Netroots Rising

In “Netroots Rising,” Nate and I highlight the contributions dozens of netroots activists, “ordinary people doing extraordinary things.” Of course, there aren’t just dozens of people like the ones in our book, there are millions. And today’s Washington Post highlights one of them - Chris West, 29, of Fairfax County, Virginia.

Does any of that sound familiar? If so, it certainly should. On the Webb campaign alone, I had the privilege of meeting hundreds of “Chrisi Wests,” people like C.W. Dean, Dave Leichtman, Dave Jernigan, Mary Detweiler, Barbara Kreykenbohm, Susan Mariner, Todd Smyth, Marc Greidinger, Cassie Arnold, Tom Counts, Jan-Lars Mueller, Abbi Easter, Chris Ambrose, Ken Kukovich, Annabel Park, Eric Byler, Josh Chernila, Lee Diamond, and many others.

Oh, and just to emphasize a point I’ve made before - it is THESE are the people who ultimately defeated George Allen, not a one-time fluke slipup by Allen when he said the word “macaca.” Sure, that hurt Allen badly, but without Webb’s 10,000-strong “ragtag army,” we wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of Allen’s mistake. Just as Barack Obama’s own “ragtag army” today is taking advantage of their own candidate’s amazing strengths, as well as John McCain’s and Sarah Palin’s fundamental flaws. When Barack Obama wins on November 4, it will be about many factors, including Americans’ desire for change, “the economy stupid,” an incredibly inspiring and eloquent candidate running an amazing campaign, and much more. But it will also, first and foremost, be about the Chris Wests of the world, millions of “ordinary people doing extraordinary things.” To me, that’s extremely inspirational.

I just thought I’d pass along this excellent review of “Netroots Rising.” Here’s an excerpt:

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up! Read the entire review here. Thanks.

This morning, I was interviewed on KPOJ, “Portland’s Progressive Talk Station, about Netroots Rising. If you’re interested, check it out here (a bit over halfway through).

Here is a review of Netroots Rising from a reader in Chile. My Spanish is pretty rusty, but this looks like an excellent review from what I can tell.

If I understand this correctly, it sounds like an accurate description of the book. Anyway, it’s pretty cool that someone’s reading about the Webb campaign, the Virginia blogosphere, Richard Morrison, etc. in Chile!

Over at Jaybird’s Jottings, Netroots Rising gets a nice mention:

I’m currently reading Markos’ book, and hopefully will have a review shortly. One thing both books - Markos’ and ours - certainly have in common is that they both demonstrate “how ordinary citizens can make a difference.” Another is that they both tell “the stories behind the movement.” They’re great stories, too…check ‘em out!

This morning brings an excellent “Netroots Rising” review by “Bloosier Hysteria”:

Thanks for the review, “RedhawkHoosier” - much appreciated!

This (Daily Kos getting into the polling business big time) is truly impressive, and a sign of how far the netroots has come in the past few years:

Fun indeed, and another sign of the “Netroots Rising!”

From Mobile Diner.

Another day, another successful draft movement? It would certainly appear so, as the “Draft Sarah Palin for Vice President” blog is joyfully declaring “WE DID IT!!!!!”. A bit of background on “Draft Sarah Palin for Vice President.”

*The founder is Adam Brickley, aka “Elephantman,” a recent graduate of the University of Colorado at Colorado-Springs who now interns for the conservative site TownHall.com.

*Brickley created his Draft Palin site (and a Facebook site as well) in February 2007, following what he describes as “about a month worth of research on potential Republican Vice-Presidential candidates for the 2008 election.”

*In true grassroots fashion, Brickley says he was “considerably less than thrilled” about various VP prospects, so he “decided to see if there was anyone better suited for the job that I hadn’t been hearing about.”

*The woman who fit his conservative credentials - “pro-life,” “pro-gun,” “not connected to the current administration,” “a woman or minority to counter Hillary Clinton,” an “energetic, young, fresh face” - was (then) recently-elected Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

*During 2007, Brickley posted 75 diaries on his blog, followed by 151 diaries in 2008. Whether or not you think that Sarah Palin is a good choice for VP - and I most certainly do not! - you’ve got to admire Brickley’s tenacity, especially when almost nobody else was really talking about Palin as VP material.

