BloggerCon II Weblog - Celebrating the art and science of weblogs, April 17 at Harvard Law School.

If the Democrats Could Blog...

Posted by dwiner@cyber.law.harvard.edu, 10/9/03 at 12:38:09 PM.

A couple of days ago I wrote If the Gray Lady Could Blog, a piece that explained how The New York Times could get started with weblogs immediately in a meaningful way. Today I had phone conversations with people from the Edwards and Kerry campaigns, and figured out how they can get started. This is based on the premise that they haven't started yet, which of course isn't exactly true. But the idea is so stunningly simple, it's the inverse of how the Dean and Clark campaigns got started, why didn't I think of it sooner -- oh well -- here it is.

Jeremiah Johnson at Edwards 

I exchanged email with Jeremiah Johnson, a Harvard undergrad taking a semester off to work for the Edwards campaign. He says:

I am an undergrad at Harvard and am currently taking a semester away from school to work for John Edwards campaign at the national headquarters in Raleigh, NC. I am in charge of using the Internet via blogs, p2p sites, and forums to get people across the nation to start talking about John Edwards.

Basically I am interested in finding coordinators at as many campuses as possible to find others to post messages about Edwards as much as possible on as many as possible different sites. I just feel like you may have some ideas about where to go with this project. It is brand new so I'm trying to get a sense of direction. Also, you may know people around the country who would be interested in helping with this. Let me know what you think.

So I had a phone talk with Jeremiah and first gave him a lot of grief for how stiff and uninteresting his candidate is, and said he was going to have to start talking plainly and honestly and forget about focus groups and TV cameras if he wanted to tap into the energy of the Internet. I said this is the thing Dean did well, probably out of a sense of desperation or a what-do-I-have-to-lose-anyway attitude. Dean was nowhere when the Internet adopted him. The same might happen with Edwards, but before you go asking for support, you'd better make sure the candidate is on the same page.

We talked some more, Jeremiah said that the campaign was staffed with people who would have a hard time getting there. I said I would write it up again, so he could pass it around, it probably wouldn't do any good but what the hell. Then just as a matter of routine I asked the crucial question. What of this conversation can I talk about? I was expecting him to ask that I not use his name, or not say he had said some things that could be perceived to be negative about the campaign, but instead he said I could talk about it all, without limit.

Then it hit me. If he could do that, then he could write a weblog about what it's like to be inside the Edwards campaign. Instead of the candidate being the Pied Piper (hard to do for a guy who has it in his head that he's going to win by going head-to-head against Dean, Kerry, Clark, etc) that Jeremiah could be the guy. And then whoever else on their campaign might feel like writing publicly and honestly. So I pitched him on it and now he's doing it. I offered to host the blog here at Harvard, since he has a harvard.edu mail address. I got an email as I am writing this that he's started his weblog. As they say in Microserfs, this is a totally 1.0 experience.

Sanford Dickert at Kerry 

At the same time I'm emailing and playing phone tag with Sanford Dickert, the CTO at the Kerry campaign, who I met this weekend at BloggerCon. He wants to figure out how to get some interest in their blog, which he admits is just press releases and therefore pretty boring. I called him up and this time I got through and said I have the answer -- find someone at your shop who wants to do a blog and give them a place to write. He thought I meant have this person write for the main campaign blog, and I said no, that's not right, they get their own space, keep it simple, don't make a big deal until the star rises. In other words, give us a window into your world and let us figure you out.

Shine some light in there, and let us see what's going on. It avoids the problem Dean has now, where every word that Matt Gross says is seen as official campaign communication. Eventually I'm pretty sure that's going to be a problem. Better to let people talk honestly about what's going on inside. Sure, it's going to be hard to get them to open up, but all it takes is one person with some guts, with some journalistic intutition, some passion to make the campaign interesting. This campaign is happening on the Internet for the first time. Who wouldn't want to be part of the history that's being made. If it can happen at the Dean campaign of course it can happen at Edwards or Kerry, esp Edwards, who isn't running for re-election to the Senate. What does he have to lose? That's the attitude that makes winners in the election of 2004.

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