Putting Ohio to Bed

Now having read four (4) class readings concerning the miniature presidential campaigns in Ohio, which in the end decided the election for Bush, I wanted to conclude with a bulleted list of Bush's Ohio accomplishments (and Kerry's failings), as the selected authors see it:

1. The Mehlman/Rove machine used an Amway-style operation, creating volunteer pyramids that had timetables and color charts and goals. This tactic not only allowed Mehlman/Rove to be anal-retentive and indulge in weekly statistic updates, but it drove volunteers to success with incentives.

2. The Kerry campaign almost unknowingly relied too much on the legwork of outside sources, whether they be labor unions or voter-registration/mobilization organizations like Americans Coming Together. His campaign seemed to be driven by a desire to beat Bush, but as Verini attested, not by putting the troops on the ground ready to fight.

3. The Bushies were able to out-Democrat the Democrats. As Mehlman explained to Bai, the Democrats had reduced a 10-point Bush lead in Ohio in 2000 to a 4-point lead with their ground game alone. To wage a war with more than 50,000 volunteers in the state -- one for every 50 voters -- certainly kept the Ohio Democratic ground machine, which had seen better days, in check.

4. Bush built a team of believers. His incentives for volunteers to perform were effective because the volunteers wanted signed photos of the president. They believed in him and what he stood for, and most important of all, they fought for their side, not against the other's. Kerry's campaign seemed inspired by a dreamlike mentality, as Verini put it, "No one could imagine a Bush win. The prospect was unthinkable. How could America reelect him? It couldn't." Few were passionate about Kerry, which makes assembling a productive volunteer machine a bit difficult."

5. Bush engaged new technology not in a groundbreaking way, but in a ground-gaining way. No, this wasn't the Dean campaign, but Mehlman/Rove certainly did use some of Dean's Internet-plus-populism-equals-movement elements. Bush wasn't an Internet candidate; the Bush team was merely Internet-savvy. The end result: the kind of offline-online synergy that Dean only partly accomplished.

In the end, I still say that the lack of passion in the Kerry campaign was the killer. I'm not sure a Dean candidacy would have won the election, but I know Democrats wouldn't be sitting around bemoaning a lack of positive motivation or lambasting their lack of synergy that the Kerry campaign came to embody. All candidates aside, the Dean machine would have been a much more appropriate match for the Mehlman/Rove plan.

Round on the End, High in the Middle

Excuse me if I sound a bit perplexed.

Reading about the "narrowcasting" that went on in Ohio in 2004 (in an article by Steve Purpura, Jacob Karczewski and Annie Hanson), I'm not sure I agree with the authors' conclusions. If the concept of narrowcasting (i.e., the opposite of broadcasting, a message that has been tailored specifically to a small segment of the voting population based on what we know about those voters) is set to be the marketing of the future, why aren't Americans Coming Together's efforts in Ohio getting recognition for its impressive ground campaign? Instead, it's Rove and his "Amway-style" field operations (read: the antiquated approach) that's getting all the kudos for a job well done. The old fuddy-duddies beat the slick new technology here.

What the Bush clan did in 2004 could be called mobilization in a true grassroots design -- where neighbors organize and influence one another's votes. As an Ohio native who spent the 2004 election working on a statewide campaign in Ohio, it actually sounded as if ACT might actually have been perceived a bit negatively in certain areas of the state. Remember the trouble Howard Dean had with his "Perfect Storm" in Iowa? Instead of orange hats, the ACT ground team had something else that screams "outsider" -- PDAs that showed political videos.

Perhaps I'm not being entirely fair. PDAs didn't cost the election for Kerry. Neither did ACT. But we should look at what effect (and it's certainly not all good) interest groups have on these campaigns. After all, had it been a neighbor that came to my house saying, "You gotta check out this video," we might have a different story on our hands. While 527s certainly helped boost the Kerry turnout in Ohio, their mere existence confounded Democratic efforts in the state and led to a lot of grassroots overlap, which could have been avoided had there not been eleventy billion PACs, 527s, etc. pushing voter mobilization on the Democratic side -- or, if the state party or the Kerry campaign taken control from the get-go. Instead, the Kerry team was hoping to be "crawling all over each other," according to Karen Hicks, who ran Kerry's field operations but more notably was my boss in New Hampshire.

