Archive: Year: 2011

"One of the best-kept secrets in American politics is that the two-party system has long been brain dead -- kept alive by support systems like state electoral laws that protect the established parties from rivals and by Federal subsidies and so-called campaign reform. The two-party system would collapse in an instant if the tubes were pulled and the IVs were cut." --Cornell University professor Theodore Lowi, former president of the American Political Science Association, writing in the New York Times Magazine, August 23, 1992. "With little more than a year before the 2012 presidential election season kicks off, time is short for the American people to become aware of the political forces in play." ...

Ever since John McCain's upset win of the New Hampshire presidential primary in February 2000, when during his live televised victory speech he mentioned his McCain2000.com website, unleashing a flood of online donations--more than $1 million in 48 hours and more than $2 million in one week--political campaigns and the journalists who cover them have been entranced by the relationship between the Internet and grassroots politics. This made sense in McCain's case: nearly one half of the people who donated to him in that dizzying week were first-time donors to the campaign, and according to Becky Donatelli, one of McCain's strategists, their gifts averaged under $100. "The deluge was so large that our servers could not handle the load and...

Joe Rospars, chief digital strategist for Obama 2012 (and the wunderkind who masterminded the campaign's 2008 new media operation), has a post up on the Obama for America blog that appears to respond to the questions I raised this morning about the grassrootsiness of the campaign's stunning $86 million second quarter fundraising haul. He writes: Folks have been asking lots of follow-up questions about the numbers, and there will be more than 15,000 pages of detail when we file our report on Friday with the answers (unlike many of the outside special-interest groups attacking President Obama, who don't disclose anything at all). But we've been able to do a little digging and math today to pull a few other interesting facts beyond...

In Los Angeles, a half-dozen PdFers gathered at Lucy's El Adobe. In Brussels, thirty folks met at the offices of Fleishman-Hillard, a PR firm. In Rome, it looks like the most stylish of affairs (see photo below; we are not surprised). In New York, we met at New Work City 2.0, a PdF-style place for sure. In Frankfurt, New York, Baltimore, Milan, even Sydney, Australia, we got together and talked about our common passion for how the internet is changing politics, government and civil society. Joe Anthony, a former Obama campaign activist (whose travails with the 2008 campaign we covered closely), attended the LA Meetup and reported: It was great to get a small group of like-minded folks together and we...

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina has announced that Obama 2012 has raised a whopping $86 million in the second quarter of this year, shattering George W. Bush's prior record of $50 million in a quarter, and way ahead of Obama's fundraising pace four years ago. The official report will be filed with the FEC this Friday, but Messina continued the campaign's tradition of reporting "first" to its grassroots email list via YouTube video. The numbers are impressive, but there's a catch. Messina emphasizes the grass-roots base of Obama 2012 in the video, rattling off statistic after statistic: 31,000 face-to-face meetings conducted by organizers; 290,000 conversations; 650 local organizing meetings; 60 field offices set up across the country. These are impressive numbers,...

If you're curious, as we are, about where Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen are going with their Google Ideas think/do-tank, check out this recent profile from the Financial Times. Pegged to a June 26-29 conference in Ireland that Google Ideas convened called the "Summit Against Violent Extremism," (SAVE) the FT report captures both the exuberant ambition of the nascent project and some confusion as well. Unlike Google.org, which is the search giant's philanthropic arm, Google Ideas is part of the company's business operations and strategy division. Its staff of six are based here in New York. Cohen, who is best known for his time at the State Department, when he asked Twitter to delay a planned maintenance shutdown to not hinder...

There's more evidence of smartphone usage in the United States enabling a kind of "leapfrog effect" over the digital divide. According to a new report by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American LIfe Project, 44 percent of African Americans and Hispanics say they own a smartphone, compared to just 30 percent of non-Hispanic whites. That said, class and education levels are also strongly related to smartphone ownership, with just 22% of people making less than $30K/yr saying they own one, compared to about 40% of people between $30K-$75K, and nearly 60 percent of people making more than $75K. The younger you are, though, the more likely you use a smartphone--even among people making less than $30K a year, 39%...

Here's what to watch for during the "First Ever Twitter @Townhall at the White House," whose theme is supposed to be jobs and the economy: Will Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey manage to ask Obama more than 8 questions over the hour, beating the record set during the April 20 Facebook "townhall"? Will President Obama or Dorsey make a disparaging joke about marijuana legalization? Will the ever-dapper Dorsey be wearing a pocket square? Will any question about top economic adviser Larry Summers' work for Obama include mention of his new gig as a member of the board of Dorsey's new company, Square? Indeed, will Summers' name even get mentioned? Will anyone go off script? Seriously, while I am all for government embracing social media, I am not...

Want to know when to get on Twitter to chat with fellow users about such topics as community building, optimizing your conversion rates, fundraising or new developments in mobile tech and social media? Check out Twitter Chat Schedule, the Google-doc-powered TV Guide of Twitter talk. It's got more than 450 hashtags listed for more topics than I knew existed under the sun, including many of sure interest to folks in the poli-tech world. See for example: #commbuild, a monthly chat that happens on the third Thursday of every month, from 4-5pm EST, moderated by Amy Sample Ward, NTEN's membership director (she also integrates CoverItLive into the chats and keeps archives!); #CROchat, a weekly chat Thursdays from 1-2pm about conversion rate optimization; #fem2, a weekly...

The Minnesota state government has shut down due to the collapse of efforts to reach a budget deal, and all kinds of state services are closing, including highway rest-stops, highway and bridge construction programs, funding for special education programs and safe houses for domestic violence victims. 23,000 state employees have been laid off. Monitoring of beaches by the state health department for high E. Coli levels has also been halted, according to the Democratic-leaning Alliance For a Better Minnesota's protest site, ShutdownShame.org. (The Huffington Post has a nice live-blog of the unfolding story, and the folks at TheUptake.org, who specialize in live-blogging crises over there, have great coverage as well..) But online, there's a kind of ghostly continuation of...