[PT] Connected politics
John Sculley moderates. The speakers are Andrew Rasiej, Joe Trippi and Adrian Wooldridge. They each get ten minutes.
Andrew: “Politics is broken. Our democracy is broken.” There are 513,000 elected officials in this country. The relationship has been top down. What we learned from the Dean campaign is the power of the person to person connection. “There are 513,000 egocentric politicians in the US. Not one of them is netcentric.” If they were netcentric, they’d say: “My constituents know more than I do.” [Shades of Dan Gillmor.]
We can use the Internet to support the status quo, which is how it’s been up through now. Or we can use it to d something new.
Adrian Wooldridge: “Connected power is not necessarily leftwing politics.” Internet tools will shift the country further to the right. Goldwater inspired the biggest political revolution in recent history. It was a populist rebellion. And the center of gravity of the US is very much to the right. We jail 5x more people than Britain. We are far more anti-abortion than Europe. 45% of us believe in the devil while only 13% of Britain does. And it’s going to get more right-ish.
Trippi: Presidential candidates are different from us. If we were asked to carry a box for four years and not drop it or else the world will end, we’d say no thanks. But every four years, ten guys come forward and say, “Gimme that box.”
The only hope for our democracy is the new community and trust-building that’s happening on the Internet; we need to form power at the bottom to change a system that’s not working. And it’s not an ideological fight. It’s about it becoming a more powerful democracy.” The Net allows us to come together and “have faith in strangers.” [Yeah!]
Sculley: Brooks says that Republicans like their presidents to be people of soul, above the fray. Democrats feel otherwise. Are issues not really as important as we usually think?
Trippi: The real problem is the broadcast media. The 6-second soundbytes.
Adrian: People dislike CrossFire because people are craving more subtlety and nuance.
Q: What good does connected campaigning do if you don’t have good candidates?
Andrew: Netcentric means that the candidate arises from the group itself.
Trippi: The system is set up to keep interesting people from succeeding. Everything works against insurgents.
Adrian: Anti-Americanism will rise even if Kerry is elected because there it has structural causes.
Trippi: If Kerry loses, there will be a huge demand to change the Democratic party, either from within quickly or from without.
Trippi: It was the voter-to-voter connection that made Dean different. Kerry and Bush are both running topdown campaigns.
Q: Adrian, you say that the Republicans have the big ideas and the big think tanks. Will that change?
Adrian: The Republicans did that consciously. The Democrats need to do that, too. they need to agree on a simple set of goals, but it’s not clear that the Left has that. The Left needs the sort of blodbath created by Goldwater so they can sit down and decide exactly what they want.
Trippi: If Kerry wins, my fear is that there will be a sigh of relief.
Adrian: The best thing would be if both lost.
Andrew: In a netcentric ecology, it’s less necessary to label yourself as left or right.
Q: Why didn’t Kerry take advantage of the Dean machine?
Andrew: Because they’re idiots. But mainly because they’re afraid. I wish someone had said during the debates that the thing we have to fear is fear.
Trippi: We’re in the infant stages of this. We need to be talking about the common good. We need leadership to talk about this. And only the trust being built online will let this happen.
Trippi: The big shock of 2004 may be the importance of cell phones. Pollsters can’t poll ’em.
Q: What rules could we change?
Andrew: Funding limits. Encourage local activism. [I missed some … and all of these reports of answers are compressed]
Trippi: The system is set up to prevent insurgents. There’s lot to change. It could happen in a single election cycle: If a third party candidate started splitting the vote with the Democratic candidate, momentum could move to the third party rapidly. “That’s what happened with the Whigs.”
Q: Will more transparency make it harder for politicians to take tough positions?
Trippi: The problem is due to people wanting to be in office permanently.
Q: What about the power of the special interests?
Andrew: Schumer has $20M in the bank which means he’s subservient to special interests.
Q: What are the features of communities where source flourishes.
Andrew: Learn from open source. You’ll find all the elements there.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
“netcentric”: candidates arising from “the group itself”?
this is facile. the problem is not just egos. we know how to organize many things in this country, but we are entirely clueless about organizing those organizings. perhaps this is an inevitable step. but at the moment, we are stuck, deluded by small evidences of order into thinking there is a larger order. there is no “the group.” There are groups, many, joined, disjoined, unjoined, loosely or otherwise. but actual community?
Q: Will more transparency make it harder for politicians to take tough positions?
Trippi: The problem is due to people wanting to be in office permanently.
This is a fascinating exchange for me — I am an association executive and we proslytize transparency of our governance processes as a way to draw in and retain members. This Q/A makes me think — we may be successful precisely because our leadership changes annually. There are no “permanent offices” in association governance. If you want to see true democracy at work, visit your local professional association.
“If a third party candidate started splitting the vote with the Democratic candidate, momentum could move to the third party rapidly.”
Umm, we already tried that recently – “Ralph Nader”. Instead of momentum, the result was implosion.
And before that, roughly (not splitting, but getting votes) Ross Perot. Heard of him lately?
Bleh. There’s no reputation-points in telling these people they’re treating the Internet as the equivalent of magic fairy pixie dust.
Tom, for me the question is whether the party that forms is a more like a movement or like a party, and that in turn has much to do with how candidate-centric it is. Something has to pull people together — ideas, outrage, a candidate — but I don’t think anyone was saying that the Net itself will. “Netcentric” was code not for nominating a geek but someone who, like the un-netty Dean, understands the movement is about us, not about him/her.
Seth, Trippi’s point was that the third party candidate would have to rapidly attract a substantial portion of Democratic voters. Perot got, what, 10% of the Democratic vote, and Nader got nowhere near that. Plus, I assume Trippi meant that the candidate would have to be more appealing to a broad swath of voters than either Perot or Nader have shown themselves to be.
Susan, I’m generally not in favor of term limits, but I can see how it works well in the associations environment.
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