Articles by Gene Koo

The New York Times’ “The Measure of a President” provides visual proof that shorter candidates suffer a remarkable handicap in winning the Presidency. Part of the blame surely lies with the media, which regularly taints their coverage with heightist phrases like “Despite his diminutive stature…” And don’t get started with the term “scrappy.”

It is little wonder that short people are tempted to vote for John McCain, at 5′7″ the shortest major party nominee since 1900. We are outraged by the heightism and discrimination spread by the mainstream media, and we are ready to fight back.

Yet we cannot allow our own justifiable outrage cloud our vision. George W. Bush beat a taller opponent in both 2000 and 2004, and look where our country is now. The last candidate to accomplish this feat was Richard Nixon in 1968 — enough said. Presidents Bush and Nixon were an embarrassment to the short community, and John McCain’s sadly stereotypical Napoleonic tendencies will do us little good in combating societal prejudice.

We look forward to a competent and qualified candidate of shorter stature who will earn our support. Change is coming: we already have one of the shortest Speakers of the House in recent history. Until that time, I am proud to be a Short Person for Obama.

Ed Cone of CIO Insight has published a series, “How the Obama Campaign is Using Technology to Change Elections on the Ground.” (Big ups to Baratunde for the tip). There’s a few tidbits here and there worth repeating:

“It’s the difference between open and closed source.” — Cyrus Krohn, director of the eCampain division of the Republican National Committee. Presumably, Obama = open source. I wonder if Krohn sees that as positive, negative or neutral? Certainly, my colleagues would agree that open source is a massive positive.

“The Ground Game: Open Source vs Closed“. This article largely discusses minimally-supported local teams and my.BarackObama.com (or “MyBO” for short). Cone observes, “The Republican’s answer to the vaunted MyBarackObama.com website, known as McCainSpace, did not go live until August, and the McCain campaign is generally seen as lagging on the technology and organizational fronts.” The article confirms that the Republicans continue to equate the Internet with “microtargeting” marketing and that the Obama campaign has “leapfrogged” them.

“Local Area Networks: How the Obama Campaign Works on the Ground” describes the pyramid-shaped MyBO system: users at the base of the pyramid have relatively fewer options than those at the top, which distinguishes MyBO from, for example, Facebook. Nonetheless, local volunteers can command teams of other volunteers to undertake impressive amounts of critical work like registering, identifying, and persuading voters. For anyone familiar with GOTV campaigns (if not, here’s my GOTV primer), what’s radically new is the possibility for such teams to self-organize, with minimal supervision from the campaign. This allows the campaign to aggressively leverage its paid organizing staff. The “force multiplier” power of good technology skews even further Obama’s decided ground-game advantage.

“Connecting the Compaign: How the Democrats Built Their Network” describes the Voter Activation Network (VAN) system, headquartered not too far from where I am, that has been the data backbone of the DNC. (All of the Democratic candidates had access to VAN during the primaries, in the interest of growing the pie for everyone, thought in the heat of battle that did lead to frictions that had to be resolved by segregating the data out. So here the commons lost some ground to self-interest). Any organizer, however technology-crippled, will tell you that databases are the key to winning campaigns. (Back in the day, they would use huge stacks of index cards and the like). Some key insights about social networking:

“Facebook is great for broadcasting yourself to friends, but it’s not very action oriented. There are few features at MyBO for broadcasting yourself in the abstract–instead it’s geared to getting people to take action.” [Jascha Franklin-Hodge of Blue State Digital]. In essence, MyBO redirects the energy of social networkers to specific, campaign-oriented tasks, such as canvassing neighborhoods. Ruffini [Bush-Cheney 2004 webmaster] agrees that the system has “morphed into a very useful tool.” A killer application, he says, is the group-building feature, which allows people to create connections to potential voters in their area, rather than just talking about their personal views of the campaign as they might on Facebook.

“Going Mobile: Texting and Twittering in the New Ground Game” identifies the VP selection text-message signup as a “watershed moment” for the campaign. It was a great way to collect thousands of phone numbers that are normally very difficult to acquire. Yet the technology also appears to be immature, with many who signed up failing to get the text message, as well as expensive.

