techPresident - Daily Digest: 10/19/07 - Comments

"Corrupt language may lead to short term gain, but..."

Nancy Scola — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:50:50 -0400

"the long term loss is enormous."

Not to harp on a simple well-intentioned email, but I do think Zephyr's point here is important. Go back to the original message from K**** W****. There's nothing in there about why I should support Barack Obama beyond the vague suggestion that he's a better candidate for refusing lobbyist contributions. We're getting into circular reasoning territory here. I don't mean to pick on K**** one bit -- it's just that at some point the expectation was created where she thought that if she was going to email someone she's never met, that she should make some sort of meaningful argument as to why the recipient should support her candidate over any of the others.

At the risk of sounding like "everything was better during the Dean campaign," I distinctly remember sitting in a bar on 14th Street in DC at a Dean meet-up and trying to come up with some solid reasons for why some person in Davenport, Iowa should support him. The entire momentum of the campaign was behind the idea that personal connections had to be made between strong supporters and critical early voters. If I was going to invade her mailbox, I had to offer something of myself. That took real work. There is a question of how much of herself K**** had to give in order to make this ask of us.

Short term vs. long term? Short term -- we can lower and lower the bar for "political participation" and see real results in our quarterly reports. But there is a risk of making that participation no more meaningful than the writing of checks to candidates has always been.

they're for raising money

Nancy Scola — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:34:04 -0400

Good point, but it points back to the original problem. The end game of having supporters send out pseudo-personal emails to people they don't know is to get their campaign contributions. That's what this whole discussion has been about -- raising cash. If the question is whether, if we assume candidates are going to have to email for contributions one way or another, bare-bones emails like this are preferable, it seems like there are strong arguments for yeah, they are. At least you don't have to look at the same campaign graphics again and again. But you could argue that exempting us from campaign emails altogether is a good reason to explore public funding...

Email campaigns are

Zephyr Teachout — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:31:03 -0400

Email campaigns are necessary for shifting the power of fundraising from bundlers to people. Its a great thing for the political process when small donations, instead of large ones,

So Nancy's pressure is doubly important, because it goes to two things:

(1) We need these small donors to become even more important than they already are, so email campaigns need "sustainable messaging," which is to say, honest and interesting. I think Obama's current campaign is working in part because its both of those. Good email campaigns, across the board, will mean that second and third-tier policy issues are less likely to be decided by bundlers.

(2) Corrupt--manipulative, dishonest--political language is dangerous to our entire political culture. If we don't trust our own political language to mean something besides "my side is better," and we think, as citizens, only strategically, and lose the capacity to use words to represent what they mean ("a personal note" from Hillary really takes "this is not a pipe" to a whole new level.), we will lose the common democratic language that makes political, small d, democratic communication possible. Corrupt language may lead to short term gain, but the long term loss is enormous.

So what are emails for then?

Joshua Levy — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:17:29 -0400

Is the problem the style of these emails -- which ring false and phony -- or email campaigns themselves? Even those groups most wanting change still need to send out emails asking for money. Is there such a thing as a people-powered email blast? Can we conceive of a time when groups don't need to send out such vapid "personalized" notes to get through to us?

raising cash vs. improving politics

Nancy Scola — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:08:56 -0400

Aww, "cynical" is putting too fine a point on it. My argument isn't that these techniques won't pay off for the campaigns. It's that what we're seeing here is using new tricks to provoke the same sort of old-school political behavior -- pouring cash into campaign coffers. My concern is that these stripped-down fake-personal emails aren't going an inch towards political campaigns any more people-powered/democratic/informed -- which I'm still un-cynical enough to believe is entirely possible.

I know, I know, stack up my concerns next to $1.85 million, and it's easy to declare a winner. But I think there's two jobs here. One is cracking the nut of how to tweak email blasts to produced the largest windfall. It's okay to leave that one to the campaigns and their consultants. That's the reason for their existence. The other is to keep working at fixing what is desperately wrong with the political process. Campaigns aren't going to waste a single second on making politics better, so that job falls to the rest of us, of course. Right?

Daily Digest: 10/19/07

Joshua Levy — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:32:03 -0400

Stephen Colbert gets a Facebook group; more data fun over at ronpaulgraphs.com; Barack Obama is the next participant in the MySpace/MTV Presidential Forum -- where are the Republicans?; Todd Zeigler on Obama's latest "personal" email.