Did the Draft Palin blog have any impact in Palin’s ultimate selection by John McCain? For starters, Sarah Palin called Brickley Friday evening to thank him for his efforts. In addition, as Slate Magazine’s Timothy Noah writes:

In short, whatever the merits of the Palin selection - and I think she’s an atrocious choice on the merits, completely unqualified to be VP and also a right-wing social extremist (opposes birth control for married couples, opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, favors teaching creationism in the public schools, etc., etc.) - it looks like, once again, the blogosphere has demonstrated that it can wield and outsized influence, whether it’s the progressive netroots or the conservative “rightosphere.” Congratulations to Adam Brickley for taking the initiative and getting involved in his nation’s politics. Also, compliments to the Republicans, who unlike the Democrats actually nurture and support their rising grassroots/netroots stars. In this case, according to Slate, Brickley “receives a $7,500 Ronald Reagan College Leaders scholarship annually from the conservative Phillips Foundation.” It’s not often you read about progressive bloggers, grassroots and netroots activists being supported like that, and as Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong write in “Crashing the Gate,” that’s a huge mistake.

P.S. One more point I just thought of. Maybe it’s a sign that the corporate media’s finally paying attention to the netroots, but I’m really struck by how much publicity Brickley is getting - tons! - compared to how much publicity Josh Chernila, Lee Diamond, Corey Hernandez and I received - none! - after the “Draft James Webb” movement succeeded and Webb threw his hat in the ring in February 2006. What’s THAT all about?

P.P.S. Of course, the Draft Webb movement was “only” for a U.S. Senate race, while the “Draft Sarah Palin” movement is for the highest office(s) in the land. Maybe that’s part of it, but I tend to think there’s more going on here than that. The dying corporate media may not like the netroots and the blogs, but it’s no longer ignoring them - with exceptions like the Washington Post, which pretty much never links to the political blogs while using their material left and right.

Jessica Vanden Berg was Jim Webb’s campaign manager in 2006. Prior to that, Vanden Berg ran Wes Clark’s winning Oklahoma primary campaign in 2005, and Amy Klobuchar’s ultimately victorious U.S. Senate campaign in 2006. The following are excerpts from an interview between Vanden Berg and me was conducted on April 22, 2007.

Feld: What do you think were the most significant elements that came together to produce such a strong grassroots/netroots movement for Wes Clark?
Vanden Berg It was the war. I started working for Bob Graham in May 2003…he dropped out in October. [There were] a lot of similarities between Graham’s and Clark’s foreign policy positions. Graham didn’t have a netroots following, Clark did. Clark was a 4-star general, a commander in war. Clark was a person who could get us out of Iraq. Clark’s background was so different from what Democrats had at the time. Same thing with Jim Webb. Both had Republican ties with strong military connections.

Feld: Howard Dean and Wes Clark were totally different types of people, but both had strong netroots followings. Bob Graham didn’t. Why do some candidates have netroots following and other don’t?
Vanden Berg: The netroots are attracted by insurgent type campaigns, authentic, outside-the-box candidates. People in the netroots are looking for leadership in other places than what is normally offered to them. There’s also anger towards the incumbent, which is what happened in Joe Lieberman’s case.

Feld: The netroots also tend to be strongly anti-Iraq war, anti-establishment.
Vanden Berg: Yes, they are anti-establishment. Both Clark and Webb would have had a hard time running without the netroots. Sometimes the netroots finds a candidate, sometimes the netroots supports candidates. It starts when you guys see someone who may be interested in running, but they may need some encouragement.

Feld: Why does the netroots see things that the establishment doesn’t see? Harris Miller, for instance, versus Jim Webb, that seemed like a no brainer. Why didn’t the establishment necessarily see that right away?
Vanden Berg: Every state is very different, but people have long-term relationships, friends, people they go to church with; they’re always going to support them. To say that Jim Webb wasn’t recruited by the DSCC isn’t right. The DSCC wanted Jim to run. Jim didn’t run for Senate because it had been a long-time dream for him. He ran for Senate because he believed in public service, he felt like he wanted to put his voice in the debate. That’s extremely different from a lot of other candidates who build themselves a political resume, take the steps from an early age…build a career to become a US Senator. Webb was not doing that. When the national Democrats saw him, they thought he’d be a good candidate. Before I got here, the DSCC had had conversations with Webb.

