Editor’s Note: The Democratic Strategist welcomes submissions on the activities of “partners” who share similar goals on the political or intellectual battle-fronts. This piece from longtime TDS contributor Matt Compton is about the new online project of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which works to support Democratic state legislative candidates around the country.
Contributors to the The Democratic Strategist wear a lot of hats. By day, I’m the communications director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
Today, we are launching a redesign of DLCC.org.
I bring this up on the Strategist because I want to note how our new online presence reflects an evolution in the way we approach political messaging and a reaction to the changing way that voters consume media.
A recent study for the Pew Project for the Internet and American Life found that fully 46 percent of all Americans have used the web to get news about the 2008 campaigns, share their views, and mobilize others.
That point is significant. The Internet has become an important resource for voters because it allows them to access candidates and campaigns directly without the filters of the media or the scripted distance imposed by television.
There are 7,382 legislators across the country, and they represent every conceivable kind of district. Most have been using radio, television, and mail for years, but for many, the Internet remains unfamiliar. They see its potential but have reservations about its complexity and challenges.
This cycle, our committee has partnered with Wired for Change to introduce a resource that reduces the barriers for campaigning online. We call it DLCCWeb.
Our goal is to make the Internet simple and affordable enough that all of our legislative candidates can build and update their own websites. They can choose from a range of templates and color schemes to create the best design for their campaigns. Blog publishing is built right into DLCCWeb, along with advocacy tools, online fundraising, and social network integration.
This cycle, more than 200 Democrats in 30 states (with a whole range of technology comfort levels) are using the Internet in a way that they haven’t before because of this service. To me, that represents a major step forward in participatory democracy and a big advantage for our party at the state level.
For our committee, a new website is the next logical step.
DLCC.org will be a clearinghouse for news about statehouses and legislative elections. The centerpiece will be a blog, hosted right on the front page, which will be updated multiple times a day, at least five days a week. Most posts will be short and quick, though each will include some sort of commentary and context. Most content will be written by our staff, but as we move forward, we plan to encourage contributions from our elected leaders and allies.
We want to start a conversation about our nation’s statehouses. We want to engage readers online to help us identify the next generation of leaders, to set real Democratic agendas in the legislatures, and to build new majorities before the next round Congressional redistricting.
I hope you’ll take a moment to visit the site and let me know what you think. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment here or there or send me an email — compton@dlcc.org.
Update: Check out a little marketing video that Wired for Change put together about DLCCWeb here.

If you log into Facebook and search for the name “Hussein,” you might be in for a surprise. For instance, the very first person to pop up in my results is a former co-worker — Dan Hussein O’Maley.
If I didn’t know him by that full name when we worked together, it’s because the Hussein is a fairly recent change.
Dan is part of a spirited group of Obama supporters who are changing their names to show solidarity with their candidate in response to conservative attacks. The New York Times covers the phenomenon this weekend:

The movement is hardly a mass one, and it has taken place mostly online, the digital equivalent of wearing a button with a clever, attention-getting message. A search revealed hundreds of participants across the country, along with a YouTube video and bumper stickers promoting the idea. Legally changing names is too much hassle, participants say, so they use “Hussein” on Facebook and in blog posts and comments on sites like nytimes.com, dailykos.com and mybarackobama.com, the campaign’s networking site.
New Husseins began to crop up online as far back as last fall. But more joined up in February after a conservative radio host, Bill Cunningham, used Mr. Obama’s middle name three times and disparaged him while introducing Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, at a campaign rally. (Mr. McCain repudiated Mr. Cunningham’s comments).

The Internet makes a movement like this possible. These Obama supporters aren’t legally changing their name (for the most part) because that requires far too much bureaucratic hassle. But with email, instant messenger, Facebook, and blogs, they don’t need to go through those hurdles to make a striking impact. And of course, online, these folks have the ability to find each other.
But the Internet itself doesn’t inspire a movement like this. Instead, it speaks to something very unique about Obama’s candidacy. It’s one thing to build an army of volunteers and raise money from millions of people. It’s another altogether to motivate hundreds of individuals to take the step of adopting Obama’s middle name.
It’s not as though the President of the United States has convinced his supporters to adopt the middle initial “W.”

