May 30, 2006 
Bob Schieffer of CBS News made a good point on “The Charlie Rose Show” last week. He said that successful presidents have all skillfully exploited the dominant medium of their times. The Founders were eloquent writers in the age of pamphleteering. Franklin D. Roosevelt restored hope in 1933 by mastering radio. And John F. Kennedy was the first president elected because of his understanding of television.
Will 2008 bring the first Internet president? Last time, Howard Dean and later John Kerry showed that the whole idea of “early money” is now obsolete in presidential politics. The Internet lets candidates who catch fire raise millions in small donations practically overnight. That’s why all the talk of Hillary Clinton’s “war chest” making her the front runner for 2008 is the most hackneyed punditry around. Money from wealthy donors remains the essential ingredient in most state and local campaigns, but “free media” shapes the outcome of presidential races, and the Internet is the freest media of all.
No one knows exactly where technology is taking politics, but we’re beginning to see some clues. For starters, the longtime stranglehold of media consultants may be over. … just as Linux lets tech-savvy users avoid Microsoft and design their own operating systems, so “netroots” political organizers may succeed in redesigning our current nominating system. But there probably won’t be much that’s organized about it. By definition, the Internet strips big shots of their control of the process, which is a good thing. Politics is at its most invigorating when it’s cacophonous and chaotic.
I’m not sure about Alter’s example, Unity08, which is an organization dedicated to elected a “unity” ticket of one Dem and one Republican in the 2008 presidential elections. The “crashing the gate” netroots initiative to reform an established party — the Dems — seems more practical. We’ll see how that goes.
Last week Jamison Foser called media “the dominant political force of our time.” Foser and Eric Boehlert, in his new book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (which I’m currently reading) make essentially the same point: In the past several years the media has made right-wing extremism seem “centrist” while progressivism, which has a long and respectable history in mainstream American politics, has been marginalized as something alien and weird and looney. Media enabled the Republicans to become the dominant party in national politics even though the Dems are more representative of American public opinion on issue after issue.
Certainly much of media does little more than act as a conduit for right-wing propaganda. The reasons for this are complex. Many media personalities (passing as journalists) are ideologues pushing their dogma with an evangelical zeal. But others of them are, I suspect, unconscious of the role they play in the noise machine. Matt Bai comes to mind. He seems sincerely oblivious to the power of mass media politics even though he is immersed in mass media politics. (Which may be the problem; does a fish perceive water?)
We can’t reform American politics without either reforming media or breaking its stranglehold on the political process. Using the Internet to strip big shots of their control of the process seems the way to go.
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