Staying Connected

Is this surprising? This is the difference between a President who started a war, yet told the citizens to just keep shopping and gave us a tax cut, vs. a President whose training in community organizing gave him a firm belief in the power of the grassroots. As for us, we don't trust the powers that be to have any competence whatsoever -- look how they handled the last eight years.

Happy New Year, Amy. Any thoughts about the Republican's network being through their church, business, college/grad school, and country/yacht club connections?

Just after the election Obama sent out an email asking how many hours a week we were willing to commit to community service, and in what areas of interest. I liked that.

The GOP's resolution for 2009 might be to figure out this whole internets thing.

You've got it wrong. The GOP thinks the Internet is digital direct mail. They think a network is a megaphone. Need proof? Look no further than the big post-election effort to learn from the Democrats. They created a website called Rebuild The Party, supposedly a bottom-up effort to collect ideas about building a new GOP. Two of the ideas consistently offered and getting top vote totals were censored -- deleted over and over again as they were re-offered and rose in vote totals. The GOP doesn't need to figure out the Internet. They need to figure out themselves. FAIL.

Amy Sullivan:
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Please be so good as to provide links to or quotes from said "skeptics", so that we may understand and judge for ourselves whether or not these concerns were significant in any way.
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"During the primaries, some skeptical observers questioned whether the excitement about Obama's candidacy would translate into turnout."
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Who are you talking about specifically? Bill Crystal? Juan Williams? Bret Hume? Who?
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"And during the general election, they wondered..."
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Who was doing the wondering? Were these savants wondering aloud in public print, or were they sending you private emails? Surely there should be some material available to demonstrate this, right Amy Sullivan?
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"Now, of course, the question is..."
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Really? There's some consensus on that question? That's funny--I've been perusing the intertubes for quite some time this year since November, and it doesn't strike me as something that's terribly up in the air. Have the people who've settled on this "question" visited the cyber-tubes recently? Does AOL go there? Who are these individuals asking these questions? Do they have names, Amy Sullivan? Do you not know how to create links?
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In our world, when people who write columns in which the importance (or even existence) of such concerns are simply asserted and assumed --especially when it comes to matters involving internet participation and campaigns-- without actually quoting or linking to the real, credible people expressing such ambivalence, we tend to think that those columnists talked to people who heard other people say those things at Beltway cocktail parties, and are therefore...well, not particularly credible (would be a nice way to put it).

Amy, thanks for the substantive post. I was one of the many thousands that took part in an Obama House Party a few weeks ago. At 55, I was the youngest person in the room - and no one remembered ever being asked by a President for anything like this kind of involvement/engagement before. Grins all around, heady stuff.
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Now if the chattering classes would just stop trying to take this guy down a peg based on nothing, just cause they can and he's a Dem, that would be really good.

Did I say "Bill Crystal"?
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LOL
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Forgive me, Amy Sullivan, I (of course) meant "Bill Kristol"
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Damn you, preview abolishers!

sz, thanks for the "some said" pushback! Exactly right.

To follow on from what Andy from MA said, perhaps Amy could offer a follow-up discussing other ways Democrats network: through prison networking jail networking, half-way house networking substance abuse networking, drug market networking, and so on and so forth.
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Meanwhile, the fact that only half expect future communication from BHO provides a clue to how he won. Any smart person who signed up for one of his lists knew the emails would keep coming no matter what happened. Of course, note the "smart" qualifier.
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And, of course, the GOP's problems go much deeper than the Internet; see, for just one data point, the Swampland-related comment from me here.

The value or lack thereof of online participation will depend entirely on how the Obama administration actually responds to the feedback it gets. As of today, this is the top "National Security" question at http://change.gov:

Will President Obama eliminate domestic warrantless wiretapping of US citizens by modifying the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" (TSP)? Is the Fourth Amendment going to be restored, or weakened further by the Obama Administration?"

While the question doesn't directly address the fact that the previous administration's crimes carried out with the complicity of the major telecoms and the Democratic Congressional leadership will remain uninvestigated, it does make clear trhat Obama's online supporters intend to hold him accountable for his actions and not function merely as a fundraising/cheerleading squad.

It may well be impossible for the wingers to use the internet the way Dems do, because they have an inherently top-down bent:
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Dean contends, and amply documents, that the "conservative" movement has become, at its core, an authoritarian movement composed of those with a psychological and emotional need to follow a strong authority figure which provides them a sense of moral clarity and a feeling of individual power, the absence of which creates fear and insecurity in the individuals who crave it. By definition, its followers' devotion to authority and the movement's own power is supreme, thereby overriding the consciences of its individual members and removing any intellectual and moral limits on what will be justified in defense of their movement.

Well said, Dirks.
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Obama's online supporters intend to hold him accountable for his actions and not function merely as a fundraising/cheerleading squad
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This is, of course, what Obama professes to believe:

I learned long ago, when working as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago, that when citizens join their voices together, they can hold their leaders accountable. I'm not exempt from that. I'm certainly not perfect, and expect to be held accountable too.

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He will be held accountable...especially if he does not re-institute accountability by investigating, and, if necessary, prosecuting those responsible for besmirching the honor of our nation over the past eight years.

