New Progressive Politics

It's a Brand New Era. Deal With It (Round II).

This week's NBC-Wall Street Journal poll demonstrating both the personal appeal to the American people of President Barack Obama and of his policy approach also has very good news for the Democratic Party. That survey and others suggest that the Democratic Party has strength that is deeper, antedates, and will likely extend beyond the Obama presidency. The NBC survey indicates that about half of the public (49%) has a favorable opinion of the Democrats, while only about half that number is positive about the Republicans (26%). The most recent Daily Kos tracking survey paints an even rosier picture for the Democrats. In that poll, while 58 percent are positive about the Democratic Party, only 32 percent feel that way about the Republicans, numbers that have improved for the Democrats and declined for the Republicans since the first of the year.

Positive feelings toward the Democratic Party and negative impressions of the GOP are deeper than these overall attitudes suggest. For example, the Republicans are given the primary blame for the partisan rancor that has characterized Washington politics in recent years. A majority (56%) attribute "all" or a "major part" of the blame for that to the Bush Administration and 41 percent blame congressional Republicans. By contrast, only a quarter (24%) say partisanship is the fault of congressional Democrats and a scant 11 percent attributes it to President Obama. As a result, a clear majority (56%) believes that GOP opposition to Obama Administration policies comes from an effort to gain political advantage rather than principle (30%). All of this goes a long way toward explaining why, by a greater than 2:1 margin on the biggest issue of the day, Americans believe that the Democrats rather than the Republicans will do a better job of ending the recession (48% vs. 20%).

To an extent, attitudes like these may change with the emergence and departure of specific issues and politicians. But, surveys indicate that the American public has formed what is likely to be a long-term attachment to the Democratic Party. The Pew Research Center's tracking of party identification gave the GOP a narrow national lead over the Democrats in party ID in 1995, the year after the Republicans captured control of both houses of Congress for the first time in about four decades (46% vs. 43%). The Democratic Party's comeback began in earnest in 2006 as it recaptured Congress and moved to a nine-percentage point party identification advantage over the Republicans (47% vs. 38%). Currently, the Democrats have a 53% to 37% edge.

What is behind the clear emergence of the Democratic Party as America's majority political party is the coming-of-age of a new generation of young Americans, the Millennial Generation (born 1982-2003). Like their GI Generation ("Greatest Generation") great grandparents before them, the Millennials are a "civic" generation, committed to liberal interventionism in the economy, activist multilateralism in foreign affairs, tolerant non-meddling on social issues, and to the Democratic Party.

Millennials identify as Democrats by a greater than 2:1 margin and are the first American generation in at least four to contain a greater number of self-perceived liberals rather than conservatives. Survey data collected by both Pew and media research and consultation firm, Frank N. Magid Associates, indicates that these identifications predated the 2008 presidential campaign or even the emergence of Barack Obama as a well-known national political figure. But Millennials did flex their political muscles in a big way in 2008, voting overwhelmingly for both Barack Obama over John McCain (68% vs. 32%) and Democratic over GOP congressional candidates (63% vs. 34%). Millennials accounted for 80 percent of Obama's national popular vote lead, turning a narrow victory into a mandate.

There is nothing to suggest that the firm attachment of the Millennial Generation to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party is in any way diminishing. The Kos survey indicates that an astounding and virtually unanimous 86 percent of Millennials now hold favorable opinions of President Obama. While Obama may personalize the political beliefs and Democratic identifications of the Millennial Generation, he is also likely to help extend them as surely as FDR aided in extending those of the GI Generation in the 1930s and 1940s. More than two-thirds of Millennials (68%) have favorable impressions of the Democratic Party and a majority is positive about congressional Democrats (53%). Meanwhile, Millennials have almost nothing good to say about the GOP: just 19 percent like the Republican Party and virtually none (9%) are positive about congressional Republicans. Voting behavior research since the 1950s indicates that once attitudes and identifications like these are formed, they tend to be set for life and rarely change. Clearly the road ahead for the Republican Party is hard and rocky.

But, as the GOP brand continues to erode, the Republicans are treating the country to a spat between its titular head, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele, and the man some consider the party's de facto leader, radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh. After Steele criticized him for being an "entertainer" with an "incendiary" and "ugly" show, Limbaugh distanced himself from the Republican National Committee, if not from the Republican Party, saying to Steele that, "You are not the head of the Republican Party. Tens of millions of conservatives and Republicans have nothing to do with the Republican National Committee."

