No Revolution
May 24th, 2008I scoff when people say that “the Internet” is going to “revolutionize” the way campaigns work. Those candidates who cling to the Internet, like Ron Paul, are doomed to fail and those candidates who use it to effectively raise large sums of money, like Barack Obama or (to a lesser extent) Hillary Clinton, are going to succeed with or without the Internet (to some reasonable extent, obviously, as we do not know if Obama will be President, but he has succeeded and would have succeeded by many measures even if he’d lost out on the nomination). That the Internet is a great outlet for communications and contact is an understatement, but it is not a political revolution. Campaigns will always be won at the grassroots, by candidates shaking hands, giving speeches and, always, receiving assistance from those people who believe in them. But this article about the Senate race in Minnesota has caused me to re-evaluate my position, and I now believe that the Internet will be a greater tool for running races at the local level than the national level.
On a laptop at a kitchen table in this cheery Twin Cities suburb, headlines ripping into Al Franken, the satirist whose campaign for the United States Senate is seen as one of the most competitive in the nation, are written up day after day for Minnesota Democrats Exposed, a political blog created by a former Republican Party researcher. Michael B. Brodkorb, the blog’s creator, has worked on the campaigns of some of this state’s top Republicans. Mr. Brodkorb’s critics say the Web site’s claims, screamed in red uppercase letters, are often breathless, far-fetched and painfully partisan. But Minnesota Democrats Exposed has dealt several blows to Mr. Franken’s campaign lately: revelations that he owed $25,000 to the State of New York for failing to pay workers’ compensation insurance and that his corporation was in forfeiture in California.
With only weeks until the state Democratic Party’s convention, where Mr. Franken is expected to win the party’s endorsement to run against Senator Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent, people here disagree about how much these financial questions will matter to voters in the fall. What Mr. Franken’s circumstance has proven, though, is that no Minnesota candidate this fall can afford to ignore Mr. Brodkorb, or the rest of the state’s universe of Web sites devoted to local politics. Experts here say the abundance of these blogs is a mirror onto this state, its partisan split in recent years and its long tradition of intense political activism (by some measures, voter turnout here was the highest in the nation in 2006). That said, they are anything but Minnesota Nice.
Eric Pusey’s liberal-leaning mnblue, for instance, tracks Mr. Coleman’s moves on a “Weasel Meter.” Some blog live from the smallest of political meetings and the forgotten campaign stops. Enough of these writers have cropped up here now to make a Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, better known here as the Mob. “We’ve kind of got a center of gravity going on up here,” said Mitch Berg, part of a group that started a True North Web site in 2007.
The Franken campaign has played down the significance of the revelations first raised on Mr. Brodkorb’s site, but there are signs the tax problems may be trouble for Mr. Franken, a former comedian who has worked hard to show voters that his campaign is serious. A recent poll of voters by The Minneapolis Star Tribune that showed Mr. Coleman leading Mr. Franken (though within the margin of error) also found that 42 percent of those polled were not satisfied with Mr. Franken’s explanations of his tax problems; 28 percent said the problems made them less likely to vote for him.
Then again, we see the conundrum of blogs in this article: does anyone truly doubt that these stories would not have been written about in the mainstream media, at least eventually? So what sort of effect do they have on the campaign beyond timing? The Internet, as a forum where people can post as they please, will eventually be a great source of political dirt, and will allow candidates to control the disclosure of embarrassing information at their leisure, because all they will have to do is post on their website or on an influential supporter’s website that something unethical or immoral or merely embarrassing is occurring or did occur, and therefore disrupt the timing of a candidate’s media cycle or of the direction of a campaign at the early stages. And candidates will be able to use money. But how, exactly, are these different than local donor fundraising and planting a story in a favorable newspaper? They aren’t. It’s a small evolution.
Not a revolution.