Obama's website and some ideas for Indiana Democrats

For anyone thinking about political websites, I suggest reading this post at Rob Hyndman's blog. There are some good points about Obama's website.

The real issue, to my mind, is whether the political process is compatible with the core values of social media. Mathew notes this as well, with some doubt that campaigns are up to it. This is of course the conversation that Stowe had recently about PR, and it’s a very good point that can be equally made about most of our social institutions: authenticity is precisely what many try to avoid, and it’s hard to resist the conclusion that the rush to social media we’ve seen so far in this campaign is anything other than a cynical attempt to grab some headlines and get some “I’m with it” branding. I frankly doubt that’s true - the online success of the last Dean campaign and of netroots - except perhaps when it came to crunch time in Lieberman v. Lamont (entirely understandable, as a commenter briskly informed me some time ago) - tells us something about what the people want. And if enough people want it ….

I think there are some lessons for us here in Indiana. We won Madison County with a straight ticket vote of about 10,000. That's impressive but should also should be worrisome. How many of those votes were UAW retirees? How much longer can we rely on those retirees? Life expectancy says not much longer. So we need to recruit more people to the Democratic Party and I think Obama's site shows how this can be done.

Take a good look at the right hand sidebar of Obama's site. Take a look at the blog tab. These are the social networking tools mentioned above. With these the site creates a dialog between candidate and public. I see now reason these cannot apply to other candidates' sites and to party sites. Let me point out some benefits I see in this kind of dialog:

1. We get an opportunity to counter the effect of the Limbaughs and the Coulters and the Fox News types have had on framing the debate by speaking directly to the public. How well have we explained what the Democratic Party stands for since Reagan? As much as I admire Bill Clinton as a politician, he did little to remove the cloud created over us in 1980. Luckily, the Republicans only had Newt Gringrich and the moronic idea of impeachment.
   
2. The party gets an opportunity to hear from the public. I noticed at the last county party meeting the general age of those who are leading the party is older than myself. Not a problem in and of itself but a dialog with the public may keep them from fighting old fights with old tools. Beginning with Reagan the Republicans were able to sell themselves as the party of innovation, of bright ideas, of freshness. We know it was a con and the pigeons have come home to roost, but all that misses the point that the public bought the story. Democratic leadership was caught in the battles of yesteryear - the McGovernites over the war, the blue collar Dems over the Sixties - while people moved on.
   
3. In an age when campaigning has almost swamped the politicians' duties to govern, these tools provide a low cost means to keep our ideas and ideals out in front of the public. We get feedback from the public and use to adapt those ideas and ideals to current concerns.

Of course, this means fighting. No more shuffling and apologizing for our views. We can admit mistakes in policy but did we have to act so shamefaced about our errors? We cannot rely upon the people to recognize the reasonableness of our ideas if we do not fight for them. We cannot fight someone like Anne Coulter with sweet reasonableness nor can we fight her head on. Reasonableness has nothing to do with people like Coulter. Fighting her head on is to let her choose to the battleground. We can point out how silly she is, though. We have muddled through but with what result? Declining real wages, declining respect in the world, a war in Iraq, an Indiana governor who missed a career as an auctioneer.