Advice for Democratic Campaigns: Find the Netroots Zeitgeist
by Chris Bowers, Sun Feb 04, 2007 at 12:13:00 PM EST
Quite a few candidates, especially on the Democratic side, are looking to tap into netroots support for their presidential campaigns. While most are trying to reach out, and while some are more popular than others, to date I think it is quite fair to say that so far no one has really struck online gold. Sure, there are developments such as large groups on social networking sites, or candidates such as Edwards and Richardson doing fairly well in terms on online fundraising. However, no one really has an online army yet--a large, and highly dedicated, group of supports ready to engage in all forms of activism on behalf of their favored candidate.
From my perspective, the reason for this is that no candidate has succeeded in defining, and then articulating, a major theme of the zeitgeist of the progressive activist base. To put this another way, no candidate has identified a recurring pattern of thought that expresses a wide range of the frustrations, hopes, and beliefs of the netroots or grassroots. This is a contrast to 2003, when I believe two candidates, Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, came to symbolize two different strains of the progressive activist zeitgeist. Howard Dean's campaign tapped into the extreme frustration many progressive activists felt at what they believed had become an extremely timid Democratic Party--one that was often complicit with some of the worst extremes of a rising conservative tide. At the same time, Wesley Clark best expressed the frustrations many activists felt at incompetent, unqualified Republicans running electoral roughshod over unelectable Democrats. Some candidates are closer than others to tapping into more contemporary progressive activist zeitgesit themes, but to date no one has achieved anywhere near the same level of success than Dean and Clark achieved. More on the flip.
From my perspective, the reason for this is that no candidate has succeeded in defining, and then articulating, a major theme of the zeitgeist of the progressive activist base. To put this another way, no candidate has identified a recurring pattern of thought that expresses a wide range of the frustrations, hopes, and beliefs of the netroots or grassroots. This is a contrast to 2003, when I believe two candidates, Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, came to symbolize two different strains of the progressive activist zeitgeist. Howard Dean's campaign tapped into the extreme frustration many progressive activists felt at what they believed had become an extremely timid Democratic Party--one that was often complicit with some of the worst extremes of a rising conservative tide. At the same time, Wesley Clark best expressed the frustrations many activists felt at incompetent, unqualified Republicans running electoral roughshod over unelectable Democrats. Some candidates are closer than others to tapping into more contemporary progressive activist zeitgesit themes, but to date no one has achieved anywhere near the same level of success than Dean and Clark achieved. More on the flip.
The key for Dean and Clark is that they were never one-issue candidates for their supporters. It went much deeper than that. Look, for example, at Howard Dean's famous "What I want to know" speech from early 2003:
For Clark, it was a different vein and a different zeitgeist, but quite effective none the less. With sitting President who had failed at everything he had done, who was only a visible public figure because his father was President, who seemed to demonstrate his stupidity and ignorance at every turn, and who filled his administration largely with ideologues instead of competent public officials, Clark came to symbolize the exact opposite: competence and personal achievement. As the supreme commander of NATO forces who was educated at Oxford in economics, politics and philosophy, Clark was uber-qualified, intelligent to the point of intellectualism, proven at leading large operations, and a success based on his personal merits. Further, at a time when Democrats seemed unable to win any elections, Clark also was a southern candidate with huge military credibility--just oozing with electability. Remember that back then many people were saying that Republicans couldn't govern and Democrats couldn't win elections. Clark seemed to be the prefect response to both problems, and as such came to symbolize the a different, though equally important, theme in the activist zeitgeist.