On the day after the 1994 GOP midterm election sweep, this writer could not resist the masochistic urge of turning his car radio dial to Limbaugh's show and hearing Limbaugh's audience of "dittoheads" extol him for his leadership of the Republican victory. On that day, Limbaugh was more than happy to accept the plaudits of his listeners and proud to wear the mantle of Republican leadership. He did not separate himself from any part of the GOP. The fact that he has done so now provides clear evidence that American politics has, indeed, entered a new era.

Thursday New Tools Feature: Increasingly Capable Cable

The New York Times reports this week that the cable TV provider Cablevision is introducing a new technology that allows for targeted marketing customized for individual households:

Beginning with 500,000 homes in Brooklyn, the Bronx and some New Jersey areas, Cablevision will use its targeting technology to route ads to specific households based on data about income, ethnicity, gender or whether the homeowner has children or pets.

The technology requires no hardware or installation in a subscriber’s home, so viewers may not realize they are seeing ads different from a neighbor’s. But during the same show, a 50-something male may see an ad for, say, high-end speakers from Best Buy, while his neighbors with children may see one for a Best Buy video game.

While at the moment this only applies for 500,000 Cablevision subscribers in the tri-state area, it seems likely that it will quickly spread. Cablevision intends to expand the service to all of its 3.1 million customers assuming the trial goes well. And initial results suggest that it will:

Cablevision tested the technology by promoting its own services with targeted and untargeted ads. In the eight-month test, the targeted ads brought in new subscriptions at a significantly higher rate than untargeted ads.

Companies, aware that their advertising dollars are threatened by the rise of DVRs, the hyper-saturation of today's media environment, and the drop in impulsive buys due to the recession, are looking for creative and effective ways to market their products more precisely. Those in the political sphere would be wise to take notice as well.

Targeted television marketing is not just limited to cable, either; streaming internet-based TV services, like the upcoming ZillionTV set-top box, allow for similar levels of precision targeting:

The pitch to advertisers is precise targeting: To get high ad prices to pay for all this, ZillionTV will watch your viewing habits, merge them with data about you it buys elsewhere, and use all that information to aim ads at certain groups of viewers. Users will also be asked to select categories of products they would like to see ads about. The ad-supported content will have half the number of commercials as broadcast television, which is still more than online services, like Hulu, have now. And you can’t skip past the commercials.

NDN and the New Politics Institute have long written about the benefits of cable and targeted marketing. Staying on top of television's evolution, as it becomes increasingly personalized and intertwined with Web video, will be critical for any candidate or organization that wants to advertise effectively in a 21st century media environment. 

To learn more about how to target your TV advertising, see our papers "Buy Cable Smart" and "An Introduction to Microtargeting in Politics," and watch this excellent and incredibly enlightening video of Amy Gershkoff of Changing Targets Media from our recent NDN/NPI event, "New Tools for a New Era."

It's a Brand New Era. Deal With It.

The NBC-Wall Street Journal survey released yesterday is chock-full of numbers indicating that the public overwhelmingly likes President Barack Obama and approves of his efforts to once again set America on the right track. More than two-thirds (68%) have a favorable opinion of the President; nearly half (47%) are "very positive." Two-thirds (67%) also "feel hopeful" about his leadership and nearly as many (60%) approve of his job performance. But, perhaps to appear "unbiased" and find something negative to say, NBC's Chuck Todd says that Obama is more popular personally than are his policies.

Technically that's true: "only" 54-percent say that the President has the "right goals and policies for the country." But in minimizing public support for the administration's policy goals, NBC and Todd are misinterpreting their own data and missing the movement of the United States to a new political and economic era that occurred with the election and inauguration of Barack Obama. That makeover or realignment substantially changed the way in which the American people perceive the role of government and the outcomes they want and expect from federal economic policy. A clear majority of Americans (58%) now favors a government that actively tries to resolve the problems facing society and the economy and almost as many (53%) want government to ensure that everyone has a basic standard of living and level of income, even if that increases government spending. Clearly, the era announced by Ronald Reagan nearly three decades ago, in which government is the problem and not the solution, has ended.

