So you may have noticed that I’m not quite posting here daily. That’s because I’m exercising my precious new freeedoms. The second month finished a while back (on the 17th?), and I’ve been running on inertia and the powerful fumes of trackbacks and comments since then. As everyone says it does, the blogging has helped out in a bunch of other areas. I’m writing better and faster in other spaces, I’m paying a bit more attention to the world, and I end up finessing ideas instead of going “huh, maybe I should write that down somewhere, one day.”
Most of all, I impressed by the magical power of public guilt. I am thinking about other potentially humiliating things to do to get ORG more members; I am also thinking a little of new beginnings. It looks like I’ll be moving apartment again pretty soon (sainted flatmates’ toddler is getting very walky, and they want more room). I might have a studio on the top of Bernal Heights to look down on the city. My work is picking up again, too: for a while, one of our team was telecommuting from the East Coast, which is good for the fact that we have to deal over lots of timezones, but not so great for co-ordinating between us. He’s been here in SF now for less than a week, and we’ve already picked up a little pace. I like to keep work out of this blog, but the issues do wriggle so, begging me to form half-baked opinions, if only ones highly tangential from what I do during the day (where we spend much of our time baking our opinions until they are perfect).
I also, God help me, have been thinking about what the next administration will actually be like. I keep thinking back to the local campaign manager for Howard Dean in San Jose, sitting with me in a cafe crammed with Dean-fans writing letters and exchanging email addresses, back in August 2003. Months before the election, his movement had already shown the others what was possible with the Net, and carried him to the frontrunners table by fundraising and publicity. A year or so before the election, I asked the campaign manager: suppose Dean does get in. Suppose he becomes President. What happens to all of this, I asked. Do you just put it in mothballs for the next election?
The campaign manager’s eyes got all dreamy, and he said: well, think how having this communications network works for a Whitehouse. Think about being able to explain your side of the story to your base like this; build on them to work with other candidates. Report back on how they feel the country is going.
Me, I’m not sure that’s something you can really achieve and stay Presidential. American Presidents are supposed to be folksy, but then ascend into Whitehouse heaven and live apart from the mortals. Not mail them every four hours like MoveOn. And it would feel a little Chavez to have the Obama fans still wired into the secret messaging while he’s also running everyone else’s country.
But the question still remains: when you have a wired campaign, do you run a wired whitehouse?
October 8th, 2008 at 10:20 am
My bet is that the biggest value of the Obama online network will be that he can use it as a tool to pressure Congress (both carrot and stick). Say representative X is opposing Obama on some issue, or can’t bring herself to vote with him. Obama applies a congressional district filter to his database, and comes up with a list of 30,000 names IN THAT CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT. Who are on Obama’s side. He sends out a TARGETED email, naming that member by name and urging those 30,000 people to call and voice their opinions. Not a blanket email to his whole list on a daily basis, but maybe once a week target 2-3 districts. Near midterm time, crank it up a little, mix in some fundraising messages. If you’re a congresscritter, that would be terrifying. 30,000 people in a district of 500,000, only half of whom are registered, and where only 25% of those registered vote in midterms is a huge huge huge stick to be wielding.
October 10th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
One thing Obama could do if he wins? Put together a strategy to create a coherent digital archive of the White House, and open up the consultation period to people outside the typical Large Corporate Tech field. Bush stopped using email a few days before he took the oath in 2001 — I remember hearing a radio piece on his sign-off message to the people on his address book — and may start again when he’s chased back to Texas. But 2001? I mean, we can see the Google index from 2001 now. That’s a long time ago. At the same time, his presidency is going to leave behind a digital archive that might take a decade to make coherent. The idea that ‘presidential technology’ should mean ‘pen, paper and a phone’ just seems weird.
October 15th, 2008 at 9:52 am
There’s no way to run a two-way “wired White House”. The political kooks would spam the input into oblivion, and if they didn’t then the paranoid kooks would do it (“MISTER PRESIDENT TELL THE REAL STOREY ABOUT CHEMTRAILS HAARP REMOTE VIEWING MORGELLONS ASPARTAME I KNOW THAT U ARE LIEING TO US!!!!”). And if they didn’t, then kids would do it for kicks.
It might be fun to see a Presidential Weblog, though. Basically, the same thing as FDR’s “Fireside Chat”, only 21st-century style.
October 15th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Well, what’s interesting about the Obama campaign is that it’s not some Deaniac “hey man let’s decentralise everything and have a CONVERSATION”. It’s just a really well-polished, hierarchical, competently run system that provides some autonomy but not too much; it just goes down to a really local scale in a way that most Federal political systems currently don’t.
As I read somebody saying with a tone of wonder, maybe this is what the Democratic “party machine” of ancient lore was like. That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it would be a new thing. Or maybe a very old thing revitalized.