tv Tonight From Washington CSPAN August 7, 2012 8:00pm-11:00pm EDT
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all right, guys. b.a. yourself tonight. b.a. yourself tonight. thank you so much for coming here in culver city. a beautiful venue. please walk amongst the space, enjoy yourselves. behavior cells also because you don't want to break anything. a lot of valuables. pretty excited. before i introduce our guests ever want to talk about the new faces in the room. who i am, i am michael davidson, ceo of h.j. next. i help run the thing. but really our purpose is in our
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name. we are trying really hard to focus on treating of virginities for future generations and confront challenges. we don't want to kick the can down the road for things that we could have solved that with the soda passed off. another will have their own challenges and we want to get as much out of the way as possible. to do that we try to attract and develop and leverage talented. we focus on successful, busy people. it is a part of that process like tonight. we know that the political process is extraordinarily important, either in ended with political ads or male or evoke or you just pay taxes, so you know that the political process certainly matters because you are affected by it every day with the now we cannot. a very influential actor so to speak is with us tonight.
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he is able oklahoma and. at 19 years old he got involved in a pr firm and had three people. within a few years it had over 50, and the involved in the u.s. senate race that his uncle was running and it forever changed his life. since then he was the creative director for the 2008 republican national convention, a chief media strategist for u.s. senator john mccain presidential race, advised corporations, loews corporation and arco and. [inaudible] [laughter] >> maybe you worked for the opposition. i don't know. but in terms of sort of the messaging, and this word message, that campaign style, he is an architect in so many ways of how they communicate with you and how they motivate you to vote for them or for -- against their opponents or care about a certain issue.
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you name it. very fascinating because you are affected by them, by them i mean him, more than you ever were realized. so hopefully we will kind of pulled low over your eyes a little bit tonight to talk about that issue. before he gets into the content of want to mention, the is a behind-the-scenes celebrity who is moving out. i guess their is a book called game change that many of you may or may not have read. figured prominently. also turned into a movie on hbo which is a fascinating movie and book. and so he is a character in and a very -- and actor who looks a lot different then embed. the movie. after tonight you can watch it. stickout fred davis. please, it is a rare opportunity to really engage somebody like him who has -- literally playing at highest levels of political power and influence and getting
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messages to you. so rare opportunities to engage in have a dialogue with somebody like him. please have an open mind. challenge, inquire, enjoy. this is why we do what we do. give you that kind of exposure. take advantage of it and we will bring it up for questions. i will come back up in moderate. thank you for coming and i will pass it on to fred davis. >> thank you, michael. [applause] well, well, well. good to be back. several of you came up and heard me speak at the geisha house. seems like that was a long time ago. i thought i was in sharp answer something. what i thought i would do is talk very briefly and let you ask any questions that you want. what is happening right now in the presidential race happened exactly like it is now four years ago. right now i am not involved in
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the presidential race, but it was out to my eyeballs four years ago. this is because michael suggested that this is what i talk about. this -- that 27, two days from now there was that team of about five or six people, i hope i'm not leaving somebody out. we met once a month in phoenix. the greatest thing in politics is being here and not being in washington. you don't have to give get beat up every day. there would all fly and little chartered planes. flight to phoenix early in the morning from ten to six.
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if the four seasons. in this bagram we would plan the next month basically. and then they would go back and i would catch the 8:00 flight. at 6:00 when we finish our planning senator mccain would come and, often with his wife and the secret service and bring tacos from his favorite targets stand. so we would present. this particular time was a particularly grueling day. it was on a sunday. barack obama was a guy who had come from nowhere to be of very, very prominent hamas likely tough challenger in europe right now. on what we call the ram boats or . his momentum was so i let our
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little gruber thought we have to break it. how on earth do we break this momentum. so we -- steve schmidt who was sitting next to me. we are running against the greatest celebrity in the world. no one knows anything about m -- hammett. what are we going to do? somewhere in that day we determined the paris hilton approach. i am a republican. i would say the answer is no, but at that time nobody knew. it was less for me to have to a explain to john mccain a wonderful brownson that his future lay in the hands of opponents of paris hilton. mom it was a long story about
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what happened at the beginning of that meeting. i will bore you with that. it was certainly in there. he was a little gas. what we did in august was the entire paris hilton's strategy, question his ability to lead, acknowledged to a great extent and expand his flamboyant as of fabulous actor and celebrity. second was how we did the republican convention. obama's was 70 or 80. a mile high stadium, whatever it's called now in denver. we were in a smaller, much
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smaller facility. st. paul. minneapolis. and so things looked really bleak, but we had to take -- the third was the vice-presidential choice and the fourth was debate. we covered all four of those. he approved. he signed off. not because of the budget, because the times are so tough. the petition. he did not want a big, gary staying. up tell you that part in the second. we decide a small convention. we thought -- we talked about vice-presidential choice. not chosen at that meeting. what was discussed was that john needed to do something maverick
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d. that was needed. you know, you can tell people you are maverick all you want, but until the rubber hits the road when that came out. my recollection is that he did not know who that was when the name came up, but that is right before he chose, not terribly long. so we made this choice is scott told john, did that. you could build a case that because of the legacy at the time, george w. bush which was troubled and being a republican that this was an impossible race to win. yet july 27 those four things, we won august. paris hilton worked. adds did work. it was not just an ad but a
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campaign. you saw her a lot. she did not hurt matters when she responded with their own ad. paris hilton's at a pool. we won august. we won the bout coming out of the convention. we had a big bounce. they had minor bounces. they had to get rid of parts of their set because it was so grandiose. ours was designed by a company here in hollywood. it looked like a presidential said. i don't know if you remember when it ended up looking like, but writing notes back-and-forth as we were seeing this. this looks like every cent i have ever seen. i wrote back, i'll take care of it. let's into the room. he did, and i went over to this
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guy who was so proud of the model he had built. you know, the column. all we ended up with was a black stage and a very simple podium. at the time the world's largest tv screen which was back there so we could put any images that we wanted on it. sarah palin, for better or worse, the time that she was named vice president was a huge home run. so we won august. even -- it came back. i'm expecting ticker-tape parades and he came back to being behind. we won the convention. when the vice presidential choice we were ahead by two or three points, not a dramatic. shocking amount which had to drive them insane up until that day the world economy collapsed. and then, you know, the debate, from that point on was an impossible thing.
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one guy in office, think of him as john mccain he and the legacy of jurors w. bush woods right now is spectacular. at the time it was a bit of a burden. the bush campaign, too. so very perturbed without that was portrayed. nonetheless, he had that problem that obama has now, a troubled economy. the outsider, mitt romney, he's in europe, right there. several people asked me tonight when i thought romney would make his vice-presidential choice. well, it's funny, he didn't ask me, but obviously it will be before the convention. you know, it is like a giant chess game. it is a test says game and it changes every minute. breaux know who the vice presidential choices.
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that was the case in our world. the work order came through our shop to design the lapel ads. rick davis. anything that is not mentioned. that is a spoof. and up to his eyeballs. a miserable job. something a was honored to do once. i the river going to die in that process. the big speaking roles at the convention.
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there is a big community theater in tulsa. and that same people have been in the cost in department at that community theater all of their lives. they would die in the cost in department. it would work their way up to the better and better role and convince them. somebody that was born into the limo decision committee. all that going on. rowley two or 300 ads that had already been produced. everybody on the little team on the inside had seen those. arguing and fighting and scratching. the article today in bloomberg. the difference between the super pak and the campaign. left out half the story. what i said was it is much more
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enjoyable in a way to do the super pak because you don't have 50 people approving every word you right in every ad and every picture. i was doing john hanson presidential race. we decided bear not going to get the money to give him a shot in the campaign. i left to form the super pak. actually, the end of july. and it was like going to my you know what school was like, some of you may still no. crazy. crazy. crazy. the first day of summer is there and you have been looking forward to it for so long, but you have nothing to do. it's like you're chomping at the bit for something to do.
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that is what happens when you go from the campaign world. there are three board members, including me, and an attorney. we talked every day for, not ours, but five minutes, ten minutes, 15 minutes was a really long call. and we would make all of the decisions we needed to make, approved everything. the campaign could not approve anything legally. the candidate could not see ads. the candidates wife could not see ads which was our big issue. it was almost like a giant let down. on the one hand it was controlled and easier and a homer and nicer, but the part that they often left out is you miss the adrenaline. yuma is that crazy excitement that kevin soon begin. and then it is a trade-off. that is what is going on. what's different is we did not have super packs four years ago. so that has made an incredible
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difference when the funding of romney in particular. and who is winding the most? the obama campaign. what happened four years ago? they had a double and triple the money that we had. so i give them no room, no road to wind because it -- we were ahead. all of us were really proud that we were ahead for such a long time with such limited resources that is all i'm going to talk about there, and then we would get into any subject that you want, but that is what is happening in those crazy presidential campaigns. >> any questions? you have your instructions on the microphone. time -- >> thank you. it seems as effective warning,
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it looks like there was a lot. the personality. so you had this charismatic person. this time around it seems less of a formality and hopefully the issues about the economy. hmm still in response. to you see that being maintained on issues are do you ultimately see it as a campaign becoming about personality? >> think of that two players. which one wants it to be about personality in which one wants it to be about issues? that is -- so you're going to see a bottle, and that will be a fascinating battle between barack obama trying to your shed the black cloud of despair that he had ever is said. he was one of the most incredible speakers i have ever
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seen. it's like he lost the ability. he released a and/or video a couple of days ago. i cannot remember the name. it's called choice. mine little inside scoop tells me than last sunday. it was really well done. a simple, direct contrast between how he sees your choice in america and how mitt romney caesar choice. mitt romney's team tried to be a republican. they tried to develop a more everyman personality. that did not work so well. on some tv show a while back.
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a very smart man. forget the personality thing. the it professional that we need to get this country out. so i think you'll see obama reverting to personality and trying to move the campaign that went. you will see mitt romney doing the opposite trying desperately to keep it on the economy. any poll anybody takes, that's what they care about. >> ultimately winning strategy, in times like this, a different time than we found in 2008, do you see -- i think personality has always played something in the way that america votes. have a conversation with.
