Will Edwards be able to build a campaign that depends on the Netroots as an essential component, and leverage that to victory?
(and, yes, that is, any, preferably all, of the Five Levels of Victory)
The answer confounds pundits ... instead of standing back and commenting from on high, it involves participant reporting, writing, argument, analysis:
It Will Happen If We Make It Happen
That is, of course, what is really distinctive about the Edwards campaign. Ever since he made the decision to commit his campaign to relying on us, in that reversal of the conventional appeals by his two main rivals to get us to commit to relying on them ... it has always been about whether We Can Make It Happen.
Will we make it happen? I have no idea ... and since I'm not paid a seven figure salary to pretend that I know all the answers, I am not going to pretend that I do.
CAN we make it happen? I think we can.
So, pages from the playbook of the Edwards Netroots Insurrection, over the fold.
Table of Contents
Did You Really Think It Would Be Easy?
The Two Senators are running to win inside the current rules of the current game.
However, those rules are only partly written down ... the most important parts of the rules of the game are our regular patterns of behavior. If we break the ruts that we operate in, and enough of us do it at the same time in a co-ordinated way:
- then at that point in time, the rules of the game are now different.
The Netroots Insurrection is currently raging full force on the Daily Kos, where the John Edwards tag page has replaced the front page for some share of DailyKos users ... where one person after another posts their view of whether the Netroots ought to be part of an insurrection, or whether it should be co-opted as Netroots auxillary of one of The Two Senators well heeled, well funded campaigns.
This is not one of those diaries, even if it will briefly pop up onto the top of that alternate front page.
That is, I take the "should we" for granted. I have seen 30 years of elections as auctions for the actors who will play the parts of front-runner and challenger, with the electorate then being shuffled into the auditorium once the play has been cast. I want an election. I want the big money to be taught that it cannot buy all of the leading roles, and it cannot censor the political dialog by simply not funding the campaigns of those who oppose that game under those rules.
This is a diary about how to do it.
But did you every think it was going to be easy? Did you think that changing the rules of the game is an easy task? If it was, we would not be running under the same core rules of the game that have applied since 1980.
The Internet Is Not A Truck
We do have to keep in mind that the Internet is not a big truck. Its a series of tubes.
The internet cannot be tightly disciplined, carefully nuanced, easily controlled. That's the point. When the conventional wisdom talks about somebody being "crowded out" of the race, they are talking in the Corporate Media environment in which a given amount of resources are devoted to putting a given amount of Newsertainment on the air. One more minute for one is one less minute for another. Each television show is, in other words, a series of trucks ... some big trucks, some little trucks, but in any event, each one with so much payload capacity.
The Internet is a series of tubes. If someone blocks up one tube, we can get the message out using a different tube.
The Mass Media calculation is that covering two in a race implies that every other contender is starved of access to the primary electorate, and therefore if every media outlet is covering the same two contenders, those are the only viable contenders. In other words, the Mass Media are the gatekeepers ... they decide who gets to play the roles of front-runner and challenger.
And of course, that is how we have this auctioning of the role of front-runner and challenger restricted to those that the corporations are happy to fund. After all, Mass Media judgments on which candidates are viable are determined to a great extent on who has enough money to be seen as viable to get on the air to be able to attract funding to have enough money ... and so on.
The Netroots Insurrection is not using the Netroots as an ATM machine. It is the ability of the Netroots to keep the lines of communication open, and keep a lifeline of funding going, so that a candidate with sufficiently strong support in the Netroots base can continue to campaign until the end of the race.
This is, of course, why Senator Obama's campaign is working so hard to try to persuade Edwards supporters to jump ship ... because only by undermining Senator Edwards Netroots base can they drive Edwards out of the campaign. As long as we stand with him, he cannot be forced out.
Organizing the Insurrection
Now, why should I be the general of the insurrection? Oops, straw horse alert ... I am just putting these ideas out there. Follow along the ideas that are good, offer substitutes for ideas that are bad. Indeed, on the internet, its possible to overcome the problem of too many chefs by letting different groups be chefs of their own dishes, and also working as dishwashers and vegetable choppers for other groups of chefs working on their dishes.
We have to get the John Edwards '08 supporters blog back in shape for the fight ahead. There has been a tendency for JE'08 to get overwhelmed by newcomers, and as they learn the ropes, they discover wider blogs, and some of the most effective at online communication then get deeply involved elsewhere ... leaving the JE'08 blog for the next wave of newcomers.
