Stirling Newberry Transcription
Stirling Newberry, you were the DraftClark.com blog, who brought him into the race. When he surfaced as a candidate, suddenly there was trouble. And you wrote a famous blog entry. Do you remember your lead?
By the time you read this, the bell will tolling for the Clark campaign. People across the country will know that it is merely the Gore campaign with a better candidate.
And suddenly you had a collision of the new politics and the old inside one campaign. Take this apart. What happened?
What happened is Wesley Clark came to prominence by standing for something before he ran for office. And out of the gate, and all the old baggage, of the 2000 campaign, was loaded on his shoulders. And all of a sudden he didn't stand for something anymore. There was something deeply amiss in how the Clark campaign was converting Clark the figure into Clark the candidate. Ironically there was more discipline of message when Clark was a noncandidate than when he was a candidate. Because when he was a noncandidate, everyone who was writing about Clark was forced to go back to Clark's words: his appearances, his speeches, his books, his articles. Once there was a campaign that became a conflict, because the message that the campaign wanted to put out was at odds with the ideology that Clark himself had stated. Clark said "alliances." Clark said "individual initiative." Clark said "do your best." The campaign said "we control the message." The campaign said "We decide who's in and out." The campaign said "We don't want to offend anybody. We don't want to say something which might cost us votes in the South Carolina primary. All of those things were completely at odds with how Clark had presented himself, and his message, and his meaning, as a noncandidate, as a public figure. That's a problem, because the people who are drawn into Clark were not political hacks, not long-time political activists. They were people who heard him on CNN, who read the book. And they felt he was speaking directly to their aspirations for a better America, for a better politics, by being better people. And the campaign did not follow through on that message.
CL: Is it possible you can have, in a modern campaign, free voices speaking in all different directions about the same candidate?
SN: It's necessary. Look at what's happening to computer programming with what's called open source software. It's not software that's built by a single company which hides the software and hides the details and hides how things work. And if you want something changed, you write a letter and you pray and you hope that they'll assign a programmer to it. In the world of open source software, there's a center. People push things into the center. The center decides what fits, but then pushes the programming back out. In open source politics, the message comes into the center, the center processes it, makes it whole, puts it together, makes it coherent. Gives it an expression, and then pushes it back out again. It's not just possible, it's necessary. It's the way we are re-organizing our society at this moment. And it's going to re-organize the politics too. For the same reasons.
CL: Are you still in the Clark campaign?
SN: I was never a member of the Clark campaign. I am still a member of the Clark movement. And I tell every reporter I talk to, "You are talking to the hardest of hard core Clark supporters."
CL: Hm. Where was that letter coming from.
SN: The letter was coming form an overwhelming sense of frustration that many people had. They did not feel, and I do not feel, that we could get the message into the center of the campaign. The phone lines were manned by a very small number of people, who had their own agenda. The email addresses belonged to a very small group of people who had their own agenda.
CL: Typical campaign.
SN: What's not typical is that those people did not report back upwards to the people who they were supposedly working for.
CL: There were in fact several Draft Clark blogs and movements. How is that transition going to go, when suddenly somebody had to schedule a candidate, raise the money, set the direction.
SN: The richness of the Clark movement goes well beyond a number of blogs. You've talked with Harold Bloom. There were reporters like Franklin For of the New Republic. There are reporters like Joshua Micah Marshall. The Clark movement was always large and diverse, because the ideas that Clark presents are large and diverse. That was part of the power, the resonance, the authenticity. You weren't getting flackery — people repeating the same things over and over again. You were getting thousands of individual voices who looked at the same figure, read the same words, and were able to put those words in terms that their place in society, whether they are a Yale academic, a young sharp reporter, a political blogger, a man on the street, a woman from Maine — all these peoplle could put Clark in their own terms. That's what made it powerful. When we were a draft movement, we were very good at sharing information, sharing technical accomplishments, sharing ideas — who used each other's ideas. We learned from each other.
