The First Campaign; Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House

by Garrett M. Graff

• ISBN13: 9780374155032
• ISBN10: 0374155038
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2007-11-27
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

The 2004 election focused on events of the past-the intelligence involved in the Iraq invasion and the candidates' conduct during the Vietnam War-to the exclusion of a debate about the events of the future. The threads of politics, technology, and globalization have intertwined to reshape our lives and our future. The challenge for the candidates in 2008 will be to recognize the changes globalization has wrought and relate them to the political realm. They must help the nation tackle the seemingly disparate but actually very interconnected issues of technology, health care, trade, energy, and the environment and unite them into a governing philosophy.

Author Biography

A Vermonter, Garrett M. Graff was Howard Dean’s webmaster; at FishbowlDC.com, he was the first blogger to be granted credentials for a White House press conference. He is now an editor at Washingtonian magazine.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Period of Consequences	p. 3
The Last Campaign	p. 19
The Rise of the Anxious Class	p. 21
Google and People-Powered Politics	p. 50
The Democrats Reboot	p. 74
2008: The Lay of the Land	p. 90
The First Campaign	p. 123
Investing in Twenty-first-Century Technology	p. 125
Educating and Recruiting Twenty-first-Century Workers	p. 154
Caring for Twenty-first-Century Workers	p. 189
Powering a Twenty-first-Century Economy	p. 212
Web 2.0 Meets Campaigning 3.0	p. 247
Conclusion: Our Collective Future	p. 277
Notes	p. 293
Acknowledgments	p. 305
Index	p. 307
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Introduction

It’s nearly impossible to nail down the day a political campaign begins. Most consultants and pundits will say that it begins the day after the last election, but sometimes—especially with presidential campaigns—campaigns can have a time line even longer than that. It is now the conventional wisdom that the 2008 campaign—which is only now entering its major phase—will be the longest in modern American history. But when did it actually start? Did it start in February 2000 when Hillary Clinton announced that she was running for the New York Senate seat being vacated by Daniel P. Moynihan? Or did it start a month later, the moment when John McCain, drubbed by George W. Bush in South Carolina, dropped out of the race and began to prepare to fight another day? Did the real beginning come when John Edwards took a trip to New Hampshire after the 2004 election, or when Evan Bayh hired a staffer to work in Iowa, or when Barack Obama plopped down on Oprah Winfrey’s couch and said that he was open to running in 2008?

Historians someday will determine the starting point of the 2008 campaign based largely on who wins and winds up president. For the moment, though, November 30, 2006, is as good a starting point as any—for that day offered telling evidence of what had changed in American politics and what had not. On that day, some twenty-three months before Election Day, with the weather overcast with temperatures in the twenties in Iowa and overcast with temperatures in the sixties in Washington, MSNBC threw a party at the Smithsonian Castle in the capital to launch its “Decision 2008” coverage; the political insider newsletter the Hotline and the University of Virginia convened a panel of potential campaign managers representing potential 2008 candidates at D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Building; and, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, Governor Tom Vilsack announced he’d seek the presidency, becoming the first official candidate. So came together the three legs of a modern campaign: the press at the Smithsonian, the pundits at Hotline’s conference, and, almost an afterthought these days, the candidates themselves, represented by Vilsack in Iowa.

During an interview at stately Terrace Hill, the Iowa governor’s mansion, just west of downtown Des Moines, Vilsack had told a Washington Post reporter that as an underdog candidate he couldn’t afford to wait. “I don’t have the luxury that some folks have,” he said. “If I’m going to do this, I’m going to have to do it and do it hard from the git-go.”1 So while Hillary Clinton still played coy, and Rudolph Giuliani launched an exploratory committee, Vilsack strode with his family into the college gymnasium in Mount Pleasant, his hometown. Inside was a crowd of some seven hundred supporters and the local high school band, which was playing its version of “The Final Countdown” by Europe, which begins, “We’re leaving together but still it’s farewell.” It was meant to express Vilsack’s departure from the Iowa governorship for national politics, but it was, perhaps, not the most optimistic song one could have chosen.