It’s been a very active week in the interplay between Barack Obama and certain Christian Right leaders, who are clearly afraid he will have some appeal to their flocks.
Most notably, the religio-political warhorse James Dobson devoted a Focus on the Family radio broadcast to an attack on a speech (a very, very good speech, BTW) Obama delivered two years ago, in which Obama had the temerity to suggest that James Dobson’s interpretations of the moral imperatives of scripture weren’t self-evidently true.
Obama, said Dobson, was “deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible,” as defined, of course, by Dobson himself.
As Amy Sullivan of Time observed, there was a pretty swift backlash against Dobson’s attack on Obama from evangelical leaders manifestly tired of self-important thunderbolts from Colorado Springs.
A few days earlier, a more sophisticated attack on Obama’s Christianity was launched by conservative evangelical syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, who said that “there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn’t meet that requirement.” Picking over a 2004 interview, Thomas anathemized Obama for denying that salvation was limited to those who expressly embrace Jesus Christ as God and Savior, and for expressing doubts about his personal fate after death.
As Sullivan pointed out in her commentary on the Obama-Christian Right dustup:

A new Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey of 35,000 Americans reports that 70% agree with the statement “Many religions can lead to eternal life,” including 57% of Evangelicals. No less a figure than George W. Bush responded “no” when asked in 1999 if he believed heaven is open only to Christians.

So if what Thomas calls Obama’s “universalism” (an epithet often hurled at all sorts of Christians with an expansive idea of God’s plan for salvation, including the new Southern Baptist Convention president Johnny Hunt) disqualifies him as a Christian, what does that make George W. Bush?
Thomas is on stronger ground in suggesting that most Christians don’t have Obama’s reluctance to visualize a heavenly afterlife for themselves. But while belief in “eternal life” is fundamental to Christianity, that’s not the same, theologically, as confidence about individual immortality in any specific sort of way.
Here’s what Karl Barth, perhaps the dominant Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, and the “neo-orthodox” scourge of theological liberals, had to say on the subject shortly before his own death:

We have no idea either of the life beyond, or of the passage of this life into the other. We have only what came to pass in Jesus Christ, which is present with us through faith.

Barth also, by the way, was often accused of “universalism,” and did explicitly teach that restrictive ideas about salvation reflected a rejection of the sovereignty of God.
It’s clear that Obama’s in pretty good orthodox Christian company, despite efforts by Dobson and Thomas to cast him out.

Each Memorial Day, you hear a lot of earnest and sometimes angry talk about the debasement of this holiday into a mere long weekend devoted to beaches, barbecues, sporting events, and celebration of the onset of of the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. (Indeed, at church yesterday I listened to a sermon dedicated to this very theme).
But if you listen carefully to these complaints, there are two very distinct ideas about the “true meaning” of Memorial Day that emerge (try googling “true meaning Memorial Day” and you’ll see what I mean). The first is about remembering the dead, most generally, and more specifically recalling in somber detail the sacrifices of those who died in the service of our country. The second is about honoring that service by exalting its purpose, making Memorial Day a patriotic holiday dedicated to retroactive and prospective dedication of Americans to the justice and selflessness associated with this country at war.
This second idea is inevitably political, particularly at a time when young Americans are being exposed to death each day in a very unpopular “war of choice.” Sure, there are some antiwar folk who encourage an examination of patriotic ideology on days like Memorial Day in the hopes that America will “live up” to the principles it proclaims. But far more common are conservative excoriations of those who out of malice or ignorance fail to endorse the unique and universal benevolence that characterizes each resort to arms by the United States.
Consider this excerpt from a long Memorial Day piece at National Review Online by Mackubin Thomas Owens:

[W]hile the individual soldier may focus on the particulars of combat, Memorial Day permits us to enlarge the individual soldier’s view, giving broader meaning to the sacrifice that was accepted of some but offered by all, not only acknowledging and remembering the sacrifice, but validating it.
In the history of the world, many good soldiers have died bravely and honorably for bad or unjust causes. Americans are fortunate in that we have been given a way of avoiding this situation by linking the sacrifice of our soldiers to the meaning of the nation. At the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg four months after the battle, President Abraham Lincoln fleshed out the understanding of what he called in his First Inaugural Address, the “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land.”
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address gives universal meaning to the particular deaths that occurred on that hallowed ground, thus allowing us to understand Memorial Day in the light of the Fourth of July, to comprehend the honorable end of the soldiers in the light of the glorious beginning and purpose of the nation. The deaths of the soldiers at Gettysburg, of those who died during the Civil War as a whole, and indeed of those who have fallen in all the wars of America, are validated by reference to the nation and its founding principles as articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

