The New Era of Distributed Politics

Another whirlwind week, and I want to point out three new examples that appeared to illustrate the new kind of distributed politics that we are lurching towards. That new brand of decentralized, bottom-up, broad-based politics was brilliantly summed up by Joe Trippi at this week’s event on Capitol Hill put on by NDN and the New Politics Institute.

Trippi, the chief strategist behind the 2004 Dean campaign and this cycle’s Edwards’ campaign (as well as a founding fellow of NPI), squeezed down the essence of what is happening in the Democratic race for the nomination. The Clinton campaign, the absolute best, most powerful example of the old model of top-down politics on the Democratic side, is getting beaten by only the second-ever example of the bottom-up new politics model, that of Obama. Watch Joe’s 10 minute exposition of this idea, where he talks about Dean’s campaign being the Wright Brothers, and now, only four years later, Obama is landing on the moon.

And so this week there were three new examples of how that new kind of distributed politics works. One comes from the supporters of Clinton. It’s a fantastic example of how ordinary citizens, without any control or even knowledge of the official campaign (or at least from what it seems), can come together to create moving media with the power to persuade. Check out Hillary Speaks for Me, which is reminiscent of 2004’s “Bush In 30 Seconds” by MoveOn, and creates an infrastructure where anyone can upload 30-second videos about why they support Hillary. It is extremely well done, and given that I have been pointing out many user-generated examples on the Obama side in recent weeks, I want to highlight this first. Bottom-up politics can benefit anyone who tunes into it.

Second is the Superdelegate Transparency Project, created partly by Jennifer Nix, a New Politics Institute Fellow. Jen herself posts about the project elsewhere on this blog so I won’t elaborate on it, but point out a couple things. This is a distributed project among what could be called citizen journalists, or bloggers, to just fill out the details of who the delegates are, who they are currently endorsing, and how the district or state they represent voted in the primaries or caucuses. Simply doing the legwork and shining sunlight in these murky corners both does a journalistic service that the understaffed mainstream media outlets can’t do, but the very fact they are doing the project at all may help change the behavior of the delegates themselves. There won’t be any backroom deals here. It’s all out in the open and out there early. Check it out.

Finally, the mainstream press, starting with the New York Times, “broke “ the McCain and Vicki Iseman story, about his uncomfortably cozy relationship to a lobbyist. I put “broke” in quotes because the blogs had been chewing on this beforehand, but it did take a respectable institution to force it onto the national agenda. However, once that crack in the dike appeared, the distributed forces started the next wave of stories. Check out the Brave New Films effort to broaden the notion of McCain’s friends, with a takeoff of the old television comedy series “Friends.” With the help of some other blogs they help fill out the famous couch with friends beyond Iseman. And they set up a petition process that people can join and virally send around.

And that was just this week. This is a mushrooming process that will continue in the weeks and months ahead. By the time November comes around, the  electorate will be churning with so many new efforts we won’t be able to track them all. Democracy, you gotta love it.

Peter Leyden
Director of the New Politics Institute