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because things are so difficult right now, that very serious tone being a winning strategy? >> they both have the potential to win. obama has the potential to win with his enthusiasm and a grass-roots network and he gets rid of the teleprompter and gets back to talking. mitt romney clearly has a pass to win. he found the economy. kind of marking him out because does he want to be president to make more money and put more money in these offshore accounts? all that kind of stuff. clever strategy as we were talking earlier. maybe a little early for that. there is only one time that it matters who is ahead, and this race is going to go back and forth and back and forth. nippon talk, fascinating to watch. great for me to watch because i don't have to -- i can actually sleep at night.
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>> i'm sorry. your job to point to that sentiment. >> i would never. >> two is the vice-presidential nominee that does have only just complimenting well, but i have given the boost in the polls that you want to see with a choice like that. who among the potential candidates would you advise him to select? >> i would advise him to take one that i don't think he's going to take. i think he will take an extremely competent skybox that may be complement's and but certainly does not overshadow him. bearing ohio. a great skill. he's not going to win because of excitement. i would look for somebody that
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is bring some excitement. sarah palin brought excitement. chris christie would bring excitement to mitt romney. i have nothing to do with that decision. that is nothing but a guess. >> this election and the last several, having beaten mccain and originally just run off, he goes back. loses. romney runs against the same candid it's over and over again. a reelection in the middle of the term for president, the candidates for coming forward for wanting to run? people not wanting to change.
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not wanting to just jump in front of the camera quite yet. >> a great question, and a lot of people, so and so is not ready yet. there is an element to that in the chris christie. but it's bigger than that. you hit the nail on the head. the biggest issue is you're going to get to do this once. you don't normally get the nomination and the nomination and then the nomination. you get one. i've been through this with several candidates. it is a tough issue. i give you an example. the huntsman people first call me several years ago, i met him once. and i thought he was a really great guy. environmental defense. fabulous night. a small group that is studying him or helping him more time to get in to run in 2016.
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no mention of 12. and i said, well, yeah. that sounds interesting. i signed on. in typical fashion we did that. and after. also, he's no fool. we started studying 2014. 2016, i'm sorry. by all the games. as the more likely to run out? newt gingrich, will he slang out, do well? so it's like a giant chess game. and you're trying to figure out more than anything, they will tell you it is not highly the -- i need a little more experience. they're trying to figure out, and are you in the game to lose?
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no. politicians, anybody, nobody plays the game to lose. i don't play at my business to lose. they try to find -- it is a miserable chore to win. they try to find the shortest path to the chance for victory. >> have a question. there is farley somebody on facebook right now. the best and most qualified to much exposure and the angry years. the brightest and most qualified. i want to take a step to that office. >> dan quayle's presidential race.
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the heir apparent. vice president. it does is turn. the republican party intends to nominate intern's. think of bob dole. there is a guy in texas, the governor, george w. bush, who very wisely dropped hints that he would run but never said that he would. never said he would. that was a tough presidential race. i got out of. one of my very best friends. dog him for ever. he runs one of the largest companies in the world. one day we were going up a ski lift in telluride where he has a home. it was a miserable day. no one is skiing. dan quayle does not know miserable days. he skis from sunup to sundown.
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adelle rumor what happened. kind of forgetting who was with i looked over. why on earth would anyone want to be president. he did not miss a beat. the only time he's ever been mad at me that i know of. he said, because if you think you have the skills that make life better for people in this world it's your duty to run, and he was dead serious. i'm not sure all of them approached it from that or of the standpoint. great senator from georgia. passed away now. he was the same way. in atlanta. on a sunday. he was out there writing his lawn mower. light 110 degrees out. be dragging in. we could talk about. again, snapped at me.
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respect and honor me enough. i walked out of my house. i should be addressed properly. i thought that was insane. the fact that he thought that i thought was just an incredible those of character for him. it more character than anyone i know. so many things that i wanted to do in the race and the some of the rest was wanted to do that he would not consider doing. >> not necessarily individuals, but put them out there for their own character to be scrutinized. obviously he knew firsthand. as a family that was potentially attacked. >> i've had a lot of clients. you mentioned facebook. it's not the client so much. because they are of a certain age that that was not around. maybe a photo.
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and many did you know have kids, and colorful. colorful college years. you don't want those pictures out there. denture doesn't want the pictures out. most of the time they have no control over it. we have to stamp that down. john hanson came back from china , a conquering hero, a returning hero. because of the laws he could not know that there was this effort for him to run for president. he had a clue that people were talking about it. he got back on a saturday night and went straight to the white house press corps correspondence to neck. totally jet lag from china. goes to that. the next morning, i talked a meeting was on monday, so i missed this. an update on what people were thinking. well, he had a lot of full-time
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employees. the at a major operation going, and he had no clue. he wasn't necessarily really happy about that. as a matter of fact, for quite a while i remember two or three weeks later. newport, we were sitting out on the fans between meetings are something. he loves the beach. sitting in the sun. he said, i've been back three weeks from china and i have yet to have my laundry done. things like that. he got pushed into that. him eventually his daughters and it up becoming famous. i think he thought correctly that he would be a spectacular president. unless you want to go through the process, it's horrible, and a big part of it is what you're talking about.
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i chuckled to myself. i couldn't run for dog catcher. these guys, you know, they get scrutinized. notice this is the quiet part. >> quick question. in this presidential campaign do you think it will be more ardor science? and what i mean by that, the data side and then there is the personality side. how would you -- >> i think it goes a little bit back to this question. you have a date candid it's the who is mitt romney. you have a personality candid if it comes back, which i think it will, barack obama. now, both sides have both of those operations going completely. massive data operations. massive social networking operations. all that is huge.
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at the top one guy that is very much data driven. they are different as night and day, i think. we will see what wins. you're going to get a great example of both of them./h >> a couple of thoughts and the question. this whole issue of a tax return , it seems that romney is not really running to win. i get the sense that his approach is more less of obama of loose. why is he running away from his success? at the success was that up as ap get the? >> it to you and everyone in this room. barack obama's base is not
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necessarily in this room. mlb voters. they're very well could be. her the average voter and now is an mitt romney vote. you have to be a little careful on these things. i don't think mitt romney is not in it to win he has wanted this to opportunities to see was a child and had two or three other corrupt thinking that i want to be president because i get a coal plant, but because i think i can do the job. it would be a fascinating, the most important job in the world, and i could do a great job and leave a great legacy from my kids and family.
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what you're talking about is the aggressiveness of the campaign. you and i talked a little bit earlier. one thing that you want to a remember, how many people would rather be ahead of right now? so the money, you saw obama spending more and he's bringing in the money to arguably do a pretty good job taking some of the window of romney's business success is telling him not just a success and wealthy guy, but a questionable guy. offshore accounts and do this, don't do that. it's troublesome. you know. it leaves this? there is never -- i have never heard a good answer on why you
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don't. mitt romney's answer is the standard answer, i don't want to get -- give them fuel. well, most people look at that and think, well, i wonder what is really in it. that is going to haunt him. he made that decision and he is a guy who sticks with his decisions. i don't know. a think the tax return birds and badly. i know we will and this other race. it is kind of a murky issue. not being up front, that's the scary thing. >> in order voters have been
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credited largely with having created a lot of the force that elected obama. something we have seen, rampant unemployment that has hit them in record numbers. my question is, what do you see happening with the youth vote in this cycle? do you think republicans embraced their relationship with the younger voters enough to eat and to sway the other side? >> in general would you say and her voters are richer report? they don't have their careers yet. so the tendency is for them to lean toward the person who is not going to increase taxes, who will increase -- the opposite, will increase taxes on the rich to help provide for the less rich. let's ordered the way. but what happens? you're right. all of those people really helped along,.
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a lot of them did not vote, but it was the momentum and enthusiasm, and that just add this groundswell that swept barack obama into office. burst their bubble. at that he would pay my car mortgage. at that would get a new car. allow the people think that. the question is, to those people not vote this time would they move to another option? he brought a lot of new voters you may never the again because they're disappointed. they might vote for romney, but they're probably not going to vote for obama. they're not trying to make good in their brain is called a second mistake twice. the youth vote will be less level this time around. time to capture of the use of --
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use of his kids. a great asset. the fervor began some how. don't count would you are seeing el as indicative of company where the race would go. >> pay off student loans orange panera funding a businesses are attaching an people to health care. do you see that next -- if the republicans are to come in right now, do you see them continuing that kind of policy where they will put specific people in place to address younger voters when -- and younger constituents when you have people make up a significant part of the population. >> republicans are going to be dying on the vine and less they
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address the kids and some of the minorities in this country. you know, you look back, the spanish in particular. those families have the same values and ideals that most republican damage to. this incredible time. the whole immigration issue has ruined republican parties in their eyes. it is a big issue. they have those tough immigration laws and the supreme court. all kinds of issues going back and forth. the very top of line for me. the republicans, if there are two things they can do it is target the kids and target hispanics. been absolutely dead person.
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so do most hispanic families and kids. >> the man who broke his glass much smarter. much smarter. >> a question, a stream of consciousness and comments. >> recently there were changes in government. would you deal to name who ran in each of these elections? >> what i? >> yes,. >> oh, heavens, no. i walked in the day after sarah palin was named buzz presidential nominee, and i got her for three hours. a game changed, so i'm not speaking out of school. i went up to her sweet in minneapolis or st. paul, in an odd spot.
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as i walked in the front you remember the blacks of close the same. there they were. in the seamstresses were tearing cease, adding sleeves. and i hear her yell from the back room, fred, come on back. around the corner. in a white robe. upon his desk. she had to stylus behind her, one was doing a perfect hairdo and end on this side a perfect eridu down to test them both. behind her nicole wallace and tucker as you in breezing, trying to get her to properly pronounce the names of all of those people you just asked me to renounce. this little element.
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one of them was using a curler of some sort. almost coming up. the hen was on fire. the research you ever seen my life. all these people are back there telling her. she lifted me. okay. which will it be? up or down? i picked up. i got it wrong. they said down. that librarian look, you know cumbersome but -- >> the reason i ask is because you obviously have a presidential race. you talk to anyone in russia, italy, japan, they know who is running for president. they have known for the past two years. a lot of them it's insane, but my question is, in bed mid-20s fdr contracted a paralytic disease. and i doubt that most americans knew he was in a wheelchair.