If, in 2007-2008, one or more Democratic candidates succeeds in building an online following equivalent to Dean or Clark, they will need to replicate their success in identifying, articulating, and coming to symbolize a new activist zeitgeist. Success online isn't about technological bells and whistles on your website. It isn't about diaries, conference calls, and fancy parties for bloggers. It isn't about Blogads, or hiring the right Internet staff. It isn't simply about vociferous opposition to the Bush administration on one or more issues. Undoubtedly, all of these things are important, but mainly they are ways to cultivate an existing base of online support, or to trim around the edges of your potential supporters. Ultimately, massive netroots success of the sort experienced by Dean and Clark in 2003-2004 is about identifying, articulating, and coming to symbolize a broader, deeper, theme of the zeitgeist felt by a wide section of the online Democratic activist base. For Dean, that meant identifying to broad feelings of frustration toward frequent Democratic timidity, and demonstrating viable means of fighting back. For Clark, it was about qualifications, intelligence and electability when many felt Republicans lacked the former, and most everyone felt Democrats lacked the latter.
Of course, this is not the sort of advice most campaigns want to hear. First, it means that reaching out to the netroots and cultivating online support will require other campaign departments to supplement the Internet portion. Many campaigns view the interent portion of a campaign as something that should supplement fundraising, media and field, rather than the other way around. Second, it also requires campaigns to do something extremely difficult: identify popular sentiment without the aide of focus groups or polls. As I know all too well, solid, up to date polling information on what netroots activists want is difficult to come by. Third, it simply replicating the themes Clark and Dean used won't work, because the veins they tapped have either moved or become blurred over the past four years. After our 2006 election victories, the netroots are not nearly as frustrated by the Democratic leadership as we were in early 2003. Also, there is not as clear a divide in the Democratic Party over the main issue of the day, Iraq policy. Everyone and their cousin has a different plan for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and no matter how lame their plan or weaseling their public statements may be, everyone claims to want to withdraw the troops and that we should have never gone to war. Further, Bush's unpopularity, our increased caucus unity, and our ability to actually propose policy serve to muddy the policy waters even more on a variety of issues.
So, what are the major themes of progressive, activist thought in early 2007 that a candidate / campaign could become the symbol of? Since Gore is probably the best thought of potential candidate online, he is also a good place to look for an answer. I think his large following online comes from being a symbol of "what could have been" had the 2000 election not been stolen. His "defeat" started the downward spiral we have faced since the start of the Bush administration, and since that time his actions and speeches have taught us how much we lost because he never took office. Gore is thus ultimately a symbol of restoration, of wiping out the past six years, of potentially correcting--or at least repudiating--all of the injustices that occurred under the Bush administration in one, fell, electoral swoop. A Gore victory would be viewed by many as not unlike liberators returning local rule to a city or country that had been under foreign occupation for a number of years. It is interesting how Clinton seems unable to tap into this same feeling, probably because many activists see her as somehow complicit with the occupiers in a way that Gore is not.
Obama current online success presents another possibility. I have written before about how I think Obama, through his biography, mannerisms, and profile, taps into a Generation X, Creative Class desire to entire a new political era not dominated by the same divisions and debates we have faced for decades. Whereas Gore might be tapping into a deep desire for a restoration of what was lost under Bush, Obama might instead be tapping into a strong desire for something very new in American politics. As I wrote in mid-December:
A third possibility is a growing sense among people online that our victories are not yielding results fast enough, and that the old pattern of Democratic timidity is slowly returning. Many people want to see more investigations into the past six years, legislation with a serious chance to end the war, less willingness to compromise with Republican minorities that gave use no quarter just a few months ago--they want to see more, and they want to see it now. It is both a call for justice over what has happened over the pat six years, and impatience with a strategy of gradual change in an era when people want a dramatic move away from Bush-ism. If there is a desire for restoration, and a desire to move beyond current political dynamics, I think there is also a desire to make sure that what happened over the past several years never happens again. This would have been Feingold's opening. While Edwards is doing the best job of filling that void, he is still nowhere near the level Feingold had / has achieved.
