Planting Liberally

If you're going to be in the Boston area next Wednesday, join Drinking Liberally and Women Action Media! for a book event with Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark! RSVP here.

Beyond the Echo Chamber, by Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark, is a groundbreaking new book for anyone who is concerned with the state of political media, journalism, or civic activism. It's also a useful handbook for progressives who want to be heard and make change, as well as a fascinating perspective on the changes in the world of professional media and journalism.

The book chronicles the rise of the new world of progressive media, circa 2004 - 2008. Having worked together at In These Times, the authors were deeply involved in the story they are telling. The Bush years were a boon to traditional progressive publications like In These Times, which saw their circulation numbers jump. They were also a time of energetic creativity and growth among progressive activists of all stripes, forming all sorts of new organizations that challenged traditional conventions in the media world. Van Slyke and Clark describe some of these organizations and the characters behind the screens, as well as the lessons learned along the way. They conclude with several important strategies that progressive media organizations should consider for their future work.

It may be difficult to remember now, but the 2004 election was a moment of deep introspection for the progressive movement. Probably as a result of the dramatic propaganda campaign that gave us the Iraq War, many progressives finally understood just how seriously inadequate the progressive media infrastructure was, compared to the conservative media machine. A whole host of bloggers, big-shot Democrats, traditional media organizations, and front-line activists got in the act of analyzing the problem and prescribing solutions. The immediate result of all that talk was a bunch of some seriously sweet charts - many of which, like the one at right, are reproduced in Beyond the Echo Chamber. The other, probably more important, result was an outpouring of progressive media activism and experimentation.

There are probably too many important experiments in progressive media and activism to count, but a few stand out. Perhaps the most well-known (and most financially troubled) was Air America Radio. The network was an early attempt to duplicate the success of conservatives in broadcasting their message across the radio airwaves. Lacking sufficient funds and without a deep stable of radio talent, it was never able to get sufficient distribution, and it ultimately failed in January of this year. Nevertheless, it was, arguably, the incubator for Al Franken's successful bid for the Senate, and it certainly propelled Rachel Maddow to MSNBC, and Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks to prominence on YouTube and on Sirius Satellite Radio.

A happier, and in many ways more interesting, story, is the evolution of Talking Points Memo, which grew from a one-person blog into a well-staffed community blog. TPM has seen many successes in its day, but perhaps the most interesting was with the US Attorneys firing scandal, in which TPM rigorously pursued a fishy story from the start. In order to dig deeper into the story, TPM asked its members to do research on potentially politically-inspired firings that would only show up in local papers. A combination of good footwork and journalistic intuition on the part of Josh Marshall, the stunning example of high-impact crowdsourced journalism ultimately led to the resignation of Attorney General Gonzales, who was at one time a rising star in Republican ranks.

One final example, which is either exciting or troubling depending on your point of view, emerged from the Off the Bus project. Established by Arianna Huffington and Jay Rosen, the project was an attempt to turn ordinary citizen-activists into small-time reporters. Volunteers throughout the country attended events on the presidential campaign trail and wrote up reports on what the candidates said; the results were aggregated and curated on the Off the Bus website. The goal was to produce an on-the-ground summary of the presidential campaign, unfiltered through the usual cast of traditional media reporters who traveled with the candidate (i.e., on the candidate's bus). Off the Bus's biggest scoop was a quote caught by Obama supporter Mayhill Fowler, who attended a campaign fundraiser where Obama spoke about people living in economically depressed rural towns who "cling to guns or religion". The quote was a major blow to the Obama campaign, and it also caused quite a stir in the world of journalism, where (according to Michael Tomasky, editor at large of the Guardian American), professional ethics would normally prevent a journalist from quoting a candidate during an off-the-record donor event.

These are only a few of the many fascinating experiments described in Beyond the Echo Chamber. Others include the masterful grassroots work done to defend the Jena Six, and the emergence of Color of Change; the savvy documentary work of Brave New Films; and the multi-platform campaign that was Get Fisa Right. Together they paint a picture of a progressive movement that is creative, energetic, and rapidly evolving to use emerging media technologies.

Making sense of this hodge-podge of stories, Van Slyke and Clark list "six strategies for high-impact progressive media", which are:

1. Build network-powered media, which both facilitates person-to-person organizing and brings institutions together to complement one another's core strengths;
2. Fight the right with bold messaging and by picking on high-profile targets, like Bill O'Reilly;
3. Embrace twenty-first century muckraking, as Josh Marshall has done;
4. Take an active role in legislative fights (or, in their words, "Take it to the hill"), blending activism and journalism;
5. Assemble the progressive choir, creating communities where progressive activists can gather and inciting them to action on key issues, as FireDogLake has done;
6. Move beyond "pale, male, and stale" by actively integrating the non-white, female, and less-than-dead-serious voices into the media landscape, as Cenk Uygur has done.