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how did or how does the marketing blitz that has become the political campaign, how does it benefit and it detract from the actual political process? >> well, the goal, of course, is to let you know more of the campus. it is my job to let you know what we want you to know about my candid and to find the things that you don't, you know, that the other guy does not want you to know and amplify those. guess what, it works both ways. that is what jim messina or whoever is on the other side is doing. and another big issue now, everybody talks about the newspapers are right off. you would vote for whomever your favorite columnist with so you about. they would do the research. well, that hasn't really changed. it is just where you get the information that is changed. so if i want to know who the
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president is akin. -- if you want to know who the president is i can find that on my iphone. we did not have that anymore -- before. about the same with the exception of those details. you're exactly right. i have gotten in a little trouble recently wanting to get more in affirmation out about people's. so whatever -- believe it or not i think the system works well. at some plants learn that by the end of the campaign will wall i was questioning whether they would make a great congressman or never leave i had some clients learn that by those people invariably do not wind. somehow, not all moi the voters
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get it right. unwed they had all the innovatin the world. in you can't speak yet. and what. >> thank you for coming. my question for you, simply a multiple choice with a bit of an explanation. has the media lost credibility this time around with their coverage of the obama campaign or is their credibility about the same? i am going to assume, perhaps, that their credibility over the last four years of their coverage of this president and the eyes of the american republic.
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>> well, there are the rest of the world stops. and, as we know, i don't think the media properly vented barack obama. i think he was one of the -- we were talking earlier. there time isn't yet. i think there might have been a time frame to be president, but not when you have been in the state senate in illinois and now when you have been a u.s. senator for two years. what does that take to think he should be present at that point? me beside dan quayle, felt it in his heart. was it vetted to the extent that every single thing was? absolutely not. had they vetted and over the last three and a half years, i don't think so. a big they you have to, but, you know, what is fascinating to me is that will that happen between september and the end of october?
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and i don't know. it's not going to be just the media. it will be both campaigns. >> from where you sit, your experience, do you think the american peoplehood are on to what should be a lack of credibility of the media coverage of obama in the last four years? >> i don't think so. i think that the news of the world, we know that. we care more about it than the average guy, but if you talk to the average at home i don't think so. i think they see simple things. the really important simple things. they see that an extra never does not have a job. those kind of things. and not just that the economy is bad, but this guy told me he was going to make it better and then it did not get better. that is the biggest, you know, one of the things, i always say
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that we do a good job and my company because a man of very smart. we are simple. this is a simple issue. did it is the economy. well, it is. the flaw is it is the opposite side. this economy, somebody is going to have to make some of the most miserable, hard choices on earth they're going to have to get them through congress which is another near impossibility unless the composition of congress changes. if the republicans elect mitt romney and get control of the senate and maintain control the house, a vast changes will take place. i think it will be -- a lot of change will take place. if, you know, obama retains the presidency the republicans maintain the house. the senate stays in democratic hands, you're not going to see a whole lot of changes.
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success. he made this dramatic amount of money really quickly in the construction business, but it was not enough. he was empty. he could not figure out what was -- of very interesting and. basically just talking really directly in tight to the camera on what -- why he turned to politics. it was not politics turned to. it was the ability to help others. and so he made his money. man-to-man that is the answer. it wasn't. he went to haiti under church trip. 10,000 families. he help those people. they elected him mayor. once he became mayor he was able to do more. he get happier in his life.
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he gets into the senate and goes there and is frustrated. hard to get anything accomplished. if he wasn't there making those tough decisions and banging his head against the wall it might be somebody else there who is going to take the easy route. so that, to me, kind of sums up politics in a way. the ones that are there for the right reasons i the ones that are going to make our world better. right now we need a few more of them because the world is not perfect yet. >> i presume this might be difficult to answer, but it's the best and do. -- >> i'm leaving now. >> says. we bring in a lot of very compelling and interesting speakers.
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you're one of them. we benefit from the nonpartisan position of having a free enterprise fed coalition, education, security, we focus on the issues and build coalitions around those issues and work with people on the right and left. a kind of just depends. so we sort of see what people are thinking and get an appreciation or duke it out and have a substantial debate. as i tend to think, there is not enough truth debate in this country. it is either polarizing or there's a push to be toward compromise as opposed to real and true debate. one of the things that i excuse or sets us on track to have a true debate is, you have the republicans, when the federal care act was going through republicans are running ads, there were running ads criticizing obamacare has
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stealing money from seniors. definitely untruth. and then you have the democrats criticizing the mitt romney and many republicans doing it. a capitalist and shift jobs overseas. patently untrue. when his campaign started to get the engine going, what they're giving us is completely disarmed so i get it. that so people are. they're going to do get out. have the window we are trying to pull over rice. no wonder substantial debate. is the center could watch for? >> call me and as to the vote for. give me a say. those fourth. first of all, i would differ with one thing you said.
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i don't think these samples you give are dishonest. they are selective. there is a big difference. these days there is always choose. you have to facts check. something of interest came up today. i was on a call with a direct mail vendor. and he mentioned something that he thought we should promote. well, that's a stretch. it was true, but it was shockingly stretched. i said, i just of the deck and put that on the air. that's right. direct mail is not subject to facts check. lesson number one, don't read your direct mail. just watch tv. [laughter] it is like anything else. you have to -- you have to make up your own mind. we have this great gift of the internet. don't just go to michael's of
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sight or cavan's website and find out what he wanted to know. that is what i'm going to be telling you. whatever is on their website, that is a guy like me who has decided that these other things based on the pull the you want to know. just type in kevin's name. page five, six, seven, eight, nine of kugel and read those things. that is what i do it when someone calls up and wants me to help them with a campaign. we don't go to see anybody. about as much about them i walk in the door the first time as i will a year later or two years later when they run. ..
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write down your creative ideas this is like your compass. >> i love these. and i keep quacks one in the story a few years ago i went to a meeting with of guy i haven't met yet but i had been hired to his campaign a guy named rick snyder is the governor of michigan, and i remember i always knew everything before i got there i got hired the day before and he said you're in. just go in there you're going to have dinner with him tuesday night. i don't know anything about him. no choice. i'm on the plane. i go up there and i take this book with me. i go to the restaurant and the round table in the corner he's a good-looking guy looks like a governor with a good sign.
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>> he said high and he had this unbelievable the unique voice. usually i take pages of notes. at the end of the dinner first of all i love things. just a great genius. he kind of helped save gateway computers and make tons of money and all this stuff, just adored him and envisioned him as the next governor of michigan. and so, at the end of dinner he said do you have any great ideas because the next morning and i opened my non-genetic book and i've written one were down in my book.
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i opened it up and the word was honored and that is the one word i had written. the way that i looked at it is michigan has tried everything else. the most recent governor was a female. you name it, barnyard animal they haven't tried yet and they hadn't tried murder, so i said i think it's time for a nerd and i purposely did not look over here brick was right here and had this look on his face but the second i said she looked up and said that's you. islamic every ad was about nerds and he won a resounding victory. [laughter]
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>> now a look at the new use of new media in the past presidential campaigns. over the next hour and a half, journalism professor discusses his book taking our country back the crafting of network politics from hoard keen to barack obama. he spoke to weeks ago at chapel hill north carolina. >> the telltale signs yes we recognize these. okay for today's lecture we are going to approach elections with a look at the last two presidential elections and a revolution in campaign communication, fund-raising and organization that occurred with the full integration of the internet into the political process. as we have a bit of a history lesson here as well as a peek at the implications of the history on the 24th election. to help us negotiate is returned to dr. daniel, professor kreis
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at journalism and mass communications where he teaches courses and research methods and political communication. he received his b.a. from college and master's and ph.d. from stanford university. before coming to carolina in july of 2011, he was a postdoctoral the soviet and all and fellow of the information society project at yale law school in institution with which he is still affiliated. his research explores the impact of technological change on the public's sphery and political practice and his recently published book taking the country that the crafting of network politics from howard dean to barack obama presents them told history of new media and democratic political campaigns over the last decade. in the book he traces innovation and online campaigning brought about by young internet staffers on the 2014 campaign under the leader and packed off through a variety of political campaigns,
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organizations and advocacy books and of course on the 2008 obama campaign. we would like this for a moment so you can order this book to take a vantage of the local bookstores. in addition to his new book his research has appeared in several peer review journals including new media and society, critical studies and media communications, the journal of information technology and politics and the international journal of communication among others. we are delighted to have him present the summer's final installment of the 2012 election nseries please join me in welcoming dr. daniel kreis as he discusses never politics from howard dean to barack obama, 2004 to 2012. [applause] >> i want to thank you all for coming today and also think the community for them and for
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extending such a wonderful invitation to be part of such a great series i finished my first at unc and it's the programs like this that have really made my time in chapel hill be so wonderful in my first year. what i want to talk about today is my recent book which is mentioned. the book presents the history of new media and electoral campaign over much of the last decade through the lives of looking at how the democratic party and its candidates have taken up new media. and i just want to say one quick thing here is that our focus on democratic campaigning to tell the history deeply and well for reasons we can talk about in the q&a i think are on the republican side of the of the have had a bit of a different history. largely for a number of different reasons but mainly the parties basis, the infrastructure that serves the two parties are different and sort of provide services in the online campaigning sector is
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different. and all this sort of makes for a bit of a different history over the last decade. and again, we can talk about that more later on. as i go along i'm going to talk a little bit more about the title and the detail. what i mean by kraft, what i mean by network politics, and the notion of taking our country back which is the title of the book. i will explain in more detail in the mobilization more generally. okay. i want to do three things today. first of all to talk a bit about how i came to this work. it's a story that begins in the dead of winter in 2004 on the streets of sioux city iowa on the eve of the iowa caucuses and it ends in the office of one of the most powerful on-line political consultant firms and politics. a firm that didn't exist when i began this research and that is one of the back stories here how things have changed over the
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last decade in terms of the major players and how the campaigns and candidates are taken up. in the process i want to talk about how scholars and journalists have thought about the of take of the internet and the electoral process. second, i want to talk about the finding of the look and show how the story of the of to give new media and politics is a story of innovation and infrastructure and organization building. and i will do so we really focusing on some of the key moments in the broad history in terms of folks coming together and creating a series of innovation in the new media and then carrying them across the democratic politics in the obama campaign in 2008 and now in 2012. finally i will talk more about what this means. how should we think about the interaction of new media and space political process these? what's new and what is not so new and what are the implications for the citizenship
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, the ways in which we carry out space process these in the party. okay. start by saying how i came to this work. during the 2004 democratic primary, i was a master student in journalism writing about presidential election. after watching the outpouring of energy around the candidacy, i was sort of excited by the potential of online network media to potentially create new forms of space political campaigning, but also the new ways to do new things and by the left you can sort of see this is the howard dean game designed by a company called grizzlies of games and the idea was that folks around the country have sort of gathered together in a massive multi player video game that sort of carried out roles
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for the voters in my life and i was sort of interested how was that translating to the on the ground old school shuler politics where were the intersections between the two? so, being a graduate student, ausley e-mail es bunch of folks i found in the area that were volunteering for the campaign and in the middle of the life and to lincoln nebraska and i drove the two and a half hours into city iowa, and i spent a couple of days falling around these volunteers watching them through baptist churches and roadside barbecue joints, supermarkets, native american cultural centers folks went door to door talking to voters etc. about the upcoming election and their role in it and how important it was that the turnout to vote. now we all know the outcome from the campaign in 2004. and i didn't know necessarily that might in terms of after we
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watch volunteers and myself as we watched the sort of concession speech we didn't notice anything out of the ordinary but by the time i got back to the car it was on the flu on the radio which again none of us had noted by the time we got home it was sort of clear this would be a major media story. little did i know at that time that experience sort of seeing that organizing taking place on line, seeing what was taking place on the ground sometimes the disconnect between the two formed the basis and the set of questions in the next decade about the interrelationship between technology and democracy and the questions that ended up framing this book. more fundamentally i had a couple basic questions that emerged from that experience. so the mid-court media bringing about new forms of space political process remaking things like the letters of
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accountability, forms of the political representation and changing democratic conversation at around elections and those became the framing questions for the study that took me to some unexpected places. the first thing i did i entered a ph.d. program and turned to the scholarly literature on the subject and what i found is a theory presented in a broad debate sort of frame what i'm going to talk about for the next hour. more generally some of a series of the new media and politics make the claim that changes in the new media technology and tools themselves or the cost of organizing the debate and i say cost and a broad expanse of sense. it takes a lot less time to find people who are interested in the causes like yours or mine. we can gather around candidates and go on the internet and the computer and find other folks who might be inclined to agree with you in some way.
