This is an unpublished, original story written during the 2006 midterm elections for the capstone project of the Department of Journalism at New York University.
For spending all night in a mad house, Alex Pareene looks sprightly.
His tweed jacket is a bit rumpled, but there’s no restraining the ironic anti-Wonkette shirt beneath it, crisp and white with fire-engine red piping. As the editor of the popular political blog his shirt derides, Pareene’s usually known for his biting sarcasm. Tonight, Election Night 2006, he seems less acerbic.
“I’m being fairly antisocial,” he says.
The din in the dark lounge grows louder as flatscreen monitors reflect new election results. Laptop keyboards clatter. Half-empty bottles of Yuengling clink. Wolf Blitzer’s voice drones on.
“At least it’s an open bar,” he types, adjusting his black horn-rimmed glasses as he perches on a barstool.
Pareene is in Tryst Coffeehouse, a well-worn Washington favorite that is surprisingly lively for a Tuesday night. A few minutes ago, CNN reporter Jacki Schechner’s microphone was in his face. Pareene answered honestly, and they left. “Everyone here subscribes to the idea that ‘all publicity is good publicity,’ ” he says. But he doesn’t need any more publicity. He needs to find more exit polls.
And maybe another drink.
Since taking the job at Wonkette in January 2006, Pareene has become just one more voice – albeit a loud one – in a growing crop of political bloggers hell-bent on changing the way American politics are done. About 25 nationally-recognized bloggers occupy the coffeehouse for CNN’s first E-lection Nite Blog Party, laptops aglow.
They are the rogues of the blogosphere: wired mercenaries who edit mostly amateur websites that provide news, information and, above all, opinions to rapidly growing and devoted audiences – often partisan – drawn by nothing more than the shared interest of the blog’s topic and the caustic tone of the editor writing it.
“The activist would say they put all their efforts online,” said Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor and Publisher. “They’d say, ‘look, we’re influencing this every day. Civil disobedience is so passé.’ ”
Though this night may be Pareene’s finest hour, technology is changing the industry of politics rapidly. Pareene and his fellow bloggers may be on the verge of replacement by embedded video sites like YouTube just as they were still realizing their own potential.
“People like video as opposed to words. The whole trend is against words,” Mitchell said. “If you believe that the young generation has an increasingly short attention span, then who’s gonna care about bloggers?”
During the past seven years, blogs have gone from an obscure trend for the tech-savvy to a legitimate alternative to mainstream news outlets. The movement began with Bob Somerby’s Daily Howler in 1998 and Mickey Kaus’ Kausfiles in 1999. This year, bloggers unexpectedly derailed candidates across the political spectrum, like Senate candidate Harold Ford, Jr., D-Tenn. and Sen. George Allen, R-Va., whose election at one point seemed all but certain, leaving campaign managers and talking heads alike with jaws slacked.
“The new politics is all online,” Mitchell said. “Street protests and door-to-door aren’t going to work anymore.”
So this is the future of the political machine: a mishmash of 20-, 30- and 40-somethings wearing striped button-downs and blazers, nursing cups of coffee, cold lager and glasses of sauvignon blanc, watching virgin poll results from a basement or neighborhood hangout and regurgitating a spiked version of them in real-time, much to the delight of readers and to the chagrin of every politician who’s ever strayed from a prepared speech.
“It gives the chance to be involved [in the political process],” Mitchell said. “It’s a chance in your spare time to have a voice and link up with other people. Everyone’s retreated to their basement on their computer.”
***
When Ned Lamont decided to challenge three-term U. S. Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut in the Democratic primary this year, he decided early that toughness would be a mark of his campaign. So would technology.
Created in early May 2006, the LamontBlog’s snarky tone and public accessibility boosted Lamont to a primary victory over Lieberman and garnering him instant national celebrity. Post headings such as “Tents, Tables and an Air of Arrogance,” “Senator Lieberman’s Contempt for the Local Press” and “ ‘Paid-for Thuggery’ ” reflected the tone of his new site.
“Advocacy bloggers certainly contributed to moving Ned Lamont front and center,” said Kate Phillips, political editor of NYTimes.com. “And I do think candidates, politicians and party operatives are examining what happened there and trying to develop their own online, so-called grassroots blogs – on the right and left.”
After his defeat in the Democratic Primary, Lieberman retooled his candidacy, filing for the general election as an independent. After conducting a high-profile staff shakeup, he launched a blog of his own.
But senior Lieberman advisor Dan Gerstein’s first post suggested some remorse that the campaign hadn’t engaged Lamont in this area earlier.
“As even our friends over at the Lamont campaign will tell you, this is long overdue,” Gerstein wrote. “The fact is, for the last several months we ceded the online debate to our rivals.”
Face-to-face again in the general election and buoyed by his new approach to the campaign, Lieberman overtook Lamont in most polls and rode a new political affiliation and campaign strategy to his fourth term in the Senate.
The turnabout raised some old familiar questions about the so-called “netroots.” Are they a paper – or more appropriately an electronic – tiger? Can they create a movement or merely point to one? Does their support actually translate to sustainable turnout in votes?
