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Tue, 28 Mar 2006
Crashing the Gate Tour Kickoff Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga @ George Washington University Intro kid name drops to hell and back... wooooooo! Notes Kerry campaign's war room line about "getting it on the blogs." Simon Rosenberg opens it; reading the Dean blog late at night, the fantasy of regular people geeking out on politics coming true... getting average people into the process an intrinsic good. Questions to open it... 1. Why a book? Jerome: coming out of 2004, when polls showed Bush hurting, why did he win? Wanted to break things down, look at things at a state level and see what went wrong, Markos: started with the idea of looking at branding issues. In Montana when Katrina hit, realized that Bush won without ideas, without execution.then started looking at the infrastructure we need to win elections. Jerome: special interests in Colorado - subsuming special interests to getting Dems elected, TX PP rep: "what do we have to lose?" Markos: interest group people are realizing what's going on, the 50 state strategy is becoming conventional wisdom. These ideas are in the book, but they're being reported from operative and politicians in the states. The opinions and direction of the party is changing, so the book is less controversial than they anticipated. Jerome: the 2006 election means that Dems need to start drawing distinctions between themselves and the GOP; they're not going to just self-destruct. Markos: Simon Rosenberg, even though he didn't support Dean, got why the campaign was meaningful. In the past three years, netroots influence is becoming internalized in the DC mentality... but Democrats aren't excited right now, the leadership is staying quiet in the hopes that the failures of the GOP alone will motivate them to get to the polls. We need more distinctions. How did you become a blogger? Jerome: started in 2001, traffic grew slowly, then blew up when Dean took off. Markos: got tired of friends grousing about the issues of the day, when there was no room in the media for liberal opinions. Blog as a tool to get things off his chest that struck a nerve. How are spineless Dems going to start differentiating themselves? Can the carrot of online donations get them to speak out in the short term? Markos: The GOP focuses long term while we focus short term; that has to change. The under 28s are all on MySpace... and who just bought MySpace? Rupert Murdoch, who can use it to learn how to market conservative ideas to the next generation of citizens/activists. To what extent is there a blurring between net and grass roots? Jerome: we're striving to take the netroots offline... it's insular, we can end up preaching to the choir. Organize online, then get offline. Markos: They're clearly symbiotic, and the term "blog" is kind of stupid because saying you're a blogger is like saying you're a "telephoner." As for the Ben Domenech thing, the Brady reign at the WaPo is a disaster. Putting a journalist up against an activist is ridiculous. Jerome: what's interesting is that Domenech saw going to the Waco as a way to increase eyeballs, wheres on the left we're seeing the opposite. Netroots vs. the Noise Machine: is a netroots "preferable," in that it's more "open?" Markos: Netroots has noise machine and organizational components, but now we have a medium that empowers random cliques of disorganized people to begin to move towards a common purpose; the GOP needs a top-down organizational model. We need talk radio, TV news, a hundred DailyKos sites... Limbaugh hits 20million per week, dKos hits maybe a million. Rosenberg: the right invested a lot of money over along period of time with the aim of moving the culture to the right, while we focused on the election cycle. They have a media machine that communicates to 40 million each week, we hit 10-15million. Consultants say they're so busy on campaigns, or the DNC has them of disparate tasks, so they never have time to handle branding issues. How do we do that and who should do it? Jerome: that approach would have worked 20 years ago, now we need campaigns from people outside DC like Schweitzer in Montana. Look at the example of Reagan - coalescing ideas in the conservative movement. We're a long time past the days when Instapundit was the biggest blog; what lessons do you see the GOP taking from your book? Jerome: Was reading Powerline's response to Bowers' "death of the conservative blogosphere post," noted that the response falls back on non-community sites. Notes the RNC response to commentors using "private" instead of "personal" accounts... shutting it down. Markos: Notes Byron York of FRO in audience; they're winning, why should they change? What do you think your sites will be like in 5-10 years? Jerome: thinks of what they do as organizers or ward captains, labor leaders. Markos: Convergence: TiVo an RSS feed/Podcast. Always role for the written word, but unfiltered, user-driven content will keep developing and growing, eventually being accessed like any other network. Blogs walk a line between being media and being activists; what about AstroTurf blogs? Self-policing? FEC monitoring? Jerome: People need to pay attention to details; campaigns have to say who they release funds to. Mentions work with Henry Farrell; blogs now being monitored by the Hill, staff wary of rules violations and unable to dedicate staff time. Markos: Credibility is key; doesn't care if an operative posts, what matters is how accurate they are. That needs to be applied across the media spectrum, not just on blogs. when video gets online, using the web to communicate will become more prominent. Rosenberg: the holy grail is for a politician to speak to an audience without a mediator (Gore's disintermediation thing! -ed) Members of congress are VERY aware of what's going on, constituents talk about what's going on in the blogs. Talked with dozens of members of congress and activists knew who he was because he'd been blogged about. Liebermann's figuring this out in CN right now. How effective is local blogging? How can we get them the same kind of exposure/cred that the big blogs get? Jerome: growth trends show blogs topping out at the upper end, but local blogs are blowing up, doing what national sites did two years ago. Integrating local/national blogs has been happening through fundraising, channeling national dollars to specific races. What needs to happen is for local bloggers to take on a leadership role. People say that the blogs want to move the party left, or is it about rfinign message? Markos: Schweitzer isn't far left, he's a proud partisan Democrat who has principals and talks about them. Hackett in the OH-2 wasn't lefty, but he talked like a democrat. Jerome: Brady says he's pro-gun, pro-gay, pro-choice. That's how you do it. Single issue orgs: rear-guard actions to stall losses. How do you see single-issue orgs in the future? Markos: mobilization, hype, research, and advocacy... what w e begrudge is when they work against Dems who don't meet litmus tests. Chafee's endorsement from NARAL. We don't say donate to Casey, we ask that you don't work against him once he's in the general. "What do we have to lose?" House parties - results or crossover from blogging? Jerome: most of what i saw was using them for finance and organizing. Audience chats on different things: Meetups, Drinking Liberally, etc. Isn't there still a set of winners/losers, a hierachry? Jerome: Lots of turnover. Markos: The Technorati top 100 turns over rapidly, most of the readership is in the long tail. |
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