I met with Webb in January 2006 for the first time. I knew Steve Jarding. Jim met Steve through Bob Kerrey. Steve explained to Webb what he was walking into, that he’d have to raise money. It was a huge deal that Webb had netroots support. I didn’t know anything about the draft, really. Steve would call/email me the pictures from the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and there were 30 or 40 people there. In politics, that just doesn’t happen organically. You just don’t go to a parade and all these people show up. Webb had this built-in field mechanism. Think about how hard it is to get a candidate on the ballot in Virginia. It took Tim Kaine months. We did it with volunteers, that just doesn’t happen. Without the grassroots, we would NOT have gotten Webb on the ballot. There was SO much to do. We could have paid to get signatures, but we didn’t have the money.

Feld: Did Jim Webb embrace the netroots?
Vanden Berg: He saw it as part of the team, there wasn’t really any difference, it was always part of the campaign. I saw it as all the same…People think it’s just people sitting back behind a computer pontificating about what’s happening the world, commenting. The reality is that it’s a way to organize. Right now, the internet is about a couple of things, getting people to take action and raising money. It will move eventually into persuasion, will become…as sophisticated as other commercial entities. In a primary, you can persuade on the internet. In general elections, it’s very hard to persuade on the internet.

Feld: Persuade FOR or persuade AGAINST? Would macaca have happened the way it did without the blogs?
Vanden Berg: I think it was also a response to how their campaign handled it, how Allen handled it personally. Campaigns are a reflection of the candidate. The netroots were able to push the story, we didn’t even know what macaca meant. We knew it wasn’t good, that it was offensive. It all sort of came together in the way the netroots pushed it. The major media pays attention to the netroots. The Allen campaign responded very poorly…so there were different stories every single day. It was a slow news time as well.

Feld: Was Webb really struggling before macaca?
Vanden Berg: Our internal polling showed that Allen never moved past 45%. That’s really bad for an incumbent Senator with 100% name ID, a former governor, very popular, with lots of money. This was David and Goliath. It was a very hard summer. I don’t ever visualize losing. The hard part was the money situation. Without it, we couldn’t introduce Jim.

Feld: At times, it seemed like Jim didn’t want to go to anything…the President’s Day parade, the St. Patrick’s day parade, and some of the volunteers were upset, mad at you, the scheduling, the whole campaign.
Vanden Berg: When you joined the campaign, it changed your perceptions.

Feld: Perhaps when Josh and I came into the campaign, that helped build a better bridge between the campaign and the grassroots?
Vanden Berg: Putting together these campaigns, with Jim never running, no money, having a lot of people who had a lot of opinions on how to do things, that wasn’t easy. I’ve been a punching bag before, I can take it. In the beginning, we could have done better with the netroots… This campaign became a pseudo-presidential level campaign. We had to put together a conglomeration of people based on where our support was.

Feld: Was this campaign really different than other campaigns?
Vanden Berg: Yes, every campaign is different. Building a multi-million dollar corporation that you build up and tear down in months. Normally, people spend time building the organization, building the structure. We were throwing it together as we were sailing the ship. There were people who were new activists, netroots, people who were fundamentally ingrained in Virginia politics, a candidate who never had run before, who didn’t want to do the fundamentals that other candidates do. Jim didn’t hide these things from reporters or from people in the office or from anybody. We were tasked almost with the impossible. Luckily, in the end, we had momentum, we had an opponent who stepped on himself every time he could, we had a mechanism to bring in money…tap sources that don’t generally exist.

Feld: Is the $4 million we raised online more than you ever expected?
Vanden Berg: Yes. Steve said he thought we could raise $1 million. We started with 2,000 e-mails and cobbled together a list. We had people at the senior staff level who worked together really well.

Feld: Yeah, the netroots thought it was you guys at fault for any problems in the campaign. They weren’t going to blame Jim Webb, they thought this was the worst campaign ever, etc. From the beginning, was the strategy to integrate the netroots?
Vanden Berg: I think you have to, it was never a conscious strategy, it was what it was, it had to be that way. I had that background, but I didn’t know a lot about it. In Oklahoma, there were draft people, there were Meetups, the grassroots wasn’t happy at all at national campaign, they were so happy when I got there, but there was no time. They separated themselves from the campaign, or maybe that schism had already happened, it was like they weren’t part of the same team, maybe it was partly my fault, I dunno. Here, I said, I don’t want that to happen.