Having spent a great deal of time reading and thinking about the role of progressive organizational capacity in electoral and legislative campaigns, I've been waiting for a book like this for a long, long time. It's a big-picture look at what we as a movement have done right, and what we've done wrong, over the past few years, and what more we need to do to go stronger in the future. We can learn a lot of good lessons by taking a step back from the daily back-and-forth of political action, and I think that's too rare a practice by far. To be sure, this is only the tip of the iceberg, as we've not yet really harnessed the potential power of mobile technology, we are still struggling with the identity crisis created by the Obama campaign and administration. We need more creativity and more experimentation, and this book is a valuable guide to doing just that.

Disclosure: Van Slyke's organization, The Media Consortium, contracted with my company for a project in 2008. I also received a complimentary copy of the book from The New Press.

In full-blown panic about an almost certain loss at the polls, conservatives are now trying to win the post-election narrative - they're trying to claim that, despite the election results, the country is still conservative.  The new watchword for conservatives is "center-right nation" - as in Jon Meacham's absurd piece in Newsweek which claimed that despite what looks like a wholesale rejection of conservatism at the polls on Tuesday, "America remains a center-right nation".  David Sirota has been doing yoeman's work beating back this meme, dedicating his column to Obama's FDR-style mandate, and running a Center-Right Nation Watch at OpenLeft.

The narrative of this county as a center-right one, despite what the polls may say on Tuesday, appears to be an important one in the post-election narrative.  It will be bolstered by exit polls which show something like 28-33% of the electorate identifying as "conservative", and 17-22% of the electorate identifying as "liberal", with the rest of the electorate identifying as "moderate".  According to the Roper archive of exit polls, ideological self-identification numbers have been hovering in that range since 1976, so if the numbers are substantially different than that on Tuesday, then we know that there's been genuine ideological movement.  Even what looks like a near-loss to conservatives - say, a 26-24% conservative-to-liberal self-identification gap - would actually be a huge victory for progressives.  Failing that kind of self-identification parity, progressives usually argue that we are a nation of "operational progressives", never mind the labels we give ourselves.  That is, that on many issues - especially economic issues - polls show that most people support the progressives point of view.  Campaign for America's Future and Media Matters made this argument most recently with an exhaustive review of recent polling in June 2007.

From the point of view of Election Night and the week following it, though, I think it's better not to bicker and parse over in this way.  We are almost certain to lose that game, since the simple numbers (the ideological self-identification numbers) are least in our favor.  Instead, I think the best approach is to promote the Democratic base as the new center of politics.

The basic idea is to promote the Democratic base, its enthusiastic support for Obama, and its incredible electoral power.  Point to Obama's repeated record-smashing small-dollar fundraising numbers.  Point to the historic crowds Obama has drawn in swing states like Missouri and Colorado in the last couple of weeks.  Point to the untold numbers of zany pro-Obama videos flooding YouTube.  Point to the unprecedented Obama ground game, and the dramatic turnaround in early voting, which is emphatically pro-Democratic this year, as compared to an even split with Republicans in 2004.

I've actually chosen these nuggets of evidence fairly carefully, and the common themes among them are: 1) they've already been reported by traditional media in the recent past; and 2) the Obama campaign is, itself, quite likely to refer to some of these nuggets in its post-election messaging.  In other words, these are the nuggets that are most likely to allow us to "close the triangle" on the post-election narrative.  The point is that we should amplify these elements of pre-existing conventional wisdom.

While this isn't exactly a logical counterpoint to the notion that this is a center-right nation, the argument is powerful for its evokation of progressive imagery.  In some way or another, many voters have already seen the proof of the progressive base supporting Obama - the footage of large Obama crowds, the Obama Girl videos, the long lines of early voters, the thirty-minute ad made possible by millions of donors, and even the incessant door-knockers bearing literature.  In addition to being powerful imagery, and imagery capable of closing the triangle on the post-election narrative, a great deal of this imagery "feels" historic, in that it is nothing like what many people have seen before; it matches the theme of an historic election.  If that image of an exuberant, powerful, massive progressive base is indelibly linked to the election results, conservatives will have no chance with the "center-right nation" canard.

Last week I wrote that we should begin planning for the post-election season, and begin shaping and amplifying our preferred post-election narrative.  I wrote that the ideal post-election narrative would be that Obama won on the strength of a green-collar melting pot coalition, one which values diversity fundamentally, which is keenly worried about the state of the economy, and which supports Obama's economic program of a green-collar, universal health care economy.

The purpose of this narrative is two-fold: first, to cast the election as a mandate for a progressive economic agenda; and second, to shift the demographic center of political discourse away from white Christian men, and towards a more diverse cluster of demographic groups, including women, African Americans, Latinos, young people, non-Christians, and LGBT individuals.  This kind of shift would have a longer-term impact of reducing the subtler forms of racism, sexism, and religious bigotry which have insinuated themselves into electoral coverage.

Since last week, there have been a few important updates on this narrative.