For many Americans, the term “blog” has only recently morphed away from one of those annoying catchphrases tech-savvy teenagers banter about. Short for “Web log,” the term was coined in 1997 to describe a Web site that allowed anyone to post daily content about anything.
“A lot of conservative types thought the mainstream media was too liberal,” Mitchell said. “They thought even with the existence of Fox News, they needed to be watchdogs. A lot of liberals felt that way, too.”
Unlike mainstream media outlets, bloggers focus their efforts on narrow topics, often becoming self-proclaimed experts as their popularity (and Web traffic) rise. As blogs proliferated, they increasingly became conduits for genuine news and serious thought.
By October 2006, more than 55 million blogs were counted. Among them was Anna Marie Cox, founder of Wonkette, the popular political site now run by Pareene. Other popular political sites include Andrew Sullivan’s AndrewSullivan.com, Ron Gunzburger’s Politics1.com, Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire, Jerome Armstrong’s MyDD and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga’s DailyKos.
“Markos might not sit in the basement in his pajamas, but many of the others do,” Mitchell said. “Electorally oriented blogs like DailyKos are the ones affecting the political process.”
Few outside Washington cared about the underground phenomenon until December 2002, when bloggers staged a dramatic show of force by propagating the seemingly nostalgic comments Senate majority leader Trent Lott made about the segregationist days of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party.
Mainstream press initially buried the incident, but the weight of ongoing reasoned debate by bloggers – including John Marshall’s Talking Points Memo – pushed the story onto the front page.
Four days later, Lott made an official apology; after two weeks, he relinquished his leadership position. Suddenly Web journalist Matt Drudge wasn’t the only civilian drawing blood from the political establishment.
Bloggers 1, mainstream media 0.
“The Trent Lott thing was a modern day classic blog moment,” Mitchell said. “It’s an example of something that normally wouldn’t have made it at all [into the headlines]. Blogs just let their teeth sink into it and didn’t let it go.”
The first politician to harness the power of the blogging movement was Vermont governor Howard Dean, a relatively small-time presidential candidate in 2004 whose use of his own blog proved to be a new way to rally grassroots constituents.
By his own admission in a Jan. 2004 issue of Wired magazine, Dean “accidentally” fell for the allure of the communal nature of the Internet and ran with it. But the accident proved somewhat successful, and Dean gained the respect of a community – and his critics – by applying the basic tenets of social networking to his campaign.
“I’d vote for SpongeBob SquarePants over Howard Dean,” wrote Derek James in his political blog, Thinking as a Hobby. But Dean’s campaign, James wrote, is being run “in a very smart, very democratic way.”
The unorthodox strategy helped Dean raise more money than any other Democratic candidate: According to a 2004 BlogPulse survey, Dean’s campaign raised $7.4 million of a total $14.8 million via the Internet in the third quarter of 2003 – with a remarkably modest average donation of less than $100.
To date, some of the most popular bloggers have been hired by campaigns looking for an edge: Peter Daou of the online magazine Salon signed on to blog for Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.; Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits has consulted for Straight Talk America, the political action committee of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.; and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD has appeared on the payroll of Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, Congressman Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Democrat Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia.
The convenience of the blog is too hard to ignore, said Phillips, whose duties at NYTimes.com include writing for “The Caucus,” a Times political blog.
“As voters and people and their children live more and more online, they are the microtarget that seems to be contemporary, at least for the moment,” Phillips said. “It’s the communication tool that requires little more than signing up for a daily e-mail or an RSS [Really Simple Syndication] feed.
“ ‘Tell me what’s happening today, and please tell me what it means.’ Even my elderly mother likes the idea, [and] not just ‘cause her daughter’s doing it.”
***
Just as campaigns were finally getting a handle on the blog phenomenon, hiring staffers under titles like “netroots coordinator” and “online press secretary,” a new technological instrument hit screens around the nation: embedded digital video.
Though tech-savvy campaign staffers were familiar with the technology and often posted in-house political advertisements on their official campaign site, few were prepared for the arrival of free video sharing site YouTube in February 2005.
“Blogs used to be just acres and acres of words,” Mitchell said. “Bloggers are linking to video more and more.”
In two short years, YouTube’s popularity exploded, landing it a $1.65 billion deal with Google, Inc. and the 2006 TIME award for Invention of the Year.
The catch?
As the 2006 midterm election heated up, campaigns uploaded their political advertisements to the site among the 60,000 videos added per day for greater reach. Alert citizen journalists captured spontaneous, off-message footage of candidates that campaigns hadn’t prepared for. And political campaigns courted the blogs that were incorporating these videos into their daily coverage.
“There was definitely an awareness [of blogs] in campaigns this season,” Pareene said. “It may have, in some cases, come too late. There was an awareness [among campaigns] that they had to get this message out to these [blogger] jokers, too, as well as the usual channels. Bloggers are the easiest people to buy off in the world.”
