'Body' language

Was Jesse Ventura's win proof of the Internet's power? Plus, Barnicle's Imus-driven comeback, and Newsweek eats its broccoli.

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

Which came first -- the technology or The Body? In other words, did the Web make it possible for Jesse "The Body" Ventura to win his long-shot campaign for governor of Minnesota? Or did the buzz surrounding Ventura allow him to use the Web in ways not available to mere mortals?

Those were some of the more interesting questions kicked around last week at a conference on "Politics on the Net," hosted by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. For more than six hours, about 50 academics, political consultants, and journalists discussed whether the Internet will revolutionize politics the way television did in the 1950s and '60s. The rough consensus: probably not -- and, at least in some respects, it could even develop into a negative.

With Ventura himself not on hand to dispense a few victory-lap chokeholds and body slams, the aura of celebrity devolved onto the Webmaster of JesseVentura.org: Phil "The Wit" Madsen, a brush-cut, poker-faced Ross Perot disciple who founded Minnesota's Reform Party in 1992.

"One of the things that convinces you of the value of the Internet very quickly is door-knocking in January, when it's 20 below," he said. "The weather in Minnesota inspires a lot of intelligent thinking about politics."

On the surface, Madsen's electronic accomplishments were impressive. The Ventura campaign's Web site received some two million hits, with 75 percent coming during the three weeks before and after Ventura's stunning three-point victory over his Democratic and Republican rivals. More important, Madsen said, the Web site was used to raise money ($50,000 in contributions and $30,000 in loans for a campaign that cost less than $500,000) and to build a "Jesse Net" of some 3000 volunteers. In one memorable instance, Madsen said, the volunteers were mobilized within just a few hours to knock down a false charge that Ventura favored the legalization of prostitution.

"We didn't just have a Web site. We had a relationship with our users," said Madsen. "The Internet did not win the election for us, but we could not have won the election without the Internet."

Well, okay. But anyone looking for lessons in Madsen's experience should keep in mind that you need to start with a crucial -- and scarce -- ingredient: Jesse Ventura, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Republican political consultant Rob Arena, who put together Web sites for 1996 presidential candidate Bob Dole and for New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, pointed out the obvious when he noted that Madsen had a commodity people wanted, and the Web simply offered an easy way for them to find it. Sure, the Internet gives politicians new tools with which to build an organization and get a candidate's message out. But if you're not Jesse Ventura, it's going to take a lot more than registering a domain name to get people banging on your virtual door.

"If Phil had any candidate other than Jesse 'The Body' Ventura, everything he did right would have been wrong," Arena said.

The dirty little secret no one at the conference wanted to talk about was that the overwhelming majority of people don't care about politics. Amid the earnest presentations about political-information sites and research showing that more people are getting their political news from online sources, it was easy to forget that hardly anyone bothered to vote in last month's election.

It's also laughably easy to exaggerate the importance of Internet activism. Take, for instance, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, the starry-eyed founders of MoveOn.org, a Web site that gathered some 300,000 "signatures" on a petition calling for Congress to censure Bill Clinton and -- well, move on.

Blades and Boyd were received like a couple of rock stars -- and, in fact, their success in garnering public support and media attention for their petition drive was unprecedented in the brief history of the Internet. But did it matter? Rich Galen, executive director of the Republican fundraising group GOPAC, noted that in California -- the state responsible for 30 percent of MoveOn.org's signatures -- the Republicans actually gained a House seat (they lost five nationally).

As for letting members of Congress know that most Americans are sick of the impeachment inquiry, it's safe to say they are already well aware of that. The problem is that Republican House members can't "move on" without infuriating their conservative base.

There is even the possibility -- admittedly slight though it may be -- that the Judiciary Committee is actually taking its obligations too seriously to be influenced by public opinion. After all, Blades and Boyd, like the public in general, are motivated by the simplistic belief that Clinton is in trouble merely for blowjobs, and for lies about blowjobs. Yet, as independent counsel Ken Starr has documented in such sexually explicit detail as to call his own sanity into question, Clinton may well have committed perjury in a civil deposition and in a grand-jury proceeding, crimes that have landed some people in prison.

The age-old debate over whether elected officials should blindly follow their constituents' wishes or, rather, exercise their own judgment moves to a new level when the Internet allows special-interest groups to mobilize hundreds of thousands of followers almost instantly.

"We're the people that elected them, and I think they definitely should be listening to public opinion," Blades told me after her presentation. "No one's going to say they should be bound by it."

A reasonable position. But the problem with politics today is that the organized, well-heeled few (the National Rifle Association and the Christian Coalition, for example) are able to take advantage of public apathy to influence the process well out of proportion to their numbers.