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it lowers the cost of organizing action and you might go door-to-door for the people that report because it's an online site and publicized through e-mail and gather together a whole bunch of names of folks who might be interested in sort of joining and participating with you. at the same time one of the things the scholars have argued is that the citizen driven political engagement might be happening independently in these old formerly organized campaigns. so the idea now where everybody can set up a website sifry candidate like howard dean what you need a campaign organization any more? anyone can have the tools of organizing themselves and have acted to these. they're suggesting but we see is a broad shift away from these formal campaign organizations
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and more towards the distributed decentralized sort of cover dhaka organization. to argue against that in a little bit. but, that's basically the grounding and one of the following approaches so far. and then finally there was a lot of suggestions that online politics would have leveled cooperation, a collaboration between piers and citizens themselves in ways that sort of a undermined the lead come under wind up candidates etc. people are more of a voice in the political process. and i thinthat is open to debate and i want to talk about this a little bit more lateron. with those questions in mind and with the scholarly literature in mind, i wanted to set out to sort of figured out if i can answer a couple of questions of my own and and really not only were they the big democratic fear the questions but also some more empirical questions namely why is it the demon campaign that was decided on the innovation in 2004 and later on
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why was a deal on a campaign that was decided in 2008? why weren't there other democratic candidates for republican candidates who were perceived as sort of advancing the of take of the new media politics in similar ways. i was really puzzled by the enormous growth in online campaigning between the two years between what we saw in 2004 versus what we saw in 2008 so what would help explain that? may be the tools of more powerful or maybe there was something else. the special process sees gathering online and finally lots of democratic party in the early campaign i was still wondering what were the larger space implications? so i did a couple things to find the answer to this question. first of all interviews and i can talk more in the q&a about how i went about researching the book but in broad terms here essentially what i did is interview every one who would talk to me who had worked in the new media politics of the last decade or so starting in 2000
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and what i ended up with is talking to over 60 staffers who work on a number of different campaigns including eldora, wesley clark, john kerry, john edwards, barack obama, tom vilsack, hillary clinton, pretty much ought major democratic party campaigns. and then because they really focus a lot on the obama campaigns and the word of the democratic party that some of the former staffers did and i will talk about that in a moment i also interviewed nearly the entire internet department from the campaign back in 2004 as well as all of the senior management in the managerial positions in the obama campaign new media division in 2008. and in fact a lot of those folks are now working for the president election day 2012 so it is current in those ways. second, we work together as an enormous amount of writing folks have been active in democratic politics and new media politics
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more generally and sort of tried to read them together into a coherent history and that is great. one of the wonderful things about on-line publishing is that they set up blogs to talk about the work they did on the campaigns or to speculate on sort of what works and what didn't. for a researcher you really have access to firsthand accounts of what things were like when they were living and breathing these campaigns in a really a different way. the related some fieldwork during the 2008 campaign. i gave observation with the barack obama campaign tools looking at the functionality of the tools so what a citizen be able to see through the technologies the campaigns were using on-line in california and nevada. okay so let me start here with abroad in terkel argument with the history. i know this might be a little difficult to see on the board but i will talk through it. important thing to remember is
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that the new media politics actually have a history. oftentimes i think we sort of forget that there's a history in terms of people doing things over time, organizations doing things over time and that this history sort of shapes the way that candidates use the internet today. it's not all new every electoral cycle. one of the arguments of the book is that it was the remnants of a failed campaign. the howard dean campaign of 2004 that was really the significant dissemination point for a whole new way of engaging and using the internet and on-line campaigning. so the campaign was the host of a number of innovations in terms of how to use the internet and we will talk more about this and that but it's what we take for granted today to read the first systematic use of e-mails through the political candidates now you get about a million e-mails from a number of different causes that didn't exist systematically back in
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2002, 2003 when the campaign started to pioneer. second, social networking platform. we tend to remember and think about campaigns now on things like facebook. back in 2000 to come to the center of the dominant network was friend store and one of the things he did is actually create their own networking platform the campaign used as a way that individuals could connect to one another and drive. things that are less visible to us that are immensely important to the history that i will tell today are content management systems and databases. so it's how you put information on-line. how do you know who your voters are online? hardee you know who you should be talking to and avoid talking to for a sample? all of that wasnew back then in this year and a couple of the things the campaign did really well, even more and i will see more about this in a minute, but you have to know how to use the tools effectively to mobilize
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the supporters, to coordinate their work in some ways in order to raise money in the communication messages and to get volunteers in the field and when i use the network politics in the title this is what i am referring to triet by referring to the ways of coordinating the volunteers that are now gathering for the first time for the candidates across the country. in the old days you used to have volunteers the would show that the field offices. now what do you do when every volunteer and the swing state like california can be making phone calls to the voters in the swing state? they become a vast network of distributed volunteers. how do you make sure everyone is doing the things you need them to do as a part of a political campaign? okay. so, briefly the history. then i will go a little bit more in a moment it turns out that after the team campaign ends, the former staffer, as you can see sort of presented there is a little the individual started an
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extraordinary array of political consultants' fees, training organizations, an advocacy groups etc., and it's through them that they carry the lessons that they learned, the technologies that they develop and the skills that they did a lot of the campaign to many other sites and the democratic electoral politics and they become the conduits of these innovations across the field. one of the things they do over the years is the not only carry the tools and techniques wholesale, they make them more powerful. they generate best practices. how do you use the website effectively? that was a new skill in 2004, one that then gets refined through their work with other organizations, other candidates, etc.. the history that i want to focus on today is moving a former dean a staffer to the democratic party after chairman dean was elected so they became the technology and the internet directors for the party and they
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easily implemented a whole new way the democratic party would be engaging in its electoral politics. and then afterwards they go from the democratic party and the obama campaign in 2008. so the new media director of the campaign in 2008 was a former staffer so there is a direct transmission of the technology. that is the policy in the sky the larger overarching argument. i'm going to go now inside a couple of these moments and just to illustrate a little bit of what i have been talking about. i want to start off by talking a little bit about innovation in terms of how did this all come out? first look at the state of red campaigning in 2000. this is a screen shot from al gore's website in 2000. and really what scholars call brochure was the dominant way of organizing a political campaign website at a time. and essentially this refers to
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creating html readable versions of campaign literature and putting it on line. they tend to be static content. it is very informative content so you could sort of see he sort of present his vision for the 21st century right on the front page. there's not a lot that you could do. you could vote and hold it's not interactive. it's very much not to present substantive information to the voters and indeed the small oil that the political staffers are working in the internet have was for undecided voters. they saw that most of the people were visiting the candidates web pages were going to be undecided voters looking for substantive information. it's a very deliberative model, this idea of citizenship where folks will be curious about candidates and will go on line and go do their research essentially and get this substantive information at the polls. now during the cycle there was
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also the first inkling that maybe this was wrong. that may be actually the visiting candidate web sites for supporters. so in that sense, when you actually see at this point in time the campaign's start to take advantage of this and to say supporters might be checking out the online media we might as well be asking them to do stuff for us, to volunteer to give money its data. so you see for the first time some early practices that were around salles dollar online fund raising driven famously by the mccain can fan, the primary campaign in 91, also bill bradley fund-raising they began providing principal literature, ford said, what you can do you saw this a lot in the campaign here in north carolina was that you could go to the web site and you could put that on your front lawn so you didn't have to go to a campaign office you could just do it yourself from a printer.
