Matt’s last post on the YouTube viewship (not to mention the hip-hop station listenership) of Obama’s big race speech yesterday is particularly fascinating to those of us with a background in political communications and speechwriting. Before now, there was an overwhelming conventional wisdom that the long, coherent, logically structured Political Speech was pretty much one of the biggest anachronisms in American politics.
Sure, there continue to be a few occasions–notably presidential State of the Union or Oval Office addresses, and convention acceptance speeches–where significant numbers of people actually watch, listen to, or read entire political speeches. But for the most part, politicians and speechwriters over the last couple of decades have learned to build speeches based not on the primary audience of people exposed to the whole product, but secondary audiences learning about it in print (hence the importance of the “lede”) or electronic (the genesis of “sound bites”) media, or even teritiary audiences who see or hear nothing other than media commentary or reaction by other politicians. Indeed, the recent (and believe it or not, it really is pretty recent) preoccupation by virtually every political campaign with “message” is a function of the fragmentation of political communications, even at the presidential level where more words are covered by the media more often, and campaigns have the resources to buy a lot of attention.
What Matt’s suggesting is that the new social media may be changing all that, and enabling candidates to get a broad and unflitered–in other words, primary audience–for longer and more nuanced communications that do the things soundbites or short “message” ads can’t–tell a story, address complex issues, convey a genuine sense of the candidate’s personality, and make a detailed argument.
It’s probably prudent not to get too carried away with this idea too fast. We don’t know how many of the million-plus people who’ve already downloaded Obama’s Philadelphia speech actually watched all of it. We don’t know how many of them were persuadable voters rather than Obama supporters. And we also don’t know if this is going to become a general phenomenon, or if Obama’s already-legendary speechmaking ability, and the explosive nature of yesterday’s topic, make him the exception rather than the rule.
But it all bears watching. And this is one old speechwriter who would be delighted if there’s once again room in political campaigns for logical appeals that take a while to deliver.

To this point, Obama’s big speech on race yesterday is getting widespread praise for its unexpected honesty and candor. Watching MSNBC, I heard it called unprecedented and brilliant, and was actually compared to Martin Lugher King’s “I Have a Dream” address.
If you do a quick survey online (and ignore The Corner) the criticism, such as it is, boils down to one simple thing — the speech was too long. It offered too many opportunities for negative soundbites. In fact, as I was watching the speech, one of the very first headlines that MSNBC put up read:

Obama: Racial anger is “real”

But that only remains true if the one way that people hear the words of Obama’s speech is in a 20-second clip. The thus-far remarkable thing about this election is that it no longer has to be that way.
The campaign put the video of the entire speech on YouTube before lunch. Twenty-four hours after Obama walked off the stage in Philadelphia, this 37-minute address has already been viewed more than 1,000,000 times. As I write this post, 20 additional people are watching the speech, it’s currently the “most-viewed video” at YouTube. ‘d bet my lunch that another 1,000,000 people will watch this speech before the week is out.
The New York Times posted a transcript of the speech in full online, and by 3:00, it was among most popular stories on the website. Formatted for the web, Obama’s remarks spill over seven pages, but the article has already been emailed and shared by thousands of NYT readers.
And the web isn’t the only nontraditional outlet for the speech either. Minutes after Obama walked off stage, I got a call from a college buddy who was driving through Richmond on the way to North Carolina. He was flipping through the radio dial, heard the speech, and stopped to listen. As soon as Obama wrapped up, a DJ cut in to explain why the station had stopped playing music to carry the speech live. My buddy thought he was listening to NPR, but it turns out this was a local hip-hop station.
I’m sure millions of people watched clips from Obama’s remarks on the network evening news. But millions more are experiencing the speech outside the mainstream media. They’re reading, watching, and listening to this speech in full, then discussing it and sharing it. The evening news is still important, and the cable shows still matter. But the filters are no doubt becoming less important, and that in turn means that the soundbite might lose some of its stranglehold on political communications.

