Garrett M. Graff's blog

Happy Birthday, YouTube!

2008-02-15T09:54:08-05:00

Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" reminds us today to wish YouTube a happy third birthday. The domain was registered for the first time February 15, 2005. It made its public debut at the end of the year and by mid-2006 was one of the fastest growing sites online.

A point to ponder this Friday: The 2008 presidential election might have been a vastly different race except for the August day in 2006 when Virginia Senator George Allen, considered one of the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, looking straight into the camera held by a 20-year-old staffer, S.R. Siddarth, of his opponent's campaign and uttering what was to become the most famous slur of the YouTube era. "This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent. He's following us around everywhere. And it's just great. We're going to places all over Virginia, and he's having it on film and it's great to have you here and you show it to your opponent because he's never been there and probably will never come." Then Allen looked around at the audience, paused for a beat, and proceeded to complete his political suicide. "Let's give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

Siddarth, a senior at the University of Virginia of Indian descent assigned to track Allen, had struck gold. Macaca, as America would come to learn in the coming days, was the name of a long-tailed Asian monkey and an obscure racial slur. The video hit YouTube and quickly went from there to CNN and local TV news stations. Allen spent the rest of his losing campaign offering one apology or another. On Sean Hannity's radio show, for instance, he said, "I take full responsibility. I'm not offering any excuses because I said it, and no one else said it. It's a mistake. I apologize, and from heart, I'm very, very sorry for it."

The power of the moment wasn't just the words--which connected with the latent fear among voters that Allen was a racist--but in the video of him saying it. If Siddarth had merely had a tape recorder, the tape probably wouldn't have had the same impact and it certainly wouldn't have if it had just been a written summary of what Allen said. Well-laid networks developed in advance by Jim Webb's Senate campaign helped to spread the story, underscoring how critical the relationship is between campaigns and new media today. The story was churning online and gaining attention long before the TV networks picked up on it thanks to the relationships the Webb campaign developed.

The irony of the moment is that Allen, who went into the race with a vastly stronger operation and piles of cash, probably would have won the race if he'd spent the final four months of it lying on a beach not campaigning. It was only his actions on the campaign trail, captured on video and uploaded to the web for all to see, that kept him from reelection. The loss moved Allen from the role of presidential heir-apparent to presidential after-thought, landing him on the scrap heap of failed ambitions. As a popular former governor and senator, Allen would have been a formidable
presidential candidate and as the only top-tier social conservative in the race, he might easily have found himself the front-runner in terms of money, support, and organization.

We might never have seen the battle of recent weeks over the "real" conservative in the GOP nomination race if only George Allen had kept his mouth shut and YouTube hadn't existed.

Anyway, Happy Birthday YouTube!

He's Got Zazzle; She's Got Fizzle?

2008-02-13T12:55:50-05:00

A large chunk of this presidential election is shaping up to be about tone: big change vs. little change, hope vs. experience. To see how these ideas are manifesting themselves among voters, one needs to look no further than Zazzle.com, the online site where people can design their own bumper stickers, buttons, and t-shirts.

Search for Obama and you'll find the first page of results packed with inspirational t-shirts, many with the theme of "Yes We Can." Through the first five pages of search results (as of this morning) the results are uniformly positive. There are "Yes We Can" t-shirts, bumper stickers, and buttons, "Republicans for Obama"-themed swag, "Latinos for Obama" stuff, "Barack to the Future" t-shirts, and many just with his face or the campaign's official logo. There's nothing about any other candidates. The depth and breadth of the slogans and voter-generated content is impressive

Hillary's Zazzle page couldn't be more different. Many of the items are negative (the bumper sticker here being just one example) and a good number of items are actually about Barack Obama. In fact, on the front page of results only approximately one-third of the items are pro-Hillary. The lead item is a t-shirt for "Billary" and the fourth and fifth items are both Obama paraphernalia.

Zazzle appears to be another solid example of how Hillary's campaign just doesn't inspire voter-generated content in the way that Obama's campaign does, which is a good proxy for grassroots fervor. Just like on YouTube, where we've seen the emergence of multiple pro-Obama viral videos without any real answer from the Clinton side. If Barack goes on to win the nomination, as appears increasingly likely this morning with his sweep of the Potomac Primary last night, it will because of the "people-powered" support he's getting online thanks to his online fundraising and energy on sites like Zazzle.