According to this point of view, you can’t honor fallen servicemen and servicewomen without honoring the specific and general causes for which they were thrown into battle. And it’s no surprise that those who maintain this point of view also believe that you can’t “support the troops” in Iraq without supporting the justice and necessity of the war itself, and its past and present conduct by the current administration in Washington.
This is an understandable if very dangerous emotion. No one is happy to acknowledge the possibility that they, or their loved ones, or for that matter, their fellow-citizens, are walking in the valley of the shadow of death “in vain” (as Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address) or “for a mistake” (as John Kerry put it in his Senate testimony for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War). Owens is a Vietnam Vet, and he makes plain his opinion that the dishonoring of American war dead began with the anti-Vietnam War movement:

The posture Americans took toward Memorial Day started to go awry with Vietnam. The press, if not the American people, began to treat soldiers as moral monsters, victims, or both. The “dysfunctional Vietnam vet” became a staple of popular culture. Despite the fact that atrocities were rare, My Lai came to symbolize the entire war. Thanks to the press’s preoccupation with the anomaly of My Lai, Lt. William Calley became the poster boy for Vietnam. The honorable and heroic performance of the vast majority of those who served in Vietnam went largely unrecognized.

Owens’ citation of My Lai and Calley is interesting. I don’t know how Calley was regarded by his former brothers-in-arms fighting in Vietnam, but in Georgia, where I was growing up at the time, he was turned into a hero–a “poster boy for Vietnam” among war supporters. “Ralleys for Calley” were held all over the state (and the country). After Richard Nixon commuted Calley’s sentence for violating military law, he adopted Columbus, Georgia, as his new home town, and was soon appearing in ads for a car dealer. Sure, some Calley supporters considered him a “scapegoat” who was being punished for the sins of higher-ups (the ex post facto rationalization that Jimmy Carter offered for his pronouncement encouraging Georgians to turn on their headlights for a day to show support for the convicted mass murderer). But what I heard most often was a very different conviction: Calley was an honorable soldier doing the dirty work that most Americans didn’t want to think about, in a war against a savage opponent who deployed women and children to kill GIs–a war that all Americans were honor-bound to support in its most horrifying moments. That was certainly the sentiment conveyed by the 1971 pop song “The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley,” which won vast radio airplay and sold 300,000 copies in the three days after its release:

While we’re fighting in the jungles they were marching in the street
While we’re dying in the rice fields they were helping our defeat
While we’re facing V.C. bullets they were sounding a retreat–
as we go marching on….
When I reach my final campground in that land beyond the sun
And the great commander asks me, “Did you fight or did you run?”
I’ll stand both straight and tall stripped of medals, rank and gun
And this is what I’ll say:
Sir, I followed all my orders and I did the best I could
It’s hard to judge the enemy and hard to tell the good
Yet there’s not a man among us would not have understood

With all due respect to Mackubin Thomas Owens, this is the moral hazard invited by those who insist all of America’s wars have been sacrifices on the altar of freedom and democracy, or who treat dissenters against war policies as unpatriotic. Was “the press” really more responsible for the mixed legacy of the Vietnam War than an administration that cynically kept the war going for political purposes years after Richard Nixon had privately admitted it was lost?
And in truth, the necessity of honoring the troops while denying the perfect justice of The Cause didn’t begin with Vietnam. As Owen notes at the very beginning of his article, Memorial Day (originally Decoration Day) began as a partisan commemoration in the northern states of the sacrifices made by Union troops in suppression of “the late rebellion” (i.e., the Confederacy). That’s why a parallel system of Confederate Memorial Days quickly developed in the South, which, following Owens’ own logic, were devoted more to celebration of the Lost Cause than to the individual sacrifices of Confederate troops and their families. Well into my own lifetime, Confederal Memorial Day was the occasion for an annual exercise in regional defiance, self-pity and rationalization, which whitewashed “the rebellion” as being “about” states rights, the agrarian lifestyle, neoclassical culture, the Cavalier tradition–indeed, everything other than human bondage and the refusal to even coexist with Americans who wanted to prevent its extension to new territories.
So put me firmly in that first camp of those who feel strongly that Memorial Day should be a day of remembrance devoted to respectful contemplation of sacrifice in national service, not a political holiday aimed at national self-congratulation or the vengeful settling of scores with those who fail to “support the troops” by supporting the policies of men like Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. In this era of an all-volunteer military and of “preemptive wars” that most of us follow on television, it is very important for those of us who haven’t risked death or injury to take some time to understand the horrors of war–the fear not just of death but of leaving families behind to fend for themselves, the randomness of the Grim Reaper in choosing his victims in modern warfare, and the courage of troops who not only defy death, but the temptations of indiscriminate total war to which William Calley (for whatever reason) succumbed. I do agree with Owens that all Americans should acknowledge and take pride in the distinguished traditions that have led many millions of Americans in uniform to increase their own odds of death or defeat by observing limitations on the scope of violence in war. But that’s all the more reason that we should resist the idea of extending to warmakers the Memorial Day remembrances we owe to warriors.
For our much-blessed country, war is occasionally necessary, sometimes preferable to the alternatives, but usually represents a failure of statecraft and the structures of peace, stability and collective security that American men and women in uniform have in recent decades defended as much as the homeland itself. On Memorial Day, we should be reminded not only of the wealth and leisure and safety we owe to those who served, but also of the terrible price that some Americans have paid for our occasional failure to give our brave troops the leadership they deserve.