With studies showing that women, minorities, the poor, and the less educated continue to lag well behind when it comes to getting connected, the Net is likely to lead to that problem's getting worse, not better.

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Former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle's friendship with syndicated radio star Don Imus is paying off for him bigtime as Barnicle, who was forced to resign last August amid charges of fabrication and plagiarism, attempts to rebuild his career.

As has already been reported, Barnicle -- currently recovering from open-heart surgery -- drew an assignment to profile New York Jets (and former Patriots) coach Bill Parcells for ESPN The Magazine thanks to the intercession of New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica, a Phoenix alumnus. But the New York Observer, which broke the news about Lupica's involvement, didn't mention the missing link: both Barnicle and Lupica are regulars on Imus in the Morning.

Imus has helped get Barnicle back in print in a more direct manner, as well -- by having him deliver weekly commentaries that are then published on the MSNBC.com Web site. (Imus's radio show is simulcast on MSNBC.) You'll find Barnicle at http://www.msnbc.com/news/IMUS_Front.asp, his mug shot planted right between the "Question of the Week" and "Some of Don's Favorite Authors." Imus has been puffing the fallen Barnicle relentlessly, referring to him one recent morning as one of the country's leading columnists -- pretty rich, given that Barnicle was maybe the fifth- or sixth-best columnist in Boston.

If you thought Barnicle would never have another chance to write one of those maudlin Veterans Day columns, well, you were wrong. His Imus debut, in fact, was on a Buddy Fratus, of Concord, New Hampshire, killed in Vietnam at almost exactly the moment that a young Bill Clinton was writing his notorious draft-board letter. "He wasn't famous, he wasn't rich, he never did anything that caused him to be ensnarled in scandal or discussed on talk shows," Barnicle wrote, sounding as though he'd never left the Metro/Region front. "He was merely a kid, one of thousands across the years who left the comfort and safety of a small town, only to lose his life in a war waged for some politician's pride."

And yes, in case you were wondering, an Edward Francis Fratus, of Concord, New Hampshire, was indeed killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam on December 9, 1969 -- just six days after Barnicle says he was, which is laser-like precision by his standards.

There's nothing wrong with Imus's doing a favor for a friend, just as long as listeners understand Barnicle's as likely to give them a "parable" (to use his terminology) as the real thing. Indeed, when reading Barnicle's Thanksgiving commentary about running into a father and his disfigured son in an elevator at Massachusetts General Hospital, it was impossible not to recall another Barnicle hospital tale -- the one that led to his August 19 departure from the Globe.

Imus, bless his heart, is as cruel as he is loyal. After Barnicle finished reading a piece on Ken Starr a few weeks ago, Imus interjected: "That's great, Barnicle -- assuming you wrote that."

Showing the lightning-quick reflexes of the truly shameless, Barnicle replied, "My heart doctor did."

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Under the late editor Maynard Parker, Newsweek carved out a successful niche in the newsmagazine wars by positioning itself as hipper than its larger rival, Time -- and, of course, as way hipper than U.S. News & World Report, the stodgy also-ran of the three.

So you've got to wonder what's been going on over there since Mark Whitaker formally took over. His first three covers: "In Search of the Supercar," featuring Ford-family scion Bill Ford, an effort that bears a strong resemblance to Popular Mechanics, circa 1968; a large green sprig of broccoli (Buy Newsweek! It's good for you!); and the nadir, "Christmas Goes Online," a worthy topic that's marred by a big photo of Martha Stewart in a Santa Claus hat, which would have been merely passé 10 years ago, but which looks Paleolithic today.

No doubt I'm making too much of this. Whitaker has supposedly been running Newsweek ever since Parker fell ill with leukemia, well over a year ago, so things couldn't have changed all that much. But still.

U.S. News is now being run by Steve Smith, an aggressive editor who had his own unhappy tenure at Newsweek some years back. Smith's predecessor, James Fallows, wanted to take the magazine in a more thoughtful, less newsy direction, and was forced out earlier this year by owner Mort Zuckerman and his editorial hatchet man, Harold "Mr. Tina Brown" Evans. (Fallows was excoriated for once putting octogenarian food legend Julia Child on his cover, but Child will always be hipper than Martha Stewart. And U.S. News illustrated its own recent cover story on cybercommerce by using an icon with considerably more cachet than Stewart: Santa Claus.)

Smith, unlike Fallows, is thought to be eager to make a frontal assault on his rivals. Whitaker has got to come up with a better response than telling his readers to eat their broccoli.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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