Archive: Author: The Management

With the year-long debate over health care reform now entering its denouement (or a new chapter), how do you think the internet affected the course of the political battle? That's the question I just sent to several dozen longtime friends, colleagues, fellow-travelers, and participants at the frontlines of the intersection of technology and politics. Over the next hours and days, I'll share their answers. But here's a stab at starting the discussion. First, a little black-and-white oversimplification. In 1993-4, as now, Democrats controlled all three branches. They had the White House, a 56-44 majority in the Senate and a 259-176 majority in the House. Then, as now, tens of millions of Americans lacked health insurance (roughly 40 million then, roughly 50 million...

Ben Smith of Politico has a good point about the role of Organizing for America in the fight over Obama's health care reform. He writes: "Obama hasn't, as some hoped and feared, transformed the political landscape and changed the way politics is done. But within the legislative trench warfare that has defined this year, his campaign organization was a serious asset." Indeed, the sheer numbers of actions tallied by OFA in the last ten days are impressive: · Made nearly 500,000 real-people calls to Congress. · Sent 324,000 letters to Congress. · Held nearly 1,200 health care-related events with more than 10,000 attendees. · Sent nearly 1 million localized text messages. · Called nearly 120,000 supporters using OFA’s Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool online. Leaving aside all the "what-ifs"...

Fun for a Friday afternoon: Am I the only person who thinks Google Suggest is like a public Ouija board? Here's a glimpse into what the hive mind is thinking currently about our current and immediate past presidents, according to the gnomes behind Google Suggest (that is, what are the likeliest search phrases people are entering after the words "Will Barack Obama...

How big are the right-roots? And how do they stack up against the net-roots? I've been asking that question of various people lately, and also looking at some of the metrics available, as both sides of the American political spectrum continue to grow and flex their online muscles in this turbulent season. Here's some relevant data regarding their respective online donor bases. On a PdF Network call yesterday with Rob Willington, director of RebuildtheParty.com and the new media director for Scott Brown's upstart victory in the Massachusetts Senate race in January, I asked whether the 100,000 or so donors to the Brown campaign--which raised a whopping $12 million in a matter of weeks--were a good measure of the right-roots base? Willington...

Shorter Pew Internet study: "The public is clearly part of the news process now." Oh, and folks at TheNewYorkTimesFoxABCNBCCBSNPRDrudgeHuffingtonPostEtc: Forget about loyalty to your brand. Those days are gone. There's a lot of interesting new data in the latest Pew Research Center/Pew Internet & American Life Project survey, which we're all chewing on this morning. After you get past the biggest headline, which is that people are largely infovores who graze everywhere for information, rather than sticking to one source loyally, here's what jumped out at me: 1. Conversation about content is king. Or, soon to be king, judging from the continued growth of participatory behavior around news content. Pew reports that: Some 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation...

Yesterday's health care summit was also a very big day for CoverItLive, the Toronto company that provides easy-to-use and highly versatile live-blogging widgets that have become the industry go-to for high volume live events. Keith McSpurren, the company's CEO, tells me that across the many sites that used CiL to host discussions about the health care summit, "about 100,000 unique live readers made around 100,000 live comments during the events." He adds: Larger users were the following (some of them take down events after Live is over...

Was yesterday's all-day meeting at Blair House on health care reform a success? Well, by one measure, it was a huge success for the White House new media operation, which provided a live web stream to users all over the web. This tweet from new media director Macon Phillips sums it up: That is to say, three times as many people watching the live web stream of the health care summit than the State of the Union. This occurred not because a summit is inherently more interesting than a speech; it's because after the first few hours, when the cable new shows stopped covering it live, people probably went looking for other ways to watch and chose the web....

"These dudes are old school communications people. They're playing the game the way they know how because it's been lucrative for them. And they're destroying the whole promise of the Obama Administration in the process." With the White House tabling a new hybrid health care reform proposal that, intriguingly, no longer appears to contain the infamous deal cut with the pharmaceutical industry to block efforts to allow cheaper drugs into the country in exchange for $80 billion in promised costs savings and a massive industry advertising campaign in favor of reform, it's worth asking whether that very deal, which reached intimately toward the pockets of two top White House advisers, had a subtle effect on how the White House imagined its...

It's been quite a 2010, hasn't it? From the Scott Brown upset in Massachusetts, setting Republican hearts aflutter everywhere; to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, upsetting small-d democrats and setting off calls for Constitutional amendments among liberals; to an anti-tax zealot dive-bombing his plane into an IRS building; war bulletins from Afghanistan and terrorists in federal court and anti-government Tea Party activists cropping up all over, one wonders if we aren't heading into our generation's version of 1968. Or perhaps I'm taking things a bit too seriously. Perhaps not. With the health care "summit" coming up this Thursday for a live, semi-unscripted(?), televised, webcast half-day encounter between President Obama and the congressional leadership from both parties, for us politics junkies...

Based on an unconfirmed report on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment site that former President Bill Clinton and James Carville are supposedly planning a dirty-tricks campaign against seven or eight top leaders of the Tea Party movement, the Tea Party Patriots network has responded with an amusing and effective expression of solidarity. A website called "IAmTheTeaPartyLeader.com" is displaying 210 video testimonials from grass-roots activists, each declaring "I am the Tea Party leader." Click on any thumbnail and you're taken to a short video; click on a "load random video" if you want the "chatroulette" version of the site. Most of the videos appear to be of middle-aged white people, a sign of the Tea Party movement's tech savvy. There are also a...