Will Johnston | Mind Muse

Last week I attended a panel discussion called “The Uncharted Political Terrain of Campaign ‘08 with Trippi, Walter.” The title is pretty vague, but it was basically a discussion of the use of a new type of politics that has risen in the ‘08 U.S. Presidential election (and an interesting although seemingly tangential presentation on voting trends within the Hispanic community). The panel was a fairly impressive group, including Joe Trippi, recently off the Edwards campaign; Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of Hotline (a National Journal publication); Simon Rosenberg, founder and president of NDN; and Andres Ramierez, VP of Hispanic Programs at NDN. It was moderated by Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute.

I’d like to focus on one important aspect of the discussion, bottom-up versus top-down campaigning. In short, a bottom-up campaign is one that involves large numbers of people doing the little bit they can, think Obama for America. A top-down campaign is one that relies on traditional political operatives/insiders exerting their considerable influence and expending their considerable resources. It is also tightly controlled from the top, and does less to encourage (and may actually discourage) independent action by supporters, think Hillary for President.

Joe Trippi argued that Hillary Clinton made a huge blunder by running a solely top-down campaign and that this was the last time that a Democratic presidential candidate would make that mistake. He believes that the Obama campaign has proved the superiority of the bottom-up approach. Hillary Clinton has, he says, the best Democratic top-down campaign in recent history, and yet the Obama campaign is still giving her a run for her money, even though it is only the second bottom-up campaign in modern politics. It seems his idea is that the type of campaign which has been mastered is in danger of being defeated by a type of campaign in its infancy.

Amy Walter took a different view. She made the point that the success of Obama’s campaign may only be a result of a confluence of factors. She believes that neither candidate had much choice in the type of campaigns they would run. Clinton had extreme institutional support and was popular among Democrats but was a divisive figure among independents (and certainly Republicans). Consequently, she had to run a top-down campaign, as her appeal was to the Democratic base, not to the masses. This left Obama with no choice but to run a bottom-up campaign. She also points out that the political environment is ripe for change, as people have an unusually high level of frustration with government, and that Clinton had no idea that campaigns would or could be run in this bottom-up manner.

Walter also makes an interesting argument that this bottom-up campaign that Obama is running may not be able to win a general election. Currently, Obama is garnering most of the independent vote. However, he is actually a leftist who has been tacking to the left in an effort to appeal to the “lunch bucket” Democrats (her words). Consequently, McCain, who is actually moderate (even if his appeal to moderates is less than Obama’s) may be able to pick this vote back up, even while she recognizes that the political environment is more favorable to Democrats.

Editorial Note: In trying to condense these views into a couple of paragraphs, I may have unintentionally distorted them. If you think so, please let me know in the comments. I’ve also embedded the videos so that you can judge for yourself.

I mostly agree with Trippi, but I do take Walter’s critiques seriously. I don’t believe that U.S. Presidential elections will ever be the same again, but I also doubt that many future campaigns will gather quite as much grassroots support as Obama’s. Candidates with the ability to inspire as Barack Obama does come around quite infrequently; Bobby Kennedy was probably the last one. Few politicians will be able to motivate and mobilize supporters in the way that Obama has. However, he has proven that the masses have great power. Candidates ignore them at their peril. A candidate who could garner one quarter of the grassroots support that Obama has would have a significant leg up on his or her opponent. In fact, it is arguable that in an election where there is no frontrunner with the name recognition and widespread support (in the Democratic Party anyway) of Hillary Clinton, that even a fraction of the grassroots support that Obama has garnered could be a huge factor in the contest.  I would argue that Clinton could have made a greater attempt to allow her non-institutional supporters to play a greater role in her campaign. This is, of course, scary because you don’t know what’s going to happen when you relinquish control, but had she and her staff had the foresight to run a more bottom-up campaign, she may be faring better than she currently is.

I also take issue with Walter’s assertion that this type of campaign may not be able to win a general election. I suppose I could be wrong about this, but it seems that the abundant resources (i.e. record numbers of volunteers and record amounts of money) provided by a bottom-up campaign are exactly what a candidate needs in a general election.
Whether or not future candidates are able to leverage support in the same way that Obama has, it is undeniable that those candidates who are best able to do so will have a significant advantage over those who do not. We have yet to see how large this shift in politics is, but it is undeniable that the nature of politics has undergone a fundamental change.

Full Video:

Thanks to the following sites for inspiration:
http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/22030/daily_digest_a_new_and_improved_youchoose_08
http://www.ipdi.org/blog/index.php/2008/02/20/the-end-of-an-era-obama-clinton-the-evolution-of-the-web-campaign/
http://www.washingtonindependent.com/view/trippi-talks

February 25th, 2008
Categories: Politics . Author: Will Johnston

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