For Republicans, Bush-Cheney 2004 is the model of a successful presidential campaign. The operation was run from top-to-bottom from an office in Arlington, Virginia. There was Karl Rove, who was the chief strategist. There was Ken Mehlman , who was the campaign manager. Beneath them, there were consultants, deputies, communications staff, and field teams. The political department divided the country into six regions, and assigned managers to each. The press department divided the country into five regions, and assigned spokespersons for each. There were staffers on the ground in all of the battleground states, but the campaign centralized everything.
John McCain’s campaign is also headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, but if this report from Marc Ambinder is accurate, his campaign is planning on approaching the 2008 race in a way that is profoundly different:

Instead of funneling authority through a few central figures at campaign headquarters in Arlington, VA, plans call for it to be dispersed to up to ten “regional campaign managers” – spread at satellite campaign offices throughout the country…The regional managers would have the authority to hire and fire, to adapt field programs to fit the needs of the states in their region. Unlike regional political directors, they would be part of the senior staff table at the campaign’s Arlington headquarters. Message and media, for the most part, would still be run through Arlington.

The closest model for this type of campaign is that of John Kerry in 2004. He centralized his message and media operations from a campaign office at McPherson Square, inside the District, then outsourced much of his field operation to 527s like America Coming Together. Those political organizations were then left to organize voter registration drives and GOTV in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, and by law, they were completely autonomous from the Kerry campaign, with contact between the two entities strictly disallowed. This entire 2004 strategy, however, was born out of necessity. The 527s could take unlimited donations from big donors, while Kerry could not. Had his advisers been given GOP-like resources, they likely would have chosen to run the campaign in a way similar to that of Mehlman and Rove.
And Democrats won’t be taking the Kerry route in 2008.
Sen. Clinton’s campaign is centrally organized — perhaps to an even greater degree than that of Bush/Cheney 04. Until she went broke in January, her fundraising operation was dominated by appeals to big money donors. Her senior staff is filled with veteran Democratic party insiders. Even after serious errors in political judgment, campaign strategy and message is developed in large part by its pollster — Mark Penn. Once the vision for the campaign is mapped out, field operatives like Ace Smith and Michael Whouley are dispatched to states, Mandy Grunwald develops the ads, and press staffers like Howard Wolfson deliver the talking points.
Obama’s campaign is something else entirely — with energy and organization pushing from the bottom up. He, of course, employs strategist and consultants, field operatives and press staff. But much of the support and enthusiasm for his candidacy begins directly with voters, and his electoral strategy is founded on the idea of empowering their efforts. The fundraising operation is predicated on giving individuals the ability to tap into their personal networks of friends and family to raise small dollar donations in large numbers. Right now, the volunteer created Yes We Can video is featured on the front page of barackobama.com. And in an even more direct example, the campaign set up wikis for its volunteers in California and Texas as a way to distribute information and resources to precinct captains.
Ambinder calls the McCain strategy decentralization, but it’s not. Splitting the field strategy into ten satellite campaigns will in effect create ten top-down, regional campaigns for president. It’s a tactical response that might give the GOP some added mechanical flexibility.
In 8 months, we will know whether that was brilliant or foolish, but it is definitely not a real change in strategy.

Barack Obama delivered a much-anticipated speech in Philadelphia today, designed to respond to the sudden firestorm of criticism he’s received for the allegedly anti-American views of his long-time pastor and spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
It’s a long and (for a politician) relatively complex speech, but its essence is pretty simple: Obama treats Wright’s perspective, along with the perspective of those most likely to be angered by it, as part of the legacy of racial divisions he wants to overcome in his candidacy, and utlimately, as a “distraction.”
Moreover, Obama categorizes Wright’s rhetoric–which has come across in the now-famous YouTube snippet as representing that enduring stereotype, the Angry Black Man–as generational, connecting to another key theme in his campaign:

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.