A Tidal Wave Ahead?

2008-01-08T11:31:42-05:00

Colin mentioned yesterday one of my favorite stories out of my new book on technology and politics in the 2008 cycle, “The First Campaign,” how snail mail possibly cost Gary Hart the 1984 election. With snail mail, the time from when a person mailed a check to a campaign to when the money was available to use often took more than ten days. In 1984, Hart pulled a stunning upset over former Vice President Walter Mondale in the New Hampshire primary, but he found himself hard-pressed to cash in on the results and the new-found momentum because of the lag time in collecting money. Tens of thousands of dollars poured into Hart’s offices around the country in the wake of his surprise Granite State victory, but it wasn’t fast enough to overcome the superior financing of Mondale’s juggernaut. Hart ended up being forced out of the race because of money shortages, even as the money continued to pour in—just not quickly enough to finance the campaign.

In 2000, John Emerson, Hart’s California 1984 campaign manager lamented to the Los Angeles Times, the challenges of raising money for a fast-moving campaign in the age of paper checks and snail mail. “For people to do that they had to know who I was, find my address, get a stamp, write the check, which I then had to deposit. Can you imagine how much more there would have been if all they had to do was go to a Gary Hart web site?”

Contrast that with the playing field by 2000. In the ten days after his upset in the New Hampshire primary, McCain raised $2.2 million online—money that just one cycle before might not have arrived in time to help an upstart insurgent take on a powerful frontrunner. In the end, the money couldn’t save McCain but could this year be different?

John Edwards has already reported he raised a million dollars online since Iowa, the fastest the campaign has ever raised that kind of money, and while we haven’t seen numbers out of Obama yet, it’s a safe bet he’s seeing money flow in online faster than normal too.

Assuming Obama and McCain win big tonight, we could see a tidal wave of online fundraising in the coming days. Even before Iowa, Obama stayed competitive with Hillary’s fundraising juggernaut thanks in large part to small dollar contributions; a surge of donations in coming days might enable him to start putting nails in her political coffin. He’s off tomorrow to a high-dollar fundraising event in New York City, Hillary’s home turf, but I have to imagine that with her aura of inevitability punctured and proof that Obama can, in fact, win, the surge of online money could be the real big money story of the next week. How many people will be inspired tonight by the dawning reality of an Obama presidency to contribute $25, 50, or $100?

Meanwhile McCain, whose fundraising in recent months has been lackluster at best, needs a serious infusion of cash if he’s to pivot from New Hampshire into the expensive national primary schedule ahead. Ron Paul has proven twice with his one-day “money bombs” just how much money is there if a candidate can tap into the right fervor. Could McCain, whose $5.5 million haul in the third quarter was less than the single day Ron Paul “money-bomb” of $6.2 in December, realistically expect to see an equivalent amount of money arrive in his campaign’s accounts in the next week? The answer appears to be yes, given how successful he was in 2000 in a much less-wired society.

The campaign that begins tomorrow, with expensive states like Florida and South Carolina coming before the “Tsunami Tuesday” of February 5th, will require millions in staff, direct mail, and television advertising. Even if McCain’s campaign is nearly broke tonight (we don’t actually know what kind of financial shape it’s in, except that he’s lagged far behind Ron Paul, Guiliani, and Romney in cash), an inspiring victory could lead the Arizona senator to wake up tomorrow morning and find millions of dollars pouring in. Unlike 1984 for Hart and 2000 for McCain, could online money be the savior of John McCain’s once-again-insurgent campaign tonight?

Did Howard Dean Win the 2004 Campaign? A View from YearlyKos

2007-08-03T16:04:27-04:00

I’m in Chicago for the second annual YearlyKos convention and since yesterday afternoon I’ve keep coming back to the same conclusion: I think, nearly three-and-a-half years after Dean for America collapsed in the wake of the Iowa caucus loss, that Howard Dean might have won the campaign.

