(KRT) It’s hard to believe it was only seven years ago when Republican Bob Dole made history by mentioning his Internet site during a presidential debate. Millions of Americans didn’t know what he was talking about. Actually, he didn’t know, either: He botched the address by omitting one of the dots.
Yet today, thanks largely to the Howard Dean phenomenon and other Web-driven developments, the Internet has become such a potent force in national politics that its most vocal boosters are heralding a brave new world of civic engagement, a new era of grassroots Jeffersonian democracy.
Well, maybe. Or maybe today’s sunniest predictors will soon look quaint in retrospect, like those 1964 World’s Fair visionaries who insisted that by 2000 we would be traveling in atomic submarines to new cities located 10,000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface.
It’s still early. As Michael Cornfield, an expert on politics and the Internet, remarks: “Right now, it’s like we’re living in 1955, when TV for the masses was maybe five years old, yet still five years away from the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Dean’s extensive use of the Internet is equivalent to the first TV ads by Dwight Eisenhower.”
But it’s clear that the Web is changing the way national politics is conducted. Campaign aides talk incessantly about conquering the “blogosphere”-the corner of cyberspace where “bloggers” write daily logs about politics. (“Blog derives from “Web log.”) Some campaigns are even courting the best-known bloggers (and, by extension, their online audiences), much the way candidates in the FDR era went hat-in-hand to the cigar-chomping party bosses.
For any serious presidential candidate these days, it’s de rigeur to have a top-notch techno-geek on staff. Ten years ago, bragging rights went to the candidate who hired the best TV ad-maker. But in campaign `08, the big hire could be the tekkie who creates the best candidate blog-an online journal accessed by the citizenry.
Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi has pioneered Web politicking, and his rivals are scrambling to keep pace. Wesley Clark had his own blog within minutes of declaring his candidacy, which means the guy is serious about wooing the wired.
This is a historic moment. The Internet is hot right now due to a host of factors: a polarized nation, a costly foreign foray, a President who is despised by his detractors, and a Web-savvy candidate who also stokes emotions. As a mobilizing tool, the Internet was also crucial this year in the citizen revolt against the Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to help big media companies grow bigger. And it helped topple Trent Lott from his Senate leadership post, because his nostalgic remarks about the segregationist South were most heavily publicized by political bloggers.
And, in California, the Internet has been a key mobilizing factor in the recall effort against Democratic Governor Gray Davis-which now seems ironic, given his remarks about the Internet at a 2000 forum: “This is not something to be feared, this is a new vehicle that will allow more people to participate.”
But what the soothsayers mention most often is the money. As evidenced by Dean’s rise, the Internet can help level the playing field for insurgent candidates. With minimal overhead costs, underdogs can potentially use the Web to seed the grassroots and speedily rack up thousands of small donations-and thereby compete with big-money establishment rivals. (The first successful practitioner was ex-pro wrestler Jesse Ventura, in the 1998 Minnesota gubernatorial election.)
“The combination of small donors and a fast turnaround time-that’s a deep artesian well that a candidate can draw from,” Cornfield said. Here’s a tip: Watch to see whether Clark raises gobs of cash on the Web over the next several weeks.
So should the fat cats be quaking with fear? Will the Internet erase the institutional perks long enjoyed by candidates who hobnob with Beltway big shots and collect checks at special-interest banquets? Richard Hoefer, who runs a pro-Dean Web site in San Francisco, says the Internet means “the end of the two-party system stranglehold that has killed the lifeblood out of representative democracy,” which sounds a tad melodramatic, like something Thomas Paine might have said.
It’s true that the grassroots have been stirred. In the Internet era, campaigns don’t always need advance men to gin up a crowd; Dean fans have found each other with the help of www.meetup.com. And it’s likely that some future campaigns will seek to replicate Dean’s decentralization formula-by encouraging citizens to create Web sites and put their own stamp on the candidate’s message.
But let’s not forget reality. For one thing, Dean hasn’t won anything yet. The Iowa caucuses are four months away. In the words of Larry Noble, a campaign-finance expert: “It’s great that people can participate at home by clicking a mouse. But, in the end, does it translate into actual votes?”
Richard Davis, an expert on the Internet and politics, says there is no evidence that the Web is energizing America’s couch potatoes. Rather, he says, “it’s reshaping the existing relationship between active citizens and candidates. The Internet has just made it a lot easier for them to find each other faster.”
Unless Internet access gets cheaper in the future, it’s likely that Web-based political campaigns will be reaching an audience that is whiter, more educated and more affluent than the general electorate. That helps explain why Howard Dean will spend the next six months introducing himself to African Americans and Latinos.
This Internet “bias” could be a long-range problem for Web-loving Democratic candidates. The latest statistics reveal that only half the Americans who reliably vote in presidential elections are wired to the Internet, and the nonwired are heavily minority and downscale-in other words, members of the Democratic base. So old-fashioned campaigning won’t be totally obsolete anytime soon.
On the money front, what’s to stop the well-heeled interests from using the same tactics? Big law firms and corporations, for example, could network on the Internet to cajole candidate donations from their far-flung employees and clients, at $2,000 apiece (the maximum allowed by law).
But even if we can’t track the extent of the Internet’s effect on elections, we can more easily predict its future effect on governance. In Cornfield’s words, the Web is a potent grassroots tool that can generate “laser-beam emissions of public opinion,” reshape events, and wreck careers.
Like so much else in modern society, the co-optation phenomenon is probably the safest prediction. Today the Web superstars are Dean and the liberal agitators at MoveOn.org; tomorrow, if the pendulum of power swings left, the Republican right will spawn its own warrior tekkies.
The likely result: mercenary cyber fund-raisers, instant-attack blogs that traffic in rumor, the Web merely deepening the partisan divide. Yes, the new medium unexpectedly has demonstrated that the bar for entering big-time politics is now lower. But the potential for skulduggery is higher.