First, the McCain campaign seems to have doubled-down on Joe the Plumber.  That move, combined with a McCain loss, is a big victory for the "melting pot coalition" narrative, as it supports the notion that campaigns which focus on white male heroes are bound to lose.  As the cherry on top, we'd like to see Obama losing among white men on Election Day while winning the election; that would underscore the notion that Democrats don't need white men to win elections.  It would also refute the idea that McCain lost because he ran a bad campaign (more on that in a bit), or that "Joe the Plumber" was an ineffective hero in capturing white male voters.  The Research 2000 internal numbers have moved a bit in the last week, but not much.  Obama is losing men overall by about 3-5%, and whites overall by about 15%; although we don't have good R2K numbers on white men specifically, it sees that he's losing this group pretty solidly, and I think that is a good thing from the point of view of narrative development.

Second, and related to the first point, Republicans are going all-in on ideological warfare.  David Sirota's been doing great work pointing out that this move plays right into our hands - if McCain represents conservatism, an Obama win is a progressive mandate.  My guess is that the all-in move is what has helped narrow McCain's gap somewhat, as some of his base is returning to the fold; note R2K's sharp uptick in McCain Republican support over the last week.

Third, Arizona now appears to be in play, and Ted Stevens was found guilty of lying on his financial disclosure forms.  However much these developments help ensure victory on Election Day, I'm not sure they really help our post-election narrative very much.  With Arizona, the danger is that Obama's victory will appear to be the result of a singularly awful campaign on McCain's part.  Similarly with Alaska, the danger is that a Begich victory, and, if it materializes, a 60-seat Democratic majority, will be the result of bad Republican Senate candidates, rather than a good Democratic message on the economy.

Fourth, the Obama campaign is taking a more progresive turn.  Mostly this turn is fairly quiet, and it's played out in Obama's media strategy.  He is aggressively pushing back against Fox News while providing interviews to progressive media like the Rachel Maddow show and the Daily Show.  Given that few people vote based on the internal mechanics of a candidate's media strategy, this move doesn't really support one election narrative or another.  On the other hand, it does suggest Obama has reason to believe that progressive media is increasingly important in modern politics, and conservative media less so.  Also, it's a signal for progressives that Obama is increasingly willing to play nice, and may be receptive to the idea of a progressive mandate.  In the week or so following Election Day, we should continue to push him to claim a mandate for progressive economic reform, and thereby to help close the triangle on this narrative.

Given all of these developments, I think the basic arc of the post-Election narrative is fairly clear:

1. Obama's victory was driven by a massive grassroots volunteer operation, which helped build a massive and very effective ground game. Obama says as much himself, and is visibly proud of his volunteers; he is likely to say something about that on Election Night and in the days following.  Sharing this talking points helps close the triangle, and suggests agreement between Obama and progressives on what comes next.
2. Obama's coalition is much more diverse than past winning coalitions; it's comprised of a lot of people who have very little in common with Joe the Plumber.  This basic fact has been true of Democratic coalitions for a long time, but there are a couple of factors which emphasize the point this year.  Most obviously, Obama himself is not white; he visibly represents the non-white-male coalition.  Also, the McCain campaign has been increasingly willing to race-bait in recent weeks, and Obama's supporters have rejected this sort of campaigning.  Finally, there are the simple demographic facts, which show Obama winning despite emphatic losses among white men.  Obama is unlikely to talk about any of this, so it will largely fall to progressives to amplify this point.
3. Obama's progressive economic program, contrasted with McCain's conservative program and combined with the economic crisis, propelled Obama to victory.  This is perhaps the most tricky piece of the narrative, but I think it's actually fairly intuitive.  There's no question that the sharpening economic crisis solidified Obama's lead; and it's also fairly clear that Obama has been talking about a green collar economy and universal health care for a long time, since before the crisis began.  At the same time, McCain's rhetoric has clearly favored a conservative economic program.  The contrast couldn't be more clear, and the fact that conservatism lost this round, big-time, is also obvious.

With Election Day rapidly approaching, it looks increasingly certain that Barack Obama will win the Presidency on November 4; solid Democratic majorities in Congress are essentially guaranteed.  The problem is, what will the headlines be on November 5?

In 2006, a dramatic tidal wave swept Democrats into power in the House and Senate.  The post-election narrative, howerver, focused on the closely-divided chambers, and lionized Rep. Rahm Emmanuel for having coordinated the Democratic victory.  The narrative favored Blue Dog Democrats, and stole a good deal of thunder from the progressive Democratic base.  As a result of that narrative (and existing structural disadvantages), progressive reform was largely stymied, despite some victories in early 2007.  The post-2004 election narrative, with the reification of "values voters" and the false assumption that anti-marriage equality ballot initiatives had pushed Bush to victory, was even more disastrous.

To avoid a similar fate this time around, progressives should prepare to define the post-election narrative for 2008.  Now, I'm well aware of the danger here - there are still 11 days to go, anything could happen, and we shouldn't become complacent.  It is, of course, important to keep working, and we should not let up on that front.  But it's possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Of course, the other problem is that we don't know exactly what the results will be.  Obama could conceivably lose, or he could win a very narrow victory.  We could hit 60 seats in the Senate, or we could fall just short.  And so forth.  Still, I think it's reasonable to predict reasonably that Obama will probably win a solid victory if not an overwhelming one, and that the House and Senate will be considerably more Democratic next year.  Based on those assumptions, I want to suggest a few key themes that we should push to develop before and on Election Night, and to suggest a coherent progressive narrative for Nov. 5.

