What with conservative opinion-leaders beginning to concede that the “death panel” claim about health care reform is, as the editors of National Review put it, “hysteria,” it’s a bit depressing to note that a lot of Americans still buy it.
According to a new Pew poll, 86% of Americans have heard the “death panel” claim. Of those, 30% think it’s true; 50% think it’s false; and 20% don’t know. The partisan breakdowns? Nearly half (47%) of self-identified Republicans think that health reform legislation will, indeed, lead to “death panels.” The number drops to 28% among independents, but then a startling 20% of Democrats think it’s true.
Now when Sarah Palin started this nonsense with her famous Facebook post, lots of observers thought she had finally jumped the shark and had discredited herself for the foreseeable future. Anyone who dismisses her chances for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 should reflect on the fact that half her party has gone along with her ravings. I’d be willing to bet the number goes a lot higher among the conservative activists–heavily dominated by her fellow hard-core right-to-lifers–who participate in the GOP’s Iowa Caucuses.

So after her quickly infamous Facebook post about health reform creating “death panels” that would threaten the life of her son, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is now urging reform opponents to avoid “tactics that can be accused of leading to intimidation or harassment.”
That’s nice, though tactical tips-from-the-coach hardly amount to a heart-felt repudiation of goon squad activity. But I have a much better idea for Ms. Palin: stop making up (or borrowing from Michele Bachmann) scary stuff about health reform, and maybe fewer people will behave hysterically.
This could be difficult for Palin, with her deep roots in the Right-to-Life movement, where Nazi analogies are thrown around very casually. But “civility” in politics isn’t just a tactic; it’s an attitude which begins with the assumption that one’s opponents are well-meaning Americans, not cartoon character villains.

Even though DC is all abuzz about Twitter, the service still has plenty of skeptics and even some of its regular users don’t understand its potential.
That is why it is worth paying attention to this week’s political protests in Moldova.
Yesterday, more than 10,000 young Moldovans converged on the capitol in opposition to the Communist leadership after the communists won a recent set of parliamentary elections that some believe were rigged.
The protesters caught the government off guard. They materialized seemingly out of nowhere and reported to no leaders.
This kind of instant crowd formation has a name — flash mobs — and it isn’t a new phenomena. But Twitter and social networks like Facebook make it easier to form these crowds and make them far more adaptive to situations on the ground.
For the most part, before Twitter, communications technology was either broad and immobile or limited and portable.
In 2005, I could send my friends a text message to tell them to join me in a protest — limited and portable. Or I could put my rally cry on a blog — broad and immobile.
Even if every single one of my friends had a cell phone, the network I could reach from the streets of a protest was limited. That shortcoming is even true of email (all the more so because most people still cannot access email on their cellular phones).
Of course, I did have access to a world-wide audience with a blog. But even if I had the ability to update my website as the situation on the ground changed (no sure thing), most of those joining me in protest would not be able to access that information.
That’s the genius of Twitter — the means of targeting a massive audience on the go.
The protests in Moldova illustrate this point perfectly:

[T]he gathering on Monday night drew only several hundred people. The protesters agreed to gather the next morning and began spreading the word through Facebook and Twitter, inventing a searchable tag for the stream of comments: #pman, which stands for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, Chisinau’s central square.

The government, not understanding the forces at work, responded to the rallies by shutting down the Internet in the capitol city. At that point, the protestors simply began to generate updates using their mobile phones.
In other, less-violent settings, Twitter has the same utility. The immediacy of the format has made it the application of choice for all kinds of real-time events. Users have created hashtags to aggregate comments about moments in time ranging from the presidential debates to college basketball games. Last year, tech-savvy attendees of the Democratic National Convention used the service to navigate crowds, find parties, and meet up with each other. In August, Republican members of Congress organized a “Drill Here, Drill Now” protest on the floor of the House using their Twitter feeds.
All proof that some in DC are starting to get it: Twitter is a powerful tool for political organizing, and its potential is only now being fully realized.