After quieting the crowd chanting “Go, Tom, Go,” Vilsack followed a pattern of announcement established by many previous candidates: He declared that he’d seek the presidency in 2008, told his personal story—how he had been born in an orphanage and adopted by a family that struggled with alcoholism and prescription drug addiction—and then described his vision for the future of the country. His campaign theme, he declared, would be “the courage to create change.” America, he said, was struggling. It needed bold leadership, a readiness to change, and the courage to attack the massive problems looming ahead. He was running, he explained, “to replace the anxiety of today with the hope of tomorrow and to guarantee every American their birthright: opportunity.” The crowd, with many holding signs emblazoned with a Great War–vintage V, applauded.

His speech completed, Vilsack headed to the airport, where he boarded a plane that would take him to five states in five days to repeat the speech for the crowds and the cameras. It was an approach so conventional as to defy his campaign’s message of change. Only a few weeks later, admitting that he couldn’t make headway in a crowded field of prodigious fund-raisers, he would drop out—months before most of the other candidates had even entered the race.

Back in Washington that same November day, representatives of a dozen different phantom campaigns—from Mitt Romney’s not-yet-existing campaign to John McCain’s not-yet-existing campaign to John Edwards’s more-or-less-existing campaign—talked shop before an audience of several hundred people about the nascent race. The various consultants, pollsters, would-be strategists, and senior advisers were just the tip of the billion-dollar industry that was to be the 2008 presidential campaign. Add to the dozen different campaigns represented onstage those not-yet-existing campaigns that weren’t present, and there were a good score of candidates out there, circling, waiting, testing. Fred Thompson’s name was barely on the radar at that point, Michael Bloomberg’s interest in the presidency was just a rumor, and Barack Obama’s race-changing decision to enter was still two months down the road.

The energy onstage was infectious nonetheless. As keynote speaker James Carville, aka the “Ragin’ Cajun,” strode across the stage,

warming up the crowd for the debates and discussions to come,

he explained that the 2008 race promised to be one of the most

exciting—perhaps the most exciting—presidential campaigns in nearly a century. What a campaign it would be!

Carville was right: The campaign would be like none in recent memory, for both parties’ nominations were wide-open. Soon there were five larger-than-life icons of American politics circling the race, including John McCain and four known by first name only: Hillary, Al, Barack, and Rudy. For only the second time since 1920, when Republican Warren Harding battled Democrat James Cox, there was no president or vice president running for reelection (and the other time, in 1952, there was Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general who had just won World War II). For the first time since 1940, there was no obvious Republican front-runner, like Reagan in 1980, Bob Dole in 1996, and George W. Bush in 2000. After a number of dreary campaigns run by political lifers—Walter Mondale’s in 1984, Michael Dukakis’s in 1988, George Bush’s in 1992, Bob Dole’s in 1996—there was suddenly an outsize collection of talent and worldly achievement in the presidential arena; even the “second-tier” candidates like Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, and Sam Brownback had résumés to envy.

And yet the panel of campaign strategists in Washington was no less conventional than Vilsack’s speech in an Iowa gym. For the strategists, to all appearances, were preparing to run campaigns much like the ones they had run in the past, and the large and open field had obscured a much more important fact: that since George W. Bush was elected in 2000, the world had changed. While the 2008 race, strictly speaking, would be the third of the new century, it would be the first campaign of a new age—an age in which the transformations brought by globalization and technology have changed America’s place in the world, and so (whether the candidates realize it or not) have changed both the substance and the manner of presidential politics to a degree not seen in more than a century.

When the Supreme Court settled Bush v. Gore in 2001, it was a very different world. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were in the planning stage, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were in power, blogs and podcasts barely existed, cell phones were a novelty, BlackBerrys were barely a year old, and the iPod was only an idea on a drawing board at Apple. Google was in its infancy, and MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube were years away. Since then—and while Bush and John Kerry traded ripostes about their Vietnam service in 2004—the world had changed; in the formulation of the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, it had gotten flat.