So, the first aspect of this is cadre ... experienced veterans inserted amongst rookies and providing on-going mentoring to bring them along faster. Since, after all, for the fight ahead, we need as many effective online communicators as possible as quickly as possible.
The second aspect is, we do have to have a home base of operations. Much as I like the Daily Kos, it obviously cannot fill the bill. At the JE'08 blog, we can organize diaries into whatever structure we find that we need, including in depth policy analysis, advice on current and long-standing talking points from The Two Senators, and whatever else is of use ... and then provide an rolling series of Netroots Insurrection diaries providing the table of contents to that information base. This forms a natural combination Combined with the HotLinks series of diaries (which works on the same system).
Third, the JE'08 supporters blog front page is a bit of a mess, with the Open Mic front page posting queue chock full of entries that are misplaced Open Thread comments, demands for John Edwards to read the posting and change his campaign to follow the advice, Argument and Analysis postings with neither, Action postings with no actions for individuals or OneCorps chapters to take ... the list goes on. There is a tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm, but it often seems to be channeled in directions that do not provide the best leverage to the campaign.
And in the end, the main campaign site actively encourages people to come onto the JE'08 blog as a place to take action to help the campaign ... but at the moment it is far from being as effective as it can be. And if we look across the blogosphere, so much high quality content is created on a daily basis that would make the front page of the JE'08 a tremendously effective New Media outlet.
We also might consider starting "At-Large" OneCorps chapters on a state by state basis for people who do not have a OneCorps chapter close at hand, where we can use all of the existing online communication tools to coordinate action on the ground in the state.
Getting Real
We also have to be realistic in our fight. Quite a lot can happen. Indeed, what happens will most likely turn out to be something that appears unlikely now.
However, we need to be prepared for the fight on an ongoing basis, and so it makes sense to have a reality check.
Yes, we are fight to win the nomination for John Edwards. However, realistically, the big fight is the fight to change the rules of the game. And that means that no setback, no disappointing result, no seeming slip by the campaign can beat us. By keeping John Edwards in the race, when the pundits all know for certain that he will be forced out, and simply do not know when, we are changing the rules of the game.
Of course, we are going to encounter a large number of instant experts online ... because instant experts is one thing that the online environment does tend to breed. (Yes, I know, they also tend to be bred by bars with cheap pitchers of beer, but the internet gives them a much bigger platform than explaining to three bemused buddies the way things work.) And those instant experts will often channel what is being said by the pundits on television.
However, The Village is a purely reactive institution. It repeats what someone just said based on what someone said ten years ago to either explain what just happened or what is going to happen. And the verb "explain", in that sentence, is defined as "fit into whatever conventional wisdom is most appealing to the agenda of the particular pundit".
We don't have to sit around chatting about whether change is going to happen, why change can't happen, what will happen because of the change that is happening, all informed by unexamined rules of thumb where an unknown number are already obsolete.
We can be the change that we are waiting for.
Why Didn't the Campaign Prepare for This?
"So, if all of this is needed, why isn't the campaign doing it? Shouldn't we wait until they organize this?"
I assume that most people reading this already know the answer to that rhetorical question ... but then again, things that "go without saying" ... uh, just really don't, online. So here goes.
It works when people do it. It can be emulated by a campaign, it can be simulated by a campaign, but it can't be done by a campaign. People who want to see this kind of real change of the rules of the game have to do it.
Now, obviously John and Elizabeth think we can do it, or they would not have taken the step of committing to it. We all know that Plan A was win Iowa, slingshot to a strong performance in New Hampshire and then a win in Nevada and South Carolina, leading to a massive.
However, if you look back at the actions and the messaging of the campaign, right from the start, WE were ALWAYS Plan B.
Really, truly. Remember how the campaign was launched:
Each day that we are still fighting, each day we keep John Edwards in the race, we change the rules of the game. And in the end, when we are the change that we are fighting for, we are winning the change in the rules of the game. And that is simple, direct, and impervious to the theory and spin of the moment, whether organized by rival campaigns or channeling the Mass Media spin.
As long as we stand with him, he cannot be forced out. So no matter the theory or spin, if you look around, and find you are standing with him, there's your counter-evidence right there.
(No) Conclusion
And then John Edwards gives the Inaugural Address and we have to start getting into the fight to get recalcitrant Congressmen in line. So the fight for change does not have a stop date on a certain Tuesday in November ... the fight keeps going on.
Join us, and we will transform the Two Americas Story into America's Success Story.