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On the November 27, 2007 Charlie Rose Show, John McCain said of Iraq:
“This is a classic counterinsurgency we are engaged in right now. This is not a new strategy. General Petraeus has updated it, but the fact is it’s a classic counterinsurgency.”
Political journalists and observers paid little attention to this particular remark, seeing it as a vague generalization. People familiar with military matters, on the other hand, knew McCain was referring to something very specific — military publication FM – 3-24 — “The US Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual”.
This publication, written by General Petraeus along with Lt. General James Amos and Lt. Colonel John Nagl, was widely described as revolutionary when it appeared in December 2006. It was rapidly downloaded over 1.5 million times from the internet and generated more commentary than any other modern military publication. Most frequently, it was cited as the basis for Petraeus’ new strategy behind the “surge”.
FM -3-24 is a statement of military doctrine. It presents a “common language and common understanding of how army forces conduct operations” and in two important respects it does indeed represent a radical departure from the past.
First, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual represents a very dramatic break with the “Powell Doctrine” that emerged out of the disillusionment with the war in Vietnam. The Powell Doctrine held among its directives that, for the use of regular Army and Marine forces (1) there must be a clearly defined mission, (2) that force, when used, should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the force used by the enemy and (3) that there must be a clear exit strategy from the conflict in which the military is engaged.
The application of the “Powell Doctrine” was clearly evident in the conduct of the first Gulf War and commanded wide approval among U.S. military commanders at the time. From this perspective, anti-guerilla campaigns were perceived as a very distinct kind of military operation that could best be handled by Special Forces and other highly specialized and uniquely trained troops.
The new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, in very stark contrast, defines anti-guerrilla warfare as a central task for the regular Army and Marines. The bibliography of FM-3-24 specifically cites books dealing with the strategy of post-World War II anti-guerrilla campaigns in Malaya, Kenya, Algeria and Indochina as the principle models upon which the new strategy is based.
Along with this radical change in doctrine, the manual also takes a very strong position on a major military debate left over from the Vietnam War — a debate between the advocates of using virtually unrestricted firepower and military force – symbolized by terms like “carpet bombing” and “free-fire zones” and the advocates of an alternative approach identified with the slogans of “Winning Hearts and Minds” and “Vietnamization”.
FM -3-24 very aggressively and systematically champions the second approach. It defines counterinsurgency operations as nothing less than “armed social work” and bluntly asserts that such campaigns cannot win unless they succeed in protecting the civilian population and rebuilding the economy. More specifically it lists four major objectives (1) Security from intimidation, coercion, violence and crime; (2) Provision of basic economic needs, (3) Provision of essential services such as water, electricity, sanitation and medical care; (4) Sustainment of key social and cultural institutions

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FDR wasn’t the first president to use the wonder of radio for a political advantage, but that is how history remembers him. More and more, it seems likely that this year’s Democratic nominee will carve out that same historic possibility by using the Internet.
We’ve written a lot about that story here, but Ron Browstein has a must-read cover story in the National Journal, which offers a bunch of examples in vivid detail:

In scope and sweep, tactics and scale, the marathon struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton has triggered such a vast evolutionary leap in the way candidates pursue the presidency that it is likely to be remembered as the first true 21st-century campaign.
On virtually every front, the two candidates’ efforts dwarf those of all previous primary contenders — not to mention presumptive GOP nominee John McCain. It’s easy to miss the magnitude of the change amid the ferocity of the Democratic competition. But largely because of their success at organizing supporters through the Internet, Clinton and, especially, Obama are reaching new heights in raising money, recruiting volunteers, hiring staff, buying television ads, contacting voters, and generating turnout. They are producing changes in degree from prior primary campaigns so large that they amount to changes in kind.

I did an appearance today on the excellent syndicated public radio show, To the Point, to talk about the latest developments in Iraq and their impact on the presidential contest. Other guests included Peter Beinart of CFR and TNR; Bobby Ghosh of Time; Shawn Brimley of the Center for a New American Security; and GOP pollster John McLaughlin.
I was pretty much paired with McLaughlin, and thought I did reasonably well at swatting down his efforts to change the subject to the latest pseudo-stories about Clinton’s Kosovo experience and Obama’s “radical friends.”
But as often happens, my one real insight occurred to me just as the show ended. Listening to McLaughlin redundantly cite McCain’s military service record as establishing his vast superiority to the Democrats on national security issues, it finally hit me: what did this sound like? Yes, it sounded like John Kerry’s campaign talking points at key junctures of the 2004 race.
McCain may be in the process of making the same big mistake his friend Kerry made in 2004–making his biography the overriding centerpiece of his national security message. Sure, McCain’s war record attests to his character and patriotism, but hardly means he’d be an effective commander-in-chief. If that were the case, we’d only have military leaders as presidents. What McCain has to say about national security issues will, over time, have as great an impact on how he’s perceived by persuadable voters as endless clips of him in uniform or returning from the Hanoi Hilton. The tragedy of the Kerry campaign was that the man did have a pretty powerful grasp of national security challenges and what to do about them, but it never much got a hearing thanks to the back-and-forth about his own “story.”
In contrast, much of what John McCain’s been saying on the substance of national security and foreign policy strikes me as an odd combo of George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 messages: a multilateral, “humble” foreign policy based on the continuation and even expansion of the very single-minded military adventurism that’s made Bush a global pariah and empirical failure. Suggesting that the Democratic nominee isn’t fit to debate him on national security because he or she doesn’t have a war record isn’t going to cut it for John McCain.