Over the past eight years, Americans could sense the change at every turn—every time they picked up a plastic good with the “Made in China” label and every time they dialed an 800 number for customer service and found themselves talking to someone in Bangalore. Industries and businesses that were once local are now international. Companies are no longer tied to a specific town or block—or even to a specific nation. We see it in Greensburg, Indiana, where just a few years ago foreign-made cars often were in danger of being vandalized in a city made up of GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Now it cheered the announcement that Honda would build a new plant there, and three hundred red-shirt-clad residents formed themselves into a human “H” logo. We see it in the images beamed back by “citizen journalists” in the wake of the 2004 South Asian tsunami long before news crews or rescue workers can reach them. We see it in every Google search by a seventy-year-old and every thirteen-year-old’s MySpace page or Facebook profile, and in the thirty-three billion text messages that Chinese citizens sent to celebrate the New Year in 2007, the year of the pig.

What’s more, we see it, more and more of us, in the world of electronic communication epitomized by the World Wide Web. In 2000, much of the world still used the slow (and noisy) dial-up connections. By the beginning of 2007, nearly 90 percent of Americans were using a broadband connection to access the internet, up from just over

50 percent a year earlier, and more than one of every three Americans was using the Web wirelessly. According to research by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, by mid-2007, only about 15 percent of Americans remained solidly off-line, while 30 percent were at the other extreme, using the Web to its fullest by texting, e-mailing, posting, networking, and tagging. Today there are more new-economy “creative” workers in the country than there are traditional blue-collar workers.2 A blog like the left-leaning DailyKos.com has more “inbound links,” that is, more sites linking to it and talking about it, than the Chicago Tribune, and the right-leaning blog Instapundit.com has more inbound links than Sports Illustrated.

Alas, we are only just beginning to see the effects of these changes on presidential politics. In important ways, the 2008 election will seem like the previous ones. America’s stance toward Iraq, Iran, and North Korea will certainly be issues. Images of terrorism’s horrors will fill our video screens. Homeland security will be debated. Hot-button wedge issues like gay marriage, flag burning, and abortion will no doubt rear their ugly heads at one point or another. Every one of these issues, though, pales in importance to the question raised by globalization: What role will America play in a globalized world? In the same way, the question of how the candidates align themselves on the usual issues pales in comparison to the question of what their vision of America’s role in a globalized world is and how they will commit the time, resources, and leadership of their campaigns to confronting the challenges of the new, wired global economy.

It happens that the election comes along precisely when the question is getting urgent, when the hour is getting late. The 2004 election focused on events of the past—the intelligence involved in the Iraq invasion and the candidates’ conduct during the Vietnam War—to the exclusion of a debate about the events of the future. The threads of politics, technology, and globalization have intertwined to reshape our lives and our future. The challenge for the candidates in 2008 will be to recognize the changes globalization has wrought and relate them to the political realm. They must help the nation tackle the seemingly disparate but actually very interconnected issues of technology, health care, trade, energy, and the environment and unite them into a governing philosophy.

This next election, this next president, and this next decade may be our last chance to make changes and address these looming challenges before they begin to become truly painful. The long-term national and economic security of the United States requires that in 2008 voters, the press, and the candidates themselves look beyond merely the short-term national security threats posed by Iraq and Al Qaeda to examine the full picture of the world today

Tom Vilsack, from his perch in the American heartland, knew just how much the world had changed and how the nation’s leadership had ducked the challenge. “Let us stop the endless talk. Let’s have a campaign of serious thought about serious problems that our nation faces,” he told the crowd on the day of his announcement. “Let us have the courage to create the change that builds a twenty-first-century American economy.”

The concerns and questions he raised that day will far outlast his campaign, for they are—or ought to be—the questions concerned citizens of all stripes are asking. When will Washington realize and address the changes that have reshaped the lives of every American since the 2000 election? How much longer can the United States thrive while its leaders fail to confront the challenges of the future? Who will lead the way?

Clearly, we cannot afford for our candidates to run the last campaign all over again. Which candidate will have the confidence—in his or her leadership and in America’s leading role in the world—to run the first campaign of the new age?

 

Excerpted from The First Campaign by Garrett M. Graff. Copyright © 2007 by Garrett M. Graff. Published in November 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Excerpted from The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House by Garrett M. Graff
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.