An interesting quote from editor and publisher magazine. It describes the private sector coming to terms with the idea that online can offer a great deal more efficiency than direct mail in reaching out to potential subscribers. Love to see any good studies exist to compare the use of "cheaper, more effective online tools" vs direct-mail to the political sphere...if you know of any post them in the comments here....

"Like print, direct-mail is quickly becoming very retro. Even the New York Times has found recently that it is actually much more effective to sell print subscriptions by using online behavioral analysis to target likely subscribers.

The Times' marketing department recently teamed with behavioral marketing company Tacoda to collect and analyze data about the online behavior of NYTimes.com readers, which then determined which kinds of readers (by interest and geography) were most likely to subscribe to the print edition. Using cookies, the Times determined the rate of subscription conversion across all the sections of the paper as well as 350 different content categories, and cross-referenced the findings with geographic data found in the user's IP address. The paper then could market directly to those people with the highest likelihood of converting (through ads targeted to them specifically). The result, according to Tacoda's Sales Strategy VP Greg Rogers, was a vastly reduced cost-per-acquisition for the paper, and more subscriptions.

In 2006 you can't rescue floundering print products by relying on more print. To prop up and reestablish offline publications you need to work with cheaper, more effective online tools and use your Web presence to highlight your brand to a worldwide audience, some part of whom might be interested enough in your content to buy a print subscription." (cross posted at mobiledemocracy blog)

As a disclaimer, this post is not about the Republican candidate for Senate in Connecticut, Alan Schlesinger. But if you haven't watched his performance on Hardball (it's pretty gruesome), take a look.

Interestingly, Tom Edsall writes in TNR about how party affiliation affects poker play. A few points he uses to back his thesis:

Republicans are much less risk-averse than Democrats, and taking risks is crucial to poker...The party advocating preemptive war is not likely to be cowed by a big bet. Democrats, conversely, are the party of risk-aversion--supportive of the safety net, opposed to new weapons systems, and sympathetic to protective trade policies. They are less able to tolerate the tension and uncertainty of a game in which a week's salary--or more--can be won or lost in a single hand.

Another argument for the view that Republicans make better poker players is that poker rewards what feminists have long considered one of the worst attributes of men: the capacity to "objectify" the other...The game, pitting men against men in a zero-sum competition, is the classic form of evolutionary conflict...But the quick and dirty summary is that the Republican Party's candidates attract a greater percentage of men than women by advocating a male view of life as a game in which the rewards justly go to the winners.

It certainly makes sense, but needs to be clarified and examined further. First, characterizing Republicans as masculine does not make Democrats feminine. This election cycle, at its very least, should prove our ability to go on the offensive. Second, nothing shows that their Darwinian, winner-take-all approach will maintain itself as a long-term governing philosophy. (Check out NDN's use of soccer to brand Democratic values here). As Edsall concludes, "Empathy and affection damage the ability to win. I think the person who probably best understands all this is Karl Rove." For my part, I'd rather keep my sense of empathy, affection, and what's right - rather than giving these up to win at any cost.

(Cross posted at MobileDemocracy blog)

From today’s Rolling Stone poltics blog on Senator Allen, YouTube, and politics. Imagine how this effect will be amplified now that over 40% of mobile phones sales are cameraphones. And how that services like YouTube allow for direct uploading of video from your mobile phone to your YouTube account….

Here is an excerpt:

“There’s a paradigm shift under way and politicians like Allen, and to a lesser extent Joe Lieberman and Barbara Boxer, are learning it the hard way. The barriers to video broadcast are now gone. So an opposing campaign no longer has to rely on a local news station or CNN or CSPAN to run video of a gaffe. Any dolt with a handicam now can capture the unscripted reality of a candidate and disseminate it worldwide.

If it generates enough buzz in the blogosphere, the cable networks will even pick it up, as happened almost immediately with Allen’s monkeyboy dig.

What does this YouTube revolution mean for politics? It’s far too early to tell. One might hope that the omipresence of handicam reporters would mean that all of the artifice of advance teams and printed backdrops and hand-picked crowds of supporters only will be erroded. Unlike the professionals at CNN who play along and film the fakeness because it makes for pretty TV, the YouTubers out there are dedicated to exposing such artifice as an embarassment. And embarassing it is.”