This shift in underlying political attitudes is reflected in the approval given the recently enacted Economic Recovery Act in the NBC-WSJ survey. Nearly a six-in-ten majority supports the "stimulus" package (57%) while barely a third (34%) oppose it. NBC says this reflects soft attitudes toward a key administration policy. However, support at that level for an act that is so big, substantially different from any economic policy since the 1930s, and almost completely opposed by the opposition party is actually quite remarkable. No president since Lyndon Johnson, or perhaps even Franklin D. Roosevelt, has been able to accomplish something so comprehensive with so little watering down in so little time. The first Obama budget, which even the Republican congressional leadership concedes it will not likely stop or even change significantly, will lead to even greater change in the direction of governmental policy.

But, perhaps the most remarkable finding in the NBC survey is the large increase in the number of Americans believing that the country is now moving in a positive direction. Forty-one percent of the public now says the nation is on the right track. That's up from 26 percent in the last month of the Bush administration. Given that Americans still believe the worst is yet to come on the economy (76% say the economy has not yet bottomed out), the increased optimism of the public can only be a result of its regard for Barack Obama and his approach that clearly reflects the movement of the United States to a new civic era of governmental activism.

Don't Mess With Census 2010

The announcement last week that Congressional Black Caucus members plan to press President Barack Obama to keep the 2010 census under White House supervision, even if the former Democratic Governor of Washington, Gary Locke, is confirmed as Commerce Secretary, brought back memories of a movie I’d seen before — a bad movie.

The statement came from U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo., the caucus’ leading voice on the census, and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform panel, which has jurisdiction over the decennial count. His assertion that the White House needs “to be hands-on, very much involved in selecting the new census director as well as being actively involved and interested in the full and accurate count,” suggests that the partisan gap about what the census should accomplish is no closer to being closed than it was 10 years ago when we last undertook the constitutionally mandated exercise in counting everyone living in America. The gap was so big last time that it helped bring about the complete shutdown of the United States government.

When Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House, he decided, in his own paranoid way, that Bill Clinton and the Democrats would use their executive authority to produce a biased census whose over-count of minorities would shift, in his opinion, 24 House seats from the Republicans to the Democrats after the 2000 census. Of course, it was ludicrous to think such an outcome would occur, since legislative boundaries are drawn by the party in power in each state. Whatever numbers the census produces in our decennial exercise can be manipulated to produce any outcome each state’s ruling party desires, as U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay and his Texas Republican cronies proved a few years ago. Nevertheless, Gingrich was determined to use the Congressional appropriations process to undercut any attempt by the Democrats to overstate minority populations in the several states.

The method by which this nefarious plot was to be carried out, in the Republican Party’s opinion, was by the use of a large sample of Americans to be surveyed at the same time as the actual count, or enumeration, required by the Constitution, was taking place. In response to concerns about previous census inaccuracies — both overcounts and undercounts — the National Academy of Sciences had recommended that the Census Bureau use survey sampling techniques to validate not just the overall count but the individual demographic sub-groups that the census’s enumeration process would identify. But this was a hugely expensive undertaking. To gain statistical accuracy, about 1.3 million Americans would have to respond to a lengthy survey that would cost about a half a billion dollars to execute. And it was this expenditure that Gingrich refused to appropriate. When he and Clinton came to the ultimate showdown on funding the government, Gingrich blinked.

As part of the budget settlement that reopened the government after the shutdown, Clinton forced him to reinstate funding for the sample survey. But despite having established the primacy of the White House in the conduct of the census, matters actually got worse for awhile. When I became Director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) under Vice President Al Gore, I was asked to monitor the implementation of the census to be sure it was done as effectively and as efficiently as possible. But the first idea on how to accomplish that came straight out of the same White House partisan playbook that is now being invoked by the Congressional Black Caucus.

In order to assure that the process was “bi-partisan,” it was suggested that a commission be established made up of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats who would oversee the activity on behalf of the Congress. Since the commission was to be equally divided, the Clinton White House wanted to make sure that only the most partisan Democrats — those who would never concede an inch to their Republican counterparts on issues such as funding and methodology — were selected. Names like Harold Ickes, Supervisor Gloria Molina, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters were discussed as representative of the type of Democrat who would make sure the use of sampling to confirm the accuracy of the count was preserved. Fortunately, thanks to the eloquence of Rob Shapiro, the Under Secretary for the Department of Commerce who had the actual authority to supervise the Census, cooler heads in the Vice President’s office were able to prevail over their White House counterparts, and the Commission notion was abandoned.

