Chris Bowers’ Tunnel Vision

Online politicos are always debating the right metrics for online political strength. TechPresident looks at site traffic, MySpace and Facebook friends, Meetup members, Eventful demands. I prefer harder metrics generated from the campaigns themselves, like money raised, e-mail list size, number of house parties, volunteers mobilized online.

If you’re Chris Bowers, none of that matters. Instead, what “stuns” Bowers is the Republicans’ “complete lack of creativity and self-directed content production.” He’s talking about some GOP user-generated video contests.

I’m not really sure why Republican activists have apparently no ability to engage in self-starting activism of this nature. I’ve floated some theories on this in the past, but this complete lack of creativity and self-directed content production stuns even me. Republicans are clearly facing a massive creativity gap at the grassroots level, one that cannot be easily explained away. …

Truly and utterly pathetic. Republicans seem to have created an army of zombies that can’t think for themselves. In the past, I have been reluctant to apply the term dittohead to the Republican rank and file, but their continuing failures to conduct any self-starting activism whatsoever is making the word more apt all the time.

This is esoteric to the nth degree. Not only does this not matter in the grand scheme of 2008. It doesn’t even particularly matter in the new media+politics space. Republicans don’t have as many people indulging their “creative”, artistic side. They’ll never win the Avenue A/Razorfish office straw poll.

In a nutshell: Republicans should resign themselves to endless Democratic victories because they don’t have the support of famous Hollywood directors like Rob Reiner and their wannabees.

In 2004, Democrats had all sorts of “creative” people making ads on their behalf. I seem to remember, based on some digging I did at the time, that the Hitler/MoveOn ad was made by someone at an ad agency in Seattle. As discussed at a post-election forum at the University of Pennsylvania, MoveOn also had Hollywood directors voluntarily submitting anti-Bush ads for air later in the cycle. Strangely enough, most of the ads — TLC’d in the mecca of creative genius — didn’t test as well as the dull and dark cookie cutter spots MoveOn aired instead.

But Bowers also ignores the most significant such contest held to date — Mitt Romney’s create-your-own ad contest, which received over 100 submissions. Smartly, Romney’s team provided users with the raw materials with which to remix spots, lowering the barriers to entry. The winning ad — which actually made it on the air where it could influence voters — was far better than anything the Romney media team had produced to date (a remarkable achievement considering the amateur ad-maker limited himself to the same footage used by the pros).

Bowers has to grasp at straws (focusing on ads made from scratch) because the Democratic field has become stagnant online while much of the interest and energy is surged to the Republicans. I don’t feel much kinship with supporters of rhymes-with-Pon-Raul but you can’t deny that in terms of “self-starting online activism,” the Paulbots run loops around the netroots. In October, second tier Mike Huckabee raised more online than second tier John Edwards and Chris Dodd combined — the top two finishers in the almighty Kos straw poll. Zephyr Teachout, Howard Dean’s former online community director, now says that Huckabee has the best online campaign of any candidate.

On the blogs too, top tier Democrats are conspicuously lacking in “self-starting online activism.” In October, unofficial candidate blogs for Giuliani, Romney, Huckabee, and Thompson had three times the activity as unofficial blogs for Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and Richardson.

Rather than pointing fingers at Republican experimentation and innovation, Bowers would do better to examine the netroots’ failure to evolve since 2003, their staggering failure to inflict so much as a scratch on Hillary Clinton’s inevitability, and the fact that their online energy has been drained to celebrity-minded forums like Facebook and MySpace and in-house campaign email lists where candidates are free to ignore them. When Barack Obama, your best hope for defeating Hillary Clinton, feels free to flagrantly blow you off, what does that say for the vaunted influence of the netroots?

Tagged: chris bowers netroots online politics

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