There is something inherently sad about reading a writer with a reputation for greatness and coming to the sudden, jarring realization that time and technology have inescapably passed him by. But that kind of conclusion is hard to avoid after reading Leon Wieseltier’s latest Washington Diary for The New Republic.
The centerpiece of his column is a complaint about an email he received from President Obama after the Inauguration. The crux of Wieseltier’s argument boils down to this: Obama’s rhetoric and the tools he uses to advance it are based on the premise that we are one nation, united with common purpose and goals, but we are in fact a splintered collection of people with divurgent views of reality and all Obama’s techological ‘networks’ only succeed in creating a veneer of actual connectivity.
The argument about our relative level of unification as a country seems silly knowing that close to three quarters of Americans approve of Obama’s rhetoric, and perhaps that’s why Wieseltier saves his real ire for the networks. Toward the end of the piece, he writes:

For one of [Obama’s] innovations in American politics has been the zealous adoption of the ideology of the network. To be sure, there were practical reasons: email and YouTube are cheaper than direct mail, and of course cooler–but direct mail is all they are. The number of people who can be reached in an instant is genuinely astounding–but this is a marketer’s dream, nothing more.

This statement is indicative of a fundmentally-flawed and outdated worldview.
If I were to guess, I’d bet that Wieseltier still pays for a newspaper subscription. Why does that matter? Because people who purchase print newspapers are readers.
People who read newspapers online, however, are users. Using tools built by the media outlets, we email articles to friends. We share op-eds on Twitter, react to news stories on blogs, and we post columns to Facebook.
People read direct mail. People use Internet communication.
We forward the emails that Obama sends to our family. We rate YouTube videos and then we post them to our personal websites. We react to everything, which in turn sparks a ‘national conversation.’
Compare that with offline communication. No one ever puts new postage on a piece of direct mail to send on to a friend.
And the remarkable thing about Obama and his staff is their ability to turn online communication into offline action.
Since the campaign ended, thousands of individuals have signed up to Facebook groups with the expressed intent of lobbying Congress to pass Obama’s recovery bill. This weekend, thousands of people attended ‘Economic Recovery House Meetings’ to discuss the president’s plan. Organizing for America tells that there were 3,587 meetings in 1,579 cities in 429 congressional districts and all 50 states.
Try getting people to do that with a piece of direct mail.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act. It’s a valuable law which preserves all manner of official communication for posterity.
But it was written at a time when people still delivered interoffice memos in those funny manila envelopes that get closed with a piece of string.
Email had been invented seven years earlier in a project funded by the Department of Defense, but it’s hard to imagine that the authors of the Presidential Records Act could have foreseen a government which put instant, electronic communication into widespread use. To ask anyone at the time to imagine the sprawling, interconnected world of the Internet as it is today would have been laughable.
And yet this 1978 law still dictates how the executive branch does business.
During the election, the Obama campaign was deeply immersed in the world of the Internet, and we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the brilliance of the external online strategy. But much less has been made of how well Obama for America as an organization used the Web internally.
Staffers used online tools to share documents, built wikis to train volunteers, used Facebook to build get to know each other. And throughout it all, the staff — from David Axlerod on down — maintained a continuous conversation through instant messenger.
It now looks, however, like that practice will be put to an end.
Citing both the requirements of the Presidential Records Act and security concerns, lawyers for the incoming administration have told staffers that they will not be able to use instant messenger in the White House. They will forgo the use of an official Facebook account as a tool to communicate with supporters. They won’t be allowed to bring in USB drives to take work home. Access to many websites will be restricted. And in many cases, the computers at their desks will be dated and running old Windows software.
The end result of these regulations and hurdles is a bubble that separates the White House staff from the outside world — they’ll get less input from critics and allies both — and the loss of these tools makes those who have come to rely on them less efficient and less flexible. By making it difficult to adopt new technology, our laws will serve to stifle creativity in government, where right now we need it most.
But there’s hope. President Obama gets to keep his Blackberry.
He asked for it, the Transition team bought into the idea, the NSA approved a model, and then the lawyers came around.
Obama needs a Blackberry for the same reasons his staff needs IM, and the White House found a way to make it work.
Now, someone should stand up to make the same argument for updating the rest of government’s communication tools. And once that’s done, Congress should be lobbied to rewrite the Presidential Records Act to reflect the reality of how professionals do business in 2009.
Governing is hard enough without asking those who commit to it to forgo anything that makes them better at their jobs.