But that didn’t stop the two parties from continuing their warfare over the value of a sample supplemented census vs. a straight enumeration. Republicans sued the Census Bureau in federal court, demanding that only the actual count of residents as provided in the Constitution be used for any congressional redistricting by the states. The Federal Appeals court dismissed the Republican lawsuit as none of the Court’s business. Foreshadowing the outcome of Gore v. Bush in 2000, the Supreme Court surprisingly took up the case and overturned the Appeals court ruling. As a result, all subsequent redistricting efforts have used only the enumeration count from the 2000 census. On the other hand, formulas used to allocate federal funds based on population characteristics were unaffected by the ruling and could have used the sampling process, had it not met an untimely and unnecessary death.

As soon as George W. Bush was elected and the incredibly professional Director of the Census Bureau, Ken Prewitt, was removed from office, the Commerce Department’s new partisan Secretary, Donald Evans, determined that the sample that had been prepared over the strong objections of congressional Republicans was not usable. Sampling, as originally conceived, was never implemented, and the country ended up relying on a very strong effort to count households and those living in them for its 2000 census. This method tends to overcount families with two houses, who respond to the census form at both of their addresses, and college students who generally answer the form from their dorm room while their parents report them as still in their household back home. And, of course, it tends to undercount less affluent populations with fewer physical ties to a specific dwelling, particularly Native Americans, and to some degree Hispanics and African Americans.

Despite these problems, a sampling approach could not be used to help correct inaccuracies in this year’s census, even if Rahm Emanuel himself were to oversee it. We are too far along in the process to recreate it. There is, however, a substitute available that should alleviate the concerns of all but the most stubborn partisans on both sides of the issue. Under the Gore reinvention initiative, the Census Bureau conceived of a concept now known as the American Community Survey. It was designed to survey a vast quantity of households over time to acquire the kind of detailed demographic data that was usually obtained from the subset of the population, about one in 10, who were asked to complete the “long form” of the census questionnaire every 10 years. Republicans hated this form and the type of questions it asked; they saw it as an unlawful intrusion on the privacy of families by the federal government. Those of us in charge of reinventing the federal government thought the ACS could be a much more scientific and efficient way of collecting this essential data, but our challenge was to keep it from becoming a political football in the partisan warfare over the census.

Finally, it was agreed that the Clinton Administration budget proposals would include a continuing increase in funds for the ACS. In order to garner Republican support, ACS would be justified as a way to eliminate the long form by 2010. The budget request was forwarded by the head of ACS directly to the Vice President’s office, which made it a priority each year, but which never publicly acknowledged any interest in the concept. The ruse worked and the project became a reality. The long form will not be used in the upcoming census because the ACS has gathered, over time, sufficient data on the demographic details of America’s population as to make it unnecessary.

Given the existence of the ACS, those now waging a battle over sampling vs. enumeration are truly guilty of fighting today’s war with yesterday’s weapons. In this new era, those who have a legitimate interest in as complete and accurate a census as possible should instead direct their efforts to the neighborhoods where the accuracy of the count will actually be determined. During the last count, the Census Bureau formed hundreds of thousands of partnerships with community groups interested in making sure that everyone they knew got counted. Today, these programs, as well as projects such as former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer’s “Nosy Neighbors” campaign, are the best way to ensure an accurate outcome.

The responsibility for America’s next census does not and should not rest with the White House. But President Obama’s experience does offer some direction: neighborhood organizing is key. Let’s hope that community leaders will follow the advice to ‘pick yourself up and dust yourself off’… and undertake the huge task of ensuring that every person is present and accounted for in America’s next census.

Cross-posted at New Geography.

Dispatches From A New Political Era

I've been in Washington for 16 years now, coming as many did with President Clinton back in 1993.  I have seen a lot of changes in my time here, but the rate of change we are witnessing today is breathtaking.  Just take a look at a few of the headlines today from a vastly changed political and societal landscape:

Economy Shrinks at Staggering Pace

Obama Announces Iraq Withdrawal Plan

AIG Faces Possible Breakup

Part of Denver's Past, the Rocky Says Goodbye

Broadcast TV Struggles to Stay Viable 

Obama's Greenhouse Gamble

Top Officials Expand Dialogue on Race

Playing With Fire In Pakistan

'Great Society' Plans for the Middle Class

The Bill That Could Break Up Europe

There are large and systemic changes underway here in the US and around the world. 20th century challenges, institutions, ideologies, economics, media and even racial understanding are being swept away.   A new global political era is surely emerging now, unfolding in front of us, one that our new President is both responding to and attempting to shape.  The President's ambitious budget this week was itself the most powerful examples of how much our politics is in the process of changing.  

