I know both Zack Exley and Markos as colleagues I respect them which is why I was very surprised to see Zack's statements at Harvard and
Markos post attacking Zack (and spelling his name wrong).
Then I began to understand. The article was wrong, and Markos was being a bit hot headed. Below is Zack's response to Markos.
The shorter version from Zack: "You got it wrong, here is what happened. Let's not fight, let's get organized."
But please read the whole thing below -- it is the best account of the development of the campaign online this election cycle.
If we are going to rebuild the Democratic party we need to have a honest and frank discussion about what everyone brings to the table and how to win. So please read Zack's letter and post your ideas and comments below.
Dear Markos and friends,
Don't you know that journalists get it ALL wrong sometimes? You just spent two days hurling criticisms at me based on what a UK reporter wrote about me in The Register. He carelessly and radically misrepresented what I said while speaking on a recent panel at Harvard's Berkman Center. He took things I said about the Bush Internet team and had me saying them about my own team; criticisms of the DNC program were reported as criticisms of the Kerry program or of ACT; criticisms of the Kerry/DNC field program were reported as criticisms of the Kerry Internet program; he flat out misquoted me inside of quotation marks and implied worse outside of quotation marks such as the "blog blather" and "goateed chinned web designers" comments.
Then came 200 comments attacking me on Daily Kos based on that careless article. I've been publicly attacked by a lot of right wingers and it never bothered me much. Bush called me a "garbage man" on camera. I was sued and attacked publicly by AOL-TW-CNN lawyers once. I've had the honor of Hannity, Bill O'Rielly and many other nutcase pundits all taking shots. The GOP even put out a fake bio of me when I went to the Kerry campaign and asked supporters to write letters to the editor attacking me. They started popping up all over the country -- giving me credit for, among other things, coming up with new ways to injure police at protests.
But the onslaught on Daily Kos has made me feel terrible because (A) you're attacking me for things I never said; and (B) There's something important at stake here concerning how Democratic campaigns can use the Internet to win elections, and so we need a clear discussion on this topic, not mud slinging.
What I really said:
I began my remarks at the Berkman conference by saying that the netroots -- the hundreds of thousands of online communities thriving on blogs, forums, and other sites -- are the Internet's MOST IMPORTANT contribution to Democracy. I didn't speak in opposition to blogs or any other kind of online community. My only comment on blogs was that they are not the be-all and end-all of online campaigns -- something Kos has agreed with.
I do disagree with a lot of conventional wisdom of Internet politics. And I have been public about mistakes the Dean campaign made, and mistakes that a whole industry of Internet consultants continue to convince candidates to make. But that is not to say that I disagree with everything the Dean campaign did or that Internet consultants are pushing these days.
My main point was that the conventional wisdom of Internet politics mistakenly de-emphasizes list building, email communications from the campaign to supporters, doing tools right, and constantly evaluating every online endeavor that consumes resources INSIDE the campaign on the basis of measurable positive results for the campaign. None of this was a criticism in any way of the thriving blogs, forums and other online communities that I had already said were much MORE IMPORTANT for Democracy than anything a campaign could do on its own.
So most of the criticisms many of you have been hurling at me just don't apply to anything I have ever actually said. I'd like to answer them and set the record straight -- so that at least folks can attack me for things I really did do or failed to do.
(1) Zack hates "get local".
No, actually Zack brought the "get local" tools to the Dean campaign. In May I took a leave from MoveOn, at Joe Trippi's request, to take MoveOn's "meeting tool" to the Dean campaign. Within a few weeks, thousands of Dean supporters were planning all kinds of events in their homes and public places. Then we sent out emails to the Dean list showing people how they could put their zip code in and find events planned by Dean supporters in their communities, and thousands more took part. It was a beautiful thing. Zephyr Teachout got that it was beautiful, of course. Joe actually freaked out, bless his heart, when he first saw the thing taking off. "This is going to be a fucking disaster!" he yelled. Zephyr and I talked him through it. He calmed down and in a couple days loved what was happening.
The reason Trippi was worrying was that the custom meeting tool allowed supporters far more freedom than Meetup.com to plan events of any sort, on any date, in any location. Meetup.com limited Dean supporters to one set day a month, and a list of approved Meetup venues that paid Meetup.com $75/month. (Meetup has since relaxed that policy somewhat, but it far more restrictive than the custom tools.)