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he also saw the campaign was creating customizable policy pages. so as a supporter you could say i'm going to create my own personalized site with the top five issues and interested in and then e-mail that. there was a we to take advantage of the social networks that folks had coming on line. now one of the challenges was that there was no real developed industry of online campaigning in 2000. and essentially a lot of this knowledge gets lost in a trend that each election cycle because if there is no dedicated firm of there is no dedicated political technology at this time, and little in the way of best practices for campaigning, which explains why well into 2003, most of the presidential candidates lacked dynamic sites that we would now associate with presidential campaigns. so, for the example, this was the dena campaign, this was a screen shot from the website in
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2003. pretty limited functionality. there's a way to sign up for e-mails and contact the governor and read about the candidate and the press and learn about some of the issues he was running. it to contribute funds came relatively late in december of 2002. even then, it wasn't as prominently featured as you would expect of a campaign website today. the campaign website had very little in the way of discussion and organizing of burgundy. for supporters, and he was by no means exceptional. all the candidates pretty much had the sites that looked like this well into the susan three, 2004 electoral cycle. now what drove innovation during the cycle was actually not a political candidate, it was loggers and here i want to talk a little bit about what we call the netroots in the sort of scholarly community, and bloggers themselves in that group, but the story behind the dena campaign was an issue of disruption. was a way that folks organizing
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independently were disrupting the way that the candidates would normally conduct elections on line. think back to the 2003, 2004 cycle for a moment candidates are vying to see president bush and among these candidates was governor dean who was running as an insurgent and outside candidate whose campaign settled on the opposition for the iraq war as well as his claims to represent the space wing of the democratic party. a key part of this story is the netroots, this online collection of lawyers that were progressive and looking to be make the democratic party were upset by the democratic party complicity in the iraq war to get the height independently the candidacies and what they did is they set up the sites like this. this is the harvard team in 2004 blog and with the sites serve to do is create forums for other folks to gather round the
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candidacy entirely independently in the campaign. and what you see here is a lot of the early organizing tactics the campaign would later take up in response to what they were doing. this is a screen shot of howard dean in 2004 from the same months in the campaign and olver you can see the key differences. certainly it is the format, lots of discussion links and also left lots of links to outside as well as the official campaign. it's a way for people to make themselves visible to one another piece it's basically to say we are here, we are supporting the candidacy and we are going to help him get elected to office. they start driving fund-raising and then they start driving the growth. it was a news site back then and was basically designed to facilitate offline gathering of people who shared online interests. so you could get together say your interest in the candidacy could join and meet everyone else in your neighborhood and
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then go off and take action to knock on doors etc.. the borders actually are the ones that drove this initially and they were the only ones the responded to the request that a campaign to sort of get involved in this and reach out to a number of different campaigns. the fund hard team come to those of four. they started to pitch this and it was only later ron the campaign install started to meet up as a tool and that the candy central organizing backbone of the campaign in 2004. >> what's interesting is these are not social modes of gathering together and organizing for a candidate on line been deadlocked by the campaign of self so this is a leader screen shot of the candidates web site in december. as you can see it got much more of the blog format in terms of creating a set of tools that enable people to gather around the campaign and take action for
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the campaign. certainly contribute is a lot more out front and center in the future prominently. you can see folks driving and also a set of links on the left-hand side that are now tools and resources. so the way you can go on line and held the campaign in some way by downloading flyers, buy passing information for your social networks, buy downloading all the give and video and being able to send in the mouth, etc. you can see on the top d'aspin official blog the first for presidential candidates to have a set of event organizing tools that we would see as standard place today. it's a social networking site the campaign developed on its own through supporters that profile themselves and start organizing their friends and family. the whole point here is that essentially the campaign itself
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realized that it's a great we have all of this energy gathering around the campaign, but held we get them working towards our electoral priorities? and then that was really the impetus behind this more sort of social orientation of the campaign website to this of the campaign manager really wanted and set out to convene all of these outside efforts and bring them to the campaign to better coordinate their electoral work because the policy is about money and message and volunteers. so they built these tools and it's an interesting thing he hires a bunch of folks to come from outside politics and here is when you start the process these of innovation. there's a lot of folks that work for the campaign and come from the high tech sector coming from both start-ups and places like silicon valley and other tech pubs around the country. there was a downturn, folks were looking for new work and the challenges and opportunities and perhaps more meaningful work
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when you interview them they are interested in seeing whether the stuff they are developing in the commercial setting can be applied to the presidential campaign. so they brought them over on the design and the creation of these sorts of websites. another thing the campaign did was create a protected species innovation. the culture that such experiment with these new tools even if we don't necessarily know what the payoff is going to be immediately we want you to try building these things and most important in building things to see this is driven by the fact the team was the of sight candidate and given the defector was an extraordinary collection of people there who came from the sectors where this was discouraged and where this was welcomed.
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a decision of working platform. in a much the same way as they would have with friend store which is a social networking platform that was, in this era but now certainly you can see ways is up profiles and pictures and your likes and interests and ways to sort of the interest of about the campaign in the social network. and then provide which is on the right have the integration of the social networking platform with an event toole which enables them to talk about their own event and i will talk about that which is used to such great the sec in 2008 which was about supporters using tools like this to help plan he sends in their own neighborhood. to give you a sense of how it works, you could normally create an even and then you could search in your zip code to find all of the other reasons that were created by your neighbors or friends or family or folks
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you don't know but live in your zip code and you can find one of those. so you might go on a canvas day on a saturday and all of this is to be independently organized from the campaign just by supporters themselves through these sorts of tools. >> okay. we all know how the campaign ends in 2004. but i should say for a minute that it was three successful let least for a time. it proves very effective on organizing at least in some of the conventional metrics we think of when we think of the politics. so, he raised $50 million over the course of a primary which shattered the record is the time and just to give you a sense of where we will go in 40 years in 2008, you know, obama in the uprising $50 million in february of 2008 alone. so, enormous jumps in scale in terms of online and you can see the numbers coming in now, but really dwarfing what she was
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able to put together in 2003, 2004. and certainly he became the frontrunner in the polls and in the platform time. i think one of the legacies in the campaign is opening up the rhetorical space for the democrats to be more critical of the sitting president in 2004 so even though he lost, i think that he made a number of important quacks she changed the dynamic of how the party was running in that election. okay. so you finished third in all ytoy and the next thing that happened is while there was little carryover in the tools and staff after 2000, many of the former staffers stayed in the electoral politics and they built new firms, they built new training organizations etc. all with this vision with a put together on the dena campaign was something extraordinary. and they want us to sort of to your out how to make it more power and enlisted in the service of space politics and
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that is in the democratic party politics. a couple things to note here this is the website of digital this is the firm that carried many of the technologies and tools and brought it to obama. was founded by the former staffers three of whom sort of had a background in high tech sectors, and essentially what they did this start of the firm and then they received the intellectual property in the campaign tools and essentially the end of rebuilding them for the political action committee called the democracy for america which is now a committee to organizing politically action committee that is still quite active in the local chapters around the country. so what they did is take the tool set and rebuilt it and made it more powerful and the subsequent years and they have eventually made their way to my barack obama about, which i will
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talk about more in a minute. but first i want to talk abo to other projects and infrastructure building that were quite important for the obama campaign and really for the democratic party more generally. for a couple of important things to note digital in the name is expressly partisan to read a lot of the firms that serve does campaigns in 2004 were mostly geared towards non-profit and if they were non-partisan. the work on both sides of the nile. in the wake of the 2004 campaign, use of a new host of firms would only work with democratic plans. these were more in the illogically and party driven consultancy is with the nonprofit clients but there's a very strong value of getting democrats elected at this point they had the technology services, such technology manning as i said before there were no dedicated tools for the political campaigns back in
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2000. after 2004, these firms created their first set of relief that a kid a political campaign technologies that could be used on line and what's important to note there is the tools developed for the nonprofits just lack the capacity that was needed for the presidential campaign. presidential campaigns need to have distance that can be implemented a very quickly and just think about it, presidential campaigns get millions of hits for a very short period of time. the nonprofits have much more consistent. so political campaigns particularly the the presidential level had a different set of technical means they're absolutely essential to understanding the 2008 through 2004 campaign. first dena went and invested a lot of time and effort in rebuilding the democratic
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party's base. he brought along one of his former staffers to do this. one of the co-founders and the firm became the technology director. and let me say a little bit about why this is more important. so the democratic party lacked the national database well into 2004, 2005. now the story of the party's national voter data base is very complicated and i would need an entire chapter to tell the history in the book. but on a broader level, essentially think of before he built this national database essentially every one of the state democratic party said this colin in database. cities in july you have 50 different systems that were implemented around the country. the data wasn't standardized. every state party had a different set of data that they might collect and they would have different formats that they were collecting it and and files were often incompatible and was
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sent for a presidential campaign that you often had to learn a number of different systems. 13, 14, 15 different systems in the course of the battleground states in the general election you can remember the night for the pay campaign where you had to learn 20, 30 different systems etc.. the other challenges that presidential campaigns in the party itself you could never in query the entire electorate itself you couldn't figure out what all the nec as looking like you couldn't search within the data coming you could only view this sort of different silo database system soft there were a number of failures and john kerry of the database that the campaign used in 2004. they crashed and so for anyone that has ever done this before, you know the nightmare it is to summarize the knocking on doors at numerous times because you don't know who was contacted or if you have out of date list etc.