Of course all you “fact-based” people out there will point out that John Kerry actually “won” the Democratic nomination and that George W. Bush actually “won” the general election and is currently serving out his four-year term as President of the United States, but I’m talking about something more ephemeral here. I look around the sprawling McCormick Place convention center here, home for the weekend to 1,400 progressive activists, and I don’t really see any sign of John Kerry’s 2004 campaign or John Edwards’s 2004 campaign. The only person, the only campaign, left standing when the 2004 campaign ended is Howard Dean.

Today the Democrats are Howard Dean’s party and Howard Dean’s people are in charge, including, of course, himself. And, again, I’m not just talking about the paid DNC staff but actually the thousand-plus activists here most of whom seem to have come into DailyKos.com and the Democratic Party through Dean for America, Democracy for America, or the state-level efforts of Dean’s 50-state campaign.

At yesterday’s Democratic Party briefings for bloggers, Parag Mehta, a former DFA staffer, led the effort. At yesterday’s panel on Democratic presidential candidate internet director panel, Joe Rospars, a former DFA staffer, spoke as Obama’s new media director, and, in fact, every single Democratic presidential campaign represented had a Dean internet staffer from either DFA or Dean’s DNC. Many former DFA staff or grassroots leaders have now graduated into positions of influence on the left and are speaking are various panels here. Joe Trippi, the irascible and colorful DFA campaign manager, is here today as the campaign manager for John Edwards’s campaign. DFA donors are behind many of the new enterprises and funding that’s flowing into the party, as demonstrated by the energetic “Democracy Bonds” reception that Dean hosted. And, not least of all, at last night’s keynote address, a matured and thoughtful Dean himself received rousing and passionate applause as he spoke about the political challenges for the party and the challenges facing the nation in the new tech-driven world.

But it doesn’t stop at DFA. The assistant Senate majority leader, Dick Durbin, spoke eloquently as well about the power of the blogosphere and its importance to the future of the Party last night. “You have been a force in nearly every positive change we’ve seen in American politics in recent years,” Durbin told the crowd. Every major Democratic candidate will be here tomorrow for the YearlyKos presidential leadership forum and not a one attended the recent Democratic Leadership Council meeting in Tennessee. The luncheon keynote today was a discussion with Andy Stern, the head of the trailblazing SEIU union chief who more than anyone in the labor movement epitomizes the energy and viewpoint of Dean. The action and energy around the Party is from Howard Dean's people, not within the Washington establishment he took on four years ago.

At the end of the 2004 campaign, where I was DFA's deputy national press secretary, I did a commentary for Vermont Public Radio that I’m impressed to say still holds up well today:

“Much has been written over the past few weeks about the premature collapse of the Dean campaign…. The campaign obituaries have focused on infighting, control over the campaign checkbook and that wonderfully ambiguous phrase, ‘messaging problems.’ But those stories miss one of the most fundamental aspects of the Dean story: the hope and political empowerment that he gave to so many previously tuned-out Americans.

“It turns out, that much as Dr. Seuss’s Grinch discovered that he couldn't stop Christmas by taking away the presents and the trees, we’ve discovered that our campaign is continuing without the candidate. And thus the campaign's greatest lasting impact might just be the fresh faces that it brings to politics at a local level….

“In my work on the campaign, and my travels and conversations with Dean supporters over the last nine months, I have always been struck by how personally affected they were by the campaign. Their belief in the power of participation has encouraged me to stay involved in politics past the end of this campaign as well.

“Last Sunday, I met John Sykes, one of the four original founders of the Dean online community, for lunch near his home in New Hampshire. We talked about the campaign, and he explained that despite his frustrations and disappointments, he was going to stay involved in politics and community service. As we stood up to go, he paused. 'You know, it may have been just a campaign slogan, but I always felt that I really did have the power,' he said.

“All across the country, people are saying the same thing: Howard Dean was right: The power to change America really didn't rest with him—it's been ours for the taking all along.”

And nowhere is that message and that conclusion more evident and more true than right here at YearlyKos. The power to change America is right here in Chicago today.

Garrett M. Graff is now the editor at large at Washingtonian magazine and the author of the forthcoming “The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House.” A native Vermonter, he served as deputy national press secretary on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, and, beginning in 1997, was Dean’s first webmaster.