For all my skepticism about the conservative “Rebuild the Party” movement, it does appear that its avatar, Patrick Ruffini of NextRight, is offering his party some very good advice. He now has a post up schooling Republicans who are just discovering the internet and the phenomenon of bloggers about the real New Media lessons of the Obama campaign:

The mainstream things people do online are 1) e-mail, 2) connect on Facebook and MySpace, and 3) watch video on YouTube…. [T]he advertising value of all Obama videos watched on YouTube was huge: over $46 million and bigger than the media budget for most primary and general election campaigns.
The difference between the Obama campaign and every other campaign is that they treated the online space as a mass medium, and not just a niche medium for the very interested. They announced online. They did their VP via text message. And they built up an e-mail list that was equal to almost 20% of their voters. They were maniacally focused on building up their e-mail list at every opportunity, requiring e-mail to attend events — and even setting up dummy registration pages late in the campaign for events where an RSVP wasn’t even required.

And as Ruffini points out, Team Obama paid relatively little attention to the blogosphere, and in fact, much of what they did bypassed bloggers and appealed directly not only to self-conscious “netizens” but to a broad swath of the technology-using public. Meanwhile, more traditional campaigns, and the Republican Party generally, still think of blogger-outreach as extremely hip:

I’ve been on numerous campaigns, some more open than others when it comes to technology. But even those campaigns that were more skeptical — and whose bunker mentality caused them to lose — always latched on to blogger relations. Blogger outreach is always the easiest thing to sell to a campaign because it’s like the thing that traditional communications people most understand — namely, pitching to reporters….
While new media is replacing old media, the model is still the same: campaigns passing along information to influential reporters/bloggers/Twitterati, and counting on them to spread the word to the general public. The Obama campaign showed that this model could be superseded. Through its 13 million strong list, the millions of people who would consume content all-digitally on YouTube, and the 2 million tied to the campaign umbilically through MyBO, the campaign built its own in-house messaging engine and didn’t need the netroots, either in the primary or the general. Of the dozens of moving parts to Obama’s online campaign, blogger outreach was probably the only one that got short shrift.

To put it another way, the Obama campaign typically treated bloggers as unnecessary “gatekeepers” that could be bypassed, much as bloggers have treated the would-be opinion-leaders of the MSM. And progressive bloggers were among the first to figure that out, and (to their credit) appreciate it.
I continue to think that Ruffini’s tech-heavy GOP reform effort can only get the party so far if it remains unwilling to reconsider its ideology and policy agenda. But he’s right to worry that too many Republican pols hear the words “new media” and think of it as it existed two or four years ago.

Between the economic meltdown and the uplifting election, Americans have had something of a respite for a few months from dispiriting headlines concerning wars and terrorism. But now the horrific atrocities in Mumbai bring a sobering reminder that the Obama administration will face a continuing, if not growing, threat of global terror, much of it directed against Americans.
As a presidential candidate, Senator Obama had to talk tough about confronting terrorists with military force. He wasn’t just overcompensating because of his opponent’s impressive military record. The cold, hard reality is that we do need enhanced military and intelligence capabilities to deal with the threat of terrorism. But our policy must be a lot smarter, with more precision in targeting military action when it’s really necessary and much stronger on-the-ground intelligence. It will require a major reformulation of our strategic goals at DOD, State, and intelligence agencies.
But the greatest challenge facing the Obama administration in confronting the threat of global terror is creating a more effective strategy for winning the struggle for hearts and minds.

