Full disclosure: Larry Biddle is the domestic partner of CL Editor David Warner. To avoid any conflict of interest, Warner was not involved in the assignment, preparation or editing of this story in any way.
Imagine a future where telecommunications brings people together to vote for candidates who listen to them, who pay attention to their blogs and Facebook groups and text messages.
Imagine a campaign's precinct captains armed with cellphones, lists of supporters' cellphone numbers and e-mail addresses, making sure on Election Day that they turn out and vote.
That's not happening, despite all the campaign buzz online in the 2008 presidential campaigns, says Larry Biddle. He should know; Biddle was part of the first great "netroots" political success: the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign. And he says the true potential of the Internet in politics has yet to be fulfilled.
"How much are campaigns really listening?" he asks. "I don't see any evidence of that."
It was Biddle who helped perfect a system of raising campaign contributions online, cash that allowed Dean to climb to what looked like a clear shot at the White House. His work earned him the tongue-in-cheek title of the "arbiter of the new hotness" from Wired magazine — despite the fact that he clocks in at a very un-Internet-like 66 years of age.
From a small office in his St. Petersburg home, Biddle envisions so much more that could be done with technology to reinvigorate American democracy, to fulfill the agenda of the Dean campaign. Biddle was there the night of the Iowa primary when Dean, handed the wrong microphone and thinking he had to shout over an exuberant crowd, cut loose his fateful rant, capped by a manic "Yeahhhhhhhhhhhh." Biddle remembers turning to the campaign's finance director and asking her, "What was that?"
"The end, I am afraid," she answered prophetically.
Within hours, footage of the "I Have a Scream" speech virally penetrated the global network. It was remixed, mashed up, set to music, dubbed onto unrelated videos and replayed constantly on content-hungry 24-hour cable news outlets. Dean, made to look like a madman, sank like a rock.
The Internet giveth, and the Internet taketh away.
Nearly four years later, Biddle and 10 other campaign staff members from the Dean effort have come together to write a book, Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons From the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics. Their account really isn't about Howard Dean himself; it's about political change and technological transformation, lessons that anyone interested in revitalizing the nation's democracy can use, regardless of political ideology.
Biddle was not a technology whiz when he landed with Dean; his background was in arts fundraising and two tours of campaign duty as a traditional Democratic finance director for a Pennsylvania state Senate campaign and a U.S. Senate race in Maine. He was hired by the Dean campaign to raise money with direct mail, telephone solicitations and "whatever possible through the Internet."
In the book, Biddle recounts his first big breakthrough in online fundraising, an e-mail solicitation as the campaign neared the deadline for its quarterly report. Biddle chose to break with convention and sent an e-mail that looked like a personal postcard from Dean himself. Biddle asked for an odd goal of $48,326 (he made the number up) because it looked more authentic than a rounded-off amount. He hit the jackpot, raising well above that number. Dean's e-mail list eventually swelled to 600,000 people.
But as Dean himself writes in one of the book's chapters, the key lesson of the campaign wasn't online fundraising: It was about building a community that traveled seamlessly between the virtual and the real world. Online, they gave money and organized. Then they showed up for Dean's speeches and rallies.
Today, political campaigns are spending lots of time and effort on the Internet and technology — but in the wrong way, Biddle insists. They haven't learned the real lesson of the Internet and are trying to force political messages out through the medium instead of allowing users in and building a relationship with them. Biddle's key admonition: Let the users drive the process and tell the campaign what those users want and need. "What they value has got to be the engine for making the site really valuable," he says. Having that kind of relationship produces the most valuable political currency: word of mouth.
The Dean campaign also opened the door for a new type of civic involvement. "It democratized politics and the Internet to a large degree," Biddle says. "People could access politics in the middle of the night in their pajamas."
And that, in turn, means that political groups and campaigns have to act differently, too. "Today's [online] organizations have to become communicating organizations," he continues. "Communication implies something that the user wants or finds of value," such as information or a sense of belonging or of being heard. When you do that, "you substantially increase the value of the relationship," Biddle says.
Biddle went on to work in the Florida campaigns of Betty Castor and Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink. He now applies the Dean lessons to nonprofit groups with his consulting firm, PlanningWorks. He gives strategic advice on how to close the loop between constituencies and organizations with technology. And he holds out hope for politics.
"If we really want to have democracy," Biddle says, "we've got to have the users be heard."
This article appears in Nov 7-13, 2007.