There are a couple of remarkable things about that passage. First, Obama is contending that some of the more exotic and controversial beliefs of many African-Americans–the AIDS conspiracy theory being the most notable–are mainly attributable to the bitter experiences of those who actually experienced Jim Crow. I’m reminded of Richard Pryor’s routine about old black men–“there ain’t nobody more racist than an old black man”–who are very conservative in manner and unfailingly polite to white people, until they are out of earshot. In a society in which young black men remain the embodiment of so many cultural fears, this contention will seem counterintuive to people who view Jim Crow as a distant and largely irrelevant evil.
Second, Obama is accepting Wright and his church as flawed reflections of the good and evil within his own community. “As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me…I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.” This is a very old conception of the church–as old as the parish system of Europe, to say the least–but one that won’t make a lot of sense to those Americans who view church membership as an expression of consumer choice, and ultimately, of the spiritual discrimination and good taste of the religious consumer. They will continue to wonder why Obama didn’t just pick up and “move his letter” elsewhere the first time Jeremiah Wright said something outrageous from the pulpit.
How will this entire speech go over? It’s hard to say. It won’t satisfy those who expected Obama to “reject” Wright as he rejected Farrakhan. It will offer fresh ammunition to Republicans who claim the “real” Obama is revealed by his associations in Chicago. It will anger some people on both sides of the racial divide by its flat statement of moral equivalence between black and white resentments. But it may resonate with Americans (especially Catholics) who have loyally attended churches for years while rejecting or ignoring key elements of church teachings.
But more clearly, this speech ups the ante for Obama’s promise to act as a reconciler and unifier. After this speech, no one should be under the impression that he’s mainly interested in overcoming the narcissistic culture-based political conflicts of the 1990s. He’s now casting his candidacy as an opportunity to transcend one of the biggest continuing traumas of the 19th and 20th centuries, and of centuries before that: race. There’s never been much question that he was viewed that way by many supporters. But now it’s explicitly on the table, and we’ll soon find out how much reconciliation and unity Americans really want, and on what terms.

As Barack Obama has gotten closer to the Democratic presidential nomination, he has, predictably, become subject to a lot more media scrutiny, in part because of his Democratic and Republican opponents, but also because he’s been reasonably open about his personal background and past affiliations.
This scrutiny has become especially intense over the last few weeks, but at present, if you ask ten Obama supporters and ten Obama detractors about the issue that could most damage the Illinois senator, most of them would cite his relationship with Jermiah Wright, long-time (but recently retired) pastor of Obama’s Trinity UCC Church.
A brief video clip from Wright’s “God Damn America” sermon is getting viral attention. Obama has said he wasn’t present for this sermon, and vehemently disagrees with its sentiments, but he has remained in Wright’s flock for 22 years. Wright consecrated Obama’s marriage, and baptized his children.
Jack and Jill Politics (a leading African-American political site) blogger Rikyrah published a valuable post at Open Left over the weekend placing the Wright controversy in the broader context of Trinity UCC’s highly affluent, culturally and politically mainstream congregation. Beyond that, anyone familiar with the African-American preaching tradition–or for that matter, the shaper edge of recent Protestant and Catholic homiletics generally–will recognize Wright’s more provocative rhetoric as emblematic of a long-standing Christian effort to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” from a thousand pulpits.
Still, the Wright controversy clearly undercuts Obama’s effort to stand for racial, partisan and ideological reconciliation, and it’s no accident that he’s decided to make this the subtext of a major speech tomorrow in Philadelphia. It will be an interesting moment. Personally, the first time I really paid attention to Barack Obama as something other than a rising political star and outstanding speaker was back in the summer of 2006, when he delivered an address to the Christian Left Call for Renewal conference that was one of the most nuanced and interesting set of comments on the subject of religion and politics heard in a long, long time. It didn’t get that much attention. But what he says tomorrow will be heard by the whole political world.

