performance, and his fans want to
share the magic they are experiencing with others. And while I haven't
had the time yet to dig into the cross-tabs, my gut tells me that Obama
is drawing more support, in absolute terms, from younger voters than
either Bradley or Hart ever managed to do--so even if his coalition is
similar in make-up to theirs, it's bigger.
But the other big change, to finally circle around to my statement at
the beginning of this post, is that we are now seeing the internet's
role in politics in full flower. As Patrick Ruffini pointed out here
recently, no candidate in American history has ever raised $32 million
in a single month--until Obama came along and hit that mark this
January. $28 million of that, the campaign says, was raised online.
Clinton, who has had a more traditional fundraising operation, raised
something like $13.5 million last month. There's also a significant
difference in how the two campaigns are doing in attracting and
mobilizing volunteers. We don't have the same kind of hard metrics, but
from all kinds of soundings we know that Obama has been deploying huge
numbers of paid and unpaid field organizers, and that voter-generated
events on his behalf vastly outnumber similar events organized by
Clinton supporters. (See my January 15 post on how he was dominating
online organizing of offline events.)
And lastly there is a real difference in how each candidate and their
base is situated in the online ecology. In addition to the backing of
e-groups like MoveOn.org, Obama is rolling up personal endorsements from
all kinds of tech/geek influentials: danah boyd, Larry Lessig, David
Weinberger, Dave Winer, Ross Mayfield of Socialtext, Michael
Arrington--there are plenty of others and I've just lost track. (The
only influential tech blogger backing Hillary that I know of is Jeff
Jarvis.) And perhaps most importantly, Obama's supporters are net
natives. They know how to use the medium to spread messages. Just
compare the DipDive "Yes We Can" video to the Clinton campaign's latest
attempt at viral video, it's dippy "Guitar Hero" parody. One campaign
benefits from voter-generated organic online support (that it has helped
foster, as Ari Melber keeps pointing out), and one hires professionals
to make online videos that, at least in this case, reek of
inauthenticity. One campaign embraces the open internet in policy terms,
and one cleaves to a Hollywood-inspired attitude towards intellectual
property that kept it from even calling for free use of campaign debate
video. The bottom line is, in generational terms Clinton's core
supporters--women in their 40s through their 60s--are far less likely to
be digital natives than Obama's youthful base.
Imagine if Bill Bradley or Gary Hart had the full-blown internet at
their disposal in 2000 or 1984. Yes, I know Bradley raised a ton of
money online (indeed, he achieved fundraising parity with Gore in 1999),
but part of my point here is that back in 2000 the small-donor
revolution was just starting--and today the internet effect is not just
about small donors (26% of Obama's money is from people giving less than
$200, compared to just 12% of Clinton's), though of course that is the
easiest metric to point to, and still the most consequential.
The internet effect is also on grass-roots mobilization, by the
campaigns as they ask their supporters to take actions (click here to
virtual phone bank, or to download a precinct walk list, or to host your
own house party) AND by supporters acting on their own to make and share
their own powerful messages of support. Back in 2004, Dean webmaster
Nicco Mele talked to me about feeling a new kind of progressive muscle
flex in support of that campaign (See "The Deaning of America.") Now
we're seeing that muscle on steroids. It's partly a product of a
candidate with charisma and a real message that resonates--things for
which there is no technological fix. But under the right circumstances,
and I think we're seeing them now, the internet is a force multiplier
for such a campaign.
The old winnowing process, which was mainly about wooing big donors and
winning news cycles, is no more. Obama seems to be carving a new path to
the nomination, one that has gotten him to parity, and maybe even given
him the edge going forward. If he wins the Democratic nomination, there
will be all kinds of reasons why. But if that happens, let's hope
everyone gives the internet and all the campaign-driven and
activist-driven organizing it has powered on his behalf a big share of
the credit.
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