Last Wednesday, before
going to a Steely Dan concert that was a grand musical trip through my college
years and young adulthood, my best friend took me on a tour of the mineral
baths in Warm Springs, Georgia that Franklin Roosevelt visited to try first to recover
from and then to live with his polio, and of the nearby “Little White House”
that he retreated to as often as he could, both before and while he was
president (and where he died).
Spending time with both one of my historical heroes and one of my contemporary
ones was great fun. It was also really fascinating, and there is a small but
interesting museum on the grounds of the “Little White House” that contained
numerous articles relating to FDR’s personal and political life, including a
mockup of a small living room from a poor sharecropper’s cottage with an old
radio playing a recording of one of FDR’s fireside chats.
It was a surprisingly powerful exhibit, conveying really well what it must have
meant to millions of desperately poor Americans (many of whom were largely
illiterate) to hear the reassurances and plans of their president in his own
voice in their own living rooms, and I was reminded of it yesterday, while reading
this brilliant article by Marc Ambinder in the Atlantic, which deals with the revolutionary
nature of Barack Obama’s campaign for president and the transformational
potential of an Obama administration (if he wins).
The whole thing is well worth reading, but the thesis of the piece is that
every time there is a new medium through which to communicate with voters, it
takes a few years before any politician figures out how to really make use of
that medium’s strengths, and when one does, it precipitates major changes in
American politics. He cites the example of FDR’s use of radio among other such
changes, and says that Obama’s use of the Internet is not only a close but also
a completely self-conscious parallel of that transformation.
I’ve written before about Obama’s use of the internet, and I think Ambinder is
absolutely right about the potential for change in our politics, as is Micah
Sifry in this piece on the Personal Democracy Forum’s techPresident site.
Sifry’s piece takes particular note of
the same phenomenon I have, that Obama’s organizational independence means big
changes for the traditional centers of power in Democratic politics and new
ways for candidates to go directly to the American people for support of both
political aspirations and legislative muscle once in office.
Ambinder’s article uses JFK as the poster boy for the use of television’s
transformative effect, and while that’s certainly the standard formulation, I
think Ronald Reagan may be a better choice for the guy who really transformed
politics through the use of TV. JFK looked great on TV, and the contrast in
their debate appearances in 1960 certainly made Nixon look like a shifty-eyed
crook (ironically, Nixon served as VP in an administration that was acutely
aware of the impact of making a good impression on TV, and hired the first TV
consultant to serve its political and policy aims), but it took St. Ronnie to
show us real mastery of the medium to manipulate public opinion directly, and
detour around the journalists handling the cameras.
Some of this is due to
coincidental shifts in the environment – in the twenty years between Kennedy
and Reagan, the evening newspaper disappeared as an American institution, the morning paper came under serious and sustained attack, and TV news broadcasts gained a great deal of influence. That made recasting a
story by using visual staging to overwhelm what the viewers heard from the
reporters much, much easier - there was far less analysis of the words to conflict with the imagery. The fact is, though, that where JFK was highlighted by the new impact of TV, Reagan played the TV news like a fiddle, and often "went over the heads of the media" directly to the American public by appearing live whenever he had something he wanted to say, and by skillful use of the images his team crafted to appear on television.
Obama too is finding his way around the gatekeepers of modern media and modern
Democratic politics, in this case by using the web as Reagan used TV. For good
or ill, the web has destabilized every institution it has touched, and there’s
no reason not to expect it to continue to do the same with politics. Since our
current politics has led us into an epic mess that can be blamed in no small
part on the uses of the current communications technology, almost any change is
likely to be an improvement.
The trick, as Ambinder alludes to, is in figuring out how to make use of the
new resources the web places at a politician’s disposal. This challenge changes
after a politician is elected to office, and there has been a good deal of
discussion in the blogosphere lately about the significance of Obama’s using up
much of the oxygen in the room on the web, and about what will happen to the
online organization he has built, both if he wins and if he doesn’t. Sifry’s
article in particular discusses the failures of past candidates who have
developed movements independent of the parties’ structures. The grass roots
organizations of Jesse Jackson in ’88 and Ross Perot in ’92 and ’96 all
dissolved immediately after the election, because their founders couldn’t let
go of the strict control of the movement. Howard Dean had considerably better
success after the election in 2004 - his “Democracy For America” is still going
strong and has served as a seed for other recent movements - in part because
Dean was willing to let it move on without him after he took over the DNC.
Since the power of the web is inherently so widely distributed, it’s unlikely
that efforts to control it in the traditional sense will be successful – web
communities, as several politicians (including Obama) have discovered, are
simply too unruly to be molded into disciplined troops serving a hierarchical
structure and a single leader.
A political organization flexible enough, though, to strike a balance between
controlling the agenda of such a large group and drawing on its almost
limitless diversity and energy could bring a real revolution in how we govern
ourselves, and Obama seems to have a good bead on the beginnings of a strategy
to do that (in that sense, his experience as a community organizer is serving
him extremely well). It remains to be seen if the techniques that are effective
in smaller community organizations are scalable to the vast numbers involved in
national political parties, but Obama’s campaign has reached pretty large size
already, and it seems to be working fine so far.
Politics as a competition between marching bands may be being overthrown by the
web, and replaced by politics as improvisational jazz. And that’s probably just
fine. I like a good marching band as much as the next guy, but it doesn’t hold
a candle to good jazz. It takes a delicate and steady touch, though, to keep a
big jazz band all headed in the same direction, and if you don’t you get a discordant
mess. My gut tells me that it’s better to let the web community breathe more,
and not suffocate it with an attempt at control, but keeping all those
musicians playing complementary music will be an ongoing challenge.