"Restoration,""new America," and "never again"--those seem to be the three main themes of the activist zeitgeist that campaigns have varying opportunities to tap into right now. To a lesser extent, there also might be a cautious optimism that, after a long era in the wilderness, we are once again slowly moving toward our electoral and legislative goals as a party. (This sentiment is probably much broader among "insider" Demcoratic activists than it is among the netroots and grassroots.) Also, "electability" is also still out there, although I do not sense it in the same palpable, raw way that it once permeated the Democratic ecosystem. (A little success, combined with shifting views on what "electability" actually means, can cause that sort of change.) There also might be themes out there that I am missing. After all, this is a very difficult thing to determine even if you spend virtually all of your time in the progressive netroots. The campaigns that dot he best job of identifying and articulating those themes will ultimately have the most success online, almost no matter how many bells and whistles they have on their websites, or no matter how much netroots outreach they conduct. Find a vein of the activist zeitgeist, and be willing to tap it. Above all else, that is the path toward netroots success for presidential candidates.
What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the President's unilateral intervention in Iraq?
What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting tax cuts, which have bankrupted this country and given us the largest deficit in the history of the United States?
What I want to know is why the Congress is fighting over the Patient's Bill of Rights? The Patient's Bill of Rights is a good bill, but not one more person gets health insurance and it's not 5 cents cheaper.
What I want to know is why the Democrats in Congress aren't standing up for us, joining every other industrialized country on the face of the Earth in providing health insurance for every man, woman and child in America.
What I want to know is why so many folks in Congress are voting for the President's Education Bill-- "The No School Board Left Standing Bill"-- the largest unfunded mandate in the history of our educational system.(...)
I don't want to win without the South. I want to go to the South, and I'm going to say to white guys that drive pick-up trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back of their car, "We want your vote too, because your kids don't have health insurance either."(...)
I never had a conversation with myself about whether or not I would sign the bill because I knew that if I was willing to sell out the hopes and dreams of a significant portion of our people, then I had wasted my life in public service.(...)
The only way that we're going to beat George Bush is to say what we mean, to stand up for who we are, to lift up a Democratic agenda against the Republican agenda because if you do that, the Democratic agenda wins every time.(...)
I want my country back! We want our country back! I am tired of being divided I don't want to listen to the fundamentalist preachers anymore!
Dean's success in this speech, which was instrumental in laying the groundwork for his future netroots support, was that he spoke to more than just activist frustrations over the impending Iraq war. Beyond that one issue, he identified an entire range of policy areas and electoral strategies where the activist base felt a profound sense of frustration with the Democratic leadership at the time: war, tax cuts, health care, education, narrow electoral targeting, selling out Democratic principles to try and win elections, not fighting back against extreme wingnuts, etc. It was the broad pattern of timidity in all of these areas to which Dean spoke, and against which he presented himself as a viable alternative. He had only presented himself as an alternative on one issue, Iraq, he would not have been nearly as successful in marshalling activist support. The key was to find and tap a deeper vein, a broad activist zeitgeist to which no other candidate was speaking at the time.What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting tax cuts, which have bankrupted this country and given us the largest deficit in the history of the United States?
What I want to know is why the Congress is fighting over the Patient's Bill of Rights? The Patient's Bill of Rights is a good bill, but not one more person gets health insurance and it's not 5 cents cheaper.
What I want to know is why the Democrats in Congress aren't standing up for us, joining every other industrialized country on the face of the Earth in providing health insurance for every man, woman and child in America.
What I want to know is why so many folks in Congress are voting for the President's Education Bill-- "The No School Board Left Standing Bill"-- the largest unfunded mandate in the history of our educational system.(...)
I don't want to win without the South. I want to go to the South, and I'm going to say to white guys that drive pick-up trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back of their car, "We want your vote too, because your kids don't have health insurance either."(...)
I never had a conversation with myself about whether or not I would sign the bill because I knew that if I was willing to sell out the hopes and dreams of a significant portion of our people, then I had wasted my life in public service.(...)