Some key themes, and the Election Night data which should support them, include:

• The economy reigns supreme.  It's hard to deny that this issue has won news cycle after news cycle for Democrats.  Democratic messaging on the economy has been superb, and McCain's hail Mary move only made things worse for the Republicans.  The Democrats have argued that Republicans are out-of-touch, uncaring, corrupt, and ideologically unable to manage a complex economy.  Republicans argued that ACORN is registering Mickey Mouse.  On top of the Democratic critique of Republican policies, there is a solid progressive proposal emerging to solve the problem, and it's easy to grasp: develop the green collar economy.  The mandate for economic reform is clear and overwhelming, and Obama has clearly been running on this idea.  Look at the issue priority questions in the exit polls to verify this theme, but expect the economy to rank as the #1 issue.
• The extraordinary motivation of the Democratic base, and the strength of Obama's ground game.  Nate Silver's On the Road series at 538 has established tons of anecodtal evidence of this massive differential in volunteer enthusiasm.  The partisan registration gap, showing Democrats with a 7-9% registration advantage depending on who's reporting, is further proof of this motivation; it is also a result of that motivation, as Democratic volunteers register more and more Democrats.
• Growth in the size and enthusiasm of the African American electorate.  The early voting numbers in some states already indicate this theme, but the most visible proof of it will be nail-biting numbers out of North Carolina and Georgia.  If these states go for Obama, or are too close to call going late into the evening, this theme should emerge as an important factor in Obama's victory.
• Growth in the Latino electorate, and a return to the Democratic Party.  The polls so far have supported this theme, but the most visible demonstration of it will be an Obama hat trick in Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada, or possibly a larger-than-expected early win in Florida.  The Florida scenario is a bit unlikely (and could be written off to a variety of other factors besides), and the Western scenario won't play out until late at night, possibly 11 pm EST or later.  So this theme is likely to receive a bit less attention.  That's a shame, as I was hoping to see the 2007 rallies vindicated and proven effective.
• Obama's strength among young voters.  Future Majority, I'm sure, will be all over this theme in many different angles.  But let me try to get the party started.  First, young voters have not been, historically, much more Democratic than the rest of the electorate.  They were about 9% more Democratic than the rest of the electorate in 80, 4% less Democratic in 84, 1% more Democratic in 88, 1% more Democratic in 92, 12% more Democratic in 96, no more Democratic in 2000, and 16% more Democratic in 2004.  (I'm looking at the numbers for 18-24 year olds, as compared to the entire electorate, at the Roper Center's archive.)  Kerry in 2004 was the Democrat best supported by 18-24 year olds, and Obama will likely win this age set by 20 points, and maybe more.  Second, combining this historical data with the fact that young voters voted 14% more Democratic than the nation as a whole in 2006 (and here I'm mixing and matching a bit, using the 18-29 numbers from the CNN archive), we have an interesting result: young voters will have voted Democratic in overwhelming numbers three elections in a row.  That makes this demographic a likely Democratic lock for a long time to come.  This is a huge and extremely diverse demographic, it's solidly Democratic, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon.  That spells long-term disaster for the Republicans.
• Obama's weakness with white males.  It remains to be seen whether this weakness will, in fact, pan out on Election Day - the way things are going, nearly any demographic scenario seems plausible.  But the recent Research 2000 numbers suggest Obama will basically split male voters with McCain, and lose white voters emphatically, by 10-13 points.  It seems reasonable to believe that Obama will win without much help from Joe the plumber.
• The death of the Bradley effect.  Related to the above, it will be interesting to see if Obama significantly underperforms the polls among white voters.  I am hoping to see the polls show Obama pull about as many white voters as were predicted by the polls, which would, hopefully, ring the death knell for the Bradley effect.  This canard has hampered the electoral prospects of far too many statewide African American candidates already.
• Continuing weakness with white Evangelicals.  Issues with a religious overtone have taken a backseat throughout this election cycle, but it's worth noting that the once-or-more-a-week white Evangelical crowd is still solidly in the Republican camp, and seem entirely unaffected by the economic news.  Street Prophets has more.
• New geographic firewall.  A win in Virginia, Ohio or Colorado should solidify the status of each of those states as a Democratic stronghold, having elected Democrats repeatedly in recent statewide elections, and now sealing the deal on a Democratic White House.  This firewall, if it holds, makes a Republican victory in 2012 nearly impossible.
• Un-real America responds.  An Obama victory in Virginia, paticularly one driven by strength in unexpected parts of the state, the defeat of Michelle Bachmann, and to some degree the defeat of Saxby Chambliss would support a theme of revenge for the tasteless un-American comments that have been a mainstay of Republican politics for so long.  Obama strength in suburban areas would also drive this theme.
• Individual symbolic victories.  Victories by progressive heroes like Darcy Burner and Al Franken, and the defeat of Prop. 8 in California, would demonstrate the strength of the progressive movement.  Defeat of Saxby Chambliss (see above) or Mitch McConnell would be particulalry crushing for Republicans.
• The union vote.  Over the past few months, union leaders have been expressing some fear that some of their white members would defect to McCain rather than voting for an African American president.  I've been skeptical of those fears for some time, especially given the prevalence of people of color and women in union membership rolls, and the extraordinary job unions have done in getting their members to the polls in recent years.  I imagine that the newfound prevalence of economic issues will help Obama capture as many union votes as Kerry did, if not more, but there's really not much polling on this issue.  Kerry's benchmark is 61% of the union household vote, which comprised 24% of the electorate.  In 2006, Democrats pulled 65% of the union household vote, which was 23% of the electorate.  It'll be interesting to see where the trendlines go.
• Up-ticket support vs. down-ticket support.  It will be interesting to see how Obama performs against other Democrats up and down the ticket.  Obama is likely to underperform two early-reporting Senate victories, the Shaheen race in NH and the Warner race in Virginia.  These might establish a theme that down-ticket Democrats are helping Obama, rather than the other way around.