Read more…

Laura Olsen’s L.A.Times article “Keeping Obama’s young army engaged” opens up an important dialogue about how the millions of young people who energized Obama’s campaign can help advance the President-elect’s agenda. Thus far, Olsen reports,

The Obama transition team already has moved to capitalize on this enormous youth base: Web-casting the president-elect’s weekly addresses on YouTube; communicating its transition steps on a post-election website, Change.gov; and reaching out by e-mail to many of the campaign’s 3 million donors amassed during a nearly two-year campaign…The team also has taken advantage of booming social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, in reaching out to younger voters in their own element.

Democrats have been presented with a formidable asset, as a result of Obama campaign’s youth outreach. (See, for example Peter Dreier’s pre-election survey of some of the more innovative Obama youth groups at the HuffPo). As Scott Keeter, the Pew Research Center’s director of survey research, notes in Olsen’s article “In terms of a separate force created from the grass-roots, the machinery for that is in place in a way that I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.”
One of the more interesting ideas is to convert a substantial part of Obama’s youth army into an energetic, well-trained lobbying force of unprecedented scale. Electing great candidates like Obama is only half the battle. Making it possible for him to win reforms is also essential, if Obama is going to fufill his enormous potential. The same tools that youth used to effectively in the campaign, Youtube, Myspace, text messaging etc. can be equally effective in building coalitions for educating people about reform legislation and mobilizing them to put pressure on legislators to support needed reforms.
Kristina Rizga, executive editor of WireTap, a political youth magazine, explores some of the other possibilities, including community organizing, community service and running for office in her article “You Voted, Now What?” in The Nation. Rizga reports that there are now more than 600 community based youth organizations working on activist projects and directs her readers to future5000.com, a data base directory of progressive youth organizations across the US., “the virtual spinal cord of today’s youth movement.” Rizga concludes,

Young people helped elect our country’s first African-American president. Record numbers of volunteers chose working for their ideals over high-paying jobs. But the work isn’t over. Not by a long shot. Barack Obama may be able to seize the moment and push a new kind of politics, but not unless he is pushed to do so. He can only realize what he was elected to achieve with the continued energy of a new generation intent on real change. Here’s to anticipation for what a new generation of first-time voters can do to change their communities and the world.

It’s always a mistake to assume that elected officials will do their best work without constant encouragement and support. Mobilizing young voters to support a charismatic candidate like Obama was relatively easy, compared to enlisting them to work for his legislative agenda. But it is a challenge that must be met, if Obama is to have any chance of success.

Dan Ancona, whose article on “Power to the Edge” we excerpted almost in toto yesterday, has another interesting post he brought to our attention in response to TDS’s request for strategic analysis. Ancona’s “Echoes of the Future” at Calitics emphasizes the importance of reaching out to diverse constituencies, running a vigorous field campaign and being bold about “dimension three,” — “shifting worldviews, ideologies, values, common sense and assumptions.” (More on ‘dimension three’ at Mark Schmitt’s American Prospect Post on “Big Picture Power.”)
Ancona then reveals what he calls “Obama’s Secret Sauce,” and describes the ingredients this way:

The first ingredient is to get the overall strategy right. OFA built a highly distributed, social network-oriented operation built on trust. The best phrase I’ve seen to describe this is “Empowered Accountability.” The one social network we all have is our neighborhood, and that’s where it starts, but they were also very savvy about getting people to tap whatever networks they had. This part has to come from the top, from the campaign leadership and the candidate. As a complex system, a good field campaign is very sensitive to initial conditions. The reason Barack’s campaign was so good had a lot to do with Barack. We have to figure out how to build this kind of leadership at the state and local level, but my guess is we’ve already started.
The second ingredient is training. The way the Camp Obamas were set up was key in getting folks not just to do useful work, but to feel like they were a real part of the campaign. This sense of ownership then drove people to make bigger and bigger commitments in both time and in small donations. Whether it was a 2 hour, all day or two-day training, the format was built around three main components: Cesar Chavez/Marshall Ganz-style storytelling, a campaign update, and then training on tools and techniques. All of these components were designed to be scaled up or scaled down to fit the available amount of time; this flexibility made it possible for the California primary campaign to hook and train hundreds of people at a time the few weekends before February 5th.
The third ingredient is having the right tools. (the usual full disclosure here: I’m going to say nice things about the VAN, which my organization, CA VoterConnect, offers to campaigns of all sizes on a sliding scale.) Coming out of our experience in the 2004 primary, we knew that the main web-based toolset a campaign would need included first, a social networking system of some kind to enable meetups and self-organization, and second, an easy-enough to use voter file to turn that self-organization into a usable electoral force. The tools are important, because if they’re designed and deployed right, they help give activists an upward path towards becoming ever more effective and more involved. [Update: I forgot better targeting, somehow. Better targeting tools, including reiterative targeting that could be used as a force multiplier for a field campaign, are absolutely crucial. Improvement in this area probably would have won us the three close races we’re losing by under 1% handily.]

