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Campaign Song 2008? Strike Up the Broadband
Already, the influence of the Internet and new media has been felt on the national political scene — from the success of Barack Obama in raising large amounts of money from small donors over the Web, to the George Allen “Macaca” clip posted on YouTube, which played a key role in his losing his Senate seat in 2006, thereby helping turn over control of the Senate to the Democrats. In his lively new book, “The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web and the Race for the White House,” Garrett M. Graff — the founding editor of the blog FishbowlDC.com and editor at large of Washingtonian magazine — asks how the technology that is transforming the global economy is going to affect the “first campaign of the new age.”
Because that campaign is still in medias res, his book circles around this question without coming to any real conclusions. But along the way Mr. Graff raises a lot of provocative questions about how candidates are grappling with “the new campaign paradigm” (which, he says, emphasizes a dialogue between candidates and voters, instead of a one-way conversation); how they are planning to chart America’s course in a new, globalized world that is increasingly reliant on broadband communication and technological innovation; and how his own generation (born in the 1980s and “more technologically savvy and more civic-minded than the one before it”) regards the current state of politics.
Although many of the more compelling ideas in this book are heavily indebted to the works of other writers — most notably, the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s writings on globalization — the astonishingly young Mr. Graff (who was born in 1981) proves in these pages that he is a cogent writer, willing to tackle large-scale issues and problems.
Unlike some bloggers, who, as Matt Bai noted in his recent book, “The Argument,” willfully eschew a historical perspective, Mr. Graff grounds his narrative in lots of historical analogies and a broad spectrum of reading. The one big flaw of his book is that while he can be eloquent on the positive effects that the Internet has had on American politics — including making vast amounts of information easily accessible, increasing voter involvement and empowering grass-roots movements — he does not come to terms with its downsides: its tendency to fuel partisanship (which in turn makes compromise and legislation on the big issues facing the country more difficult); its blurring of the lines between subjective analyses and rigorously fact-checked reports; its tendency to promote commiseration among like-minded people instead of reasoned debate between individuals with different points of view.
Mr. Graff got his start as Howard Dean’s first Webmaster and he makes it clear in these pages that he believes that “the reins of power online are firmly in the hands of the Democrats” — even though the veteran political reporters Mark Halperin and John F. Harris suggested in their 2006 book, “The Way to Win,” that the new media overwhelmingly favors conservatives, not only because of the ascendance of Fox News, the Drudge Report and talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, but also because the right showed with its Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004 that it knew how to manipulate the new-media landscape.
In contrast, Mr. Graff argues that Republicans have been slower to capitalize on Internet fund-raising than Democrats like Barack Obama, that the G.O.P. signaled its wariness of the Internet this year by trying to scuttle a YouTube debate, and that “a new power structure of ordinary bloggers” like Daily Kos has emerged on the left that poses a potent threat to conservatives.
“The left’s blogosphere,” Mr. Graff writes, “has grown up in an era when Republicans controlled government, giving them a target and an ongoing battle to wage. The right’s blogosphere has grown only in fits and starts within a party that’s both in power and by its core nature more hierarchical.”
When it comes to Washington’s understanding of the need to build a technological infrastructure for the 21st century — expanding broadband access, encouraging research and development, and educating and recruiting new-economy workers — Mr. Graff is gloomier about both sides of the political aisle. Whereas the cold war helped set off a boom in science- and government-sponsored research, he says, the United States now “risks being overtaken in the world that it created.”
Mr. Graff writes that America “is no longer a net exporter of high tech, going from a $54 billion surplus in 1990 to a $50 billion deficit in 2001”; that in 2005 only one out of the 25 largest I.P.O.’s worldwide was held in the United States; that only 3 of the Top 10 recipients of American patents in 2003 were United States-based companies; that as a percentage of gross domestic product, federal research and development dollars fell to less than 1 percent in the early 2000s from nearly 2 percent in 1965; and that the United States now ranks 12th among major industrialized nations for broadband penetration.
Today, Mr. Graff observes, “the nation’s best minds quickly end up in places like Silicon Valley or Wall Street,” not the government, leaving Washington increasingly “out of touch” with the new economy. “This disconnect points to one of the biggest problems that the country faces today,” he goes on. “The new economy lacks a political infrastructure. The older industries are the best organized and most entrenched and therefore the most powerful. They’re able to land the meetings with officials that lead to government loans; it’s their armies of lobbyists who can operate in back rooms, slipping in tax breaks and making competition for newcomers more difficult.”
Echoing arguments that Bill Bradley made in his 2007 book, “The New American Story,” and Charles E. Schumer made in his 2007 book, “Positively American,” Mr. Graff suggests that the erosion of quality in American education poses a serious threat to American competitiveness in a global environment in which countries like China and India are capturing more and more of the high-tech jobs that once went to the United States.
Given globalization, Mr. Graff argues, education and job security, like energy policy, are no longer simply domestic issues, adding that the question of whether the United States “will make the investments and decisions necessary to compete in the coming decades must be front and center” in the presidential campaign of 2008.
So far, this does not seem to be happening. While some candidates are learning to embrace the digital age as a means of getting their message out, none have yet made the issue of technological innovation and the challenge of globalization centerpieces of their campaign.
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