Burnt Orange Report

One Year Anniversary

By Byron LaMasters

I'm two days late on this, but I got busy with the Texas Young Democrats Convention (I'll post on that shortly) over the weekend and didn't get around to doing this post on Saturday. I should note that on April 24, 2003, the Burnt Orange Report was born over at livejournal. My first post was on "Blogs Changing Politics", and for memories sake, I'll repost it here since it's interesting to reflect on my thoughts a year ago:

Blogs Changing Politics

Blogs are indeed changing politics as we know it. With blogs, anyone can publish anything to a worldwide audience anytime, all the time. I believe that blogs are leading the “second” Internet revolution, capable of revolutionizing politics the way that the television did in the 1950s and 60s.

Blogs have already had a profound effect on news and politics, changing the way news is made and published. The Agonist became famous for providing minute-to-minute coverage of the war in Iraq. So what, you say… that’s what CNN is for, but the Agonist linked to global sites offering worldwide perspective on events often ignored by the American and western media. One example is the video clips and pictures of American POW’s in Iraq shown on Al-Jezeera but not on US television. No worry, Americans could find it on the Internet, courtesy of blogs.

Meetup.com has turned a long-shot Democratic presidential candidate, Howard Dean, into a contender. Dean had a small following at the beginning of the year, but it was primarily among anti-war liberals, gays and lesbians familiar with his signing of the Vermont civil-unions law, and local leaders from and near his home state of Vermont. With Meetup.com , Dean had a tool to organize thousands of activists galvanized into action by his firm anti-war stance, and rousing speeches made to NARAL Pro-choice America in January, the Democratic National Committee in February and to the California Democratic Party Convention in March. These Internet savvy activists could watch Dean’s speeches on C-SPAN and get involved in their communities by joining the Dean Meetup which the Dean campaign smartly linked to from their homepage. Soon the Dean Meetup Challenge began among these activists and Dean raised a surprising $2.6 Million in the first quarter of 2003 – nearly as much as Joe Lieberman, a nationally tested politician. Dean raised $750,000 online, and was able to attract contributions from over 12,000 individuals, giving him broader financial support than every other Democratic presidential candidate save John Kerry, another nationally known politician. Blogs and the Internet were able to raise Howard Dean from a candidate expected to raise little over $1 Million to being on the heels of Joe Lieberman in fundraising. Now, Dean Meetup.com has over 17,000 members meeting monthly in hundreds of cities across the county. This gives Dean the profound advantage of building a grassroots organization in every single state in the country. No longer is the Internet one component of a strong campaign, but it is becoming the center of any strong grassroots campaign.

The Dean Campaign has also started a blog, run by the campaign and there are others such as this that are not official campaign sites, but serve the same purpose. This unprecedented step of an official campaign blog keeps supporters updated daily with the efforts of the campaign. This has revolutionized politics. Just a decade ago, volunteers and activists were frequently left out of the loop. In order to find out how a campaign was going or what was needed to be done, activists had to call their local or precinct organizer. That organizer would call the county organizer. The county organizer would call the state organizer, and the state organizer could get in touch with the national campaign. Often, it took weeks for messages to get relayed back and forth, and little was done in the later primary states until weeks before primary date. That delay of weeks has now been forever eradicated. Blogs and email changed that. Now, blogs are starting to replace email as the preferred method of political communication – many people that are reluctant to get on an email list, or that skim over their email are more inclined to bookmark a blog. Dean has even started a text-messaging service for campaign updates. No wonder Dean has heavy student support. His campaign speaks our language. Other candidates, from city council to president should be advised to do the same. Gary Hart is one such example. He started a blog last month on his website. It still leaves much to be desired, but he can lay claim to being the only presidential candidate with his own personal blog. Speaking of Gary Hart, is he running or not? The campaign denies recruiting campaign interns, but I can tell you that they undoubtedly are. We know first hand and contributed to this piece run on political wire. This is an example of news that would be impossible without blogs. Mainstream media won’t give us the time of day, but bloggers are happy to listen to us. So what might not be news to the mainstream media is news to the Internet media.

Posted by: Byron L.