There is a simple way to unite all of these themes under one narrative: progressive realignment.  As Paul Rosenberg has argued for a couple of years, and as John Judis and Ruy Teixeira predicted a long time ago, this election is about the victory of a powerful progressive coalition, which will provide the backbone for a strong Democratic majority.  The coalition is composed of people of color, young voters, women, religious minorities, LGBT individuals, and union households.  Whites, particularly white males and white evangelicals, play a remarkably small role.  What's more, the primary beneficiary of this coalition (Obama) is also a great representative of it.

With the election of the country's first African American president, this will be a historic moment.  Indeed, there is more than just history being made this year, but, perhaps, history being repeated.  Despite all the comparisons of this election to those of 1980, 1996, or just about any other in recent memory, perhaps the most fitting is that of 1932.  In that year, an economic disaster solidified a coalition of demographic groups who were capable of providing a long-term popular backbone for a massive new economic program and, eventually, a new world order.

There are reasons to view this election as a sign of even greater progressive strength than that of 1932.  FDR's political accomplishment was holding together a coalition of groups - including Southern whites and Northern racial and ethnic minorities - who actually did not have a lot in common, except for an economic crisis.  Obama's coalition has much more internal cohesion, and its foundational value is diversity - whether racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual.  Indeed, even the centerpiece of Obama's economic policy - the green collar economy and health care for everyone - is ultimately about diversifying our energy portfolio and our economic base.  Obama's central campaign themes are rooted in this foundational value: unity (because we are all different, but we still have to live together) and change (away from a government that excludes many demographic groups.)  The value of diversity, ironically, is a major point of unity for the Obama coalition, and it's hard to see that value becoming less important, even after the economic crisis is solved.  While there are certainly matters of contention betwen different elements of the base (like continuing tensions between some African American religious leaders and GLBT groups, or between unions and young professionals), as a whole I think the Obama coalition is considerably more internally cohesive than the FDR coalition was.

It's important that we center the discussion of this election around this coalition, and the strong mandate for diversity and economic change it represents.  This is going to be a bit difficult, since the coalition is by its nature not as easily typified as past coalitions, with their soccer moms and NASCAR dads.  Still, I think it would be fair to characterize this coalition as "the green-collar melting pot" coalition, or something similar.  Such a characterization would not only reify a major progressive goal (the establishment of a green-collar economy), it would also move the center of politics away from the white suburban voter, and would cast the election not as a victory for Obama, but as a victory for Obama's base.

This is a subtle distinction, but an important one: it's the difference between giving Obama a blank check, and laying the groundwork for a progressive critique of an Obama administration; it's the difference between allowing Blue Dogs to hold sway in Congress, and setting up progressive Democrats in Congress as the "loyal opposition" to Obama.  Moreover, this is a distinction which already has a basis in Obama's rhetoric.  Obama has, in Dean-like fashion, consistently held up for praise his own volunteer base, throughout his campaign.  Given the widespread view that Obama is a progressive, progressives might as well stand up and own the logical conclusion: that the progressive base, the "green collar melting pot" coalition, was the powerhouse behind this landslide.

Ideally, I'd love to see progressive pundits capable of making these points forcefully and analyzing the kind of data I referred to above on-the-fly on Election Night.  My "dream team" lineup of pundits would probably include Ruy Teixeira, Van Jones, Simon Rosenberg, Nate Silver, and David Sirota.  (Silver, I believe, will be hanging out with Dan Rather that night, so at least some of these pundits will be well-situated.)  There are probably many others I'm leaving out, and I'd certainly like to hear some suggestions in the comments.

On the whole, here's what I'm wondering: Are there any themes or important data points I'm leaving up in my list above?  Does this narrative make sense, or is it entirely off?  Besides pushing this narrative in the blogosphere and trying to encourage the major news networks to choose a progressive lineup of pundits, what can we do to establish and solidify this narrative?  I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. 