I end my quick morning post with an excerpt from Joe Nocera's column from the New York Times today.  Nocera has been writing as intelligently as anyone about the financial and economic crisis, and this column, Propping Up A House of Cards, is an absolute required read: 

Next week, perhaps as early as Monday, the American International Group is going to report the largest quarterly loss in history. Rumors suggest it will be around $60 billion, which will affirm, yet again, A.I.G.'s sorry status as the most crippled of all the nation's wounded financial institutions. The recent quarterly losses suffered by Merrill Lynch and Citigroup - "only" $15.4 billion and $8.3 billion, respectively - pale by comparison.

At the same time A.I.G. reveals its loss, the federal government is also likely to announce - yet again! - a new plan to save A.I.G., the third since September. So far the government has thrown $150 billion at the company, in loans, investments and equity injections, to keep it afloat. It has softened the terms it set for the original $85 billion loan it made back in September. To ease the pressure even more, the Federal Reserve actually runs a facility that buys toxic assets that A.I.G. had insured. A.I.G. effectively has been nationalized, with the government owning a hair under 80 percent of the stock. Not that it's worth very much; A.I.G. shares closed Friday at 42 cents.

Donn Vickrey, who runs the independent research firm Gradient Analytics, predicts that A.I.G. is going to cost taxpayers at least $100 billion more before it finally stabilizes, by which time the company will almost surely have been broken into pieces, with the government owning large chunks of it. A quarter of a trillion dollars, if it comes to that, is an astounding amount of money to hand over to one company to prevent it from going bust. Yet the government feels it has no choice: because of A.I.G.'s dubious business practices during the housing bubble it pretty much has the world's financial system by the throat.

If we let A.I.G. fail, said Seamus P. McMahon, a banking expert at Booz & Company, other institutions, including pension funds and American and European banks "will face their own capital and liquidity crisis, and we could have a domino effect." A bailout of A.I.G. is really a bailout of its trading partners - which essentially constitutes the entire Western banking system. 

NDN/NPI Event, Tuesday, March 10 -- A Conversation with Joe Rospars, New Media Director for the Obama Presidential Campaign

On Tuesday, March 10, at 12 p.m., NDN and the New Politics Institute will be holding a special event here at the our offices in DC -- a luncheon conversation with Joe Rospars, the new media director of the Obama presidential campaign and founder of Blue State Digital, one of the nation's leading new media consulting firms.

There is little argument now that the way the 2008 Obama campaign used new media and the Internet has changed politics here, and around the world, forever. Joe was the director of this historic effort, and we are very pleased that he will be taking the time to reflect on their remarkable campaign, and offer some thoughts on what we might expect in this space in the years to come.

The conversation with Joe will take place at the NDN offices at 729 15th St., NW, between H Street and New York Avenue. Lunch will be served. Seating is limited and will be first come first serve -- please click here to RSVP.

For those not able to attend the event here in our offices, be sure to watch it live on our new high-end Web casting system. Just go to ndnblog.org/livecast -- the stream will begin at 12:15 p.m. ET.

Joe's full bio follows:

A Blue State Digital founding partner, Joe served as the New Media Director for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, where he oversaw all online aspects of the unprecedented fundraising, communications and grassroots mobilization effort.

Joe led a wide-ranging program that integrated design and branding, web and video content, mass email, text messaging, and online advertising, organizing and fundraising.

Prior to the Obama campaign, Joe led BSD's work with Gov. Howard Dean at the Democratic National Committee; during Dean's campaign for party chairman; and at Democracy for America. Joe was a writer and strategist in New Media for Dean's 2004 Presidential campaign.

He holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the George Washington University.

NDN/NPI Event March 10th - A Conversation with Joe Rospars

I am excited to be announce that on Tuesday March 10 we will be holding a special event here at NDN - a luncheon conversation with Joe Rospars, the new media director of the Obama Presidential Campaign and founder of Blue State Digital, one of the nation's leading new media consulting firms.  

