BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
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click
here.
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Driving to work with Christopher
Lydon. Howard Dean has showed how technology can change the way
we choose a president -- or at least a Democratic presidential
nominee.
Christopher Lydon may be changing
how we learn about such things.
I've been aware of Lydon's
weblog
for a few months. Last week, while I was talking with him about
something else, he mentioned an interview he'd done with Dean's
campaign manager, Joe Trippi, as something he was particularly proud
of.
Lydon has written up the
highlights, but I wanted to hear the whole thing. The
interview
consists of three MP3 files, totaling about an hour -- just about the
length of his old Connection show on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM). I
saved them on my hard drive, burned them onto a CD, and popped it
into my car stereo.
It was a terrific interview, with
Lydon prodding Trippi to talk about this odd marriage between the
Dean campaign and the Internet. I don't have any direct quotes --
hey, I was driving! -- but Trippi offered considerable insight,
comparing the Dean online campaign to Linux, which is an open-source
alternative to Windows and the Mac OS to which anyone can
contribute.
Trippi also disdained the "command
and control" orientation of traditional candidates, including Wesley
Clark, who smothered the Internet enthusiasm that had originally
fueled his entry into the race by seeking to replace it with a
top-down hierarchy.
Trippi was especially good on
fundraising, observing that if the Dean campaign can achieve its goal
of getting two million supporters to contribute $100 each, it will
have managed the unthinkable feat of matching George W. Bush's $200
million campaign stash. Dean has taken a lot of grief for opting out
of the voluntary public-financing system. But it strikes me that what
he's trying to accomplish is actually a much more profound reform
than sticking to an outmoded patchwork of special-interest
contributions, Byzantine spending limits, and matching federal
funds.
As you will see, there's a lot of
good stuff on Lydon's blog. Lydon -- whose daytime home these days is
the Berkman
Center for Internet & Society,
at Harvard Law School -- sounds just as sharp as he did on the
radio.
Of course, Internet audio is
nothing new. But I wouldn't have listened to the Trippi interview if
I'd had to be chained to my computer. What's great about what Lydon
is doing is that he's taking advantage of the fact that technology
has continued to improve.
When Lydon
left WBUR in 2001 in the
midst of an incredibly nasty contract dispute, most Internet users
were still stuck with dial-up connections, and CD burners were rare.
These days, broadband is widely available, and many users can easily
transfer audio files to CDs or to portable MP3 players.
The fundamental problem with the
Internet, of course, is that no one knows how to make any money from
it. Money's not the key to everything, but people have to eat.
Lydon's online interviews are generating no money -- they're free,
and there are no ads. That's great for you and me, but not so good
for anyone looking to follow his path.
If you miss hearing Chris Lydon --
and you know you do -- check this out.
The Queen of Sheba smears Howard
Dean. I'm a day late, but I didn't want to pass up the chance to
comment on New York Times columnist David Brooks's
deeply
stupid piece. Here's his
Tuesday lead:
My moment of illumination
about Howard Dean came one day in Iowa when I saw him lean into a
crowd and begin a sentence with, "Us rural people...."
Dean grew up on Park Avenue and
in East Hampton. If he's a rural person, I'm the Queen of Sheba.
Yet he said it with conviction. He said it uninhibited by any fear
that someone might laugh at or contradict him.
It was then that I saw how Dean
had liberated himself from his past, liberated himself from his
record and liberated himself from the restraints that bind
conventional politicians. He has freed himself to say anything, to
be anybody.
Well, my moment of
illumination about how the right is going to try to destroy Dean came
yesterday, when I read this tripe by someone who normally comes off
as a conservative of the sensible, non-mouth-foaming
variety.
Dean moved to Vermont -- one of the
most rural states in the country, if you don't count the big empty
ones out West -- in the late 1970s, shortly after graduating from
medical school. He served as a Vermont legislator and lieutenant
governor for most of the '80s, and became governor in
1991.
If any candidate has the right to
describe himself as a "rural person" in this race, it is Howard Dean.
Brooks's outburst is so plainly, obviously wrong that I can't believe
he wrote it.
posted at 9:35 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