Feld: Did it happen here?
Vanden Berg: People were not happy…the super activist netroots type. They got mad at me. They wanted more yard signs, more more more. We didn’t have the money to do it. People went out and bought stuff on their own. At a point, I felt like they’d stop donating to the campaign, but maybe they wouldn’t have donated to the campaign. Not doing more around the local elections before primary, that was my error.

Feld: At a point, it was Jim Franklin and Antonia Scatton sitting in an office, almost like there was a force field between paid staff and volunteers.
Vanden Berg: That’s true, I don’t know why. I think it’s because there was so much to do…it was a mistake…there was so much going on. The fly-around announcement tour really set the campaign off beyond, in a different way, beyond the netroots. People were saying you have a lot of supporters, you have the netroots folks, but what does that mean? It means something very different now after this election than what it did at that moment. We did the drive and fly-around announcement tour, the Shad Planking. We had volunteers putting together huge events, while Harris Miller was having 5 people show up in Northern Virginia. It was just very different. There were things we knew we had to do that the netroots were part of. We had to put together a fundraising operation from scratch - there was NOTHING.

Feld: We did have 1,000 signatures and $40,000 from the draft…

Feld: Joe Trippi has said that some candidate will raise $500 million - 5 million people give $100 each. What do you think about that?
Vanden Berg: It may happen. There have been a lot of changes since Trippi worked for Howard Dean. There’s been a shift change in mentality among people about giving money online. It used to be that Democrats were always outraised by Republicans, that’s not the case anymore. Today, there are small dollar donations that people feel comfortable giving and it’s easier to give. Republicans do well with direct mail, but haven’t really figured out the online giving. They’re more top down, absolutely top down. There’s a certain profile of people who are active online. The GLBT community, for instance, is very active online.

Feld: For instance, in the Arlington school board race last year, Sally Baird - who is a lesbian - had a great interview on RK, and she ended up winning the election by just a few votes.
Vanden Berg: It’s hard to use the internet in a big way to persuade people. In local or primary campaigns, it’s very different. In the Webb-Miller primary, people were saying we weren’t doing things for real, not sending out any mail pieces, doing any TV, etc. I did a DSCC debrief. Our plan changed every week. I would go see how much John Kerry’s e-mail raised, then I’d put $5,000 on the radio. We thought we’d only raise $3 million total in the general election.

Feld: Should we have done more in terms of blogads? Why didn’t we? Is it that traditional political people don’t understand it?
Vanden Berg: Probably. There were really cash flow issues. We should have done more. It was a very bitter primary, a lot of people in the establishment were Miller people. I don’t remember being anti-blogads.

Feld: In the Clark campaign, was there a conscious strategy to exclude the netroots?
Vanden Berg: I got there way after that point.

Feld: How effective were the blogs in the Webb campaign?
Vanden Berg: I think they were pretty effective. We were all putting out stuff that was pretty hardhitting.

Feld: In terms of coordination on messaging, Josh and I weren’t in the morning strategy calls.
Vanden Berg: You probably should have been in them, I don’t know. You were in these two different worlds - work on campaign and be seen as independent - I don’t think they can really do it anymore. You could actually go and blog about things or issues that were not Jim related. That was “Lowell Feld.” It was new then, now that’s not necessarily possible. I had made it clear that I didn’t want to call Allen a racist, I told everyone that.

Feld: I don’t remember that.
Vanden Berg: People don’t want to run those kind of [netroots] campaigns, they’re scared of those kind of campaigns. If you were boxed in that much, you wouldn’t have been as effective.

Feld: I felt like it was working.
Vanden Berg: Our message was the same three things as from the beginning. I think it worked out fine…Contrary to popular opinion, we didn’t look into what you had written. We didn’t do any background investigations, who had time to do that? I would rather focus our staff energy on defining Allen. Ben Tribbett not liking me had no effect on me whatsoever.