(The tools I brought to the Dean campaign were later re-done in php from perl, as I understand it, and folded into a larger suite of tools that included Deanlink and other stuff.)
MoveOn and Patrick Kane of We Also Walk Dogs developed the meeting tool as far back as early 2000. Meetup.com was a parallel development. Evite was another parallel phenomenon, as was the brief flashmobs craze. I played a very small role in the emergence of the Internet's off-line organizing powers in 2000 around the election crisis. At MoveOn I was the lead organizer on the candlelight vigils before the Iraq war and other big steps toward using the Internet to get people together.
I love Get Local.
(2) Zack drowned Meetup.com in a bathtub in the basement of the Kerry campaign.
I love Meetup.com, and Scott Heiferman is a friend. I think that Meetup.com is perhaps the single best thing that has happened on the Internet. The newest big Meetup -- stay-at-home moms -- is the best example of what it's making possible. For almost a century in atomized American suburbs mothers have felt as though they were loosing their minds, stuck at home, sometimes without a car (like my mom when I was growing up), isolated from everything and having no way to find other mothers in their areas. Now, by typing in a zip code and making a few clicks, mothers can find a few others right in their neighborhoods and begin recreating the natural, logical support networks that no mother ever should be without. And that's just one example out of hundreds that make Meetup a force that is changing this world for good.
Meetup.com, however, had some limitations, which I mentioned above, that we could not live with. Before I came to the Kerry campaign Josh Ross had already begun building a set of get local tools for Kerry. When they became fully functional, then we drove people to them instead of to Meetup.com.
We dropped Meetup.com so that we could have MORE meet-ups (with a small m). Not only MORE meet-ups, but also meet-ups any day of the month, in any venue, with any structure, and so on.
Meetup.com didn't even allow supporters to have meetings in their homes. We were just fighting to be able to give the netroots the maximum flexibility. And so it feels very wrong to be yelled at for not supporting the netroots because we gave people better tools and stopped promoting a private company, albeit a great company.
If I remember correctly, Kerry had a maximum of 1,600 Meetup.com meet-ups in a single month, and most were very small. When we switched to our own volunteer center, we immediately had TENS OF THOUSANDS of self-organized events taking place every month. Many of these were fundraisers, and we blew away the record set by Dean for simultaneous house party fundraisers. But the majority were organizing meetings.
Plus: the number of Meetup.com meetups barely decreased. We didn't kill Kerry Meetup.com, we just linked to our more flexible tools and not to Meetup.com from our site.
Everyone was so used to reading and writing about the Dean meetups that they kept looking at Kerry's Meetup.com numbers and saying "Kerry is giving up on the netroots!" Well, it's true that most of the Kerry campaign and Democratic establishment could not have cared less about getting supporters together in their homes and public meeting places. But on the Internet team we desperately cared about that and that is why we switched to our own tools, and organized 100 times more meetups as a result, building a far bigger movement.
(3) Zack is a Stalinist.
I keep getting criticized by Internet thinkers for being all top-down. The reason: I keep telling them that when it comes to campaigns (and only campaigns) they need to stop focusing on communication among supporters TO THE EXCLUSION of communication from the center.
What many forget is that the Dean campaign was driven by communication among supporters -- but also by communication from the campaign to supporters. Call it "top down" if you must. Joe Trippi posted on the blog right alongside other supporters. But he also sent emails to his growing email list. And those emails spawned much more organizing and raised much more money than the Dean blog did. That is not to denigrate the blog. It's just a numbers thing: not all 600,000 Dean email subscribers visited the blog every day. But they did check their email everyday. So Joe could reach more people by posting to the blog AND sending an email than by ONLY posting to the blog. I know that no one is saying campaigns shouldn't email their supporters. But conventional wisdom of the web devalues that communication from the center. And I just think that it's important for Democratic campaigns to get good at that.
(4) All Zack wanted was your money.
Now we're getting to the good stuff. It is a valid criticism of the Kerry campaign that it missed an opportunity to really connect with a whole new world of political activists and build an incredible movement. I agree with that criticism -- and I made it every day internally when I was at the campaign, as many irritated Kerry communications and finance people would confirm.