There is little argument now that the way the 2008 Obama campaign used new media and the internet has changed politics here, and around the world, forever.  Joe was the director of this historic effort, and I am very pleased he will be taking the time to reflect on their remarkable campaign, and offer some thoughts on what we might expect in this space in the years to come.

We will be making a more formal announcement on this in a few days, but in the meantime mark your calendar for this midday discussion with Joe Rospars.  For those not able to attend the event here in our offices be sure to watch it live on our new high-end webcasting system

New Attitudes for a New Era

President Barack Obama’s signature on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is the clearest signal yet that America has entered a new civic era, very different from the idealist era of the past four decades. As has been the case with all previous realignments or makeovers in our history, this new era will be marked by a far different conception of the role of government and of the way in which public policy is made and judged.

The latest survey results from the Millennial Strategy Program of communication research and consultation firm, Frank N. Magid Associates, demonstrate that the American public fully embraces this new era even as many in the country’s political establishment continue to behave as though the 2008 election never happened.

Conservatives in the media, and virtually everyone on the Republican side of the congressional aisle, amazingly still seem to believe that the country remains "center-right" and is willing to accept an answer to its economic distress that is based on a continuation of the financial and fiscal policies of the past four decades. Many of their counterparts in the liberal media and blogosphere, and some congressional Democrats, are upset that President Obama even deigns to talk to Republicans and are unrealistically disappointed that that the entire Democratic legislative wish list of recent decades has not been fully enacted within the first month of the new Administration. But what both sides fail to fully comprehend is the degree to which public attitudes have shifted. From the perspective of public opinion, America is now a very different country than it was in the 1980s, 1990s, and even what it was before the financial meltdown of last September.

Here are some highlights from the latest results from Magid’s February 2009 survey that clearly document this change and describe the new contours of the public opinion bedrock on which governmental policy will be debated, enacted, and gauged in the coming decades.

  • Governmental activism has replaced a laissez faire approach to societal and economic concerns. By a greater than 2:1 majority, Americans now say they prefer a government that actively tries to solve the problems facing society and the economy rather than one that stays out of society and the economy to the greatest extent possible. (58% vs. 26%). Overwhelming support for an activist approach crosses all demographic and political lines; only Republicans, conservatives, and 2008 McCain voters have any lingering doubts about the matter. In the 1980s and 1990s many, if not most, Americans believed, along with Ronald Reagan, that government was the problem, and not the solution to problems. In 2009, the American people have turned Mr. Reagan's aphorism on its head even as Republicans in Congress and the media continue to preach that very old time religion.
  • Economic equality is a major goal and standard by which to gauge government policy. A majority of the American public now believes that the best policy is to ensure that everyone has at least a basic standard of living and level of income, even if that increases government spending, instead of an approach that lets each person get along economically on their own, even if that means some have more than others (53% vs. 30%). Support for policies that promote economic equality is widespread demographically and politically. Only Republicans and conservatives are opposed. By contrast, in Pew surveys taken in the mid-1990s, only about four in ten Americans endorsed a governmental guarantee of a basic standard of living.
  • Americans favor a foreign policy based on multilateralism. By almost 2:1, Americans agree that the best way to protect our national security is through building strong alliances with other nations rather than by relying primarily on our own military strength (56% vs. 29%). Once again, Republicans and conservatives stand in opposition to all other major demographic and political groups on this matter. And, once again, the American public has clearly moved in a new direction in recent years. Since early 2002, support for relying on military strength for the country's security has fallen by about 15 percentage points while the preference for depending on alliances with other countries has also increased by about the same amount.
  • Pragmatism has replaced ideological purity as the preferred standard for gauging public policy. Half of Americans (49%) say that the best way to judge the correctness of government policies is how well they work. Only a third (31%) believe that the standard should be whether the policies seem to be morally right or wrong. As in other areas, it is only Republicans and conservatives who are out of step with the rest of the public. Clearly, most of the American people, if not many of those inside the Beltway, are ready to say farewell to the ideological gridlock that has characterized U.S. politics for the past 40 years.

These results reflect an almost total shift in the bedrock beliefs of the American people about the purpose of government and the standards for evaluating public policy. Under the heavy influence of the Millennial Generation’s (those born between 1982 and 2003) preference for liberal interventionism in economic matters, activist multilateralism in foreign affairs, and tolerant non-meddling on social issues, the United States has moved squarely into a new civic era.

