Think of this as Volume 11, Number 37 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I’ve written since 1997. Enjoy.
This is the hardest moment in the creation of any new political thesis. You build it, you argue about it, but then you have to put it on choppy waters, into the center of the storm, and you have to believe you’re right.
This is such a time for the Internet Thesis.
The Internet Thesis holds that the values of this medium — not the values of the TV medium — are what will drive our politics. Consensus, not conflict. Openness, not secrecy. These values have been made manifest in the person and politics of Barack Obama, and the old thesis is fighting back with everything it has.
Why not? They have nothing to lose, and everything to lose. They’re going to use TV, use conflict, pull out all the Rovian stops, until the voters stop them. And we have nothing to respond with except faith that this thesis, with its online organization, with its consensual cool, with its deep pool of facts behind it, can somehow prevail.
If you believe in this thesis, then work for it. Or have the simple decency to Shut The Fuck Up. If he loses, hammer him then. But don’t hammer him now, because in criticizing him you’re only doing the other side’s work.
The one point made by Netroots advocates for five years now is that you can’t trust the Republicans to act like ladies and gentlemen, that they’re dirty fighters, and that you’ve got to be willing to mud-wrestle them. Kerry failed, they said, because he didn’t do that. (I believe he failed because people age more slowly now so the knees still jerked.)
Instead of getting John Kerry, we got to see the whole structure of Bushism collapse upon itself. Katrina, the Big Shitpile, the Iraq casualty lists, all of it. People no longer believe in the Bush Thesis. So why assume that anything McCain does can somehow lead that thesis to triumph?
While Obama has become more forceful he’s not going into the mud. He has allowed Republicans to inflate the Palin balloon and assumed that it will deflate as the press pokes holes in it. He has not engaged in a mud-wrestling contest even after Republicans accused him of doing just that in order to get him off his game.
Barack Obama is a steady man. Patience and steel, Andrew Sullivan calls it. But with the polls looking bleak some, like Margaret Carlson, say that what makes for a good President may make for a bad candidate, so he should hit McCain harder, harder, and harder.
I feel that way, too. Very much so. I have been screaming at the TV, even screaming at Barack, often these last few weeks.
But two points need to be made:
- The first votes are still a month away.
- Barack Obama is our candidate and we have no choice but to get behind him.
Just because polls indicate bad things right now, it doesn’t mean
they will show the same bad things a month from now. Polls are like stock
prices — they fluctuate.
The second point is more important. You build this ship, this
campaign, and you send it into the hurricane. Then you support that
ship. This is something Republicans learned long ago and Democrats
still haven’t figured out.
So right now, the concern trolling of the Huffington Post and Hullaballoo is worse-than-worthless. It is counterproductive. It is doing McCain’s work
for him. If you want to bitch about something, go to the Obama site and
launch your own blog. Bitch there, behind their firewall. Don’t engage
in the circular firing squad tactics which you used to torpedo Gore,
Dean and Kerry while those boats were in the water. You do your cause
no good.
What’s clear to me is that Barack Obama, and the Obama Campaign,
believe in a new kind of politics, believe in the Internet Thesis, to a
far greater degree than I ever imagined. People are not stupid, he
says, despite polling evidence to the contrary. The Palin balloon will deflate, the Rovian attacks will turn back on themselves.
There is some evidence this is already happening. The attacks of the
last week are being called lies by people who haven’t called McCain a
liar before. People like Mark Halperin and the Associated Press, whom we’ve assumed to be in the tank for McCain, are now seeing him as dishonorable. That’s the most important news of this week, because it will inform the coverage of the crucial weeks to come.
The other point which must be made is that all this caterwauling and
caterwailing distracts us from the hard work that must now be underway.
You do yourself and your candidate a lot more good right now by making
phone calls and knocking on doors than you do by blogging. Blogging is
easy. Door-knocking is hard. I know.
The game is on. You’ve got to know when to hold ’em and know when to
fold ’em. Right now, you hold ’em. You believe in your man as he
believes in us. You work your butt off and you hang on for dear life.
Believe. There will be plenty of time for your usual cynicism later. For now, believe.
You really have no choice.
The Internet is a medium, not a political party. There are just as many Republicans use the Internet as Democrats. The freedom-loving open-sourcers are probably only 5% of the Internet.
Most of the Internet are DRM-loving, ad-pushing money-grabbing businesses. Have you looked at the Internet recently? It is a swamp of malware, viruses, theft, porn, ads, phishing, etc.
The ‘freedom’ bloggers that you like are few in number and powerless in the real world. They chatter to the converted, who probably won’t bother to vote anyway.
The Internet is a time sink, like the constant texting and twittering nonsense to each other.
It is no coincidence that the rich and powerful don’t ‘do’ the Web (except for the few web millionaires). They have employees to do that for them.
BillK
The Internet is a medium, not a political party. There are just as many Republicans use the Internet as Democrats. The freedom-loving open-sourcers are probably only 5% of the Internet.
Most of the Internet are DRM-loving, ad-pushing money-grabbing businesses. Have you looked at the Internet recently? It is a swamp of malware, viruses, theft, porn, ads, phishing, etc.
The ‘freedom’ bloggers that you like are few in number and powerless in the real world. They chatter to the converted, who probably won’t bother to vote anyway.
The Internet is a time sink, like the constant texting and twittering nonsense to each other.
It is no coincidence that the rich and powerful don’t ‘do’ the Web (except for the few web millionaires). They have employees to do that for them.
BillK
Excellent, Dana. We tried to wrap words around this concept last year in the 12-week online discourse at Extreme Democracy. What does democracy look like when confronted with the internet? What happens to representative democracy when we can all speak directly for ourselves, especially when representation and the media that supports representative democracy have been gamed and corrupted? What is the real nature of democracy, anyhow — does it change with the use of different mediums of communication, or is there an underlying concept that is changeless?
I think we came to an agreement at the end of 12 weeks, that democracy only thrives with participation, and that participation is enabled by the internet. It is the great equalization of participation the internet enables that scares the power brokers, the gatekeepers, the entrenched powerbase as it challenges the means by which they they have supported themselves. Net neutrality and open source are a real threat to their way of life.
But we do have an advantage over them; they cannot grok this because they don’t speak the language, aren’t part of the culture. When one’s sense of self is based upon orientation within hierarchy, a flat world is incomprehensible.
(And this is a salient point in BillK’s preceding comment: participation is essential in this flat, wired world. Having an underling “do teh Google” for you is an implicit statement that one doesn’t get this new, distributed democracy.)
Excellent, Dana. We tried to wrap words around this concept last year in the 12-week online discourse at Extreme Democracy. What does democracy look like when confronted with the internet? What happens to representative democracy when we can all speak directly for ourselves, especially when representation and the media that supports representative democracy have been gamed and corrupted? What is the real nature of democracy, anyhow — does it change with the use of different mediums of communication, or is there an underlying concept that is changeless?
I think we came to an agreement at the end of 12 weeks, that democracy only thrives with participation, and that participation is enabled by the internet. It is the great equalization of participation the internet enables that scares the power brokers, the gatekeepers, the entrenched powerbase as it challenges the means by which they they have supported themselves. Net neutrality and open source are a real threat to their way of life.
But we do have an advantage over them; they cannot grok this because they don’t speak the language, aren’t part of the culture. When one’s sense of self is based upon orientation within hierarchy, a flat world is incomprehensible.
(And this is a salient point in BillK’s preceding comment: participation is essential in this flat, wired world. Having an underling “do teh Google” for you is an implicit statement that one doesn’t get this new, distributed democracy.)