Feld: Speaking of which, I found out about “macaca” from NLS even though I was on the campaign. Why is that?
Vanden Berg: It shouldn’t have happened that way, none of us knew what it was. It happened on Friday. Siddarth called Jon Paul, played the tape over the phone, we went to the bar. I told him to drop it off with Joe Stanley in Roanoke. Joe e-mailed it to me. I told him “do not put it on YouTube. There was not this big YouTube conspiracy, YouTube was nothing at that point. I got in on Saturday or Sunday, watched it and watched it. We didn’t know what we had. Nobody was authorized to see it, except Siddarth was to give it to Joe. How Ben found out about it, I don’t know. There is no way Ben was going to get it. There wasn’t a “we’re not going to give it to Lowell,” it was more “what the [expletive deleted] was going on with Ben?” Sunday, Ben put the story up, “Video coming soon.” We all sat down, tried to figure out how to deal with it. Jim Webb only knew about it right before it went on YouTube. We thought we had something because of the way he looked at the camera. We sent it to Tim Craig, Monday early. We decided to try to get the “mainstream media” to bite on it, write about it, put a framework around it. At first, Tim Craig wasn’t sure if it was news. Everybody knew that George Allen had this in him, but nobody cared, that’s just who he is. Tim was new, he was on our beat…we sent it to him, he and Michael Shear wrote about it on the web, we put it up on YouTube, then everybody had it. Maybe we should have given it to you. I know there were times you felt that there were trust issues.

Feld: I was coming from a different place, I was well aware that there was an issue of integrating the netroots with the campaign.
Vanden Berg: What macaca did was it generated so much media attention, started poking holes in what George Allen was about. The polls didn’t change much right away. The money didn’t change much right away. It was Meet the Press that really changed things. Between macaca and Meet the Press, we placed a $100,000 buy for the Ronald Reagan ad, which was very controversial. I had a panic moment, called Larry Huynh, asked him if should have given this to Markos before we put it up, I was afraid the netroots would turn on us because of Ronald Reagan. The netroots has a manual: don’t be a Republican, don’t be a conservative. In Virginia, it’s not about being a Democrat or Republican, it’s about being a leader. Larry said we should just give it to him when we give it to him, because if he doesn’t like it, it could serve the opposite effect. We did a very small buy in early September. People thought it was a good ad, the Republicans started attacking us. It got so much other media attention, we probably got $500,000 worth out of it. Then, people started to say, “what’s going on here.” We went on Meet the Press, which was a great venue for Webb, he’s very comfortable in that environment. Webb did a great job on that, people saw him, and from that day to 24 hours later, we raised $100,000 online. That was the money turning point.

Feld: Before that, it had felt like we were slogging away in the coal mines for months on end so that IF a moment like macaca came along, we could capitalize.
Vanden Berg: Yeah. People can see through the crap. Authenticity is key. We want a candidate who can win…a leadership/win model. We had big national endorsements, a big volunteer push. In the primary, we changed it to leadership, experience, we can win. Now, Democrats believe that we can win. They want someone who is real, authentic, and can win. That’s what the netroots did. People asked me whether it wasn’t horrible for a political hack like me to have so much out of my control. I think it’s good. Participatory Democracy brings it to a whole new level. Everything Jim did was on YouTube, not just macaca.

Feld: We had all these people running around, the democratization of this technology. Interview with [Jim Webb's wife] Hong Le.
Vanden Berg: Yeah, yep, right. In a lot of campaigns, a lot of that stuff would have been screened. We were an insurgent campaign so we could do that, also we needed to grab everything we could. In other campaigns, things are much more controlled. We would have never won if we hadn’t done it that way (e.g., the netroots swarming all over campaign HQ, students coming down from Yale Law School, Eric Byler filming things). There was a level of trust, we didn’t screw up that much, we were pretty disciplined in terms of the media. It’s not the norm on most campaigns. I don’t know how this campaign ended up being so different from other campaigns. In part it was the culture. We had so few resources, so all these people willing to do all this stuff, even if it wasn’t exactly the way we wanted it, you have to let people do it. The lack of resources was almost a blessing. Jim was very hands off. He hated campaigning, which allowed us a lot of freedom. Jim said two things: 1) we’re all in this together; 2) if he hits me, hit back harder. I did things in this campaign that I wasn’t allowed to do in other campaigns. We made very few public mistakes compared to our opponent.