« Barlow's Taste of the System | Main | Entropy, Evolution, Internet » Kerry and the grassrootsAt the Berkman Center's Votes, Bits, and Bytes gathering, Zack Exley and Chuck Defeo discussed their respective campaigns, blogged by Micah Sifry at the Personal Democracy Forum. Exley was a tad defensive, given the complaints from the left that Kerry's online effort was too top-down and fundraising-obsessed and didn't do enough fostering of grassroots conversation or power. He parried those critiques by pointing out that they used the net to get thousands of people on the ground talking to voters, and given the Bush campaign's expected fundraising advantage, they felt it important to raise the money needed to keep pace in the ad wars. "We did listen to our base," he noted, describing how the campaign solicited stories from its supporters on how they had been affected by the Bush economy. "We got 100,000 responses which were put into a database. So when you saw people standing at a Kerry rally telling their life stories, those were real people telling real stories," he said.In fact Kerry's campaign was top-down, and I note that Exley ignored advice from a team of online community experts that offered the campaign a plan for organizing at the grassroots. Ever wonder how the Kerry campaign would have fared if it had incorporated a grassroots strategy a la Howard Dean? jon posted this at 7:08 AM |
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