At the John f. Kennedy Forum at the John f. Kennedy School of Government, the Berkman Center is kicking off it’s conference on the Internet and politics. A couple of dramatic statements came out at this first event…

The moderator, journalist Kathleen Matthews, begins by saying that some think the Internet is a useful tool and others think it will change everything. She introduces Joe Trippi (head Deaniac) and Michael Turk, e-campaign director for Bush/Cheney who “marshalled 7.5m e-activists”. She says they should talk in sound bites, which she unfortunately twice refers to as “blogspeak.” [Jeff Jarvis, behind me, whispers, “She obviously doesn’t read Rosen.” And I want to tell her, “Don’t confuse being interesting with speaking in sound bites.]

Q: Trippi, you say the revolution won’t be televised. What do you mean by that?

Trippi: TV is a passive medium. In 2003, the question was whether people would get past sending email to one another and go out an organize in the community. That was a huge sea-change. What this was about is Americans learning to trust strangers again. A community of trust gets built on the Net. No one would put their name address on a telephone pole saying come talk with me about politics, but that’s just what people were doing on the Internet.

Q: For a hundred years, your party would sponsor your little league team, and on election day you’d be given a little money and you’d walk around and get out the vote. Then it became big media buys on TV. In the 2004 campaign, what was new?

Turk: Viral marketing. People at house parties pass along the messages of the campaign. That’s one reason there was more interest in the campaign.

Q: And it was easier for people to contribute.

Turk: Yes, but we were more interested in getting the volunteer base communicating and spreading the message. [Politics as “message passing.” I hate it. Democracy is not marketing.]

Trippi: The Net is making a lot of the standard powers of politics more irrelevant. People weren’t taking their cues from the party leaders. The Net let the message be spread, but it was people talking with their friends and neighbors and co-workers that enabled us to grow. Meetup.com was important.

Q: You also gave people marching orders on the Dean web site…

Trippi: We asked people to talk about Dean with a friend and get them to sign up. But people responded with their own ideas and creativity. People knew they owned a portion of the campaign, if not all of it.

Q: Wasn’t the Dean campaign almost anarchy with no hierarchy?

Trippi: We started with 432 people. All insurgent campaigns have that lack of command and control.

Turk: Because we were a presidential campaign, we couldn’t do some things that a challenger could do … some of the cartoons going around on the Net wouldn’t make it onto our site. We used the Internet to organize and coordinate, e.g., download the maps of where people should go canvass.

Trippi: We put up lists of undecideds for Dean supporters to write letters to. 135,000 letters were written to them, but we only wrote 95,000, so we know that the Kerry or Clark campaigns were coming onto our site and downloading names.

Q: What happened to Dean in Iowa?

Trippi: We were well organized. But the Iowa tape in which Dean denigrated the caucuses dropped us ten points overnight in our own polling. When Dean told an Iowan to sit down so Dean could speak, we lost another 5 points. (Trippi recounts his blunder on Crossfire in which he intimated that Carter was going to endorse Dean.) The campaign made a bunch of errors that devoured our support.

Q: In this campaign $1.5B was spent on advertising. What will happen when everyone can block out ads? And will the Internet be where this advertising happens?

Turk: There will lots of advertising on the Internet. There’s something very compelling about video.

Q: How are you going to communicate with voters in 2008?

Trippi: In 2000, you couldn’t have predicted 2004. Same thing with 2008. My guess? The Dean campaign was running video on our site, 24 hours a day. At first we wondered how we’d ever feed it. It was a headache at first. But then all over the country, people started creating their own video, running a camera in a coffee shop where Howard was eating. My favorite was a student right before an event telling Dean that he was skipping exams for this. Howard turned from presidential candidate to father…We decided which ones to post, but there was an explosion of creativity.

Q: Will we just have aggregated party channels covering the conventions?

Turk: You look at RSS feeds, and news aggregators … you create your own channel.

Trippi: I think email will be supplanted by RSS feeds as the way the average citizen gets informatoin about the campaign. I think the blogosphere is here to stay. The press keeps looking at these blogs that are getting the huge traffic, but that’s not where the story is. It’s in the long tail. Think about 4.5M blogs averaging 10 readers. That’s 45M readers. There’s no way to stop that or control that.

Q: How do you see the credibility of the blogs expanding?

Turk: You’ll see more stories like Rathergate. The depths of experience represented by those blogs is just amazing. The blogger who uncovered the forgeries was more of an expert than the expert CBS had hired.

Q: What about the problem of blogs spreading misinformation and not having a self-correcting mechanism for days?

Trippi: With blogs??? The interesting thing about the blogosphere is that the average blogger gets called on it immediately. The blogosphere and the Internet are incredibly self-policing. In one sense, the Internet is only surfacing the rumors that have always spread; we just didn’t know they were spreading. The mainstream media have the responsibility of looking into these rumors, e.g., that Bush stole the Ohio election. It’s a healthy thing that the Web bubbles those sorts of rumors up.

Audience participation:

Jeff Jarvis: This national campaign stuff is really cute, but isn’t it really going to matter at the local level?

Trippi: It’s already having a huge impact at the local level. And lots of people have learned that they can use this tool to get involved in their democracy. I’m really excited about what’s going to happen.

Bill Bates: Is the Internet bringing us a deeper understading of the issues, or shallower?

Turk: It depends on the next four years. How much of 2004 was the pop cutural coverage as opposed to community involvement.

Allison: [I couldn’t fully hear her question about the media.]

Kathleen (Moderator): In newsooms, they’re checking the blogs, just as print reporters watch cable news. News is more of a conversation. News consumers are also producers.

Trippi: When reporters were embedded in Iraq so that we only got one flavor of coverage, there was only one place to go: the blogosphere.

Kathleen: It’s a shift in the power structure of the media. And politics.

Q: How do you balance the need to focus on a controlled message and the emphasis on grassroots opinions?

Trippi: If you have the answer, we want you as chair of the Democratic Party. We need to let the people’s voices speak and let the message emerge.

Q: Digital divide? Is using the Internet for politics just white guys talking to white guys?

Turk: It also brings in the activists.

Trippi: Don’t think about the Internet as the age of information but as the age of empowerment.

Jay Rosen: This year, a more interesting narrative was that some people in politics still practice control and some who believe in de-control. This was a war in the Democratic party. It was probably there in the Republican party as well. That’s one way of rewriting the story of the campaign. Looking forward, you have all these people in politics whose career is tied up in control of story, money, news, etc. If the Net is really going to de-control all that, then what happens to this class?

Turk: Every article we saw about the e-campaign was “The Bush campaign is all about control.” But there was no feeling of that internally. There are lots of people who don’t mind bowling alone, who don’t want to be part of a communal structure. [Stowe Boyd, sitting next to me, mutters, “That’s preposterous.”] We never told a volunteer that they had to make ten calls. We gave them tools so that they could spread the message of the campaign. [NO MORE MESSAGES! Please.]

Trippi: Up until this election, there was no where for the urge to reform to go. Both parties continue to slap down reform and not get that this is about recognizing that there is an urge to participate and urge to reform. One party — probably the Democrats — will go to the way of the Whigs. [Whoa, Nelly! Don’t go telling the truth!]

Q: Will the Internet strengthen the two party system?

Trippi: The parties are already becoming irrelevant. The Democratic Party beats the Republicans only in contributions above $1M. You can’t have that and withstand the pressure from below for reform. Someone is going to run an independent campaign and wreak havoc on the parties.

[Turk talks about marketing and passing messages. Trippi talks about people talking and conversing. OTOH, Bush won and Dean lost.]

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