Late last week a diarist at Daily Kos, going by the handle of Alegre, called on fellow supporters of Hillary Clinton to conduct a “writer’s strike” at the site. As Markos Moulitsas quickly noted, this is actually a boycott, not a strike–or maybe the right word is a secession, since the idea is for pro-HRC Kossacks to find somewhere else to blog and talk.
On its own terms, the boycott is a pretty unremarkable example of the inherent tensions of the blogosphere, where centrifugal and centripital forces are always fighting for ascendancy. As the largest single site in the political blogosphere, and as one that features both a vast and decentralized array of opinion, and a very strong sense of being a “community” with a distinct point of view, Daily Kos is especially conducive to this sort of tension. It’s not surprising there are intra-Kossack rebellions now and then. New blogs and spinoffs (remember that Markos himself began as a diarist at MyDD) are extraordinarily common, for the simple reason that netroots participants will often decide to form “communities” more closely tailored to their opinions and particular needs, or provide them with a more prominent platform.
On the other hand, the boycott also reflects the growing ferocity of the Clinton-Obama competition, and as such, should concern all Democrats. Alegre’s boycott call could have been clearer, but its main complaint is about the “abusive nature” and “horrid and sexist manner” of anti-HRC commentary at DKos, rather than the pro-Obama allegiances of front-pagers and commenters.
At the risk of putting words into a lot of mouths, I’d summarize the increasingly personal nature of the argument between Clinton and Obama supporters in the blogosphere, and beyond it, as follows:
Obama supporters are generally upset at what they consider to be a destructive rearguard action by HRC’s campaign to boost her slim chances at the nomination by severely damaging Obama’s general election prospects. Exhibits #1 and #2 in this indictment was her public suggestion that Obama is less qualified to be commander-in-chief than John McCain, and her alleged abettment, on national television, of the idea that Obama is some sort of crypto-Muslim.
While Obama supporters don’t often accuse Clinton supporters generally of being racist, they do accuse the Clinton campaign of appealing to racist impulses in the electorate.
Meanwhile, Clinton supporters in the blogosphere naturally feel more than a bit persecuted, because they are a distinct and enduring minority, and also because HRC-abuse long predated this presidential campaign. Much of this abuse obviously stemmed from her support for the Iraq War Resolution, but a lot also represented displaced anger at the alleged ideological and partisan heresies of her husband. As an example, an extraordinary amount of cyberspace has been devoted to attacks on HRC as the “DLC candidate,” even though she led what was perceived at the time as being the anti-DLC faction in the Clinton White House, at least in the early years of that administration. This attack-line is particularly infuriating to those HRC supporters (most notably Armando Llorens at Talk Left and to some extent, Blogfather Jerome Armstrong at MyDD) who think the Obama candidacy reflects the worst aspects of Clintoninan “triangulation.”
The “sexism” charge against Obama supporters is slightly less prevalent, though there are a host of feminist bloggers–some of whom actually support Obama–who are chronically upset about criticisms of HRC that follow sexist stereotypes. And some pro-HRC or neutral feminists, within and beyond the blogosphere, are convinced that the entire Obama campaign is a political example of the well-known real-life phenomenon of loyal, long-serving, talented women being displaced in hiring decisions by the first promising young man who walks through the door.
Personally, I’ve long argued that intra-Democratic arguments, particularly in presidential primaries, need to benefit from a free-speech presumption, including electability arguments, so long as they don’t directly suggest that the intra-party rival is objectively inferior to the partisan opponent, and more pertinently, so long as they do not ascribe invidious personal motives to fellow Democrats.
The Clinton-Obama competition is complex, but I think it would be helpful to sort it out in terms of the conditions just mentioned. Do readers agree? I’d be very curious to know.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