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so, what the chairman did along with this technology director was worked out a system where the national party, the national democratic party assumed the cost of improving and maintaining and building the new database in exchange for the permission to sort of aggregate them and the system the resulted from that you will see a screen shot from here this is what all the major democratic party candidates used in 2008 and the democratic party advocacy groups have used since then and essentially what it is is the democratic party database and voter files with an interface system around it which is created by a firm called better activation at work and what is really helped the party do is to standardize the data across all of the state party systems and then also more effectively be able to collect and capture data on the electorate so just to give you one quick example, the barack obama campaign in 2008 generated over 200 million
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pieces of the affirmation of the electorate just from people going door to door. all of that has now housed in the democratic party voter database the campaign can then go back and rational reasons for schweiker generating data on the electorate of the presidential campaign to be used later on. now the second part of the chairman did was bringing over an internet director and also a co-founder that builds and helps refine a new online organizing platform for the democratic party coming into this is called party builder. i told you will but more have
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the sort of rebuild the tools. this is the democratic party dillinger there was basically version two-point go of the tools. you can see a lot of the very similar sort of organizing features that people can create even and new features they can create groups and set up your own groups. an african-american for the democratic party etc. you can do online fund raising. it would basically be online platform that supporters of the democratic party could use in 2006 during the midterm election. it was this system that then became mybarackobama.com during the presidential election. let me say a quick note about this. what's important about that history, this is a screen shot of the obama 08 website from july, 2007 obama announced in
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2007 the campaign had in place a platform to support thousands of support groups around the country immediately going on line and starting to take action for the candidate. remember i showed you earlier the campaign before the tools listed in essentially the candidates would waste months. they didn't have a way to get supporters engaged. they didn't have a way to get the ground running. they could announce thousands of groups could start already to be mobilized by the campaign and start to take action in fund raising whether it is through online be sent creation, whether it is through the local events etc. or even just keeping up with the candian is doing in a highly dynamic and interactive way. the story of the obama campaign isn't simply about the tools, however. both tom vilsack and richard
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nixon knew the services during the 2008 election. after a essentially the folks in the digital brought form should the democratic party to the long campaign one of the innovative things that they did it for very well as creating a organization of around the tools to use them effectively in some way. and i want to frame this by a vote in the chief technology officer from 2008 gave me when i interviewed him about some of the work in the campaign in the integration officer for 22 of, but the idea is that folks were already mobilized around the candidacy. they were mobilized the charisma, his rhetoric, just the political opportunity to elect a democrat to office for the first time in a long time into the concrete electoral resources and
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a really the mantra of the campaign media division was money message and votes. the stables of electioneering. you need money to do things like air of television advertising to coordinate your electoral campaign and you need to drive your message to get it out there and make sure you communicate with the citizens of the press and ultimately on election day need to make sure that you turn people out of the polls. so, what he's talking about here is what they were able to do is sort of create and have in place both the tools and the organizations necessary that translated that interest and energy around candidacy and to those resources that helped them win an election. to do so they created a new media division which was sprawling and have over 140 staffers and volunteers by the end of the election that you can sort of see the larger areas at work here. but the important thing is that they were using tools has
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generating practices that would be translating benner energy account into the resources they needed. i'm going to talk about three things here. i'm going to talk about the design and the cultural or it was played in the campaign. i'm going to talk about the internal organizing. so, organizing on mybarackobama.com. and then i will talk briefly about the analytics that essentially was working to make sure that candidates that people visiting the web site would be taking the actions they needed to take and from there i will take you right into 2012. so, first, briefly, this is the redesign which you can see looks a lot different from the earlier website that i should do about the obama candidate and the important thing to talk about here is the campaign's spent a lot of time working with very talented designers to think about how was a candidates website guinn to reflect a division of the candidates and
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help construct what barack obama candidacy meant to the nation? so, designers really wanted to communicate the excitement to the united states of america so what they did is developed with the referred to as an aesthetic of obama so you can see this at play and the idea is they wanted to help the reporters and staffers transformational figure hit into the participatory movement that was really changing the way that electoral policies work in america and to just show you how they did this online you can sort of see the iconic obama which is the association that we have on line when you think about the obama campaign. all of this was standardized and coordinated in the campaign and there's been so very deliberately in the things like
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the color and the competence as an organizer. obama was relatively new to the political scene. the junior senator from illinois. one of the ways they wanted to sort of create the sense that obama was this executive and would be is the only thing like standardizing so you wouldn't have the mixing and matching of the different images etc they wanted to create this experience a couple other things they did is the historical documents and the american event which had portraits of the candidates to sort of recall scenes from things like the civil rights movement so they wanted to sort of creative vision of the impression that obama was the historical figure in some way and they tried to do this through the design and they did a whole bunch of other stuff. they to get created a status that would using official
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looking documents. they created a supporter seen that different groups would see their own identity sort of representatives the campaign using a rainbow flag for gay and lesbian etc so the idea is that through design you could sort of construct the image of the candidate and the campaign itself. mao design went hand in hand with tools and this is a screen shot from the support of my barack obama.com. the important thing is that the campaign really wanted to see the supporters interested in the obama candidacy doing that work on the gloves and they did a whole bunch of stuff and you see again this is a later version of the original campaign tools. you can see the capacity to create even and the capacity to fund raise for the candidates using the capacity to create a network of other supporters who might be in your geographic area or certainly prefer for the asian network. you can dhaka and to get the
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action. you can use this interface to make the of decided voters looking in north carolina and in some ways that was further in the few levers of the supporters work. the campaign also developed a set of analytical practices and in the industry known as often as asian that was probabilistic we increase the likelihood that he would deal with the campaign needed to get done. as a comfortable, in what is done in the industry has the means testing, the candidate would continue, the campaign would test different images on the web site, different colors on the web site to see what would be more likely to generate people taking the action we want them to take to give you a sense of how this worked whether that is the change as opposed to join the movement with the use of a picture of the obama family as the candidate for the defense of
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video whether it said learn more verses sign up all of these things were continually tested to make sure they would be paid based on who you work when you are visiting the web site to show you briefly how this works there's a set of different categories so when you log into quacks when you visit the web page the campaign can collected alleged in formation so you would know whether you visited a previously whether he would sign off on the e-mails and whether you've made a donation and actually purchase something, but there you are actually having an account on mybarackobama.com and then they would look at giorgio locations if you are in a district that was leading strongly democratic or you in a district that was strong republican or were you in a battleground state and then they would serve you up different content on the basis of who they knew you were and where they knew you were dialling in the campaigns from. essentially just to give you an example to talk about this more
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leader in a sense if you're visiting for the first time you go to the general welcome page and urge you to find out more to get harder, if you were somebody who was a battleground state and had visited the site previously, you might get a direct link to their application for a vote for change which is an online voter registration tool they wanted sure they knew you were a supporter and they want to make sure that you registered to vote. and then when you move all the weight of the category, for example, if you already have a mybarackobama.com account coming in your already acted and taking action for the campaign, they will keep you right over to the candidate pool so you can immediately start contacting voters. now, this is where the real resources to the campaign and here to the back just to talk for one minute about what this meant optimization alone according to is worth $50 million for the campaign. again, this is all about figuring out what color, what
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buttons, but language to use and this is more than the entire state budget in florida, for example. just by making these small tweets making the web page better and the analytics team had van roekel that came from google chrome browser. okay. where are we in the 2012? we've got me ten more minutes total and then we can take questions. the area that the history i just talked about sort of helps us eliminate certain things to look for in the coming elections. i want to talk about two areas in particular to the growing use of online volunteers and leveraging for field efforts the data that goes into contemporary campaigning, and finally, new forms of social and individualized information. i will say a little bit more about that in a minute.
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i want to begin with a caveat. it is exceptionally difficult to talk about an election in progress and i want to throw that out there. i'm going to be talking about general trend is that i'm seeing from the outside. there's lots of claims of what people are doing and oftentimes the campaigns will talk to the press about and that is stuff that they would want the press to and not necessarily what is actually going on behind the scenes. that is one reason i did an interview after the campaign ended they gave me a good book where people could be reformed. so what i want to do is sort of speculative it based on what life seen in terms of what you've learned from studying this over the last decade. okay. so, on one level we have sort of scene this extension of the early organizing around mybarackobama.com. this is essentially the obama - board system that is new and designed.
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essentially what it does is create older organizing capacities on mybarackobama.com and it adds the new one. so this is the - board system. anyone can create an account on this. and immediately what happens come and this is huge, deutsch of into a volunteer team based on your system. you can see team members and i can create a profile for myself, etc., and fred folks organizing the keen defense in the area. you can sort of see under the hard numbers of the different things that i can do as dialing into the campaign. so, as a registered voters, i can do quacks i can make trout calls. all of which is tracked. i can see because i want to motivate myself to the volunteer they have the sense of what is going on in the ground here in north carolina etc. one of the important things here
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that isn't visible to you but that was an important part of the reason is the database the folks generate mcginn calls using this application for entering data on this using this platform from going door-to-door or registering folks in the farmer's market etc is that this data is seen it with the voter filing in ways that it wasn't. importantly the campaign online tools in 2008, essentially you can make calls from california into north carolina but then it would take a while to make it into the voter files. ..