Again, to get back to the Cluetrain Manifesto, networked electorates become smarter faster than campaigns do. And if a campaign can bring in their networked electorate, they suddenly have thousands and thousands of people who can do more than carry signs wear t-shirts and hand out candy bars.
Those are still important to the campaign. They have thousands and thousands of part-time professionals who can contribute a day of professional labor to the campaign. Labor that you would otherwise have to go out and pay expensive political consultants in expensive offices in Washington to do for you.
CL. Let's talk about the Iowa caucuses, because it comes to a crunch there. Wesley Clark bails out of Iowa because he thought he didn't have the time to do the very personal retail campaigning that those caususes require. If he asked you, whether we stay in Iowa, or bail, what would you have told him?
SN: I would have told him, "Make Iowa the test case for the new politics. Make Iowa the place where the ability of people to become sophisticated conveyors of the Clark Message, and campaign for you — to do the personal campaigning for you. Teach them how to campaign for Wesley Clark. Make them into leaders. That's no-lose." It would be a feel-good democracy story. He comes in third, he comes in fourth. It doesn't matter. There's a week of great stories coming out of Iowa, of people talking to reporters, and having something to say which is rich, and sophisticated and sounds and feels like a campaign. Even though they are not getting their talking points from Little Rock. Clark has a network of people who believe in Wesley Clark's message in a way that people do not believe in Kerry's message, in Liberman's message or John Edwards' message.
CL: But are there enough bloggers in Iowa, are there enough people online at all, to sustain a Clark campaign?
SN: There is a very important marketing book called The Influentials. A very small percentage of the American population tells their fellow consumers what's good, what's working, what's ready for prime time. "This computer, it's not ready. I like it, but it's too much trouble. The Internet is where the political influentials are congregating: the people who will tell ten people, and those ten people will tell ten more people. Each person that you get on the Internet represents another 100 people who will be drawn into the sphere around the candidate, the movement around the candidate.
Kerry has a lot of people who respect him, who respect his record, who like what he does. They don't generate force. They don't persuade other people. Dennis Kucinich has a lot of people who are very active; but they don't talk to anyone else. It was Clark and Dean who generated people who got up from the computer, and went out and talked to reporters, talked to politicians, talked to their Democratic state committees, their Democratic local committees, to other people who were voters, to school committee members, to the man on the street, and said "This man must be president."
CL: What's your definition of the magic multiplier on the Internet? It's a small percentage of the country, the electorate, that's online.
SN: The difference is that the people who are deciding what the images are are coming to the Internet. Ten years ago, everyone formed their image of what was happening in the society by what they saw on television and what they read in a few major publications. Now many of the people who are writing the headlines, writing the stories, making the political decisions, pushing the news, go to the Internet to get what's happening. They look for, "How do people feel?" Their zeitgeist meter is no longer what's playing in Time Magazine. Their zeitgeist meter is "What's playing on Atrios' blog?" Or the Daily Kos. Or, on the conservative side, on Drudge and Instapundit. Where people form their opinions has changed. The people who are manufacturing, who are creating, the artifice of opinion, are now on the Internet. And that means it expands outwards. Reporters don't trust what they read in the New York Times. They trust what they can find online, and research online, and dig into what's really going on.
CL: Can you explain why?
SN: The magic of the Internet, and this is a word you've used, authenticity. And authenticity is more than what's real. Authenticity is what cannot be faked — what works. A hundred people writing a boilerplate email is not authenticity. That's astroturf. A blog, however badly done, represents somebody who took time out of their day to set things up and put their own personal stamp on what is going on. People who are willing to take the time to write, and assemble, and link, and quote, is an excellent indicator of what people are willing to spend their time doing. And that's how society runs. Things that people are willing to take time out of their day, every day, or every week, to do. That's how a church works, that's how a community works, that's how a school works. What are people willing to do, every single day? What's part of their lives? What's woven into the fabric of their existence? The Internet's an indicator of what people are willing to do every single day.