Compare the YouTube pages of the McCain and Obama campaigns, and you’ll also get a glimpse of how very different their strategies are. Both feature 30- and 60-second advertisements, but Obama also offers a wide range of other pieces that include speeches and rallies, calls to action, and, increasingly, videos that support local grassroots efforts.

In other words, McCain’s 300 videos are an extension of his marketing — the “air war.” Obama’s 1,428 videos extend both his “air war” and his “ground war.” Given the Obama campaign’s relatively extensive investment and innovation in this area, we can get a glimpse of the state-of-the-art in weaving together new media and traditional organizing.

I would divvy up the Obama YouTube videos into the following categories:

1. Advertisements. Frankly, I find these boring transplants from another medium (TV), but some are highly-watched. The long pieces are made-for-Web. Example from McCain: “Chicago documentary,” which attacks Barack Obama as complacent on Latino issues.
2. “Raw” footage. Videos of Obama, Biden, or surrogates stumping and, in many, audience reaction. These can be quite long, and some are also (surprisingly) well-watched. Example: “A More Perfect Union” a/k/a Obama’s “race speech” (almost 5 million views).
3. Calls to action. A direct appeal to the viewer to go and do something. Recently, this has focused on registering, voting, and volunteering. Examples: “Come to Ohio,” which invites viewers to head over to volunteer in Ohio; “Vote Early in Ohio,” which asks Ohio citizens to register and vote early.
4. Instructional video. A simple explanation of how to do something to help the campaign. These recently started showing up. This category blurs a bit with #3, as these pieces are also persuasive. Example: “Phonebanking 101.”

(None of this includes the unofficial videos that are created outside the campaigns, the most famous of which is probably the “Yes we can” music video. More on those media here.)

For traditional grassroots organizers, videos of type 3 and 4 are worth studying. One of the key weaknesses of new media are their apparent inefficacy in getting people to do things in the real world. Or at least that’s the conventional wisdom after the collapse of the Dean campaign in 2004. Whether these videos, by themselves, convince people to go and cast an early vote in Ohio remains to be seen.

But these videos do not operate by themselves; rather, it’s pretty clear that some are intended to be wrapped into a traditional grassroots campaign. For example, the “Phonebanking 101″ video could be used to help recruit volunteers for a phonebank as well as to train them once they’ve shown up. In other words, these media work hand-in-hand with other tactics — which is quite different than mass-market advertising. Thus, while you might normally measure the effectiveness of a YouTube video by the number of hits it gets, it would be wrong to conclude that the “Color By Numbers” advertisement (11,500 views one day after it was posted) is more useful and successful than the “Come to Colorado” piece (2,964 views over the same period). “Color by Numbers,” at best, might persuade a few people to not vote for McCain (or strengthen their resolve for Obama). The “Come to Colorado” video, by contrast, might persuade people to drive over to volunteer and, in turn, reach out to hundreds, maybe thousands, of voters.

More on how these videos are made, and the significance of that production strategy for grassroots organizing, to come…

I don’t live in the Second Suffolk District, where a heated battle is underway between incumbent State Senator Diane Wilkerson and challenger Sonia Chang-Diaz, the challenger who won the Democratic nomination last week. I have no standing to evaluate whether Wilkerson or Chang-Diaz is more capable of representing that District’s needs.

However, as a Chinese-American, I do feel strongly disserved by the executive director of the Chinese Progressive Association, Lydia Lowe, who is quoted in the Bay State Banner as saying, “I think progressive whites don’t care about what people of color want or who they see as their leaders.”

This is a disgraceful show of divisive 70s-style racial politics that we simply don’t need at this moment in history. Progressive (and not-so-progressive) whites — indeed people of all races — have shown that they do care about other people, of other races. I fundamentally and profoundly disagree with the sentiment that progressive whites are selling out their non-white brethren. If anything, history has repeatedly shown us that progressive whites have been essential to the advancement of so many issues of importance to minorities, whether civil rights, affirmative action, or immigration reform.