Ancona names some of the specific tools that can add proficiency to 21st century campaigns:

On the social networking side, a local organization can use a mishmash of the DNC’s PartyBuilder or the Courage Campaign‘s social network, as well as tools like Google Groups & Google Docs, and to some degree Facebook (although sometimes it seems like Facebook has gone out of their way to make it impossible to use it to organize). On the voter file side, while of course I’m a big proponent of the VAN (the Voter Activation Network, a web-based voter file tool), as long as the system has fresh, high-quality baseline data, supports local control, local ownership and ongoing storage of the contact data, and can be used for social-network and neighborhood organizing, it will do. This may be the direction that Political Data, Inc. OnlineCampaignCenter and MOE tools that the CDP uses are going. My feeling is that the VAN is still superior and will become more so over the next few cycles, but all that’s required of a tool is for it to meet those basic requirements. There will also likely be new tools and new innovations in this area that campaigns and organizations can and should experiment with as they’re developed and released.

But the secret sauce is not all wonk and no heart. Ancona conveys an infectious spirit of inclusiveness that sets a tone all campaigns should emulate:

People want to get involved, and if we can create satisfying roles for them and walk them along a path of deepening commitment, they will get involved and stay involved… If we can show people how their efforts are effective, how they are helping to build the functional and participatory next version of our democracy, they’ll build it. It gets easier to imagine that future every year: for the first time, we have a big, national campaign (and a glorious victory) to point to as an example.

It’s the TLC in the secret sauce that brings it all together.

Whenever there is a change of party control of the executive branch of the federal government, lots of jobs come open, and lots of ambitious and/or dedicated folk start scheming for ways to join the new administration. There’s even a handy-dandy publication–known as the “Plum Book”–put out by the House Committee on Government Reform that lays out available positions.
But in this particular transition, it’s becoming clear that job aspirants, and their family members, better be exceptionally tidy record-keepers, whether or not they’ve got potential conflicts-of-interest or the odd drunk-driving charge in their background. According to a Jackie Calmes article in The New York Times today, the basic questionnaire being distributed by the Obama transition team to those seeking “high-ranking positions” is a 63-point monster of a request for disclosure that goes beyond the usual have-you-been-a-lobbyist-or-felon stuff. Ever sent a potentially embarassing email? (Who hasn’t!). Cough it up. Ever done a blog post or set up a Facebook page? Send that along, please. Some questions clearly relate to issues that came up during the last Democratic transition in 1992. There’s one on “domestic help” that asks about the immigration status and witholding tax arrangements of nannies, housekeepers, and yard workers–a stumbling block, you may recall, for at least two potential Clinton administration Attorneys General. Notes Calmes:

The questionnaire includes 63 requests for personal and professional records, some covering applicants’ spouses and grown children as well, that are forcing job-seekers to rummage from basements to attics, in shoe boxes, diaries and computer archives to document both their achievements and missteps.

It’s not clear from the article exactly how far down the food chain this questionnaire is being applied. But those who face it must understand that after they past this test, there’s additional vetting by the FBI and the Office of Government Ethics.
As one of the worst record-keepers you’ll ever meet, I’m sure glad I’m not interested in a high-ranking job with the feds. But for those with that aspiration, perhaps the Obama vetting process will keep the crowds down.