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>> when folks join those groups, they reach out to everyone gathering online. now facebook to essential communication tools. on twitter and facebook, what i call a digital two-step flow. the idea that you want to reach out to folks who are supporting them and have them pass on your message in the social networks. the idea that you will find it more credible as a voter to see
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information coming from one of your friends, rather than a political campaign or a political candidate. it is about distributing communications that supporters are to have all migrated is really behind twitter. obama will put out messages on twitter and hopefully the people who follow him will then read tweet his messages. it is the messages that we all see both online and off-line. folks can signal their allegiance to candidates, they can do this for candidates and et etc. facebook offers new ways for candidates to collect information for supporters. if you join a facebook application of one of the candidates, they will have access to your name, gender, date of birth, social network data and they can start to run a target based on zip code. they can send messages to particular areas that might be
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an electoral part of the campaign. or they can try to figure out influences in a particular network and then try to send messages to them and get that message disseminated in some way to people's social networks. the growth of these social information flows, it goes hand-in-hand with what i call individualized information. what i am talking about here is online advertising to target voters in new ways. what campaigns want to do is target the subsets. if you look at the list building, if you look on the left, in what they want to do is
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give your e-mail address to the campaign so they are able to message you will later on. once they have my e-mail address, they are then going to send you a higher order application for this is the second reason campaigns often use online advertising, which is what they would call mobilization. that is making a donation. you can immediately see the first ad was signed, after i gave them my e-mail address it was a small dollar contributions to have a dinner with barack obama. you see from this building to mobilization. campaigns also have a wealth of targeting and other areas. this is one of the areas that has really seen explosive growth. this campaign cycle is online advertising. first of all, geolocation. zip code and area code. if you are surfing "the new york times" for a particular
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high-interest congressional district campaign, they might send an online ad view on the basis of where you are at on that page. the second demographic, campaigns on advertising there is a complex for the voter model that i'm not going to go into. this is off-line identities to online identities. it is also not 100%. and i hear it is anywhere from 60 to 80% effective, but the idea is that when you could actually do is campaigns can find a set of targets in their databases. they know that they might want to reach this particular individual. and they can go to a third-party matching firm that can provide the campaign or more likely, an ad agency that is serving their online ads are within ip address or a cookie. they can then send the ads to
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whatever computer he is walking in on based on who their target is. this is matching what used to be separate categories of information. finally, what is known as look-alikes, this is essentially running target advertising and voter groups and individuals based on matching groups. for example if you want to reach a set of voters who say, like the romney campaign has been talking about this, off the grid voters. people who might not be watching live television. if you know people that are watching live television might be voters age 18 to 24 years old, who might be living in urban areas and etc. essentially what you want to do is find voters who look like them online and have similar driving habits and serve them with apps. it would be a look-alike audience. maybe not an exact set, but you
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are advertising to a universe of people who have similar browsing habits based on what you have already realized. i can pull back for a bit here and talk about the democratic process. i don't know if this came out, but it's a picture of obama in a picture from a recent campaign event, blurring together that there are continuities. what i argue in the book is that essentially you need to dramatically amplified institutional ways of electoral politics. what i mean by that is that campaign campaigns and the media, making donations to campaigns, volunteering by
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canvassing, phone banking, planning events. the stables of electoral politics. what the media has not necessarily demonstrate candidates more responsive or even their supporters online. we don't see transformational democracy. it is not about coming up with new policy positions that mitt romney should adopt. it is more about how can we raise money in office. the media tools work best is really coordinating machinery. when we have ideological commitments, partisan commitments, it provides us ways to get involved it is a way to mobilize individuals to really deliver the financial and political resources that they might need. and really, it is in the sense of that endurance that i offer up my book title, which is "taking our country back." which was a key bit of rhetoric
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from the obama campaign. it was actually first used by the archconservative, pat buchanan and what his president did in 1992. a user to illustrate this point, that we do see these electoral politics, even in the face of considerable technological change. over the last decade in particular. really what we have seen is a hybrid form of organizing politics. politics that remind provides leverage the data to help make sure that supporters actions are being courted native but we have done and also empowerment. in the past used to have to watch the campaign from afar. to go online and to rally round together, make phone calls, it is really powerful from a democratic perspective as well. we see an extension of some amplified institution.
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also with citizens empowerment in particular. with that, i will stop and invite questions and you can see my e-mail address. [applause] >> the floor is open to professor daniel kreiss. please wait for the boom mike to get close to you. >> one of the things that president the president obama did during the 2000 nato campaign -- i mean, the presidential campaign -- phone messaging. is that something that they have abandoned when they are continuing to use, and how effective is that? >> that is a great, great question. in 2008, it was highly lauded that obama would announce his vice presidential pick through a text message.
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i've learned to be very selective of what i'm talking about. i can say a couple of brought stretches about that. certain campaigns think a lot about navarro technology. more and more is being consumed on mobile technology. in order to mobilize folks in a particular area, another thing of this campaign cycle is using applications on things like iphone's to do this door-to-door voter canvassing you can actually enter any volunteer contact immediately on your iphone that will sync with the database. it is certainly central. i think it is being used in a number of different ways. certainly, campaigns once much information as possible in the middle figure out what to do that later.
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certainly come a long the way i would say most importantly creating efficiency, thinking about how to advertise locally and to do that in more effective ways that have been done before. but i don't know, for example, i don't know what you are trying to engage with mobile in different ways. >> other questions? [inaudible conversations] >> getting people to do something this november. is there any effort to go beyond this immediate persuasion and
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mobilization to try to create a long-term basis for supporting a party or program to building up an ideology? survey data shows that people's ideas are very uncoordinated. there is a very low correlation between support over one issue and another. is anyone thinking about long-term education of the supporters of either the liberal or conservatives in politics? >> i think that is the 50 million-dollar question. it is a great question. and it is one that i can speak a little bit about.
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engaging with president obama and the democratic party and etc. what makes this difficult, i think, and here is how i will sum this up. it is by saying that, you know, governance and policy making is a lot different than campaigning looks. what you can say is candidate obama is different than president obama. all of a sudden you are having to steer them through a policy making process where democrats may be representing more conservative states and more conservative districts. there is a need to compromise,
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it is less than what comes to the campaign. a lot of the challenge that folks coordinate with the online side of obama's campaign of 2008, it is how do they translate this energy, which has a clear outline, something like health care. how do they engage folks saying that this is what you need and a health care system. essentially, what i think happened, there are issues with what people are willing to accept, compromise they're willing to accept, and at the same time, organizing for america which is the organization that became the
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house and the democratic party that grew out of obama's campaign. using it for things like conservative democratic candidates, which was less of the energy that was fueling the obama campaign to begin with. so you had this general dissipation of energy in some ways. and then really no clear outcomes. it was really tough to know what the and would be to the health care debate. it was groups like organizing for america to organize things like public options, for example, which might be different than what the democratic party has done. essentially you have a lot of different choices emerging at that point. i think it made it difficult for organizing for america to translate that into something longer lasting. stepping back for second and saying it certainly seems to me and there have been a number of scholars talking about this argument, that the republican conservative infrastructure has
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invested a lot in exactly the ideology that you are referencing. there is a wonderful book that looked at looks at the lives of the conservative leader establishment which is a network of foundations, think tanks, you know, training for conservative legal scholars that essentially built up and resulted in the current accord, according to some arguments. those sorts of efforts look little different and i think this narrow short-term goal is. but i don't think this conflicts with it. i think it ultimately for example, if you are a democrat, i think that they feed off of one another in the end. but i don't necessarily know of a democratic corollary to what i think the republicans had built up in any way.
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>> are there other questions? >> yes reign. >> [inaudible question] >> how much is being done on the congressional level? >> that is a great question. my sense is, i just have senses of emerging research in this area, it is pretty uneven. some candidates are quick to adopt media tools. the idea is there would be more widespread adoption of these sorts of things. around things like canvassing and etc. i continue to think that the big challenge here is not necessarily the truth, but the
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volunteers that are going to be using the tools. my sense is that it has been very uneven. there are some folks who have done less in the media area. they invested a lot in these technology areas and tools and etc. then drove a lot of conversations online. that was one of the first big state efforts that i saw. so i think the long arc is for this to be a part of the campaigning and developing media practice for the question is how much will that be integrated and incorporated with all the other campaign activities is it worth
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investing in the media or in advertising. is it worth investing in online advertising, they are constantly making the cost benefit analyses, i think. the long arc is that every candidate is going to have an insight. we might already be at that point. generally it is in that direction. >> i am curious what percentage, based on your last statement, people want to watch broadcast
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tv it seems like most focus on tv advertisement in that kind of thing. >> [inaudible question] the romney campaign in the digital director comes out of digital advertising. that could mean anything from clips of the daily show or online or workcenter. that is enormous if it is true. i can say part of it is this new reality, so much more media being consumed even though we are not necessarily all there yet, which we are moving that direction. the second thing is i think this is one of the reasons why we
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have seen in the past decade, and there is a wonderful book called brown dwarfs, which i encourage you to read, which charts the rise in the campaign over the last decade. part of the story, according to him is that campaigns realize that television broadcasting is no longer as effective as it was back in 2000. they made unwise investments in their old-school door-to-door, knock on door campaigns of the past. since television ads in the 1960s on. this idea that more and more personalized voter contact needs to be made in some way whether it is going door-to-door or an online process, or figuring out how to use social networks to get your message out.
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because broadcast television in some ways is in decline. there are a vast majority resources used on television advertising. the numbers as i have seen of right now, it is about 25% of the advertising budget right now. which is significant. in terms of resources. i think it is moving that direction. >> in 2000 and eight, the obama administration was running to show. the democratic party was not well organized and had a terrible dignity. i haven't seen much evidence of either the obama campaign or the democratic party in orange
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county making much headway. is this just because some are not aware or things are really beginning to develop? >> if you mean in terms of on the ground organizing? i don't know the campaign strategies in the field organization. >> you have to have an energized volunteer base if you're going to use all this data. i haven't seen a lot of evidence of that. >> certainly i think that is one of the concerns. this election is unfolding in a fascinating way.
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is that energy translating this time around. as it did in 2008. ultimately that will be the effectiveness of the media. translating that energy and enthusiasm into the resources. you are telling me you haven't seen much on the ground. i don't know the numbers here. but will the obama campaign act like a they did four years ago? i don't know. my sense is they are going to try hard to re-create that moment and enthusiasm. >> yes? >> the obama office is on franklin street.
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i have had a lot of contact with them, especially women for obama they are revving up right now. the question is we are in june and july. i think it is a slow-motion primary. sure enough, by august and september, there could be movement. we are not hearing and seeing it does at this point in time of year. and that is hard. >> it is very hard. [laughter] >> that's right. we really can't let ourselves be fooled by this. we need to get out and do all we can so that we can do that on the ground kind of stuff i think
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it will be vital at every point. [inaudible] >> you have spent a lot of time doing a lot of research. i'm going to call you showed us the light side. there is a light side and a dark side. to try to use new approaches provide misinformation, information, fraud, can you talk about that for a second? >> i can and let me say a little bit more about that. i try to be balanced in that respect. i am glad that my sunny disposition comes off. there is certainly the capacity for that there are a lot of scholars who have worked.
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online people can gather with like-minded individuals and regulated. this is what i think press plays such a huge usual. one of the things that they can do is open up those individualized information areas. we need a new message of convening this general interest conversation of interrogating the claims to a certain extent. pointing out the various differences.
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>> we have things like youtube, campaigns can generate without that, so it seems like it is aggressive and not coming out. all of these things is why i need strong institutions. i take that 100%. i think there is a very will potential to the dark side. i think the dark side isn't there and i think that we cannot
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print a lot of this stuff is old, too. i think that we just have to face challenges. >> thank you. >> c-span is airing this week each day. on wednesday we will look at health insurance. the ceo of the girl scouts, annamarie chavez talks about the organization and the anniversary. on friday, also tomorrow, author douglas brinkley on walter cronkite, covering world war ii to anchoring the "cbs evening news".
