BraceLand

This was a question posed to today’s Berkman Tuesday Luncheon Series speaker, Liz Losh during her talk on the Obama administration’s use of social media and its pitfalls (video will be posted in the next day or two at cyber.law.harvard.edu).  This particular question was a little off topic (she was speaking mostly about the challenges of governments using these tools from the perspective of archiving civic discourse), but it made me perk up nonetheless.

My first reaction was that it seems we all have very short memories.  In 2004, the Berkman Center hosted a conference following the presidential elections at which we spent about a day and a half talking about how the Bush/Cheney campaign absolutely demolished Kerry/Edwards in the online organizing arena.  And have we forgotten Howard Dean’s demise? I’ve been in the presence of many Internet/campaign/politics conversations over the last four years, and I find we have a tendency to forget one very important element in the success of such campaigns: the candidate.  I feel very strongly that had Obama not had the force of personality or the biography or the ideas, then he could never have organized such a level of support, online or offline.  People signed up for his email list, or organized canvassing trips, not because the tools made it easy to do but because they felt compelled by the candidate, the issues, the context to get involved.  Obama’s message just happened to hit home especially hard with those most likely to be familiar with these tools in the first place: young people, innovators, intellectuals, hipsters, etc.  If John Kerry had had these tools at his disposal in 2004, I’m not sure it would have made any difference.

So I guess my answer to the original questions is no, Republicans aren’t inherently bad at social media.  Democrats have the ability to be just as sucky (doesn’t anyone remember that Obama had some primary opponents who didn’t have the best web 2.0 strategies themselves?), and there are some Republicans who did really well online in 2008 (well, maybe just one–Ron Paul–but it’s because he actually had some ideas to rally around).  The point is, Republicans can have as many of their members in congress tweeting as they want, until they have some ideas to communicate, it’s not going to matter.