Real-Time Politics
Bob Brigham blogging in Union Square, San Francisco
News: Bob Brigham and other bloggers like him are putting the fight back into Democratic campaigns.
November 22, 2005
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On the first Monday morning in October, Bob Brigham sat himself down in a Redwood City, CA candy store that also—and crucially—serves regular coffee. His cell phone rang. It was the office of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. Brigham excused himself to take the call, and returned several minutes later, positively giddy.
“The field position has changed today,” said Brigham, a tall, lanky 27-year-old San Franciscan, shaking his head in disbelief and amusement. “Just sitting back and watching the entire conservative base cut off of from the President—it’s just good entertainment, great politics. I mean, the Republicans are freaking out! It’s going to be the Republicans now demanding that she give her stance on the issues. You know, it’s like at halftime, when the teams switch directions—but nobody told anyone.”
Today, October 3, was a very good day for Democrats, Brigham reckoned. President Bush had just nominated White House Counsel Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, and conservatives were enacting “Lord of the Flies.” After rising at 5 a.m. and scouring the blogosphere in his darkened home office, as he does every day, “to track things ahead of the curve,” Brigham weighed in on his blog, Swing State Project. “An important function of the blogosphere,” he wrote, “is [to] peek into real-time politics. Bloggers show and create what is going on in politics right now. The Miers announcement, he wrote, “gives us a short window to peer into the GOP.”
Earlier this year, Brigham and a 29-year-old Midwesterner named Tim Tagaris discovered Paul Hackett, a former Marine running in a special election for an Ohio congressional seat in a predominantly Republican district. The Democratic leadership, which traditionally targets resources to races deemed statistically winnable, had written off the Ohio race. But Hackett was that rare thing in electoral politics today—a straight talker, particularly on Iraq, which appeared to earn voters’—and bloggers’—respect. And in Hackett’s framing of the issues (“Democrats are for limited government because they don’t want government in our bedrooms”), Brigham and Tagaris saw a strategy that could win. They galvanized the liberal blogosphere, which turned out volunteers, mobilized people from all across the country to the district, and raised around $600,000 for the Hackett campaign from the netroots, greatly out-raising the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and forcing the National Republican Congressional Committee to spend money on a fight it hadn’t planned for.
The bloggers' effectiveness as a rapid-response team proved decisive in the Hackett campaign. When a conservative muckraker kicked off a “swift boat”-style smear campaign against Hackett—charging that the Marine had never seen combat—Brigham credits Tagaris with invalidating the claim and shutting down the stratagem within a day. On another occasion, at 10pm on the Saturday before the election, Brigham and Tagaris got wind of a video that Jean Schmidt, Hackett’s opponent, was set to air the next day, claiming that she’d never met Tom Noe. Noe was George W. Bush’s chief Ohio fundraiser, and he was then embroiled in a campaign finance and money laundering probe known as "Coingate." Alerted to the tape, Brigham and Tagaris speed-dialed bloggers across the country and set them to work digging up evidence to show that the two had, in fact, met. By the next morning they had proof, and they delivered it at a prime-time televised press conference on the courthouse steps.
In the end, of course, Hackett lost the race; but he came much closer than anyone had expected—thanks in large part to Brigham and the liberal blogosphere. The experience emboldened Brigham, who publicly denounced the DCCC as “irrelevant” and hailed the Hackett race as a model for future grassroots Democratic campaigning, and that “big, bold action not backing down will earn the respect of voters”—even conservatives. (Brigham has a tendency to speak in measured sound bites, as you might expect of somebody who's spent much of his young adult life, as he has, working on political messaging.)
Bob Brigham engages in real-time politics the way an aggressive mutual fund manager trades stocks. A Montana native who was introduced to computers around the time he was learning his ABCs, Brigham briefly went to college—where he was a lobbyist for the student body—but dropped out in 1996 to work on a political campaign. “I was able to learn traditional politics right at the point as Internet was maturing,” he says. “Being at that nexus allowed me to take principles underlying traditional political campaigning and couple them with the potential for online politics.” In 2004, Brigham blogged for Democrat Ginny Schrader during her unsuccessful run for Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District. During this time he met “DavidNYC,” Swing State Project’s respected founding blogger, who was using the blog to raise money for Schrader. Swing State Project began focusing on swing states in the 2004 Presidential election, but has since put an emphasis on federal and state races in districts that people might not consider even to be competitive. Brigham, along with Tagaris—“the only two people using blog diaries to drive political messages in congressional races”—asked David if they could join forces with him.
Brigham’s approach to politics follows, he suggests, from having grown up in a generation bombarded by—and cynical about—commercial messaging. The Internet allows for real-time politics and supplies a new benchmark for measuring success, he says. “If we only take stock and evaluate our success the morning after election day, we only get one chance every two years to see how we’re doing. The mindset I advocate is to ask yourself every day whether we won on that given day. What that brings about is an end to compromising in hopes of winning an election and enforces best practices … on a daily basis.”
If the 2004 Presidential Election marked a coming of age for bloggers, who for the first time became highly visible and respected political players, 2005 has been a year for maturation. The bipartisan debate over Social Security last Spring, the blogopshere’s first large policy fight after mostly electoral battles, united the Democratic netroots and illustrated the power that 600 united bloggers can wield in shaping and spreading political messages. (“We had the perfect line,” says Brigham, referring to the slogan thought up by blogger Matt Stoller, after a Christmas Eve conference call, to counter Presidents Bush’s fear-mongering on the issue. “’There is no crisis.’”)
Lessons in organizing and messaging learned from the Social Security fight were deployed through the summer’s Republican Congressional scandals and Supreme court nominations. “[This year] has ramped up the knowledge base in the blogosphere,” says Brigham. “Going forward, the community will be able to provide excellent commentary and analysis on all three branches of government.”
The relationship between liberal bloggers and DC Democrats can be seen as one of mutual dependence. While their political styles may be divergent (“a large portion of the Democratic Caucus are very courteous and deferential in the style of politics that they play, whereas in the blogs it’s no holds barred,” says Brigham), there exists a lot of common ground and plenty of potential for cooperation. However, a friction is palpable, as the netroots challenges the traditional mentality of the party leadership and forces grassroots party support for choices in candidates and positions on issues. The blogosphere, representing—indeed, constituting—an energized base, operates almost as a check-and-balance within the party. “We reward good behavior and are willing to support Democrats who are mature in their understanding of the current political system,” says Brigham.
