Joe Lieberman has a fight on his hands. Until very recently, the three-term Democratic senator and former presidential candidate was cruising to re-election in Connecticut, his home state. But the 64-year-old grandee now finds himself in sudden danger of falling victim to a new political life form: the internet candidate.
Ned Lamont, a cable television entrepreneur, has come from nowhere to pose a serious threat, with the help of internet fundraising and anti-war bloggers outraged at Lieberman’s gung-ho support for the Iraq invasion.
Less than two months ago, the Connecticut senator was 27 percentage points ahead of Lamont in the polls. By last week that had shrunk to six points, with seven long weeks to go before the Democratic primary election.
Over the weekend, in a sure sign of nerves, the Lieberman camp ”went negative”, producing a much-ridiculed attack advert in the form of a cartoon portraying the upstart as a bear cub running as a proxy for Republican interests.
What seemed at first to be a quixotic challenge to a Democratic titan is turning into an epic battle that could signal the direction the party will take.
It is a test of strength between the old way of doing politics built around a hierarchical party machine and the new campaigns fought by the so-called ”netroots”, who organise themselves and raise money on the web. The first netroots uprising was the Howard Dean insurgency, but when the former Vermont governor imploded as a candidate in 2004 the new politics lost some of its glamour.
If Lamont stages an upset in the Connecticut primaries on August 8, it may signal the point of no return for American politics. ”It will change the kind of person who goes into politics,” said Arianna Huffington, who runs the political blog Huffington Post. ”It will end the dominance of consultants who have been running campaigns in the same focus-group, poll-driven way that has taken the soul out of politics.”
For the time being, this conflict between old and new is being fought out principally inside the Democratic party. That is mostly because the Republicans went through a similar shake-up two decades ago, driven by more basic technology. Social conservatives used talk radio to put their stamp on the party, making abortion a litmus test for candidates, for instance. Rightwing bloggers are ploughing the same furrow and consequently having less of an impact. Meanwhile, the Republican establishment has quietly incorporated the other elements of the revolution, such as internet fundraising, into its arsenal.
The blossoming of the web has turned the Democratic party on its head. When liberal bloggers held a convention in Las Vegas this month, many heavyweights were in attendance. Harry Reid, the party’s Senate leader, gave the keynote address. A former presidential hopeful, retired general Wesley Clark, worked the corridors and Mark Warner, a former Virginia governor and leading presidential candidate for 2008, threw a $50 000 party for bloggers, wooing them with champagne, chicken satay and a chocolate fountain. Access to opinion-makers was worth every cent, a Warner spokesperson said
The star of the ball was Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a 34-year-old liberal super-blogger. His running commentary on Democratic politics, the Daily Kos, is the most popular political blog in the country with more than 500 000 hits a day, and his support has been critical to Lamont’s challenge.
”It’s a testament to how much influence we have that this race is even competitive,” he told The Guardian. ”Incumbents almost never lose, but people in Connecticut were tired of seeing the party perverted by Joe Lieberman … This is a testament to people power.”
A video ad for Moulitsas’s new book, Crashing the Gate, shows a line of people tugging on a rope in an unsuccessful effort to move a donkey (the symbol for the Democratic party). Moulitsas walks past them and gets it going with a sharp kick to the backside.
No one now doubts the power of the internet to fuel anti-establishment candidates such as Ned Lamont. It allows them to raise large amounts of money in small contributions with minimal outlay, bypassing the big corporate donors who were once the kingmakers.
The technique was pioneered by the Dean campaign, and the breakthrough came at one of its lowest points when the candidate gave a disastrously poor performance on a television talk show.
Joe Trippi, his campaign manager, recalled: ”I getting ready to pack my bags when my web manager came in and said, ‘Something incredible is happening. We’re raising more money per minute than we ever have.’ People were not prepared to see the end of his candidacy. That was the moment when I thought, we’re really changing things.”
In this year’s congressional campaigns, internet fundraising is the norm.
”The Dean campaign got everybody focused on the money,” said David Corn, the Washington editor for the Nation magazine, who also runs a blog. ”You didn’t have to use the candidate’s time, which is your most precious resource. Put a tin cup on the internet and it would magically fill.”
That is potentially good news for insurgents. It might allow challengers such as Mark Warner to stop Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. The New York senator is the queen of the traditional fundraising circuit. But in the anti-war blogosphere, she is excoriated. Warner, not having served in Congress, does not carry the burden of a voting record on the war. And while Clinton stayed away from Las Vegas last week, Warner used it to lay the groundwork for a guerrilla campaign. The former Virginia governor has also hired Jerome Armstrong, a Dean veteran now working on a whole new arsenal of web campaigning tools for 2008.
Arguably the most revolutionary part of the Dean experiment has not been embraced so enthusiastically by the politicians. It involved devolving real decision-making power to the activists, allowing them to have a say in setting the campaign agenda. For many Dean veterans, that devolution of power was what really energised the insurgency. They point out that Iowa, where the anti-war presidential bid collapsed, was one of the few states where they relied on a traditional campaign.
”What we figured out was there was extraordinary passion and energy and vitality out there. We didn’t figure out how to use it properly,” said Zephyr Teachout, who ran the Dean web campaign. ”It’s like finding oil. The first machines don’t run that well on it, and it takes a while to figure out the combustion engine.”
If the only lesson politicians draw from the Dean experience is that the web is a good place to raise money, Teachout argues, they will fail to break through the apathy and cynicism of the electorate. But she has left politics and is teaching at the University of Vermont. The top ”Deaniacs” who stayed in politics are mostly working as fundraising consultants for Democrats in Washington. It is far from clear at this stage who has coopted whom — the blogosphere or the political establishment. – Guardian Unlimited Â