Like a certain black pastor who recently received nationwide notoriety, Lydia Lowe’s years of fighting for the interests of Chinatown and the Chinese-American community may have, at the same time, given her a sadly frozen view of race relations. Diane Wilkerson’s own preferred candidate for President chastised his former pastor: “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made… But what we know — what we have seen - is that America can change.”

The idea that whites in Jamaica Plain are selling out their non-white neighbors because of race is reprehensible and disgusting. Lydia Lowe and her organization may win a tactical victory if her candidate returns to the Senate. But by playing the race card — against a woman who’s mixed white, Latina, and Chinese, no less — she’ll be hurting the long-term interests of her own constituency, pushing away the very people who have been a cornerstone of political success any time minorities have tried to attain success beyond our own boundaries.

Total economic meltdown sure is confusing, isn’t it?

So where to turn for helpful information? Well, the sense I’m getting is: while many experts know and agree on what’s happening (collapse of mortgages and mortgage-backed derivatives, collapse of other lines of credit, credit crunch across the board), we are in uncharted territory as far as what happens next and the consequences for our national and global economies. Here are some links to articles that might be helpful based on looking around quite a bit:

• Post today by Dean Baker in TPM : “The main cause of the economy’s weakness is not insolvent banks and lack of credit; it’s the loss of $4 trillion to $5 trillion in housing equity as a result of the bubble’s partial deflation. Families used their equity to support their consumption in the years from 2002 to 2007, as the savings rate fell to almost zero. With much of this equity now eliminated by the collapse of the bubble, many families can no longer sustain their levels of consumption. The main reason that banks won’t lend to these families is that they no longer have home equity to serve as collateral. It wouldn’t matter how much money the banks had, they are not going to make mortgage loans to people who have no equity.”
• Paul Krugman — particularly Crisis Endgame (”This flight to safety has cut off credit to many businesses, including major players in the financial industry — and that, in turn, is setting us up for more big failures and further panic. It’s also depressing business spending, a bad thing as signs gather that the economic slump is deepening.”).
• Pretty serious macroeconomic analysis from Brad DeLong, concluding, “there is now no time for tolerance of the three objections to this analysis and this plan of action, roughly: (1) it’s immoral, (2) it’s unfair, and (3) it can’t work in the long run.”
• RGE Monitor — Financial intelligence company with limited free membership during this crisis. My friend Jarrett highly recommends Nouriel Roubini’s Global EconoMonitor, e.g.
• The Worst Financial Crisis Since the Great Depression — caution — reading this will be like jumping into icewater
• Harsh assessment of the original Paulson/Bernanke Bailout plan

There’s much more out there, but my own conclusions, in trying to keep things simple in my own head, are that (a) we have been in a bubble since the close of the Clinton years; (b) Greenspan refused to pop the bubble, instead superinflating it; (c) exotic new financial products multiplied the force of the bubble many times greater than normal; (d) the final popping of the bubble will have real and psychological effects that will crash the economy to below where it “really” is right now.

There’s nothing that policy and leadership can do, now, about (a)-(c). We can only hope that wise leadership will steer us away from (d) if at all possible…

New survey out from the Wall Street Journal / NBC / MySpace. Full report. The WSJ’s read on this was that new voters were less likely than the poll of all voters to vote this November (”very interested” = 49% vs. 70%). However, what I find interesting is that this question is on a 10-pt scale, and that the 10,9,8 votes 78% for new voters vs. 87% for all voters. I wonder if new voters are simply less willing to pick the most extreme possibility.

