The First Campaign: Globalization, The Web, And The Race for the White House - Hardcover

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THE RISE OF THE ANXIOUS CLASS

www.thedrudgereport.com www.moveon.org

You have to be global in this business to survive.

—JACK WELCH

For every end, there is a beginning. In 1980, the Democratic Party saw the end of fifty years of the proud liberal New Deal–type politics that had defined it since the days of FDR. At the same time, thousands of miles away, a decorated army veteran was laying the groundwork for a movement that would years later reenergize the party and breathe new life into what had become a stale and voiceless opposition.

For liberal firebrand Ted Kennedy, vanquished by Chappaquiddick from his final attempt at the nation’s highest office once held by his brother, the end of his presidential ambitions came August 12, 1980, in Madison Square Garden. There he took the stage of the Democratic convention in New York City and delivered one of the most memorable convention speeches in a generation, and in it made a promise to his party and to the nation.

"As Democrats we recognize that each generation of Americans has a rendezvous with a different reality. The answers of one generation become the questions of the next generation." His booming voice, thick with its trademark accent, filled the hall. "We are the party—We are the party of the New Freedom, the New Deal, and the New Frontier. We have always been the party of hope. So this year let us offer new hope, new hope to an America uncertain about the present, but unsurpassed in its potential for the future."

Later, after quoting Tennyson and rising to a crescendo, Kennedy proclaimed, "For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

Kennedy’s speech marked an end to the aspirations of liberal Democrats, who wouldn’t see one of their own nominated for president for decades.

However, the same year, 1980, in retrospect marked a beginning too, a beginning whose importance we can only now begin to understand. Far away from the crowds, television lights, and confetti of Madison Square Garden, in a dingy working-class bar in Colorado City, David Hughes was talking politics. What made him different, though, was that for the first time he was doing it online.

Dave Hughes is not exactly the typical computer geek: Now closing in on eighty and bearing wispy facial hair, Hughes almost always wears a Stetson. A Colorado native, he grew up in a rock-ribbed Republican family and, having just missed World War II, he showed up at West Point in 1946. A star student, he graduated June 6, 1950, just twenty days before the North Koreans crossed the border into South Korea. Hughes returned safely from the Korean War with a chest full of medals and stayed in the military. Eventually, in 1965, as Vietnam was heating up, he became part of a team of soldiers studying the future of combat. It was there that he began to put together the pieces of the changing technological landscape. "What I picked up was that miniaturization of technology was coming. We invented the Stinger missile that any mujahideen kid could put on his shoulder and bring down a Russian jet in Afghanistan. We and the Germans invented the shaped charge, which becomes the RPG that any damn fool can fire," he says. As he explains it, the miniaturization of technology was a tool for political radicals—violent or otherwise.

Technology allowed individuals to go behind and around the strict century-old political party structure just as individual radical militants could outwit the mechanized corps of a powerful army. A decade later, as he was leaving the military, Hughes made his home in Colorado City, later purchasing the city’s first Kaypro computer and throwing himself into local economic development. Using a then-groundbreaking acoustic modem in 1977, he signed onto the nation’s first national commercial online bulletin board service, The Source, to pick the brains of other commercial and economic development people across the country. Three years later, as Kennedy conceded defeat in New York and as Jimmy Carter lost the general election to Ronald Reagan, Hughes set up his own online bulletin board service with a section devoted to local politics. He named it Roger’s Bar, after the real-life local Democratic Union bar where regulars debated local, state, and national politics. It is widely credited as the first such online political endeavor on the then very nascent internet.

From the earliest days, the promise was clear: "This is going to diminish the influence of special interest groups. The dominant economic interests have influenced media, but BBSs bypass the press and don’t stand to lose advertising dollars. With BBSs, special interest groups cannot control where people get their information," Hughes told a computer publication in 1992.1

"Two can argue or fight. It takes three to politics. Each side tries to convince the third," Hughes says. "We got consensus that way, through dialogue—what screwed it up was . . . we aggregated our dialogue to news anchors. They do the dialoguing for us." The internet opened the first chance for people to debate and discuss in the television age. "The heart and soul is people being able to go back and forth, challenging the facts that they throw out—because the public had a hell of a time challenging anything that came out of the television."

Roger’s Bar was a big success, or at least as big a success as something could be when it existed on a technology platform—the internet—that only a relative handful of people had ever heard of. Hughes went down to the actual namesake pub and convinced the staff to install a telephone jack in one of their booths so that patrons of the bar could log on to his online bulletin board to talk politics using Hughes’s laptop and an acoustic modem—this long before most people had a laptop, let alone even understood what a modem did.

With the internet, people don’t need to collect a paycheck from a major media conglomerate in order to share their opinions. They don’t need to worry about offending corporate advertisers. And people on the local level who care about a particular issue can connect with others across the country to share thoughts, opinions, and ideas—just as Hughes first did with economic development thirty years ago. During one local argument over a proposed zoning ordinance, Hughes, helped by debate on his bulletin board, managed to get 175 people to show up at the planning board meeting and contest the new rules. The board, surprised by the passion and the turnout, relented. Hughes immediately understood the power the internet could bring to bear on politics, especially given the speed at which dialogue and debate happened online. "Washington is a great soggy log floating down the Potomac with a bunch of ants who think they’re steering." Hughes guffaws. "This is a grassroots nation. Anything that’s worth a damn in this country starts on the grassroots level. In a future-shock, accelerated-change society, by the time it gets to Washington, it’s already obsolete."

WASHINGTON, AT LEAST the Democratic parts of it, certainly seemed obsolete by the 1980s. During the middle of the twentieth century, a period of liberal ascendancy and institution building stretching from 1932 to 1968, Democrats built a strong social network that helped lift the country out of the Great Depression, win World War II, educate a generation with the GI Bill, spread civil rights, and put a man on the moon. Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson were strong internationalists, big thinkers, and great institution builders. They opened up global trade, founded institutions like the World Bank and NATO,...