The Campaign for America’s Future will celebrate St. Patty’s Day soberly (at least until nightfall) by opening it’s annual 3-day conference, ‘Take Back America 2008.” The Conference will address five themes: Economic Strategy for America in the Global Economy; Green Jobs for a Sustainable Energy Future; Quality, Affordable Health Care for All; Out of Iraq to Real Security; and The New Social Justice Agenda.
The conference will feature presentations by a number of progressive leaders, activists and media figures, including: Chris Bowers; Digby; Mark Green; Naomi Klein; Robert Kuttner; Celinda Lake; Van Jones; Eli Pariser; Tom Matzzie; Rep. Jan Schakowski; David Sirota; Stewart Acuff; Majora Carter; Rep. David Bonior; Drew Westen; Ezra Klein; Senator James Webb; Arianna Huffington; Robert Creamer; Amy Sullivan; Roger Hickey; Jane Hamsher; Matt Stoller; Donna Edwards; Rick Perlstein; Jesse Jackson; Norman Lear; Barbara Ehrenreich; Anna Greenberg; Roger Wilkins; Phil Donahue and Kathleen Turner. Presenters will address the themes through program workshops on such diverse topics as ‘Building our Own Media,’ ‘The Emerging New Progressive Majority,’ ‘Global Warming: The National Security Imperative,’ ‘The Politics of Health Care’ and ‘The Strategy to End the War,’ to name a few.
“Take Back America 2008” participants will find encouragement in a new report “The Decline of Conservatism” by Stan Greenberg for Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. The report provides a series of charts graphically documenting a rising tide of progressive ideals and new strength for the Democratic Party. Greenberg reports, for example that 41 percent of respondents affirmed that they “now think of yourself” as a Democrat, compared to 33 percent who chose Republican. The report addressed changing public attitudes on a range of critical issues, finding for example, that 54 percent of the public now favors repealing the federal income tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2002 and using the money to pay for new health care programs, with 41 percent opposed.
In light of the trends cited in Greenberg’s report, CAF Co-Chair Robert Borosage believes a “sea-change election” is in the making:

Today progressives are on the march, driving the Democratic presidential candidates to bolder positions on the war in Iraq, for universal health care, for investment in new energy, against corporate trade and tax strategies. MoveOn.org and the blogosphere have brought new energy, resources and volunteers into the political process. An embattled and divided labor movement has revitalized its political program. An array of liberal thinktanks and campaign organizations has driven the debate against Bush’s debacles. New voters—including youth and Latinos—are mobilizing through the Democratic primaries.
….Like 1980, 2008 is likely to be a close, bitterly contested presidential election. The objective conditions are present for a sea-change election, one that launches a new era of progressive reform. Conservatism is bankrupt. The economy is a mess. Our security has been eroding abroad. Americans are looking for change in large numbers. A new majority coalition for reform is emerging. If the election were held today, Democrats would pick up new majorities in both houses of Congress and take the White House.

The critical importance of the ’08 elections notwithstanding, the CAF confab is addressing something even more important, the foundation for a more effective progressive movement which can endure — and prevail — in the decades ahead.

I’ve written a review for the latest issue of the Washington Monthly of a new biography entitled Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, by William A. Link.
You can judge the review, and the book, for yourself. But I did want to note here that it’s astonishing how much impact the crazily extremist Helms had on the contemporary conservative movement and Republican Party. The politics of cultural reaction, partisan polarization, legislative obtructionism, and foreign policy unilateralism were all pioneered by Helms, who also helped create the Right’s ideological small donor base. He was the living link between the Old Right (including its racist and isolationist wings) and the modern Right. And it’s only in the context of the radicalized Republican Party Helms helped create that politicians like John McCain can be perceived as “centrist.”
Helms also personally mentored a host of young conservative zealots, among them Charlie Black, the Super Lobbyist who is now in McCain’s inner circle.
Jesse did a lot of damage to the body politic in his long career, but I’m afraid his legacy lives on.

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post has a useful item today listing the top ten states that might flip from one party to the other in the November presidential election. Eight of the ten (IA, NM, NV, CO, OH, VA, FL, and MO) went Republican in 2004; only NH and MN are viewed as (unlikely) prospects to go the other way.
Cillizza doesn’t get into this, but most observers would add a second tier of potential battleground states, including three carried by Bush in 2004 (AZ, AR and WV) and three carried by Kerry (MI, PA and WI).