In the end, Bush won because he had organization. All Kerry had were organizations.

Now It's Iran's Turn to Restrict Freedom

Does it excite anyone else that a recent phenomenon of political text messaging in Iran is being described as "somewhat of a craze"?

Yahoo! News reports that people -- especially the young and cynical -- have been participating in loads of back-and-forth text messaging about the candidates in their upcoming presidential election, many of which have been "highly acerbic." Sounds like a sure sign that the country might actually be pulling off free and fair elections, right?

Not to Iran, it doesn't. One of the founding members of the rock ensemble Axis of Evil, the Persian nation has never really been considered a beacon of freedom and/or democracy. On this issue, it doesn't stray from expectations. Iranian officials have reportedly been tinkering with the idea of shutting down all SMS service over their messaging woes, and the nation's ultra-conservative judiciary has threatened to prosecute anyone who "denigrates" a candidate in their messages.

But, before we chalk this one up to another case of Iranian-Grade censorship, let's consider what is frightening the Iranian candidates. The text messages have picked particularly on the ultra-conservative mayor of Tehran, who will purportedly bring about apocalypse and the separation of men and women into different work days -- both accusations the candidate has denied (Yep, even the apocalypse one).

Herein lies one of the hidden features of SMS technology: easy smear campaigns. Imagine push polls made easier, faster and harder to track. We as political professionals need to be wary -- not necessarily of this technology, but of its possible Rovian misuse to spread lies about one's opponent. And while shutting down the system or prosecuting those who talk bad about a candidate might be just a tad over the top, what's there to prevent the "text-smearing" of the next rising political star?

Google to Take Over World

Per our class last week when we talked about PayPal.com, here's an interesting article that can fit in the "What will Google not do in its efforts to dominate our society?" category.

Where'd My NYTimes Go?

Amy Gahran couldn't be more right about the complementary nature of RSS feeds to e-mail newsletters. Her point hits especially close to home as I am currently waging a vicious battle with my spam filter -- and losing miserably.

Recently, I've found about half of the lists I've opted into in my Yahoo! "Bulk Mail" folder, which operates seemingly independently of me and my wishes. Still, it lets through "Great Deals on All Adobe Produts!!!" Seriously, anything with more than one exclamation point should automatically be blocked into the "Stop This Madman" folder. [A teacher of mine once told me: "Use exclamation points as if you only have a dozen to use in your entire lifetime. That's how rare they should be." Needless to say, more than one in a sentence is a bit superfluous.]

I have a feeling that most of the e-mail I get from politicians or political causes go straight to "Bulk" and are shipped away each night to the netherlands of the Internet without me ever bothering to sift through the junk. In the end, I feel like a guy without his daily newspaper. Instead of assuming my neighbor stole it off your doorstep, I'm starting to assume my Bulk Mail folder ate my New York Times.

Britney to Blame for Spreading Viruses

Britney Spears gets around. At least her name does.

CNN reports that the most common tactic of hackers trying to entice people into willingly downloading damaging viruses is by using the name "Britney Spears." Of course, these viruses are doubly sad because not only do they often cause lots of computer trouble, but they need to trick the emotionally fragile or technologically innocent saps who will actually think they have an e-mail from Mrs. Federline or some juicy scoop about her in their inbox.

Similarly, the Michael Jackson fanatics got a scare last week when a virus was circulating in inboxes claiming to show an alleged suicide note from the King of Pop.

But Jackson wasn't even close to coming in second in this celebrity-virus affair. The Virus Prom King to Britney's queen was Bill Gates. Eww, gross.