John Palfrey

Like it or not, it’s standard practice for campaigns — like nearly any buyer of paid TV — to pay commissions of 10% - 15% to those who place their TV advertisements.  The buying function is frequently linked to the process of formulating the campaign’s message (including speeches, direct mail pieces, and the like) and making the ads, such that often the same entity that produces the ads also coordinates, or carries out, the ad buy (and pockets, or splits with someone who collaborates, the commission, which is the real money in campaign consulting).  It’s surely a fair question as to whether conflict is created when one person, or a series of tightly related entities, controls too many of these functions — including management of the campaign itself.  But there’s no news here.  

Don’t miss a whole host of good takes on the meaning of the Internet
and the Presidential primary, post-Iowa-and-NH: several terrific days’
worth of Dave Winer looking hard at what we should — and shouldn’t
– take away from the Dean campaign’s stumble (too many entries to cite
to specifically, so just cruise through the last few days of January,
2004); Barlow on the relationship between this campaign and the mass media; Chris Lydon,
picking up Winer’s thread, describing the emergence of “big media” from
its “cave” (see also Lydon’s “After New Hampshire“; and, not least, from the inside of the Dean campaign, Jim Moore,
with his high-end consultant’s hat on, tackling organizational
learning, momentum investing, and truth, as well as a few pictures,
above it, from the Joe Trippi farewell
party.  [Levity, after all that aforementioned seriousness: Derek Slater on re-mixing Dean; and the Decembrist’s Billy Tauzin/Common Cause reference.]

Some excellent writing hitting the web.

As a former campaign operative, I’ve suffered the fickleness of polling data.  It can feel like being on a roller-coaster without a reliable seat-belt.  But the current crop of polls of New Hampshire voters strike me as particularly strange.  Leave aside other polls showing even larger differences, but not with a tracking nature to them.  How is it that these three can co-exist? 

* The Boston Globe/WBZ tracking poll has Sen. Kerry with a lead of 20 to 23 points over Gov. Dean for the past three days. The margin for error is +/- 5 percentage points, with a sample size of 400 likely voters.

* USA Today/CNN/Gallup’s tracking poll has Sen. Kerry with a lead of 11 to 13 points over Gov. Dean for the past three days.  The margin for error is +/- 4 percentage points, with a sample size of 970. 

* The MSNBC/Reuters/Zogby tracking poll, covering the same three-day period, by contrast, shows a much tighter race — even a statistic dead-heat on Sunday (i.e., Kerry up by 3 percentage points over Dean, but within the +/- 4.1 percentage point margin for error; sample size of 601).

Surely, the methodologies are not precisely the same, one to the next, with different sampling methods, different questions asked, and different callers used.  Is it possible that the Gallup poll has Kerry ahead by 4 points too many and Zogby has Kerry ahead by 4 points too few?   How could the Boston Globe/WBZ poll possibly square with the Zogby findings?  Does one of the polls have to be “wrong”?  How useful can this batch of information from these various tracking polls really be? 

The first sustained national blogradio conversation, on weblogs and the Presidential campaign, a Lydon-McGrath-Stoller-et al. production.

It’s everywhere: Robert Boynton’s New York Times magazine piece (”The Tyranny of Copyright?”), running this weekend, is online already.  The increasingly prevalent analogy comparing the free culture/copy left movement and the environmental movement resonates.

Stanford CIS’s Lauren Gelman says much of what I’ve been thinking about the Net and political campaigns in her excellent piece at FindLaw.  And better than I could, at that.

Regardless of the outcome of the presidential campaign this year, it would be a terrible mistake – a deep misreading of the situation — to assert that the internet did not come of age in political campaigns during this cycle.  Witness non-Howard Dean candidate John Kerry’s statement on fundraising today: “We’re doing spectacularly, we raised an extraordinary amount, a record amount on the Internet in the past 24 hours.”  Gov. Dean has been the pace-setter in terms of using internet to campaign this cycle, but he’s not the only one who has benefited from harnessing its powers.

[Disclosure: in my personal capacity, I support Senator Kerry in his candidacy for president and am a member of his environment steering committee.]

On this frosty-yet-exciting post-Iowa, pre-NH morning, I’ll be interested to see how the campaigns fire up their internet teams to capitalize on/mitigate the harm of the big surprise in Iowa last night.  (I’ve gotten an in-box full of celebratory Kerry campaign messages (”Iowa’s ‘comeback kid’”) already).  Meanwhile, Foster’s Daily Democrat had a piece on weblogs last Sunday, with mention of the Dean (”literally built a campaign out of thin air through one” says the article) and Clark campaigns.

An unforgettable photo — as well as commentary — from Ethan Zuckerman in Ghana.  There’s also a picture of Bernard Woma, about whom Ethan told us in Digital Democracy class.

Andrew responds with a picture of Ethan raising the roof.

Funny guys.

Among other things, they’re in Accra to promote BlogAfrica.

An “authentic plea for commentary” from one of the coolest thinkers (and, presumably, teachers) in this space.  Prof. Crawford’s planning out a syllabus for an Internet Law course and exploring new teaching tools for making it interesting.

Update: Ernest Miller replies in depth to Prof. Crawford.  And her final syllabus is here.