Though Mary Beth Cahill did work very closely with us to produce those emails, it was not the same as when Joe Trippi used the campaign emails (early in the Dean campaign) to really speak from the heart to supporters. We were one tier down from the actual heartbeat of the campaign at Kerry. It was a real problem. (But by the way, this became a problem at the Dean campaign too as the Governor became the front runner.)
So I don't defend what was a real shortcoming of the campaign. And I won't bore you with stories of failed but noble attempts by Josh Ross, Ari Rabin-Havt, David Thorne, Peter Daou, Tom Matzzie, Dick Bell, myself and others to get key players throughout the campaign to understand the enormous potential that was there. I'm just as frustrated with the Democratic establishment and Democratic Party culture as anyone. But I think that the problem is really more fundamental to the left and progressive movement as a whole. The left doesn't really trust people, doesn't really respect them. On progressive blogs, people have faith in their own slice of the culture, but not -- in general -- in the vast American people. Trippi does have that faith in the people, and that's why the Dean campaign got a few things right online that made all the difference. But he's a rare bird. What I'm saying is that I came to think that the real problem isn't making Dems understand the Internet, but rather it's a tougher problem of getting them to understand the American people.
Having said "you're right" about the Kerry campaign's failure to do it completely right, I have to say you're wrong about a few things:
A) We didn't only send fundraising emails. In fact, I think that we sent a lot more non-fundraising emails than Burlington did during the Dean campaign. We sent tons of emails asking people to: write letters to the editor, volunteer to be spokespeople locally and to tell us their stories of life under Bush (we built a 100,000+ searchable database of those stories), hold house parties and organizing meetings, and more. We signed up tens of thousands of volunteers for special groups such as the Media Corps (run by Amanda Michel formerly of the Dean campaign) and the Phone Corps, who's job it was to call through our entire volunteer list in swing states using special tools to get people who weren't responding to emails off their asses.
B) Thanks in large part to Tom Matzzie, who we pulled over from the AFL-CIO, we built the biggest and best organized Internet-driven field program ever. And this is what I mean by that: in the swing states, local organizers posted canvasses, phone banks and whatever using our get local tools, and we'd send out tons of email to people with the locations of their nearest volunteer opportunities. We also built, thanks to Josh Hendler (formerly of the Clark campaign), a volunteer phone banking system that allowed volunteers in non-swing states to make a big impact by calling and recruiting volunteers in swing states. We turned out -- from our email list -- from 50% to 90% of the volunteers in different cities and towns in the swing states. (You're right, we didn't do enough in non-swing states.)
C) While you may have found the fundraising emails annoying, they did in fact close the gap in spending between the Democrat and Republican for the first time in who knows how long. Those outgoing emails raised the VAST majority of the $122 million that our email list donated to Kerry and the DNC. If we had cut the volume of those fundraising emails in two, you would still be complaining and we would have left $50m or $60m on the table. It was entirely reasonable to believe that $50m could have made the difference in this election. So I totally stand by the decision that I and others made to go full on with the fundraising.
One thing to consider is that most people saw donating as one of the only ways -- along with door knocking -- to make a difference in the race. We were not always able to give people a direct connection to the heartbeat of the real campaign -- and that was bad. But at least we were able to offer people a sincere way to make a difference in the campaign, and we reported back to them every week about what a huge difference they were making.
(5) Zack was behind "the God awful Kerry blog".
Unfortunately, I can't claim credit for the Kerry blog. It was run by Dick Bell and Peter Daou. I think they did the best job they could considering the distance from the real heart of the campaign that we were all operating at (as explained above). Our blog had some great moments -- especially when Ari Rabin-Havt was posting from the road with Kerry, a short period when the site was actually connected in some way to the real campaign.
In closing, thanks for letting me set the record straight. There are some misdirected criticisms that I still haven't answered, but I've gone on way too long.
I think this stuff is extremely important for 2006 and 2008. My plea is just for the "thinkers of the Internet" to stop treating campaigns as though they were online communities. Online communities are beautiful. And campaigns have many lessons to learn from them. However there are additional and separate rules and principles that apply to campaigning. Because Dems are so weak in so many areas, this isn't an area where we can afford to let automatic acceptance of conventional wisdom trip us up.
In Solidarity,
Zack Exley