This week, Chris Bowers at OpenLeft has been encouraging readers to run their own media campaign. The idea is very simple: at a fairly low budget, anyone can set up a simple Google ad campaign, targeted geographically and by keyword. Bowers has been running two ads - one against McCain, the other against Palin - in his native Pennsylvania, and thinks he can reach a lot of voters on a fairly low budget.

The commenters at OpenLeft have been ecstatic about the idea, and I think it is exceptionally clever. In addition to the first order effects - exposing anti-McCain messages to a lot of voters in swing states - the campaign could also have an indirect sway over the campaign's own messaging strategy, by demonstrating in a quantifiable way the messages that work (and receive a lot of click-throughs) and those that don't. I suppose that's a long shot with this campaign, but it's nevertheless a possibility.

In any case, I'd be interested to see if someone could take this idea to the next level, and make the decentralized media campaign idea a bit more social. For example, would it be possible to set up a website which allows people to set up all of the parameters for a Google Ad campaign - the keywords, the geographic target, and the message/link which appears - and then to aggregate all of those campaigns on the website in some interesting way? There are a lot of different ways to do this - e.g. breaking down ad campaigns by state, tag-clouding the chosen keywords, and showing aggregate click-through and impression statistics. This kind of aggregation could be augmented with comments (suggesting refinments and tweaks to existing campaigns) as well as team fundraising pages, allowing site visitors to support one campaign or another monetarily. It's also possible to maximize and quantify the impact of a campaign like this by targeting all of these ads at an action-oriented microsite, which takes a user through the steps of signing up for Obama's email list, giving a small donation to the campaign, signing up for My.BarackObama.com, and so on.

This sounds, to me, like a good example of a simple business idea that could be modestly profitable, since after all the main point of this project is to sell Google ads. Technologically, this should be a relatively simple mashup of a community platform like Drupal with the Google Adwords software development toolkit. With relatively low costs, it should be possible to set the transaction costs - on top of the raw costs for the campaign itself - at a sufficient level to generate relatively decent profit margins. Besides the constant problem facing any social web platform - will anyone show up? - the only difficulty, as many OpenLeft commenters have already alluded to, is whether such an endeavor would run afoul of campaign finance rules, and whether or not Google Ad purchases would be considered campaign contributions. My guess is that this kind of project would have to be organized as a 527, or under the auspices of one.

If something like this doesn't take shape between now and Election Day, it's probably a worthwhile organization to develop, even so. Beyond the immediate need to go on the offense against McCain, as Chris points out, it's important to help develop and test messaging for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, in an environment that's not controlld by the campaigns themselves. More than that, with Google beginning to sell offline media ads in newspapers, radio and television, there's no reason to restrict an ad campaign to Google Adwords (although it's much more gratifying, as real-time metrics are available.) Any takers?

Disclosure: My company worked on a small technical/design project for Open Left last year.

There have been a lot of interesting stories running across the wires in the world of progressive culture this week.  Unfortunately I don't have time to really analyze each of them in-depth, but I thought I'd point them out here:

• Michael Wolff profiles Roger Ailes, owner of Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal, in Vanity Fair.
• David Moberg has a great piece on Working America in The Nation.  Working America is the AFL-CIO's "community affiliate".  Essentially it's a large (2.5-million-member) list of non-union members who sympathize with the union's position on a number of bread-and-butter issues, and it gives the union the ability to extend its electoral might outside the boundaries of its membership.  What's more, Working America has also started enlisting its members in support of labor organzing drives, picket lines, and the like.
• Over at Build the Echo, Tracy van Slyke talks about digg moving to the left, and progressive new media activism inspired by The Young Turks. Progressive media creators, especially vloggers and podcasters: read this post!  Disclosure: van Slyke's organization, The Media Consortium, is a client of my company.
• Again at Build the Echo, Jessica Clark highlights this great video (another good example of progressive new media activism) about Obama's Challenge:
  
  That Amazon discount code, again, is: RGVTUIQY.  You can also buy the book at Powells.
• Global Labor Strategies has a challenging, thought-provoking post about the big-picture problems facing the labor movement, both in the US and abroad.  They argue that service sector organizing and EFCA won't cut it, given the ways corporations are reorganizing globally.  It's a fascinating piece, and well worth consideration.
• The UFT announces the opening of a labor-friendly charter school in New York City, by Green Dot Public Schools.  Given the way charter schools often pit public education advocates against teachers unions, and especially in light of all the hey made about the tiff between the DC city council and DC teachers' unions, I think this is an important development.  It's not a revolutionary one - Green Dot operates a number of schools in LA already - but something we should be keeping an eye on nonetheless.  Still, I think it is one more bit of evidence that these two progressive cultural institutions don't need to be at odds.

Earlier this week, MSNBC announced that Rachel Maddow would get her own show in the nightly line-up, replacing Dan Abrams. The announcement was a victory for progressives in a number of ways. First, Maddow's show will strengthen the toe-hold that progressive voices like Keith Olbermann have on cable TV. Second, Maddow represents perhaps the first progressive voice to bubble up through the nascent progressive media machine and into traditional media. Finally, Maddow is the first woman with her own show representing progressives on one of the three major cable news channels.