Its propellerhead head morning on the NDN blog. As if the white knuckle excitement of the deficit figures isn't enough, lets talk productivity. Some weeks ago i'm sure we were all shocked that revisions to historic US productivity figures failed to splash accross the front pages. Undiscussed as these figures might have been on Hannity and Colmes, today they get a good going over in the FT. I'm not going to quote from the article; suffice to say its a very comprehensive overview, and a good primer on the various debates about productivity growth in the 90s, and the stellar growth since. These figures - while they might be dull - do pose an intriguing economic problems. Only recently Chairman Bernanke was bullish on continued increases. He might be right; as this chart from Michael Mandel shows, the trend rate of increase is still upwards. From NDN's point of view, productivity is interesting as part of a wider puzzle about what is happening to the American economy. In particular Rob Shapiro has highlighted the theoretical link between productivity increases and wages. Even the newly revised productivity rises are historically pretty impressive. But perhaps the new lower estimates go a little way to explaining why this important link in the economy is, at least temporarily, broken.

The President is off at Camp David today, trying to figure out how to make the economic situation look better. This comes against a backdrop of some brighter budget deficit figures yesterday. Barring a crunching slowdown the budget deficit should continue to improve over the next year, as one might expect at this point in the economic cycle where tax recipts grow to reflect economic growth. The same is unlikely to be true of trade deficit, where only an economic slowdown, which will lower imports, will make much of a difference. Nonetheless, as the Times writes today, the longer term picture still looks bad. The official figures look bad enough, but if you add in continaution of the tax cuts and scrapping of the AMT - a tax originally deisigned to stop the very rich avoiding paying any tax at all - it looks very, very bad. But we knew most of this before. Normally progressives slap their foreheads and sigh; given figures like this, wouldn't it be good if the President could do more to aid the economy? Perhaps instead we should glance at Paul Krugman's collumn, which mentions the consensus on wages before moving onto the more fraught issue of economic inequality:

I've been studying the long-term history of inequality in the United States. And it's hard to avoid the sense that it matters a lot which political party, or more accurately, which political ideology rules Washington.... It seems likely that government policies have played a big role in America's growing economic polarization -- not just easily measured policies like tax rates for the rich and the level of the minimum wage, but things like the shift in Labor Department policy from protection of worker rights to tacit support for union-busting.

Given this analysis, more Presidential action might not be what the economy needs. Perhaps we might simply ask the President to join his colleagues in the Congress, and do nothing?

What is it with Republican and Harley Davidson factories? In January this year Dick Cheney trotted off to one in Kansas to talk about how great the economy was. And yesterday President Bush was in Pennslyvania astride a hog, talking up the benefits of free trade:

"My concern is that this kind of fear of globalization causes a reaction that will cause us to lurch toward protectionism. That's my biggest concern," the president said in a 25-minute interview with USA TODAY. "I am worried that may be where a country that is concerned about the future heads."

The USA Today piece is interesting, containing as it does some sharp words on the President's patchy record on trade. Nonetheless, his remarks are to be welcomed, and mirror almost exactly the sentiments of Treasury Secretary Paulson's speech a week or so back, as quoted in this excellent Post piece on why "openness should begin at home". But what of Harley themselves? It seems the choice of venue has been somewhat controversial. Dean Baker's Beat the Press page at The American Prospect notes the irony that Harley Davidson was the recipient of tarrif protection during the early 1980s. Reagan allowed the protection during the hey-dey of early 80s jap bashing. Protection basically allowed Harley to avoid going bust in the face of competition from much superior Japanese motorcylces. Its a nice debating point. But Baker's none-too-subtle shout out to the wonderous powers of tarrif protection would likely no longer get much of a hearing at Harley's Milwaukee HQ. The manufacturer has spent the last few years badgering the Commerce Department to help them overcome trade barriers, and get a toe hold in the Chinese market.

Wired News features a captivating two-part series following piracy in Sweden. In the first part, we learn about the Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracking website that touts some remarkable facts and figures: the site has "an international user base and easily clears 1 million unique visitors a day." In Sweden, it appears the culture of piracy is, well, different. Simply put, "the administrators of the Pirate Bay believe the law is wrong."

