Campaigning In The Internet Age

Political Players is a weekly conversation with the leaders, consultants, and activists who are shaping American politics. This week, CBS News' David Miller talks with Andrew Rasiej, founder and publisher of TechPresident.com, about what role the Internet will play in the 2008 election and which candidates are making the best use of technology in their pursuit of the White House.

CBSNews.com: Monday night's YouTube debate represents a good jumping-off point when talking about the intersection of technology and politics. What were your thoughts on the debate and how it went?

Andrew Rasiej: Well, it was a great first step in traditional political culture and traditional media culture, recognizing that the Internet is playing a central role in the political landscape, and that voter-generated content may have a defining impact on who the next president is.

CBSNews.com: Which candidates do you think handled that best, and which candidates do you think are leveraging technology the best for their campaigns?

Andrew Rasiej: As much as the debate was a step forward, there were some serious flaws in the way the whole thing was structured because, ultimately, the individual questioners were just "talking heads," and they were better "talking heads" than even journalists who might be in that role in a traditional television debate. But they didn't really take advantage of the fact that the Internet and Internet video, and actually video itself, could do a more compelling job of delivering the punch or the meaning of a question. So, for example, if its just talking head, is it any different than a person from a town hall debate raising their hand and asking a question? I would argue that it's actually worse because the person's not actually even in the facility to follow-up, to say that you didn't really answer my question.

So what you ended up seeing was a dynamic where often, not in every case, but often the candidates, instead of answering directly the question, picked up on the theme of the question and just went to their traditional talking points. And, [debate moderator] Anderson Cooper tried a number of times to hold them accountable, but it wasn't successful in every case. But later on in the proceedings when you saw, for example, the health care videos panning back to show their sick loved ones, now you're talking about going beyond and putting the question in context, and the questions that could have been chosen could have been more related to the dynamics of the media itself.

CBSNews.com: Overall, you've obviously looked at all of the candidate's websites and their text messaging efforts — and everything else. Which ones do you think are doing a really good job on that front?

Andrew Rasiej: Well, it's pretty clear that the Barack Obama campaign and the John Edwards campaign are using technology in the most innovative ways by embracing the notion that by building a strong and robust online community, taking advantage of voter-generated content and various other technological tools to support their efforts, that they are getting more traction online and building more enthusiastic support online. With that said, the holy grail is trying to figure out how to get on online enthusiasm to turn into offline action, and that remains pretty elusive to all the candidates.

CBSNews.com: Touching off on that, Mike Gravel, and especially Ron Paul, have these huge Internet followings, but in the general public they're pretty much nonexistent. Is there a reason that people on the Internet are so drawn to those candidates?

Andrew Rasiej: Ron Paul, in particular, is a libertarian. In technology people tend to be libertarians, and so a lot of supporters of Ron Paul are actually very technologically-savvy and know how to spread the word using the tools they've developed themselves. And, Mike Gravel has become sort of known as a maverick, and is a little less risk-averse. But Ron Paul's sort of like the Howard Dean for Republicans this time around. Because he's actually running around saying George Bush is wrong — things that other Republican candidates would never say — and people are flocking to him because he's so profoundly honest about what he believes.

But following that dynamic, that question, let me just help you on one other step: There's a clear, clear, distinction between the way Republicans are using their technology and the Democrats are using their technology.

CBSNews.com: Could you discuss the partisan split on that, why there's a perception Democrats are using the Internet better than Republicans?

Andrew Rasiej: There's sort of a fundamental reason, which is that the Republicans have, for decades, been really, really good at building a communications infrastructure that develops the message either through think tanks or through policymakers, and then make sure that that gets delivered through from the top, down. And the culture of the Internet is anything but top-down. It is a side-to-side and a bottoms-up type of infrastructure. I mean, there are top-down organizations on the Internet, too. For example, MoveOn.org is a top-down organization. But the Internet lends itself much more to this sort of free, open framework, and the Republicans are having a really hard time adapting to it based on the history of how they've been operating politically for the last tow or three decades.

On the other hand, back to the Democrats. The Democrats have actually failed for the last two or three decades to build a robust, top-down, political infrastructure and, as a result, it's their own rank-and-file that have taken the technology into their own hands and have developed ways in which they communicate amongst themselves to create a new 21st century style infrastructure that isn't top-down but can be very powerful, and it's commonly known as the "net roots."

CBSNews.com: One Republican who has gotten praise for using the Internet is Fred Thompson. He posts on blogs a lot and has posted some online videos that have gotten a lot of attention, like the one criticizing Michael Moore. Do you see him doing things a little better than the typical Republican candidate?

Andrew Rasiej: Actually, no. I'd say that each campaign had a couple of things that they do better than other campaigns. Mitt Romney, for example, is an avid blogger and his family are avid bloggers. Blogging is one tool that can be used, and some of them are doing better videos than others, and Fred Thompson is trying to do a couple of things that are pushing the envelope a little bit. But Rudy Giuliani did that thing where they basically put all of his videos on one page, and you could click on any video and it would highlight that video and you would watch that video but you could actually run, like, thirty videos all at the same time on one page. They're all trying to do individual stuff.

But I think, to answer your question, for Fred Thompson — or any candidate that wants to have online success — you have to nourish your community and do more than just post on blogs and do clever videos. They're going to constantly be playing catch up.

CBSNews.com: It does seem that the candidates and politicians are always trying to make it look like they're with the times but they're sort of always running behind. Do you see any real innovation in the use of the Internet overall, through politicians, or does it come from other places?

