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Mon. Feb 09, 2004

Another Autopsy on the Living

Another Autopsy on the Living – Dave Winer has written a piece called Howard Dean is not a soapbar, which is a bit of an autopsy on the living, in order to determine who delivered the mortal blow: ”He did raise a lot of money on the Internet, and that’s interesting, for sure, and he taught us so much, and if he had gone all the way, I believe he would have survived the onslaught of CNN, ABC and NBC, who were his real competitors, not the other candidates for the Democratic nomination. Read that sentence again, please.”

Please do, as it’s a bit of a run-on sentence. I think Dave believes it was the media that kneecapped Dean, because he was an Outsider Candidate who represented a threat to their wallet. This despite the fact Dean has spent more on media buys than any other candidate.

”The Dean campaign taught us that you can’t use the Internet to launch into a successful television campaign to win primaries. By raising money to run ads you play into the gatekeepers, who for obvious financial reasons, have a lot at stake in the money continuing to flow through their bank accounts. At some point he wouldn’t need them. If Dean didn’t get it, they did. So they proved that in 2004 at least, they still get a veto on who runs for President.”

”To Blitzer, Sawyer and Russert, to Viacom, GE, Time-Warner and Disney, Kerry seems safe, but Dean is dangerous, he routes around them, he goes direct. To accept his candidacy would be to accept the end of television-dominated politics. They aren’t going to let this happen, any more than the record and movie companies are going to roll over for P2P distribution.”

That’s an interesting viewpoint. It’s one of several I’ve read that suggest Dean is a victim of forces outside his control, not of his own actions and their consequences. It’s the DNC, it’s the Clintons, it’s the dirty tricks of the Kerry campaign, it’s the media, etc. It ignores the verbal and tactical gaffes that plagued the Dean camp in December and January, and implies that the media has always ”played fair” with every other political candidate … until Dean came along (ask the Clark supporters about that one). It ignores the fact that when you try to create a Perfect Storm, you are creating something that quickly moves beyond your control, and could end up hurting you as much as anyone else.

”Had Dean fully embraced the Internet the campaign would have helped flow good news and bad about all the candidates. They would have followed Rule 1 for Internet candidates, run a real weblog. Then, when the inevitable smear came from CNN (who protests that the candidate actually had the gall to behave like a human being instead of a soap bar)—key point—the voters would have known where to tune to get a variety of viewpoints.”

A few small problems with that ”key point.” 35-40% of Americans still do not have the easy access to the Internet that those on Mount Olympus assume is as common as water out of a tap. Of the 60-65% of American households who do have Internet access, perhaps (if we’re generous) 20% of them know what a weblog is, or visit one on a regular basis. That works out to about 10% of the US population.

Entirely coincidentally, Dean has gotten about 10% of the vote nationwide in primaries so far. Go figure.

About a third of America is Net-less, and about a tenth of this country is even partially clued in to what a weblog is. Meanwhile, 98.2% of American households have a TV.

It’s that simple.

In TV terms, we’re in about 1955, when 2/3 of American households had a TV. The 90% threshold wasn’t crossed until 1965. So I think it’s safe to say it will be at least another Presidential election, or maybe two, before Internet penetration reaches the point where Dave’s statement will be true. Then we will have reached a point where any citizen has easy access to alternate information on the Internet.

But today, all you have is a good start, and a small foundation on which to grow before you encounter the 90% of the Real World that will never interact with your online community. Your great success there will mean nothing to them.

”I’m an engineer and a writer, and after years of work on content management, editorial interfaces, syndication and desktop tools, delivering a variety of viewpoints to thinking citizens is something we can now engineer. Technologically we’re ready to route around the news channels.”

Well, other than the fact a third of America can’t access your technology today. But that will change. Perhaps by 2008, and certainly by 2012, more than 90% of American households will have easy Internet access. But we’re talking about changing more than just technology here. You face resistance greater than mere dark corporate conspiracies. You’ve got to enable a great behavioral change, and no one candidate will do that, it will happen in small chunks over time. Technology is used by people. You can change the technology overnight, but changing people’s behavior takes a long time.

And while America may be disgruntled with their various biased media outlets, I don’t think that means they’re ready to ”route around the news channels” in favor of a clearly one sided and biased viewpoint issued by the candidate. It’s going to be a mix of the two, a give and take, in proportions yet to be determined.

There is no doubt that much will be learned from this Dean campaign, and used to build upon in the future. In 2006, we’ll see some of the tactics tried on the state and local levels, which will be quite interesting. However, to suggest it was nearly pulled off this time, but for the intervention of Big Media, is to miss a lot of the lessons to be learned from this.

And given the circumstances, I’d guess those are lessons that won’t be fully and properly learned until there’s some distance from these events. To quote Monty Python, ”he’s not quite dead yet.” Some of the people involved may need some emotional distance, and some closure they’ve yet to be provided in this campaign, before they can properly reflect on just what went wrong.

And what went right.