As important a victory as Maddow's show is, we should not bask too long in the glow of victory. Now that corporate media has acknowledged the importance of attracting a progressive audience, it's time for the movement to flex its muscle still further.

In the short term, this means doing some of what we're already doing, only more often and more emphatically. Certainly, we should make sure to tune in to Maddow's show, and to promote it by embedding and spreading video clips of the show through blogs and social networks. On top of that, we should work to voice our support for Maddow to MSNBC management and advertisers. And once the show gets going, we should play the role of constructive critics, in order to improve and perfect it over time. Maddow has already proven her mettle as a commenter and as a replacement for Olbermann; and the progressive grassroots has already proven its enthusiasm for supporting her work, so this part of the job should be pretty easy.

The more difficult work will be in extending our victory outside of Maddow's show. The combination of Maddow and Olbermann on MSNBC should mark the network as the unofficial liberal cable news channel, but the network still plays host to more than enough conservative viewpoints; replacing voices like Joe Scarborough with new progressive voices will help clear up any confusion viewers might have about who is and who isn't a progressive on the channel. The slow rightward drift of CNN needs to be halted and reversed. And perhaps most importantly, we need a genuine progressive cable news channel, not one like MSNBC. As Cable News Confidential vividly depicts, it's not wise to entrust progressive voices to large corporations with decidedly unprogressive interests, like GE, and management which doesn't understand niche programming, like MSNBC's.

Of course, it's one thing to lay these goals out, and quite another to achieve them. Fortunately, there is already some progress on these fronts. Without a major scandal, like the one which took Don Imus off of MSNBC and CBS, it's hard to remove a show from the air and make room for a new progressive show. On the other hand, it should be possible to push more progressives into positions as commentators, replacement hosts, or even co-hosts. A number of high-profile liberal bloggers have already made the leap into one-time commentator gigs. Perhaps it's time to cultivate more of those gigs, provide training to those bloggers, and assemble grassroots support for those individuals. In particular, the coalition that was assembled for Stephanie Miller as a potential replacement for Don Imus on MSNBC should be rekindled and prepared to support a bid for her to take any potential opportunities that might open up.

Establishing a genuinely progressive nationwide cable news channel will be even harder. Fortunately, there are a few fledgling efforts, like Link TV, The Real News and Free Speech TV. Currently programming from these channels is available in a limited number of markets and via satellite TV. We should work to expand the reach of these channels, perhaps starting with leasing time on existing, struggling channels, or by cross-promoting these channels with existing progressive radio shows. In addition, we should work to integrate the programming from these channels, as well as material from existing web-based progressive political shows like The Young Turks, into other progressive media, in order to build popular demand for the channels.

On top of the efforts we can make to drive popular demand for this kind of programming to be available on cable, we can also work to create a potential supply of sponsorship or advertising. Certainly, there are plenty of big- budget advertisers who should have at least latent interest in reaching a niche progressive audience on TV - think of Toyota advertising for the Prius, Miramax advertising a Michael Moore film, or Apple trying to reach a creative and largely progressive audience. Moreover, as Spot.us and similar TV advertising resellers have demonstrated, it's possible to aggregate large blocks of advertising spots in order to make localized, on-the-cheap advertising available to the kinds of mom-and-pop retailers that progressives love to frequent - bookstores, coffee shops, and independent movie theaters. It's not yet clear how this kind of latent advertising demand can be organized and leveraged into the kind of start-up funding needed to credibly build a nationwide progressive cable TV channel, but it is clear that many of the raw materials are in place.

None of this will be particularly easy, nor do I imagine that we'll be successful on all fronts. It took conservatives the better part of a decade to start making inroads with CNN, and quite a lot of money to establish Fox News. At the same time, I think we have reached an important moment to build momentum and to develop a strategy to permanently transform cable news.

It's about time: after months of speculation, it appears that Rachel Maddow will replace Dan Abrams in the MSNBC lineup. The move will shift the lineup emphatically to the left, and finally gives progressives a regularly-appearing female voice on one of the three major cable news channels.

Maddows' ascension comes after a somewhat convoluted path that began with a radio show on Air America, continued with her role as a frequent commentator during MSNBC election coverage, and, perhaps most significantly, her occasional stints as a replacement for Keith Olbermann on Countdown. In other words, this is perhaps the first example in recent memory of a progressive commentator "bubbling up" from the new progressie media machine into traditional corporate media, and as such it's an important milestone. It would be nice to see this kind of thing happen more frequently, and perhaps, if Maddow's show receives good ratings, CNN might take notice. Olbermann's diary on DailyKos suggested that both he and Maddow's grassroots supporters helped make the show a reality, but, unfortunately we don't have much of a roadmap for the next progressive cable TV coup.

