A couple of days ago I received an email from Michael Turk, head of the 2004 Bush e-campaign. Here, with Michael’s permission, is his email, my response, and his response. [Note: The first comment is from Joe Trippi.]

Michael’s first email:
I was bored for a minute, and doing some light ego-surfing, and came across a reference to me on your blog. Here, specifically:

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/003460.html

You related the following to your readers:

Last night, I wasd [sic] talking with a friend I love who said that he had been talking with Michael Turk, head of the Bush e-campaign. (Here [Live blogging of a discussion between Joe Trippi and Turk – dw] and here [A reduction of that discussion to mere punctuation, in a way that puzzled some, including Trippi – dw] on Turk.) My friend said that Turk said that the Bush blog had no commenting because they were afraid people would say things that would alienate Bush’s fundamentalist supporters.

I’d be glad to explain the reson we had no comments. I’ve done so in several publications and don’t mind repeating it.

We viewed our blog as the journal of the campaign – our way to share with supporters the story of our campaign from thoughts of senior staff to the people on the ground going door-to-door. We had hundreds of contributors to the blog. What we didn’t want to do, is create an online echo chamber where engaged activists, who we wanted to spread our message, sat in discussions with one another, rather than reaching their friends and family.

The best messenger for any campaign is the inidividual activist talking to the people closest to them. That word of mouth marketing is better than any direct mail piece, TV ad or radio spot, or paid phone call. We had no interest in corraling all of those supporters in one place, and having them reinforce each other.

We could have gone the way of other campaigns, and seen our campaign as an extension of our community. Instead, we saw our community as an extension of the campaign. It’s a significant difference.

In a December 2003 issue of the New York Times magazine, a Dean supporter said their campaign was about allowing people “to come together and tell their life stories.” As I have said in writings before and since, we saw socialization as a side effect of getting Bush elected, not the reverse.

So the reason we did not have comments was not to avoid alienating our base. The reason we did not have comments was to keep our supporters active in other arenas – family life, work life, etc. – communicating our message.

My reply:

Michael,

Thanks for the explanation. Would you mind posting it as a comment on my post so others can read it? Otherwise, do you mind if I post it as email received from you?

Your posing of this as an either/or — either supporters comment or they engage with others — I think is fundamentally mistaken. I certainly agree that an insurgent and an incumbent have to run different campaigns. But I wish our elected officials had more of a sense that we citizens are more interesting than they are, that we are the source to which they should turn first for help (e.g., Katrina), that top-down responses are a second-resort, that campaigns are actually about us, not them…

But, Dean lost. Bush won. On to 2008 ;)

Best, David W.

Michael’s reply:

I agree it’s not an absolute trade off. That’s why I pushed really hard to make sure the RNC included comments when we relaunched GOP.com. Especially in party building, the open and frank exchange of ideas is key. Campaigns, though, are more personality driven.

You’re also right about the nature of politics. Politicians get elected to serve the people. Unfortunately, in our society, we value fame as a commodity. As a result, the politicians become psuedo-celebrities. Since people tend to gravitate toward celebrities – more so than institutions – the risk of someone congregating just for the sake of “being seen” on the site is much greater. The trade off becomes tilted.

In the case of a party, if you allow comments, the conversations tend to focus on how we can further the goals of a party. On a campaign (and I am sepaking generally, not about Bush-Cheney 04), the conversations tend to move toward a “we’re in the cool clique” mode. I spent time scanning the blog comments on Presidential sites and saw a lot of people who were supporters – not opponents – of the candidate who were shunned and ignored because they didn’t spend the amount of time others did merely sitting on the site.

That’s the difficult part of a site as visible as a Presidential campaign. How do you maximize the efforts of the people online while still fostering community? We looked at the number of pro-Bush and pro-Republican blogs and decided there were plenty of places where people could gather online to discuss the campaign – and we visited them frequently to see what people were saying and ideas they had. But we wanted our site to focus on activities like organizing your own walks and phone banks.

You should feel free to post these. Especially after seeing the dead letter office at GeorgeWBush.org, I sort of expect to see contents of e-mail online, so I try not to say anything stupid. Unfortunately, I don’t always catch typos, so I’ll have to deal with those being out there… [Tags: politics MichaelTurk GeorgeBush blogs]

Categories: blogs dw