The recent announcement of a coordinated $350 million election-year effort by independent liberal and progressive groups — including MoveOn, the AFL-CIO, Change To Win, Women’ Voices, Women Vote, the National Council of La Raza, Acorn and Rock the Vote — is profoundly impressive. Together with the Democratic candidates’ tremendous success in direct small-donor fundraising this year it raises the hope that Dems might actually come close to matching or surpassing the Republicans in overall funding.
Lurking in the background, however, is the ominous fact that pro-Republican independent groups – led by Freedom Watch which by itself already has a $250 million war chest — will still probably far outspend pro-Democratic independent groups. As Freedom Watch’s treasurer bluntly told one reporter recently, in 2008, “money won’t be an object”. Moreover, because the large liberal-progressive organizations are generally more oriented toward grass-roots and GOTV organizing than big-money advertising campaigns, it is probable that in the specific area of TV and radio advertising by independent committees the pro-Republican advantage will be even greater. This is particularly disturbing because independent committee money – free from the need for the candidate to directly endorse its message – is the best tool for the most dishonest and scurrilous type of attack ads.
Behind the myriad minor variations, the basic strategy of the “slime attack” or “character assassination” category of advertising is usually to dishonestly associate a Democrat with some kind of deeply negative stereotype or schema that is already strongly embedded in the voter’s mind. Barack Obama provides a particularly rich target in this respect. Because of his unconventional personal history and background, it is almost trivially easy for a skilled ad designer to slyly imply that he is (or once was) anything from a “secret Muslim” to a “Black militant”, a “60’s radical”, an “inner city crack user”, an “ivy- league liberal snob” or a “corrupt Chicago pol”. (The comparable attack on Hillary Clinton would focus on activating negative schemas involving liberals and professional women – the “anti-family women’s libber,” the “snotty, rich do-gooder”, the “affluent limousine liberal”, and the “bitch”, “witch”, or “man-hater.”)
These subtle forms of character assassination work best when they are not consciously analyzed by the audience but absorbed in the background. This takes advantage of the unconscious assumption many people now make that while all political ads are untrustworthy, they are also all roughly equal in their degree of mendacity (e.g. “all those political ads are crap”, “It’s all just a bunch of B.S.”). This unfortunately common mental short-cut enhances the credibility of attacks that are based on slander and innuendo and diminishes the credibility of those that are more factually based.
There are two standard Democratic responses to attacks of this kind – (1) directly defending against the specific accusation or (2) making a comparably slashing counter-attack. Both have major drawbacks.
On the one hand, political strategists universally dislike simple responses to attacks because continually “playing defense” is considered ultimately a losing strategy. On the other hand, liberals are handicapped in playing tit-for tat with conservatives because of their generally less ruthless political outlook (it is hard, for example, to imagine any of the leading liberal independent committees producing material suggesting that a Republican fathered an illegitimate Black child–as pro-Bush operatives suggested about McCain at one point in 2000–or presenting patently phony “witnesses” to dishonestly discredit a soldiers medals, as the swift-boaters did to John Kerry in 2004).
However, in trying to match the provocative, infuriating and attention-getting effect of conservative “slime attacks” without resorting to outright lies and dishonest innuendo, liberal independent committees often find themselves making attacks that come across as exaggerated, strident or shrill to undecided voters. The “General betray-us” New York Times ad, for example, was popular with highly partisan anti-war Democrats because of its’ bitter, “in-your-face” expression of anger and disrespect, but it had a zero or negative persuasive effect on other voters.
There is an alternative strategy Democrats can consider, however – one based on research conducted during the 1950’s on how people can best be taught to resist “brainwashing” techniques like those used on GI’s in the Korean War. Two important findings were the “inoculation” effect (that prior, controlled exposure to propaganda significantly reduces its effectiveness) and the “ulterior motive” or “hidden agenda” effect (that awareness of a message source’s manipulative intent reduces its persuasiveness) On the surface both notions seem so self-evident as to be trivial, but the demonstration that they were empirically measurable phenomena made it possible for communication specialists to argue that it could sometimes be worthwhile to allocate scarce advertising dollars to messages that employed them.
The possible strategy that flows from this research is simple – allocate some part of the pro-Democratic ad budget to directly and explicitly attacking the “independent” conservative committees like Freedom Watch and their commercials.

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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.

Daily Kos’ DHinMI has a very informative post about independent expenditures on behalf of the Democratic candidates in OH and TX. It’s basically a tale of the competition between three groups who have been supporting HRC almost from the beginning–the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Emily’s List, and the American Federation of Teachers–and two who have more recently endorsed Obama–the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers. Looks like SEIU in particular is really kicking out the jams for Obama in OH and TX:

Through the Wisconsin primary, the three groups backing Clinton spent about $4.4 million. In Ohio, they have continued the model of what worked well in the early states—lots of direct mail, probably directed at women, followed up with phone calls. In Ohio, they have boosted their program. Whereas in most states they appear to have sent about 6 pieces of mail, it appears that in Ohio their target audience has received up to 8 pieces. They have also run a small amount of media, and are now following up the mail with phone calls. The total expenditures come to about $500,000.
FEC reports indicate that SEIU will probably spend over 5 times as much as AFSCME and EMILY’s list in Ohio. They’ve spent $400,000 in mail, almost matching AFSCME and EMILY’s List. In addition to the mail, they have also spent $200,000 on phones, $425,000 on a paid canvass program, and $1.4 million on electronic media. All together, with staff, production and other expenses factored in, SEIU has spent over $2.6 million in Ohio.
Obama will benefit from other expenditures. While EMILY’s list has spent $140,000 in media in Texas—such a small expenditure suggests it’s probably Spanish language radio, or possibly cable ads on networks that focus on women, like Lifetime—SEIU has dropped over $1.7 million in to that state. They have spent $700,000 on media, almost $500,000 on a canvass program, $300,000 on phones and almost $300,000 on mail.
The amount SEIU has spent just in Ohio and Texas now equals the combined spending of AFSCME, the AFT and EMILY’s List from the start of the campaign through the Wisconsin primary.

If Obama manages to pull off wins in these two states, he’ll owe a lot to his new union friends.