The only way that we're going to beat George Bush is to say what we mean, to stand up for who we are, to lift up a Democratic agenda against the Republican agenda because if you do that, the Democratic agenda wins every time.(...)
I want my country back! We want our country back! I am tired of being divided I don't want to listen to the fundamentalist preachers anymore!
For Clark, it was a different vein and a different zeitgeist, but quite effective none the less. With sitting President who had failed at everything he had done, who was only a visible public figure because his father was President, who seemed to demonstrate his stupidity and ignorance at every turn, and who filled his administration largely with ideologues instead of competent public officials, Clark came to symbolize the exact opposite: competence and personal achievement. As the supreme commander of NATO forces who was educated at Oxford in economics, politics and philosophy, Clark was uber-qualified, intelligent to the point of intellectualism, proven at leading large operations, and a success based on his personal merits. Further, at a time when Democrats seemed unable to win any elections, Clark also was a southern candidate with huge military credibility--just oozing with electability. Remember that back then many people were saying that Republicans couldn't govern and Democrats couldn't win elections. Clark seemed to be the prefect response to both problems, and as such came to symbolize the a different, though equally important, theme in the activist zeitgeist.
If, in 2007-2008, one or more Democratic candidates succeeds in building an online following equivalent to Dean or Clark, they will need to replicate their success in identifying, articulating, and coming to symbolize a new activist zeitgeist. Success online isn't about technological bells and whistles on your website. It isn't about diaries, conference calls, and fancy parties for bloggers. It isn't about Blogads, or hiring the right Internet staff. It isn't simply about vociferous opposition to the Bush administration on one or more issues. Undoubtedly, all of these things are important, but mainly they are ways to cultivate an existing base of online support, or to trim around the edges of your potential supporters. Ultimately, massive netroots success of the sort experienced by Dean and Clark in 2003-2004 is about identifying, articulating, and coming to symbolize a broader, deeper, theme of the zeitgeist felt by a wide section of the online Democratic activist base. For Dean, that meant identifying to broad feelings of frustration toward frequent Democratic timidity, and demonstrating viable means of fighting back. For Clark, it was about qualifications, intelligence and electability when many felt Republicans lacked the former, and most everyone felt Democrats lacked the latter.
Of course, this is not the sort of advice most campaigns want to hear. First, it means that reaching out to the netroots and cultivating online support will require other campaign departments to supplement the Internet portion. Many campaigns view the interent portion of a campaign as something that should supplement fundraising, media and field, rather than the other way around. Second, it also requires campaigns to do something extremely difficult: identify popular sentiment without the aide of focus groups or polls. As I know all too well, solid, up to date polling information on what netroots activists want is difficult to come by. Third, it simply replicating the themes Clark and Dean used won't work, because the veins they tapped have either moved or become blurred over the past four years. After our 2006 election victories, the netroots are not nearly as frustrated by the Democratic leadership as we were in early 2003. Also, there is not as clear a divide in the Democratic Party over the main issue of the day, Iraq policy. Everyone and their cousin has a different plan for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and no matter how lame their plan or weaseling their public statements may be, everyone claims to want to withdraw the troops and that we should have never gone to war. Further, Bush's unpopularity, our increased caucus unity, and our ability to actually propose policy serve to muddy the policy waters even more on a variety of issues.
So, what are the major themes of progressive, activist thought in early 2007 that a candidate / campaign could become the symbol of? Since Gore is probably the best thought of potential candidate online, he is also a good place to look for an answer. I think his large following online comes from being a symbol of "what could have been" had the 2000 election not been stolen. His "defeat" started the downward spiral we have faced since the start of the Bush administration, and since that time his actions and speeches have taught us how much we lost because he never took office. Gore is thus ultimately a symbol of restoration, of wiping out the past six years, of potentially correcting--or at least repudiating--all of the injustices that occurred under the Bush administration in one, fell, electoral swoop. A Gore victory would be viewed by many as not unlike liberators returning local rule to a city or country that had been under foreign occupation for a number of years. It is interesting how Clinton seems unable to tap into this same feeling, probably because many activists see her as somehow complicit with the occupiers in a way that Gore is not.