As the eulogies for Bill Buckley give way to more cerebral discussions of modern day conservatism, it is worth stopping for a moment to insist upon a basic fact – one that Democrats should never allow the mainstream media (or themselves) to forget.
Despite the frequent use of the term “movement” by the press, the “conservative movement” that has provided the Republican Party with its basic ideology since the Reagan- Gingrich era is profoundly different from the two major social movements whose viewpoints are deeply embedded in the basic outlook and philosophy of the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party’s economic perspective comes not simply from the legislation of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, but from the epic struggle of the American trade union movement in the 1930’s. Equally, at the heart of the modern Democratic Party’s social philosophy lies the historical experience of the civil rights movement and the legacy of Martin Luther King.
These two social movements had three things in common. They were struggles of profoundly disadvantaged and oppressed groups for basic social and economic justice, they were grass-roots, bottom-up movements in which leaders emerged from the rank and file, and they were led by dedicated militants who made huge personal and human sacrifices.
Both trade union and civil right organizers lived with the constant fear of death, vicious beatings, or imprisonment and both movements had many famous martyrs killed in the struggle (the Haymarket victims and Joe Hill for the trade unionists; Emmet Till, Medgar Evers, the Mississippi Three, (Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner) and the children of the Birmingham bombing for the civil rights movement). Many of the leaders of both movements spent significant time in jail — it was, in fact, a proud badge of honor and a symbol of their commitment to the cause.
Sadly, for many people under the age of 40 these realities — which everybody knew perfectly well at the time — now sound like melodramatic exaggerations. But they are not; they are simple statements of fact.
The modern “official” conservative movement on the other hand – although in some respects indeed a social movement – was and is to a significant degree a movement of the “haves” rather than the “have-nots” and as a result has never had any of the three characteristics above.
The modern conservative movement was heavily subsidized by foundations and wealthy individuals from its beginnings. By the 1980’s there was a substantial network of think-tanks, book publishers, house-organ magazines, scholarships and internships that recruited and financially supported young conservatives. Communication with ordinary people was overwhelmingly conducted by very sanitary, “no getting the hands dirty” methods – largely direct mail and television (particularly televangelist programming) – rather than by any actual door-to-door, grass-roots organizing.
Now to be sure. there have indeed been a number of genuine right-wing, grass roots activist movements since the 1970’s. There have been skinhead/racist/survivalist groups (like “The Order” and “White Power” in 1980’s, the militia movement in 1990s, the Minutemen today), and also broader grass-roots movements to fight local gun control initiatives, to infiltrate local school boards to mandate creationism and to conduct civil (and also very uncivil) disobedience against abortion clinics.
All of these movements shared two characteristics – they were authentically bottom up, grass-roots movements and they were all treated like embarrassing, party-crashing, beer-drinking, trailer park trash phenomena by the official beltway conservative “movement”.
On the other hand when the current generation of “official” conservative spokesmen – the Gingrichs, D’Souzas, Laffers, Murrays, Limbaughs, O’Reillys and Coulters– were in college in the 70’s and 80’s, the worst injustice most of them suffered was having to listen to pompous tenured radicals talk endlessly about Foucault and Germaine Greer rather than Edmund Burke and Adam Smith.
It is important for Democrats to point this out whenever the media casually equate the modern conservative “movement” with the genuine social movements that underlie the Democratic coalition because it creates a false equivalence between the moral authority of the two. It artificially imbues official “inside-the-beltway” conservatism with connotations of a genuine grass-roots social movement – traditions of altruism and self sacrifice, identification with the struggle for justice and solidarity with the underdog.
Let’s face the facts. The conservative movement indeed recognized and capitalized upon a number of genuine and sincere grievances of working-class and other ordinary Americans. But the middle-class and upper-class, white American men who compose the official conservative movement have never in their “custom-tailored-suit- and- tie”, “better-side-of town” lifetimes been the oppressed victims of systematic social injustice.
This is illustrated by an ironic fact. Genuine grass-roots social movements of the oppressed always have songs and anthems that express their deepest social ideals. At the end of every union organizing meeting trade unionists would always sing “Solidarity Forever”. Every civil rights rally concluded with the singing of “Oh Freedom” and “We Shall Overcome”.
There is nothing remotely comparable in the well-funded, “inside the beltway” conservative so-called “movement”. In fact, it is hard to even visualize exactly what kind of spiritual anthem could properly express the social philosophy of the audiences who attend meetings of groups like the Conservative Political Action Council, the Heritage Foundation, the College Republicans or the US Chamber of Commerce.
Oh, wait a minute. Come to think of it, there is one. All these groups could kick off their conferences with a few lusty choruses of “Yo-Ho, Yo-Ho, A Pirates’ Life for Me”. It would fit them like a glove.