I am getting some good feedback and pushback on my recent post speculating that if there is any direction to netroots given by opinion-leader blogs such as MyDD, Firedoglake, Americablog, Daily Kos, Eschaton etc, the direction for 2008 should be away from the presidential campaigns and towards more localized races. Within this argument were numerous assumptions about power, politics and process. I want to make those assumptions clear in four sections. The first is how I perceive the political incentive and thus power structure. The second is the role of coalitions while the third looks at power aggregation within coalitions. Finally, I have some significant assumptions about the netroots and small donors.
Political Assumptions
I assume that most politicians like their jobs and believe that they are doing a fairly good to very good job at their job. This implies that they would like to keep their job and that they will take positive steps that in their mind will increase the probability of gaining or keeping their job. I also assume that most politicians are like most people, on things that they are passionate about they will commit a massive amount of energy and effort, while on necessary but less than fully passionate tasks, they would not mind satisficing instead of optimizing their efforts. For most politicians fundraising is not a task that arouses full passion and commitment
Using the assumption of least resistance movement and decision making on non-core issues means that opinions and actions can be influenced by outside forces including the threat or promise of increased ease or opposition for future electoral support, logrolling support on a secondary issue to individual A for A's support on a critical issue for individual B with the expectation of future reciprocation and finally voting out of rational ignorance by using others that the politician respects as markers and opinion leaders.
Role of Coalitions
Every politician is elected by a coalition of competing and cooperating interests. The depth and width of issue, opinion and passion of the individual members of the coalition can vary widely. However there is almost never unaminity of opinion within the current winning coalition or within any plausible future winning coalition. As I wrote last week, every coalition has its chump which works hard and gets neither respect nor policy actions for its efforts. In the best campaigns the chump's role is minimal and it is rotated among the different factions that comprise the coalition so everyone believes that their high priority issues are at least being addressed and that the trade-offs of chumpdom occur on second and third levels of issue space.
This is more likely to occur when the politician is naturally gifted combined with friendly agenda control or that the winning coalition is a marginal coalition where the future defection of any significant bloc will destroy the coalition. The Democratic Yellow Dog caucus has played this game to a T threatening defections from their colleagues in order to create a temporary conservative majority or to previously expand upon a Republican majority. Single group chumpdom is more likely when the winning coalition is a large coalition with a surplus of excess voters. For instance if a politician can afford to piss off 10% of his former voters if he won the last three elections by at least a 70% to 30% margin.
POWER AGGREGATION
When a decision that does not directly derive from an individual's convictions is in the decision process, power comes into play. Politicians will make their decisions on a basis of available information which has significant filtering mechanisms that are path dependent on previous power arrangements, what their friends and supporters would like them to do, and the probability that a decision pathway leads to a better future where the definition of better is open to manifold interpretations.
This process can often be broken down to the simpler saying that politicians will dance with the ones who brought them in most cases. Personal conscience and analysis will occur on high priority exceptions, but as the representative of a coalition, the voting member will often act as an agent for the coalition. So the question is which members of the coalition are listened to when there is intra-coalition conflict?
Going back to the previous assumptions that fundraising is a non-optimal and less than enjoyable task, and making the assumption that people reward loyalty, the three groups that often will get asked to dance are the people who have been the initial supporters and the bedrock base of a candidate, especially a new candidate who has only been in office for a couple of cycles, secondly the groups that joined the coalition as part of the marginal winning group. If they defect the next election becomes a whole lot more difficult, and finally the people who put their trackable and identifiable money into the candidate. Sometimes these three groups are really only one group, but usually the early adapters are the volunteers and fundraisers and the marginal supporters with a credible threat of defection come into the picture later.
Within this analysis, the groups who do not contribute significant money, votes or key resources such as access, expertise, organization or volunteer hours, or who can not credibly threaten to defect should expect to be played as chumps on a regular basis. They have no lever of power to exert if they always come back no matter how they are treated.
NETROOTS, LONG TERM OBJECTIVES, POWER AND FUNDRAISING
I think I made my strongest unstated assumptions about the netroots in this piece as I thought my audience has also internalized or at least recognized these assumptions. My first assumption was the that the term netroots in the piece referred to blog-reading, blog writing activists who have a significantly different tactical and ideological profile than the Democratic Party and its elite constituency has had over the past decade. This is a fairly broad critique, but this group is much smaller than the universe of individuals who are categorized as internet political activists and information seekers as defined by Pew. The netroots in my mind are a fairly amphorous group with massive day to day disagreements and focuses, but I think the underlying theme that the current Democratic Party and the current American political-media system is not working as well as it should be is a common theme. A simpler but near universal progressive netroots theme is "Don't be stupid" which is often expressed by references to the hiring of 0-7 Presidential election loser Bob Shrum to run a major campaign. He has already demonstrated that he is not a good hiring decision for a Presidential race, so it would be stupid to let him blow race #8.
I am also assuming that there is some set of long term objectives to implement changes to the system of information dissemination and power dynamics within the political sphere. This assumption is based on the existance and widespread fundraising support, volunteer mobilization and media pushback by some of the major blogs and thousands of local blogs. Act Blue has tens of thousands of donations from blogreaders to candidates, BlueAmerica Pac and BlogPac are functioning political entities, Raising Kaine, MyLeftNutmeg and BlueJersey have demonstrated impact for major elections. One of the strengths of this system is the wide variety of opportunities to experiment and engage the poltiical process. Most of these experiments will fail, but successes can be identified fairly early on and best practices disseminated very quickly by an organic peer to peer model. A second strength is the idiosyncratic nature of topic selection --- if anything happens about anything, there is going to be at least a couple of experts who have been writing about the subject for years already out there. Learning curves are steep and compressed for the interested layperson.
I assume bloggers and blog readers who identify themselves as part of the netroots are indepedent and under no one's control. However I am also assuming on the basis of previous successeful fundraising and publicity models that there are opinion leading and opinion shifting blogs who have the credibility of past positive judgment or at least credible examination of past failures to act as signposts and channel shifters to give candidates, campaigns and ideas a more intensive look than they otherwise would have received. For instance, Scott Kleeb (D-NE-3) attracted significant donations and attention after Americablog started to focus on him. Given past history the 3rd CD in Nebraska would not have been predicted to have received any significant outside support. Good candidates and campaigns whose values align with netroots activists will receive support on their own merits, while crappy candidates with insufferable positions will not receive that support.
My proposal was for some of the opinion leading and shifting blogs to consider focusing their attention at a level where netroots activism, fundraising and publicity can actively contribute to power aggregation and usage. Congressional campaigns outside of the top ten to fifteen funded races will see an infusion of a hundred thousand dollars early on to be a critical and potentially race altering event. These same campaigns will also see the hundred volunteers out for an early canvas ten months out to be a significant asset or the decentralized research and media management as election winning assets. In these cases the netroots as an amorphous entity can either be the earliest adapters, fundraisers and marginal members of the winning coalition at once.
My analysis of the Presidential election cycle indicates that the netroots as a whole are constant supporters of whomever is the Democratic nominee in 2008, and can not raise sufficient identifiable, low cost money or provide the massive pools of manpower that these campaigns will burn through and thus the netroots and its primary concerns are easily chumpable. And I would strongly prefer not to be a chump.
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