Andrew Rasiej: Well, you need to look at a site called webcameron.org.uk. David Cameron is a member of Parliament in England who basically video blogs every day while he's making eggs for his kids or walking into Parliament to debate. He's figured out that every time the video camera's pointed at him, it's not television, and he's developed a way and a style to be able to use video as a way of making himself more accessible, and, actually, more authentic to his constituents.

I'm only telling you about that to look at that in comparison to the way our existing candidates are using the Internet video where they still, for the most part, when they themselves are on camera, they think it's a television camera talking to them, you know, looking at them. They haven't quite realized that it's a less-scripted, different medium all together. It actually looks for informality; it doesn't want formality.

CBSNews.com: You saw that last night in the debate when they had those YouTube-style videos produced by the campaigns, but most of them seemed just like regular old commercials.

Andrew Rasiej: Right, but actually, to Hillary Clinton's credit, she actually used one that was created by a community member, so she at least recognized that maybe somebody out there in her community could do a better job producing something than then can. So there was an acknowledgment of that.

I mean, in some ways these campaigns are actually further behind than Howard Dean was before [in 2004], because they're more afraid about it. After the "macaca" moment happened to George Allen, they've all been told, "Be really, really careful what you do when you're in the presence of any human being because you're going to be caught on camera." So they're very guarded, in a way. Back to the Edwards and Obama campaigns — they have former Dean folks in their organizations. They're willing to play with the technology a little further, so you'll find mobile text messaging tools that they've been using to reach people by mobile phone. Barack, in particular, is encouraging people to create their own blogs on his site and their encouraging introducing members to each other through his site.

Whereas with Hillary Clinton, it's "Come register, give us your e-mail address, and we'll keep you informed, and every once in a while we'll ask you to do something." But Hillary's not really encouraging people to blog on her site because we all know what would happen: There would be half of the world attacking her. So she's actually got the problem, which is sort of the Republican problem, which is she and her operation have been so good at top-down political messaging for years that they're having as difficult a time adapting to this new culture as anybody. And, in fact, you could argue that the "1984" video was actually confirming what the Internet culture and community felt about Hillary Clinton's "announcement" or "conversation," because it wasn't really a conversation, but it was "me talking down to you, through the Internet".

So I'm giving you examples of how they're still really dancing around the edges and just beginning to understand that this requires a concerted effort to turn into success. But they clearly can't ignore it because the Internet is no longer an adjunct to the political process. It's actually setting the tone, the pace, the pulse, and, very likely, determining the result of the campaign.

CBSNews.com: 2004 was the year that blogs became really big, and 2006 was the year that YouTube had a lot of influence. Is there something on the horizon that you think is going to be the big Internet thing for the '08 campaign?

Andrew Rasiej: Wow, that's a really good question. I would say that the YouTube of '06 was just a blip on the screen and that that phenomenon is going to go much further in its impact, and let me explain that because I think this is central to the way you're going to think about this going forward.

People pay attention to voter-generated content, I think, because the Obama video gets a whole bunch of news and then is seen by 100,000 or 200,000 or 300,000 people online, and then it jumps to the mainstream media and gets seen by a million, or two to three. And people ask the question, "Well, does that really change anybody's opinion? Does the Obama Girl really change anybody's opinion?" Certainly the John Edwards, combing his hair, may have turned some people off to Edwards and the "Bomb, bomb, bomb" may have turned some people off to McCain, but those are all, sort of, the ones that we all know of because we're seeing them in mass.

But here's the thing that makes it so interesting. The long tail of politics is individuals who are producing content, either video blogs or even an e-mail or a Facebook profile, and distributing it among their ten friends, 100 friends, or 1,000 friends, and it never, ever, ever gets a big, critical mass of millions of viewers, but there's so many people doing it. The way that you think about it is that the water cooler conversations, the dinner conversations around the table, or the conversations over the back fence — that used to define the way that people solidified their political candidates when they talked amongst themselves — are now on steroids because these conversations now happening with the added ability of these tools to amplify and extend the reach of those conversations. Those kinds of conversations have been going on in our society for years and so the movement of political opinion happened, sort of, word-of-mouth in the physical world. Well now it's happening word-of-mouth in the digital world, and that means accelerating the impact of voter-generated content, YouTube video, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, social networks.

The story of the 2008 election is that it's not just one video or one application that will define it. It's not going to be something that critically definitive. But there's a tsunami of this voter-generated content out there, and it's under the radar screen and it's not necessarily visible to everybody. But in total, it will have a precipitous effect.

CBSNews.com: Regarding that effect, a lot of this race is said to be determined by early states like New Hampshire and Iowa where people expect to shake hands with the candidate and go to events with them. Can the Internet have an effect when that kind of retail politics is still important?

Andrew Rasiej: Absolutely, because there will be a time where there will be enough opportunities for people locally to express their concerns from their perspective so that a campaign in advance can actually connect to those local people before they get there and address their concerns. One example of that: There was a significant, fantastic little competition last week between these two towns claiming to be the most rural town in America in order to get John Edwards to agree to go there to talk about poverty. So people could actually demand an event. People are starting to use tools to ask for events to happen.

So this is just the beginning of what may be a sea change in politics where the term "all politics is local" has even more meaning on the Internet, where the needs or the concerns of local communities can actually be touched be candidates even if they're not physically near the town that's of interest.

By David Miller