Soon, a flurry of viral videos stole headlines:
1. A Michael J. Fox advertisement on behalf of various Democratic candidates advocating stem cell research and his explosive condemnation by talk radio host Rush Limbaugh put the issue back on voters’ radar.
2. A race-baiting advertisement by the Republican National Committee suggesting Tennessee Democratic Rep. Harold Ford, Jr. prefers white women led to a tight Republican victory in the state.
3. A stream of bizarre videos from Florida – one of Republican Senatorial candidate Katherine Harris firing a .38 special handgun on the campaign trail and
4. Another of Republican House candidate Tramm Hudson exclaiming that blacks don’t know how to swim – translated to losses for both candidates.
5. A vague remark made by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., while stumping for a Democratic candidate in California was interpreted as an insult to the intelligence of soldiers in the armed forces, leading to his swift departure from the pre-election speaking circuit.
Of them all, the most potent was a candid home video of Sen. George Allen, R-Va., using the racial epithet “macaca” for a bystander of Indian ancestry during a campaign stop in his home state.
Allen fumbled for several days but eventually hired liberal blogger John Henke to handle damage control on the Web. His numbers at the polls dropped 16 percentage points, and erased his comfortable lead over Democratic candidate Jim Webb. But Henke’s words weren’t enough to turn back a tide as the videos gave bloggers visual ammunition to match their words.
“If you look at the way the Washington Post covered [the Allen gaffe], it barely registered at all,” Pareene said. “It became such a sustained story on the Internet. It became a meta story that the media could come back to.”
***
Eighty-three days before the 2004 Iowa caucuses, Dean told Wired magazine his way to take back the country: “If I give a speech and the blog people don’t like it, next time I change the speech.” Two years, nine months and 22 days later, the now-Democratic National Committee chairman capped his 50-state strategy with his party’s sweep of both houses of Congress. Bloggers covered every moment.
“Some people would say the reason the Democrats got so popular and won Congress is because there isn’t that anger in the streets [like there was during the Vietnam war],” Mitchell said. “It’s like there’s no backlash.”
The recent midterm election placed a new generation of political strategists and old-school political leaders at a technological crossroads. Though Democrats won back both houses of Congress under the direction of Dean, a blogger favorite, there remain a few lost House seats that resisted technology’s best efforts. Is the blog effect a lot of partisan babble falling on the mostly deaf ears of a technologically-uninformed electorate?
“Massively overhyped, [blogs are] massively overhyped,” Pareene said, noting that Wonkette received 380,000 pageviews on Election Day and 450,000 on the following day, a record for the site.
“How many million viewers does the CBS news get every night? We’re the best trafficked blog, and we’re a minor faction of that,” he added, “but we’re slowly and gradually influencing the media channels that do influence people.”
Trivial as they may seem to some, there’s no denying the effects blogs have had on setting the agenda and framing elections. With the incestuous blogosphere doubling in size every five months and triggering nationwide campaign epidemics along the way, “Net Damage Control” might just be the most important campaign position in 2008.
“We have learned that online blogging and email can be the tipping point for networking in politics, and that tipping point is a lot more rapid and the impact is a lot greater and quicker than any of us imagined,” said Bob Fois, netroots coordinator for the failed Senatorial campaign of John Spencer, R-N.Y. “My only regret is that we didn’t start sooner.”
But the Howard Dean model of political success isn’t going away anytime soon. Though 100,000 daily visitors to Dean’s “Blog For America” didn’t guarantee him victory in the 2004 primaries, it put a dangerous political wild card firmly in the hand of citizens.
“Two years ago Howard Dean’s scream was shown on television 50 million times,” Mitchell said. “Any flub will end up on blogs.”
Weeks after Election Day, curious candidates such as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have begun looking toward the presidential election in 2008 by forming exploratory committees to start raising money. They just as well should be hiring web technicians, Pareene said.
“What it’s gonna lead to is better rehearsed and less spontaneous candidates,” Pareene said. “But that’s the single most effective way to prevent it from destroying your career.”
***
Back at Wonkette headquarters, Pareene is still tired and alone. Overnight, news of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation broke – on Comedy Central’s CC Insider blog, no less – and Pareene is skipping from site to site looking for more information and late results from the night before. His clothes are still rumpled and he’s nursing a serious hangover, one compounded by his early morning rise to start the workday again.
“I’m exhausted,” he says. “Our West Coast bureau chief had to tell me, ‘go to bed, for Christ’s sake.’ It was to the point where I couldn’t read words on the computer screen and news kept happening anyway.”
Despite lingering fatigue, Pareene presses on, noting a hijacked Wikipedia entry for Rumsfeld’s replacement, former CIA director Robert Gates, describing him as “a fag.” He smirks, takes a screenshot and posts it on Wonkette. Many of his favorite targets were slaughtered the night before, and Pareene said he needs new blood.
Maybe even bluer blood.
“Depending on how Congress goes, we could turn off a great part of our audience by turning our knives on them,” Pareene said. “But a great part of the appeal is [being] the angry guys sniping from the sidelines. We’ll have to see who plays the media better.”