The Internet and American Presidential Politics

Dick Morris, former politcal consultant to Presidents turned columnist and Fox News Channel talking head, has a very interesting column in the New York Post on what the use of the Internet by the Dean campaign means for the future of politcal campaigning in America.

He says:

The larger message of the Dean candidacy is that the era of TV-dominated politics is coming to a close after 30 years. With dwindling audiences and an increasingly sophisticated electorate, the 30-second ad and the seven-second soundbite are losing their power to control the political dialogue. Taking their place is grassroots organizing, made possible by the Internet, in which candidates grow from the outside, mobilizing on the hustings, guerrilla style, before they take their act to the center stage of national politics.

After the collapse of the political bosses in the '60s and '70s, it seemed, briefly, that grassroots direct politics would become the new order of the day. In 1964, enthusiastic, young Republicans overthrew their party's Eastern establishment and nominated Barry Goldwater at a raucous convention in San Francisco. In 1972, the young Democrats had their day overthrowing the party elders and nominating George McGovern.

But both Goldwater and McGovern were crushed by the new force of television advertising. Lyndon Johnson defeated the Arizona Republican and Richard Nixon trounced the South Dakota Democrat with a torrent of negative advertising, marginalizing them on the right and left fringes of U.S. politics.

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But the habits that underlay this media domination of politics has ebbed. The top prime-time TV shows now draw 10-15 million households where once they enthralled more than 30 million at a shot. National television news no longer reaches 60 million homes every night, but has to settle for 20 million instead.

The low costs of Internet campaigning, and the viral way in which it spreads by word of mouth and person-to-person contact, is offering an alternative to top-driven, capital-intensive TV campaigning. A candidate like Dean- animated by a cause larger than his own ambition - can attract vital support and find himself catapulted into prominence by astute use of this new political tool.

Dean may falter as John McCain did, but the inevitable replacement of television with the Internet as the fundamental tool of political communication is destined to accelerate. The true answer to campaign-finance reform, the Internet will open a real possibility of a transfer of power to the people, much as the right-wing Goldwater Girls (like young Hillary Rodham) and the left-wing activists in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had hoped would happen decades ago.

As TV's power wanes, so will the power of money to control politics. Just as the political bosses faded into irrelevance, so the excessive power of fund-raisers and big donors is also likely to drop

I disagree with this, at least as far as the Democrats are concerned for 2004. The USA Today had an op-ed on the "Wealth Primary" that made clear that it was the same people, the same political monoculture, giving to Dean as to other Democratic candidates:

Even candidates running as insurgents can come to depend on a few well-known political funding sources. Democrat Howard Dean, for example, has generated buzz for raising more than $3.5 million via the Internet, much of it in small contributions. But new reports filed last week at the Federal Election Commission show Dean's fundraising still is heavily concentrated in affluent neighborhoods such as Manhattan, Beverly Hills and Georgetown.

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Based on midyear returns, the fundraising frontrunners for the Democratic nomination are John Kerry, John Edwards and Dean. And one New York ZIP code, 10021, is among the three leading sources of cash for all of the top five Democrats in the race.

The Internet's role in Dean's lead in fund raising is simple. Dean hit upon the right message with the Democratic money bags first and the internet allowed him to collect "impulse buy" fundraising contributions first. This is why every Democratic candidate save for Lieberman, has been running an anti-war/anti-Bush screed campaign. They are all shilling for primary cash and hoping that the public won't be paying attention for the General election campaign. (Karl Rove sure is.)

So the question remains, why are all the Democratic candidate risking their ultimate election prospects for money, if broadcast television is less powerful as Morris contends? The main reason is you have to win the primaries in order to get a shot at the general election. No money means you lose. And the people giving the money to Democratic candidates want to hear anti-Bush hate speech and anti-War diatribes about no blood for oil.

There are a number of other reasons as well. While costly network broadcasting is a declining force, narrow casting through various cable channels, key local TV broadcast markets and radio is still flipping expensive. Next, the cost of accurate political polling, AKA face to face polling, has gone up as people call screen out telephone polling along with obnoxious telemarketers. And last, the renewed and computer aided "get out the vote" mobilizations of core party voters takes a lot of money because it involves a lot of people.

Lieberman's finances compared to the other top Democratic candidates shows that his pandering opponents may have a real point.

Make no mistake that the Internet is a rising force in American politics. Exactly how it will cut as far as narrow moneyed interest groups versus narrow ideological interest groups versus populist mobilizations remains an open question. The one thing I am certain of is that money will remain the "mother's milk of politics."