CL: Explain how the Internet suddenly got here. People have been betting on the Internet, waiting for an Internet transformation for ten, fifteen years, and losing — losing a whole lot of money. And suddenly it seems to be here. What happened?
SN: Two changes have happened in the last year. One, the Internet no longer needs to be manipulated by geeks. A person who does things can get to the Internet and put out their message in a polished, professional, usable form, without having to learn a big thick book of "teach yourself today's obscure programming language in 24 hours." That's the first change. The technology has become more transparent. The same way, in 1928, if you wanted a radio, you ordered it, you assembled it, if a tube burned out you took it apart, you ordered the tube, you put it in place, you played with it. In 1932, if you wanted a radio, you went out to Sears Roebuck, you bought a radio. That's the change between 1928 and 1932 in the radio. The second change, however, is a change in the society. The society wants forward movement. We no longer have a politics of complacency. The budget can be solved next year. The environment can be solved next year. Foreign policy can be solved next year. Today let's fight over our one little issue and gridlock.
The society and the technology rammed head-on, and Iraq was the spark that changed politics. Because a huge faction of the country said "We never voted for this. We never wanted this. We went to our representatives, they all voted for this." It was a a headlong rush. It was a blank check. What happened? It was no longer the 10% of the population that's against all wars under any conditions, under any circumstances. It was 50% of the population that said, "Maybe I would have voted for a war in Iraq, but I didn't vote for this war, this way, this time. Why wasn't I listened to? Why was the door shut?" And that's what drove the explosion of politics on the Internet.
And it was into that moment that two figures stepped. Howard Dean and Wesley Clark. And both of them spoke to the large section of America that is very very troubled about the rush to judgement and the way we did things. They were not pacifists. They were not disarmament buffs from way back. They were hard-headed centrist political figures. One had run a war. One said I've supported every intervention until this one. Into that environment stepped a group of people who were saying, "What were our options? What choices did we have? We never felt we had a choice. We just had this Weapons of Mass Destruction... There will be a mushroom cloud over New York City... We've gotta go in... We've gotta do this... We can't take a chance... We know he's bad.... We know he's dirty... We know he has the program.... We know he has tons and tons and tons of chemical stocks... We have to do it before he sells them to Al Qaeda. And it was a kind of pitch that just rolled over everybody.
And in the wake of the invasion people siad There weren't weapons of mass destruction. There was no program. We didn't go in because he had weapons of mass destruction. We went in because he didn't. We didn't go in because he was a threat. We went in because he wasn't. We were lied to. What happened? Why was there this rush to judgement? And because there was no outlet through the establishment media, there was no channel which this voice could speak in a coherent fashion — because the establishment media had reduced the story down to anti-war people carrying signs the way they had for 30 years. We have to vote with the hard-headed political realists. Suddenly the hard-headed political realists didn't look realistic. They looked like a huge boondoggle which was unnecessary, and, as Wesley Clark said, optional surgery.
And that was the explosion. When you had people who had supported the idea of a war saying I didn't support this war. And that gets to a larger point, which is the deep change that's happening on the Internet. The rebirth of Main Street America. Ten years ago, the Internet was the industrial park where technical people talked about technical things. It was the sewer system of our financial infrastructure, where banks talk to each other about which checks had been cashed. And it was the seedy side of town where people went to bar room brawls to yell about things that frustrated them, and look for seedy things that they couldn't find in the light of Main Street America.
The Internet has changed. My grandmother is on the Internet, and reads news on the Internet. My mother is a teacher. She reads political news off the Internet. Main Street America is no longer simply pushing back on a pyramid's reigning message down on them. It's saying We have coherent ideas and we want to be heard in full. We want to be people again, that are three dimensional and have the ability to articulate complex political ideas. I want to be able to communicate with my representative by more than a ten-world telegram and a three-word bumper sticker. That's the change. That's the rebirth of Main Street America on the Internet.
CL: Pick up the Clark Campaign.