The second part offers both sides of the story. It chronicles the entry of Rickard Falkvinge, a man who created the Swedish Pirate Party, into politics, and the role of the mysterious Pirate's Bureau. Marianne Levin, the Swedish representative of the MPAA, also gets to tell her side of the story. Both sides have become accustomed to the others' slandering words.

But this really caught my eye: "Parting with many copyright minimalists in the United States, [Pirate's Bureau] acknowledges that file sharing can do real harm to rights holders." This certainly shifts the debate - in Sweden they're not downloading in dark corners and alleyways, so to speak. They're doing it openly, civilly disobedient to a system they believe is flawed. It has become the job of others to persuade them that pirating is even wrong at all.

Can the Democrats take back the House in November? Whisper it quietly, but the new question might soon become "by how much" will we win. So pervasive is the pessimism within the Democratic party, and so mighty is seen to be the tactical superiority of Republican cut and run machine, that commentators are very cautious about predicting a big shift. But, gradually, they are beginning to. Veteran poll watcher Thomas Mann was among the first to do so last month when he wrote that "we could see a national tide in November that will sweep the Democrats back into the majority." In the last few days a few more voices have been added. Yesterday, Chris Cillizza on the excellent Washington Post "The Fix" blog, quoted arguments that ongoing Democratic poll leads allow us to "conclude that a Democratic wave is building that will sweep Republicans out of a House majority in November."

"If you take an average of the last three or four polls, because any one can be an outlier in either direction, you can determine which way the wind is blowing, and whether the wind speed is small, medium, large or extra-large," said [Polster Charlie] Cook. "The last three generics that I have seen have been in the 18 or 19 point range, which is on the high side of extra large. That suggests the probability of large Democratic gains."

Now, in this morning's Post, David Broder reports unheard of GOP weaknesses in the Ohio Governor's race. Another story reports that K Street Lobbyists are hiring Democrats, much in the same way that fund managers re-balance their equity portfolios in anticipation of changes in the market. So why doesn't the story get wider play? Three reasons occur to me. First, the only recent model for a change of leadership is 1994. The lack of either a Democratic Gingrich, or a Gingrich-like agenda, seems to convince analysts that a landslide isn't possible. Second, the almost mythic status of the GOP electoral machine, and the tactical masterminds who drive it, convince people not to be too hasty in writing them off. Finally, Democrats themeslves have a seemingly unshakeable belief in their own innability to promote a coherent, popular message. But perhaps, just perhaps, come November it will turn out that you don't need a Gingrich to win, that the GOP machine is out of gas, and that the Dems have run a more disciplined and organized campaign than anyone noticed.

Another month passes, another set of figures show no rise in real wages. Figures out today from the Bureua of Labor Statistics show that real average weekly earning fell in July. Or, to put it much more tediously and longwindedly:

Real average weekly earnings decreased by 0.1 percent from June to July after seasonal adjustment, according to preliminary data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. A 0.4 percent increase in average hourly earnings was more than offset by a 0.5 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). Average weekly hours were unchanged. (PDF)

This is not great news. Wage growth seemed to be picking up in two out of the last three months. Given that yesterday's mild CPI figures seemed to show a slowing in price rises, it might have been hoped that robust wage growth and slowing prices might translate into real wage growth. Instead, we're now 6 for 12: six out of the past twelve monthly statements have shown weekly earnings declining in real terms. With growing concerns about the state of the economy, most apocalyptically from economist Nouriel Roubini, we wonder again if this economic cycle will see no rise in real wages at all.

Fed up with federal inaction over immigration, many local towns have started to take their own measures, usually in very unorthodox ways. As the LA Times reports, one town passed an ordinance which "suspends the license of any business that "employs, retains, aids or abets" illegal immigrants; imposes a fine of $1000 per day on any landlord renting property to an illegal immigrant; and declares that all official city business be written in English only."

Some astute lawyers, however, have noticed that this isn't exactly Constitutional (after all, an issue like immigration is under the distinct jurisdiction of the federal government, not local). But we all know how House Republicans wanted to solve the matter, the enforcement-only policy that NDN picked up early. And, as David Broder comments, we all know that the Republicans inability to effectively deal with this issue is leaving a sour taste in the mouths of Latino voters.