President Barack Obama intuitively and clearly understands the magnitude of this major change in public opinion. The American people have adopted new attitudes for a new era. It's now time for the Washington political elites to do the same.

Today at Noon, Watch or Attend "New Tools for a New Era" -- Cutting Edge New Tools

UPDATE: Today, Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post points out that more and more politicians are finally waking up to the fact that using 21st-century coummunication technology is vital in today's political environment. From his excellent piece:

...the GOP will be rebuilding itself at a time when the Democratic Party continues to make inroads in using technology to reach a diverse set of constituents with their message. Today, the New Politics Institute, an arm of the liberal think-tank New Democrat Network, will hold one of its many lunches for Democratic Hill staffers and advocacy folks. The title of the event: "New Tools for a New Era." Simon Rosenberg, founder of NDN, said the lunch is a part of his group's ongoing New Tools series, which tout the use of cell phones, social networks and micro-targeting, among others, in campaigning.

We hope you will join NDN and its affiliate, the New Politics Institute (NPI), today at noon for our first post-election tech event of 2009, New Tools for a New Age -- a discussion of three exciting media and tech tools with tremendous potential for use in politics, advocacy and governing today. This event will showcase some impressive new advances in the fields of social networking, Web video and microtargeting of television advertising.

For those not able to attend, we are excited to announce that we will be providing a live Web cast of the event from our newly redesigned, high-tech NDN event space just a block from the White House. Visit ndnblog.org/livecast today to catch a high-quality stream of the forum. Feel free to tell others you think might be interested in attending or watching. For those watching on the Web, the live program will begin at 12:15 p.m. ET.

Joining NDN President Simon Rosenberg for this forum will be Jason Rosenthal, Senior Vice President of Business Operations at Ning, Inc.; Tim Chambers, Co-Founder of the Media 50 Group and Principal, Dewey Digital; and Amy Gershkoff, co-founder of Changing Targets Media. Jason will talk about how Ning -- a scalable social networking platform -- can be adapted to a huge variety of applications; Tim will show us the new Dewey Digital Radar, which provides accurate and detailed Web video metrics for more than 150 Web video platforms; and Amy will tell us how Precision Buy can make media buys more efficient, from targeting the right cable systems to buying the right television programs.

The forum will take place at NDN's offices from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. Lunch will be served, and seating will be first-come, first-serve. Space is limited, so please RSVP as soon as possible. For maps, speaker bios, and other information, please click here.

For background, feel free to review the following memos and papers from NDN and NPI: Leverage Social Networks, Buy Cable Smart, and shaping and delivering messages with Microtargeting.

Thursday New Tools Feature: Obama Finds Search Works

A recent post from Personal Democracy Forum reports that the Obama campaign found online search ads had

a "ridiculously" high Return On Investment as a list-builder. Joe Rospars talked significantly more at a second NOI-sponsored event last month, divulging that search and contextual ads (Google Ads) were the backbone of the campaign's online advertising outreach, and that a relatively straightforward strategy had been steadily and consistently effective...when compared with the cost of acquiring supporters via other channels, search advertising absolutely shone, with an ROI Rospars described as approaching 15:1.

searchThe Obama campaign, recognizing the power of search ads, spent a much larger percentage of their budget on them than the McCain campaign did; the Obama campaign spent about $8 million on search ads in 2008, compared to the McCain campaign's $1.5 million. To put that $8 million in perspective, it is reported to account for nearly half of all political search ad money for the year.

Given the Obama campaign's solid grasp of new media tools, their emphasis on search ads is not surprising. Nor are the results - NDN and the New Politics Institute have been pushing the use of online search ads for years now precisely because they are so inexpensive relative to their impact. For tips on how to use online search ads effectively, check out our excellent papers, Use Search and Advertise Online, or watch the video below of Google's Peter Greenberger speaking at one of our NPI events. Of course, not everyone will get the kind of return that the Obama campaign did - few people have been searched more in the last two years than Barack Obama. But as people get more and more accustomed to using Google whenever they need information about anything, search ads become more and more effective.

Finally, to learn about other great ways to improve your advocacy or campaign, be sure to drop by our NDN / NPI event, "New Tools for a New Era," this coming Tuesday, where we'll look at new advances in social networking, microtargeting, and web video. Anyone interested in technology and politics is guaranteed to geek out, and we'll be debuting a few new toys of our own; stay tuned for more info. 

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