Last year, when it appeared that Tucker Carlson's show was in jeopardy, I wrote that replacing Carlson with a second progressive voice in the MSNBC lineup should be a short-term goal for the progressive movement. Now that we've achieved that goal (or half of it), it's worth looking farther down the road. What should be the next milestone that the nascent progressive media machine strives for, when it comes to Cable TV? Here are a few that come to mind:

• Establishing more avowedly progressive talk shows on MSNBC or CNN
• Getting more progressive commentators to appear on MSNBC or CNN
• Expanding the racial and gender diversity on cable talk shows
• Establishing a fourth, and genuinely progressive, cable news channel
• Expanding the reach and programming of fledgling progressive networks like Link TV, Free Speech TV, or Real News Network
• Indirectly altering cable news through regulatory reform - e.g., a la carte retail cable

Any others? And more importantly - what can we do to reach these goals? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Jay Rosen posted a thought-provoking piece at Press Think this week, National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News. The post takes the case of an excellent piece of explanatory journalism - Ira Glass's The Giant Pool of Money, which is a one-hour tutorial on the mortgage crisis - and bemoans the shortage of good explanatory journalism, especially given the possibility that if more people understood a story, they would be prone to seek out more news about that story. Rosen even suggests that the primary audience for this kind of explanatory journalism would be other journalists, whose coverage would improve from better background understanding of a complex story.

Rosen has an excellent point, and he voices a frustration I've often felt with news stories, especially complex ones like subprime mortgages: there's often very few places to turn for good background information. Rosen goes into good detail on why traditional media frequently fail to explain a complex story properly. Wikipedia and the web in general can be helpful, but they can also be very hit-or-miss. Wikipedia, in particular, is just not well-geared to explanatory journalism; the best articles in Wikipedia are usually the ones which have had a lot of time to stew, or have been edited and revised again and again by a lot of eyeballs. Complex news stories, especially relatively recent ones like the war in Georgia, are unlikely to meet either criteria.

I'd love to see explanatory journalism take hold and become a more prominent feature of the news landscape; I think it would help turn the tide in journalism toward improved coverage of important stories. Fortunately, as Rosen points out, (perhaps unintentionally) explanatory journalism also has a built-in business model, both because it has several potential audiences and because it tends to boost news consumption. A high-quality, up-to-date, reliable repository of pieces dedicated to explaining the major stories of the day could be a very valuable asset, if properly organized and monetized.

In other words, I think there is an opportunity for the creation of a center of explanatory journalism, whose job is to regularly churn out explanatory pieces about stories of the day. Such a center could sustain itself by repurposing content for different audiences (people who want to listen to a piece on their iPods; local journalists who want to understand how their region is affected, or who might even want a "cheat sheet" of acronyms and important players in a story); selling reprinting rights to newspapers and magazines; and earning money by directing traffic to news organizations with more day-to-day coverage, whether through ads or otherwise.

Incidentally, if an explanatory journalism center was wise about crowdsourcing and sharing its profits with contributors, the center could even help bloggers sustain their own blogs. After all, bloggers are extremely well-suited to explanatory journalism - they are voracious news consumers, they tend to pick a very targeted "beat" and pursue it doggedly, they don't have the same kind of deadline and word limit restrictions that traditional journalists face, and they must, to some degree or another, explain the background of a story to their audience in order to provide a reasonably coherent opinion.

Given the neverending financial difficulties at most news organizations, I think that relying on traditional journalists to produce explanatory journalism on a regular basis is a nearly lost cause. Unfortunately, "The Giant Pool of Money" is almost certainly a special case, not the beginning of a revolution in the way news is done. If explanatory journalism is to take hold, I think it will need a new business model, located outside the world of traditional journalism, but hopefully interacting with that world and helping to improve it.

PS - I know that I haven't been the best about blogging regularly. In fact, I think it's been almost a full Friedman Unit since my last post! I do apologize that, but I'm glad to announce that we're finally turning that corner. More seriously, I'll try and get back into the game and not disappear entirely.

Via CNN, it looks like the writer's strike may soon be over, with WGA leaders voting to recommend the contract negotiated last week with the AMTPA. In addition to support from the leadership, it appears that members who attended meetings in LA and New York yesterday generally approved the contract.

This contract includes provisions for royalties on Internet media, which was the major sticking point from day one. Unfortunately, contract clauses which would have allowed WGA to represent animation and reality TV workers were dropped. WGA will pursue these workers, but without guaranteed neutrality on the part of studios.

I don't have nearly enough knowledge of the industry to say whether the deal is a good one or a bad one, although it strikes me as very significant that the writers have won an agreement in principle to royalties for Internet distribution. That should lay the groundwork for the union to share in the prosperity of new media distribution. Moreover, I think the strike has been a very visible reminder to America's workers. First and most generally, that workers have power and that when they stick together, they can win. More specifically, that professional workers belong in unions and that union representation is highly relevant to them. There are, I hope, millions of professional writers, artists, designers, and software developers taking a look at what the WGA has accomplished, and the degree to which it has reshaped its industry, and thinking, "hey, I can do that."

Congratulations to the writers on a hard-fought victory!