Other interesting data:

• 28% of new/lapsed voters have watched a homemade video about the election on YouTube, vs. 22% of all voters.
• 25% have sent a text message, vs. 16%
• 21% have joined an online social networking group for either campaign, vs. 8%
• The spread of confidence across internet media, MSM, fed gv’t and financial industry are interesting as well. New voters have little confidence in any of these, but have the most (least least?) confidence in Internet media.
• Despite this, they claim to get and trust the news from cable news channel above MSM and print/online newspapers. Despite stereotypes they don’t rank late night shows, social networking, or blogs very highly. (However, I tend to distrust self-reporting on whom the respondents “trust.” Peer influence, e.g. through social networks and blogs, would be very hard for someone to recognize on themselves.)
• Despite a stereotype that young people don’t join (and these are mostly young voters, though there’s no cross-tab), 23% identify themselves as “strong Democrat,” the largest percentage of any of the other options (19% identify as “strictly independent”).
• 65% of respondents use Internet network (MS, FB, etc.), and 35% have a cell phone but no landline.

A few days ago I discussed how Treasury Secretary Paulson came to the negotiation with an extreme, highly “anchored” opening move, and how negotiations research shows that anchoring works. Why, then, don’t we always use absurd opening moves when engaging in a negotiation over used cars or other purchases? The answer is that the party making the offer can lose credibility with or respect of the other party, and the chances of reaching an agreement can go down. That’s precisely what happened when the House rejected Paulson’s plan — even as modified — on Sunday.

By including unacceptable terms — most notably, non-reviewability — Paulson et.al. were perceived as overreaching. Even though the Administration quickly gave up those terms, the mistrust was already sown, especially because the proposal echoed the earlier “trust me” terms of the Iraq war authorization.

Maintaining a strong working relationship with the other party in a negotiation is critical to successful outcomes for both parties. In this case, by playing chicken with Congress, the Administration may have precipitated the worst outcome for both sides: failure to reach an agreement. Let’s hope our economy can survive the results.

The Obama campaign has a unique opportunity to show us what leadership in his Internet-savvy administration might look like. Americans are panicking now over the crisis on Wall Street, panicking but completely at a loss as to what we should do. This is Obama’s chance to show us real leadership through running a serious of Web spots and TV ads that:

• Explain, in simple English, what is happening on Wall Street, and how that affects Main Street;
• Use graphics and Ross Perot charts to illustrate rather than use words;
• Outline the options, and the pluses and minuses of each one in as non-partisan way as possible;
• Do it in the calm, serene, and non-partisan manner in which Obama excels — and which the citizenry really need right now.

This would:

• Assert high-minded leadership at a time when everyone else is embroiled in politics;
• Demonstrate Obama’s belief that we are mature and intelligent;
• Spread like wildfire — because we are all desperate for answers, and no one — including the MSM — is giving us any.

Obama has run a spectacular, Internet-infused grassroots campaign for the Presidency. I’m ready to see how that translates into leadership and governance.

This week’s Economist describes a difficult negotiation underway in Washington:

An impaired mortgage security might yield 65 cents on the dollar if held to maturity. But because the market is so illiquid and suspicion about mortgage values so high, it might fetch just 35 cents in the market today. Recapitalising banks would mean paying as close to 65 cents as possible. Those that valued them at less on their books could mark them up, boosting their capital. On the other hand, minimising taxpayer losses would dictate that the government seek to pay only 35 cents. But this would provide little benefit to the selling banks, and those that carried them at higher values on their books could see their capital further impaired.

If we want DC to drive a hard bargain and get taxpayers maximum value, we want them to lowball for $.35. But that would be self-defeating, as the economy would likely seize up. If we go for the $.65, we might be overpaying for them, rewarding Wall Street for its greedy stupidity at taxpayer expense.

There’s a spectrum here between what is “fair” and what will “work” — and what’s worse, we can’t know if/when we cross either threshold. It’s possible, as The Economist suggests, that $.65 will NOT work — AND yet still be perceived as unfair.

The thing that’s impossible for most American taxpayers to swallow with corporate welfare is exactly the same as for individual welfare: you (the taxpayer) will personally pay a certain amount of money for an uncertain and socially distributed benefit. It’s hard enough to convince Americans that we are our brother’s keeper when it comes to getting homeless people we can actually see off the streets with programs that we can understand (if not agree with). The bailout wants us to enact that same value with people who aren’t that sympathetic using mechanisms that even most economists are having a hard time articulating.