Obama current online success presents another possibility. I have written before about how I think Obama, through his biography, mannerisms, and profile, taps into a Generation X, Creative Class desire to entire a new political era not dominated by the same divisions and debates we have faced for decades. Whereas Gore might be tapping into a deep desire for a restoration of what was lost under Bush, Obama might instead be tapping into a strong desire for something very new in American politics. As I wrote in mid-December:
I think Obama, simply in terms of his demeanor and his biography, strongly appeals to politicos from a new generation and a new socioeconomic class because he strikes them in some sort of gut, intuitive level as being from that class. Multi-ethnic, post-Vietnam, highly educated, raised in a major urban center--these are many of the cosmopolitan, self-creating, forward looking aspects of life for many younger professionals. As much as we may or may not like Bill Clinton, coming from a little town in Arkansas is not a story many Americans can relate to anymore, because we just didn't grow up that way. Even John Edwards's story of growing up in a mill town when the mill closed seems very, very rustic for a northeasterner such as myself, since our mills closed down sixty years ago to move to places like North Carolina. These rustic visions of America simply are not where people are at these days, especially news junkies and activists within the Democratic Party and the bluer parts of America. Those people instead look to places like Harlem, where Bill Clinton now keeps his offices. People moving into the gentrifying areas of Harlem probably like Barack Obama quite a bit, and probably feel some sort of gut-level, identity-based connection with him that they can't even quite put their finger on at this point.
From what I can tell, even though he has had a decent amount of online success so far, the main problem holding Obama back is that while he is the promise of a new era, much of his rhetoric on that front--vagaries like "the audacity of hope," and his use of left-wing strawmen--seems cliché and boilerplate. While he could solidify his position as a symbol for a new generation and socioeconomic class, he won't succeed unless he also uses a new kind of rhetoric. If you sound like pretty much every other politician, people are less likely to view you as a new kind of politician.A third possibility is a growing sense among people online that our victories are not yielding results fast enough, and that the old pattern of Democratic timidity is slowly returning. Many people want to see more investigations into the past six years, legislation with a serious chance to end the war, less willingness to compromise with Republican minorities that gave use no quarter just a few months ago--they want to see more, and they want to see it now. It is both a call for justice over what has happened over the pat six years, and impatience with a strategy of gradual change in an era when people want a dramatic move away from Bush-ism. If there is a desire for restoration, and a desire to move beyond current political dynamics, I think there is also a desire to make sure that what happened over the past several years never happens again. This would have been Feingold's opening. While Edwards is doing the best job of filling that void, he is still nowhere near the level Feingold had / has achieved.
"Restoration,""new America," and "never again"--those seem to be the three main themes of the activist zeitgeist that campaigns have varying opportunities to tap into right now. To a lesser extent, there also might be a cautious optimism that, after a long era in the wilderness, we are once again slowly moving toward our electoral and legislative goals as a party. (This sentiment is probably much broader among "insider" Demcoratic activists than it is among the netroots and grassroots.) Also, "electability" is also still out there, although I do not sense it in the same palpable, raw way that it once permeated the Democratic ecosystem. (A little success, combined with shifting views on what "electability" actually means, can cause that sort of change.) There also might be themes out there that I am missing. After all, this is a very difficult thing to determine even if you spend virtually all of your time in the progressive netroots. The campaigns that dot he best job of identifying and articulating those themes will ultimately have the most success online, almost no matter how many bells and whistles they have on their websites, or no matter how much netroots outreach they conduct. Find a vein of the activist zeitgeist, and be willing to tap it. Above all else, that is the path toward netroots success for presidential candidates.
Tags: Howard Dean, netroots, President 2004, President 2008, Wesley Clark (all tags)
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