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>> you're watching c-span2 at politics and public affairs weekdays featuring live coverage of the u.s. senate. on weeknights watch key public policy events and every weekend believes nonfiction authors and books on booktv. >> in a few moments, the issues affecting the latino community. in three hours, gop media strategist ted davis in 2008. after that we will re-air the discussion on how democratic candidates use new media in the last two presidential campaigns. >> tomorrow morning on "washington journal", stephen moore of "the wall street
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journal" on the pre-election election agenda and what they need to complete before november. and gerald connolly explains why he was one of 19 democrats went across the aisle and voted to extend the bush era tax cuts. plus your e-mails, phone calls and tweets. watch live on c-span. >> the center for american progress on labor secretary phyllis leaves and council director cecilia munoz. panelists will examine a variety of issues, including health care, education and veterans
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secretary hilda salinas. i just want to say a few thoughts with you. there are successes and challenges intertwined with the future of our nation. in the last few years, there have been progress is made. there is a growing political fight in this community. this community is also experiencing significant challenges. there are disproportionate rates. these disparities are critical stakeholders in the current and future policy debates, yet we
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rarely hear of public discourse accurately, and the two impacts and contributions of our community. it is often examine only in the heated political debates over immigration policies. let me be clear, here is the place where we are committed to good change. when we talk about latinos, we need to have a broader conversation that includes immigration and also the successes and challenges in the economy and education and health care, business development and on and on. latinos have always been part of the american spirit. today more than ever, given their exponential growth, they are our future and a conversation about them is a conversation about all of us. thankfully in the last four years, we have seen a number of
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initiatives to help provide incentives to the middle class in this community. we have worked hard to show how strategies of health care reform and investments or education benefit the growing hispanic community. we can also think the obama administration for pushing through necessary reforms and leveling the playing field and protecting some of the changes that are helping latinos today, including the affordable care act. challenges remain and we must discuss it and would also remains to be done. we want to make sure this important community as part of a national dialogue and makes sure our decision-makers understand that there will will be matters to all of us that impact all of us. that is why i am thrilled to start this conversation.
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secretary hilda solis served as the secretary of labor. she's the first latina woman to serve in the united states cabinet. prior to confirmation of secretary of labor, she represented the 32nd congressional district in california. in congress, she expanded health care and improving the lives of working families that have proven benefits to latino communities and affecting countless middle-class roles. this includes individuals of all types. a nationally recognized leader on the environment, transport became the first woman to
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receive the profile in courage award in 2000 for her pioneering works on environmental justice. please join me in welcoming hilda solis. >> thank you so much. thank you so much for having me here this morning. good morning to everyone and when ocs. it is good to be here again at our other home. it is exciting because so many of you are here at a critical time for latinos. i think everyone who knows that the recent dialogue that plays critical roles in our efforts in developing policy and programs for all americans, i want to thank everyone for your commitment to this very important work and for your
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timely work. thank you to make sure that we climb the ladder of success and opportunity for latinos in all communities. the fact that our nation is only as strong as ever in communities of color. in particular, about the latino community. since president obama took office, progress has been made on behalf of latinos. in the last couple of months, this president has achieved so much for our community. the supreme court's decision to uphold to the court the affordable care act is a huge victory for latinos and for the millions of americans who will continue to benefit from this legislation. as many as 9 million latinos will now receive health insurance because of this historic law. because of the ruling, if you have a pre-existing condition, you will be guaranteed health
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care. lord knows that we suffer from high rates of asthma and diabetes. if you are a woman from you will not be terminated against with higher premiums. care like mammograms will be covered free of charge and senior citizens will continue to save hundreds of thousands of dollars on their prescription drugs. youth will be able to stay on their families plans into age of 26. that is real progress for many. we are so fortunate to have a president who not only appreciates her work, but is fair. it is so important.
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the president appointed sonia sotomayor him, the first latino to represent us. and the first first ambassador to el el salvador. the rest of us can now step out of the shadows and without fear. yes on everything from employment to education to health care and immigration, this president has delivered. like the president said, we have only just begun, we have a lot of work to do. we have some very serious headwinds ahead of us. there is no silver bullet to solving the challenges of our time and we still have more work to do. we need to keep moving forward. we need to keep building on that ladder of success and opportunity for latinos until every person in our community is
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thriving. that is what today's all about and i'm thrilled to be a part of the conversation. we play a critical role in providing tools and resources for latinos to succeed as we recover. this ensures that latinos have the right to a clean workspace and wages that are fair. and also that latinos have access to quality work programs. we know that we need to develop the skills and the workforce that is ready to take on the jobs of the future. starting with the recovery act, we have invested so.
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this is particularly important for latinos, as we are the fastest growing segment of the american workforce. entire communities were devastated and so many are hurting today. during the recession, a peak at 13% for latinos. we have made progress and we are going to continue on that path. as our economy continues to grow, there are numbers of
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latinos that are finding employment. last friday announced that the unemployment rate for latinos dropped nearly a percentage point last month all the way to 10.3% rate over the last two years, the unemployment rate for our community has dropped nearly three points. more than four out of 10 new jobs have gone to latinos. compared to the last previous sessions, this is the fastest remember the latino community has experienced. make no mistake about it, latinos are going back to work. we are going back to work in high-paying industries like manufacturing, business services, at twice the rate we are finding jobs in low-wage sectors. we are making some important strides in the community. but we have to continue on this path. and that is why president obama continues to work with an economy that is built to last.
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that isn't me that is built on the skills and innovation of american workers. in america, where education in finance and training are afforded to everyone in this country. to do this, the president recently launched an 8 billion-dollar creer program. this is very important that latino community. many are attending community colleges. community colleges are local, flexible and adaptable. they provide accelerated programs. something workers need and something that employers want. we put a great focus on job seekers and degrees that can be earned in as little as six months up to two years.
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we are bringing together employers and community-based organizations to give workers options. the idea is simple. we want what businesses are looking for and we are helping employers with what they need in an office. we are training all types of people, yes, especially college graduates, so that they can get jobs and meaningful careers. i can tell you that that is a concern of mine at the department of labor. the department of labor is playing an increasing role in supporting our government. recently, we awarded $80 million aimed at providing helping
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latinos. last year i introduced a program which allows post- 9/11 veterans to get six months of intensive job counseling services at our 3000 local one-stop centers. we have also developed a program to better match the experiences of veterans with employers. and we have created an online resource to help veterans translate military skills and two civilian careers. we want and need to do more for every american is looking for work. that is why president obama and
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his focus on america shares these values. everyone gets a fair shot and everyone has their fair share and everyo plays by the same set of rules. that is the america that latinos have always been. our priorities are based on community and shared responsibility. that vision is also shared by our president. that is why he believes that the wealthiest among us pay their fair share to raise the revenue, and we need to grow our economy and invest more in job creation and participation programs. i don't think that's too much bass. it is wrong, and i believe to balance our budget on things that don't help people.
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investments are critical programs needed to create jobs and strengthen our economy. congress should be lifting of the long-term unemployed. we need to grow an economy that works for everyone and not just for a particular queue. that is why president obama is extending the tax cuts for 90% of americans making less than $250,000 a year. if they don't come in a typical middle-class family of four will see their taxes go up by $2200 for $114 million in the families will suffer, as our economy as a whole. we are going to put congress under pressure to do the right things on behalf of our family. teachers and police officers and firefighters on the block.
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we need to put them back on the job. no community has suffered more than construction workers. those who also invest in education and build a better tomorrow. that is what is at stake here. i'm happy to be part of that discussion. so i want to thank all of you for being here because i know you're here because you are dedicated. you want to see something done, so i applaud you and on behalf of our president, and myself and others, i think you the opportunity to come and speak to you. [speaking in native tongue] >> thank you very much. >> that is a fantastic way to start our conversation in mourning.
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we are going to have to panel discussion and conversation i'm going to ask my colleague and friend to come up and moderate the first panel which is about economic issues facing the latino community today. >> thank you for having me appear. it is a pleasure to sit here. very well. >> let me introduce our panel. to start with adriana kugler. and in this ana recio harvey, she oversees the growth of women-owned businesses through programs that provide business
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training and counseling and access to capital and the networking opportunities. she manages a nationwide web of women's business centers located in nearly every state. before joining them to establish the synopsis, a highly successful multilingual communications company, her clients from fortune 500 companies and government agencies and nonprofit organizations. while still managing her company with the latino programs director and she's also a past president and ceo of the greater hispanic council. adriana kugler is the chief economist for the u.s. department of labor. she is currently on leave from her position as a professor at georgetown. we also have the center court
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research and analysis in london and poverty and inequality at stanford university. she serves on the editorial boards of the industrial relations committee. labor economics and etc. adriana kugler is also a writer for economic journals and articles on immigration. she is one words from the labor and employment associations. she has a ba in economics and a phd from uc berkeley. and we have the role that is essential for housing finance and stakeholders in congress and
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the press, president and senior advisers on the way communication in the latest strategy. that is our podium and panel. let me start then i would just like to start off asking in the areas that you work in, to talk a little bit about how in those areas we are affected and we will get to the real site about what we're doing about it. okay? >> i think it is good to
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remember we are in the worst recession since the great depression. the economy had a rate of 8%. one president obama took office from 800,000 jobs were being lost from him. we were really creating jobs and then it quickly fell and we we started losing jobs over a year later -- >> so even though you are right, it can be a blessing, we know that minority communities were expecting to partake -- we have seen things in full across the
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board, and that includes latino communities and african-americans and minority communities. we need to remind ourselves that a lot of that is part of what is put in place. there are many efforts of the department of labor, all of latinos in the minority communities. the program has about 250,000 latino workers. the payroll tax holiday is,
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they're about 30 million latinos affected by this payroll tax holiday. all of that affects the latino community, we are lending a hand and providing a lifeline to those people. we have to remember that those policies, for every 1 dollar that we put into it, hard-working americans, it is a win-win and helps everybody. secretary hilda solis -- she displays a good example in the private sector as well as the government sector.
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