The New Road to the White House

How grassroots blogs are transforming presidential politics.

Lawrence Lessig [New Column]

Wired

November 2003

When they write the account of the 2004 campaign, it will include at least one word that has never appeared in any presidential history: blog. Whether or not it elects the next president, the blog may be the first innovation from the Internet to make a real difference in election politics. But to see just why requires a bit of careful attention.

Politics has always been about engaging people to act. It is still that today. But for the past 50 years, the most efficient tool for engaging people to action (however lethargic) has been broadcast media. The key to victory has been mainlining a message through as many outlets of media as possible. Broadcasting is the drug; the bigger pusher usually wins.

Yet over time, we grow immune. Surrounded by images pushing every passion imaginable, the only sane response is to develop increasingly thick walls to block them out. One result: Broadcast has become increasingly weak. Still, candidates compete using the tools of broadcasters, since victory is always just relative. But the weakened power of broadcast politics creates a strong incentive to develop an alternative.

Enter the blog, a space where people gab. As implemented by most campaigns, it is a place where candidates gab down to the people.

But when done right, as the Howard Dean campaign apparently is doing, the blog is a tool for building community. The trick is to turn the audience into the speaker. A well-structured blog inspires both reading and writing. And by getting the audience to type, candidates get the audience committed. Engagement replaces reception, which in turn leads to real space action. The life of the Dean campaign on the Internet is not really life on the Internet. It's the activity in real space that the Internet inspires.

None of this works unless the blog community is authentic. And that requires that members feel they own their gabbing space. A managed community works about as well as a managed economy. So the challenge is to find a way to build community without the community feeling built.

It is here that Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, had his insight. After a short stint at Progeny Linux Systems, Trippi recognized, he told me, "you will absolutely suffocate anything that you're trying to do on the Internet by trying to command and control it."

Instead, Trippi adopted a method for campaign development that parallels the most successful community model for software development - free or open source. Trippi let control of the blogs go and thus was born the first open source presidential campaign. The Dean campaign engages hundreds of blogs without policing who says what when, or who is on-message how much of the time.

This is just what traditional politics would never allow. As Trippi explained, "This is my seventh presidential campaign. In all of them, everything I learned was that you're supposed to have strong military command over everything in the organization. You give commands to your state directors, who give it to the county directors, who order the precinct captains around."

That style may have worked when there were thousands of local political organizations that mattered to national results. But it doesn't work when the aim is to build new organizations. To do that, you need a style that allows for a million ideas to form, in the froth of engagement that is the stuff of blogs. And that style requires that you give up some control.

The Internet community is still unsure about this development model. Companies still struggle with whether they can give up control over their message or product. Campaigns understandably hesitate as well.

But in the world of politics, the best theory is what works. And the lesson of the Dean campaign so far is that community can't be broadcast. It gets built not from slick commercials squeezed onto a Web page, but from tools that enable, and thus inspire, hundreds of thousands of people to something that American politics has not seen in many years: hundreds of thousands of people actually doing something.

It may not work. There is always time to trip. But the Dean campaign has shown yet another context into which open source ideals can usefully migrate. Set a framework within which your clients can become your contributors, and you will have many more clients and contributors. As Trippi commented about a blog fundraising challenge that raised more than a $2,000-a-seat vice presidential lunch, "Who can argue with $508,000 coming in over a $3 turkey sandwich?"

Lawrence Lessig (lessig@pobox.com) is a professor at Stanford Law School. Howard Dean, John Edwards, and other candidates have guest-blogged for him at lessig.org/blog.