Campaigns Aren’t Conversations
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 20th, 2007 11:50 pm“Campaigns are conversations.” If I hear this one more time, I swear my head is going to explode. Campaign 2008 already has its most overused cliche, at least among us techie types.
“Let the conversation begin,” blares Hillary Clinton’s Web site. “Start the conversation,” says Chris Dodd’s. “This campaign is about YOU,” proclaims Barack Obama’s. Jeff Jarvis has a new blog on Presidential video dedicated to the Platonic ideal of campaigns as a neverending bull session with the voters.
Problem is, I don’t get the point of this exactly. At some level, this seems like no more than a basic transposition of Doc Searls’ “markets are conversations,” which is brilliant as applied to business because markets are inherently leaderless. It’s trickier to apply this pure and abstract ideal to politics where the voice of the people matters but where voters can and do evaluate candidates as leaders who stand on principle and don’t just do things because they’re popular.
On another level, I don’t see how any of this is new. The ideals of candidates listening to voters, answering questions, or holding town halls where even hostile questioners get their say isn’t exactly new. Politics in America has featured some element of conversation since right about the Boston Tea Party, and Iowa and New Hampshire living rooms are arguably pretty darn representative. Candidates who don’t have some sense of how to interact with regular people usually face prospects far worse than an unfavorable review on TechPresident. It’s called losing.
Candidates need to know how to converse. But they also need to know how to lead. They need to be able to stand on principle, even if that means telling everyone that they’re conversing with, “Sorry, but you’re wrong.” When America is under attack, I don’t want my President to have a conversation with me. I want him to lead.
Ronald Reagan, JFK, and FDR inspired the country with soaring rhetoric that belied the latter’s casual-sounding Fireside Chats. In the history books, they stand in marked contrast to conversational leaders like Bill Clinton, who wasn’t exactly known as a man of bold principle. Last November, I was on a panel with Robert Moran of StrategyOne, who remarked that Reagan would have made a great Internet candidate. I couldn’t agree more. Why? Because he genuinely inspired us. He came up from the people, not from Washington. And yet Reagan was the master of the set piece, not the conversation. His radio addresses that made him President and his greatest speeches once he got there were not the product of a conversation or a committee, but lonely brilliance jotted down on yellow legal pads.
In the age of new media, the worst thing someone can be guilty of is being inauthentic. That’s not exactly a new insight either, but the YouTubeization of politics amplifies a candidate’s past twists and contradictions many times over. That means you don’t have a “conversation” with someone that’s really a monologue. Most of Hillary Clinton’s invitations to “chat” are immediately followed by a fade to black. Faking a conversation is worse than not having one at all.
I’m involved in online politics because I think the Internet can help unpack the spin, get smart people involved who wouldn’t otherwise played a role, and show candidates as they really are, through a medium that’s truer and more expansive than 30-second ads or 8-second soundbites. The first rule of thumb governing all of this is don’t ever try and be something you’re not. If your candidate is a man of deep conviction with a clear sense of what they want to accomplish, don’t pretend they are going to lead by plebiscite and practice democracy by Web chat.
Don’t get me wrong here. I don’t think candidates should live in bunkers (because if you do, you lose). Blogs, wikis, social media, wisdom of crowds — all of that, I’m there. But at some point the conversation has to end and leadership has to start. I want candidates who are real, and tell me stuff I don’t already know — not just what I want to hear.
And that’s ultimately the road this new therapeutic, conversational culture is leading us down: getting candidates to bend to the prevailing winds and hence not being leaders at all.
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Tagged: conversation 
hillary clinton online politics ronald reagan strategy
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