The crisis on Wall Street and subsequent negotiation between the Bush Administration and Congress over solutions expose a dangerous weakness of the people’s branch in the modern era: legislators lack unity and the power that unity affords. They will lose almost every time they get into a showdown with the President, especially without an O’Neill or Gingrich to rally them. The fact that the representative branch of government operates at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the executive branch presents an enormous threat to our democracy.

High school civics classes teach that Congress makes the laws and the President enforces them. Americans would be forgiven if they think that it’s the President who makes law and Congress who has the veto power. The Wall Street bailout and the Iraq war resolution illustrate how — in high-profile crises — the Executive branch drives its agenda through Congress due to its superior ability to plan, focus attention, and control national discourse. Often, Congress is relegated to nibbling around the edges or poking holes in the President’s plans.

Making the first offer gives the Administration enormous leverage over Congress. In both the Iraq war resolution and the Wall Street bailout, Congress never really questioned the core premise (Iraq presents an imminent threat; the economy will collapse without intervention) nor strayed very far from the proposed solution (invade; bail out). We know, in the case of Iraq, at least, that this is not because the President was right on the merits. Rather, he was simply in the better bargaining position, having “anchored” the negotiation.

Administrations have also proven adept at controlling the pace of negotiations. The meltdown on Wall Street was real, but the Iraqi threat was not; yet in both cases, the executive branch set artificial timelines to exert pressure on Congress to accept its view of reality.

Both bargaining tactics are rooted in institutional advantages that the President enjoys over Congress: the staff and personnel to be better-informed (or at least look like it), and message discipline to speak with one voice. Congress “wins” when these strengths are minimized — for example, by dragging out the process and throwing up doubt and noise (see Bush’s failed Social Security and immigration initiatives) or small-bore issues that won’t get national attention. No wonder earmarks have gone haywire.

Mass media have strengthened the executive branch’s power. Television and radio favor those who speak with one voice; Congress is by nature as fractured, contentious, and divided as the electorate itself — something that, paradoxically, the electorate don’t like. In the history of the Gallop Polls’ Congressional approval ratings, Congress has never broken 50%, except right after 9/11. Moreover, broadcast news puts heavy pressure towards real-time drama, something that C-SPAN has proven the Congress lacks.

How does or can the Internet change this dynamic?

First, the Internet is starting to fracture the broadcast bias towards singular voices. We can see the various Netroots refracting and punching holes in political marketing campaigns. Clearly this was insufficient to halt the Iraq war or the bailout, but it remains to be seen whether Internet chatter will gain enough strength to effectively counterbalance the MSM’s tendency to amplify already-powerful messages.

But it’s not enough to destroy hegemonic messaging; the result would be anarchy. I hope, instead, that the deliberative strength of our democracy will expand as the Internet matures as a medium. David Weinberger, my colleague at Berkman, has mused on how the Internet might function as an e-gov social network. This is, I think, the right question, but David grounds that function in the wrong institution. We all want a more transparent Administration, but it’s Congress that’s sorely in need of more deliberative power to counterbalance the Administration’s already mighty dominance over American democracy.

Imagine if, in the past two weeks, Internet technologies had given grassroots networks the ability to rally citizenry around carefully-crafted alternatives to the Paulson-Bernanke plan. Better yet, imagine if in the past few months those networks enabled Congress to tap the wisdom of our citizenry to craft a democratic yet expert plan — proactively — to respond to the crisis before it broke. Science-fiction writer Victor Venge has posited that today’s predictive markets will evolve into rapid-response networks capable of quickly gathering, synthesizing, and analyzing data to support complex decision-making. It’s idealistic, but not impossible to imagine, such network restoring democratic principles to our increasingly top-down government. Everyone would have a role to play in such a system — experts in shaping policy strategy, ordinary citizens in shaping the values that such policies must meet. Lingering anger on both the left and right over not just the Iraq war and the bailout, but also how they were rammed through Congress, may provide us the opportune moment to begin building this future.