Not to pile on the new kid(Amy,welcome)but ditto on the pushback from #5 about the "some say" device that most "journalists" use these days. The "some says" that were used throughout the primaries and the GE have to be called out. Because a lot of the time they were used to substantiate a flimsy meme,i.e "some say that Obama has trouble with working class whites,"etc,etc.,ad nauseum.

Again,Amy,not to pile on, but we would all love for the "some say" people to be identified, that way we get to weigh for ourselves who is doing the saying and what political agenda they might be potentially promoting with their quotes. Is that too much too ask?

other ways Democrats network: through prison networking jail networking, half-way house networking substance abuse networking, drug market networking
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Me and my dealer are hella tight, yo.
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From kattest's comment on thenextright.com:
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2. KarenTumulty was recently able to ID me under a different screen name because I'm the only person commenting over at their site from a non-DailyKos perspective. I thrice tried to get FReepers and once tried to get readers of this site to go sign up for accounts there and begin discrediting their hacks, all without luck. If people can't even be roused to the incredibly easy task of discrediting JoeKlein, perhaps there's a deeper problem.
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You missed those posts from Joe where all the conservative trolls from The Corner or wherever would come over here and whine for ten minutes and then disappear for ever. You guys just don't have any staying power.

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kettest: If people can't even be roused to the incredibly easy task of discrediting JoeKlein, perhaps there's a deeper problem. Actually, the sentient beings here ate JoeK's lunch back when he persisted in saying stupid, wrong things (see: FISA, Klein, Hoekstra). That was back when he stenographically transmitted the RW stupidity so beloved of you FReepers. Lately, he decided to swear of teh stoopid. You might try it some time.

You know, I have no problem with dissenting opinions -- it might even perk up the back-and-forth around here -- but how dumb is that post from kattest? There's no content there. It's bizarrely incoherent and empty. Can't the right send over someone with something interesting to say?

This reporter at the Washington Post got it right:

While researching the history of the intersection of politics and the Internet, I hit the books. One was Joe Trippi's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything," which came out in 2004, after Trippi had orchestrated Dean's online-fueled campaign. Another was "Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age," a collection of essays by some of the most perceptive thinkers in the online political sphere, including Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum.
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But the book that I ended up underlining and highlighting most was called "The Assault on Reason," which came out in the spring of 2007, just as I was digging into my new beat. A critique of TV's influence on politics and a blueprint for the Internet's current and future impact on our civic life, it's written by former vice president Al Gore. "The Internet is perhaps the greatest source for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish," Gore wrote in the last chapter, titled "A Well-Connected Citizenry." "It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge."
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In a phone interview last week, Gore said, "I still stand by those words." ..."What we're witnessing," Gore continued, "is the rebirth of our participatory democracy."

The GOP sez: "participatory democracy? Reasoning citizens in a functioning public sphere? Do not want."

see, for just one data point, the Swampland-related comment from me here. -- (Link)

Still hungry for more. Could you provide links to everything you've ever written. I can't get enough.

Someone has to find Joe Trippi and Howard Dean some great high-profile jobs...

Also, kattest - great use of the word "thrice." Do you get a free Robin Hood hat for your RenFairs every time you use it?

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pourmecoffee: Still hungry for more.
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Nice snark, but be careful what you wish for...Kattest/Blather/Lonewacko has been blogwhoring her particular brand of xenophobic lunacy all over the Intertubes for years. Takes a lot for a right-winger to get banned from Redstate and QandO for being too freakin' crazy.
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Sullivan: The GOP's resolution for 2009 might be to figure out this whole internets thing.
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I'd like to reiterate the weakness of the 'some said' argument stated earlier...I'd also like to mention that you'd have to be blind as a Beltway bat not to see that it wasn't the GOP's lack of online organization that cost them the election. It was their failure to effectively govern, do right by We The People, hold themselves accountable, and put forth a set of policy proposals to which the majority would respond favorably.
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Believe it or not, I actually do applaud the effort on the Repubs' part to figure out what's wrong with them. I'm afraid that effort will fail, not due to lack of online expertise, but due to the fact that they will have to be different, which their ideology won't allow.

The reason they're not connected is that the repubs live in a world that pre-dates the internets. Where men with crew-cuts protect the country (and their daughters) from dirty pinko hippies. You might as well ask them why they haven't taken advantage of the telleporter.
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And Kattest/NoMore- The "deeper problem" you face trying to get your people "roused" is that many here are well-informed and will make substantive arguments. I think the crowd you're pitching is information-adverse.

In Amy's defense, during the campaign, I did encounter much of the same doubts she was expressing. That those doubts originated from the circle-jerk formation of CW spinners that make up our mediascape is a fundemental fact. The ability to see the phenomenon is a good litmus test to separate Villagers from DFH's. Welcome to the interface, Amy.

"The GOP's resolution for 2009 might be to figure out this whole internets thing."
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But, but ... wouldn't that be like community organizing? (LOL)
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All snark asides, they need to do that, but the Web 2.0 stuff only really (IMO) levelled the playing field with the Religious Right using churches or para-church organizations to GOTV.
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They also need to figure out how to keep the Paulistas (who are very wired-in) from dominating the online conversation. Everything I've seen so far (rebuildtheparty.com being a notable example) had the Paulistas all over, out of all proportion to their actual percentage of the party. (Speaking of rebuildtheparty, there were some merry pranksters as well due to poorly-thought-out site security.)