Give This Man a Job: Bill Richardson's New Resume

Bill Richardson has relaunched his website, coinciding with his announcement that he is officially running for the Democratic nomination for President. On the heels of his highly successful Job Interview web commercial, his newly redesigned website is essentially his resume 2.0.

After delivering up more than 150,000 views of his subtle but hysterical Job Interview commercial on YouTube, the Richardson campaign has decided the candidate's resume needed a new look and feel. In the age of digital elections, a candidate's website is his/her resume, providing voters with information regarding experience, issue positions, and plans for leading the nation. It is a place where voters can create their own relationship with the candidate and the campaign. And it is a place where the press can gather fodder for its stories. A good campaign website is all of these things.

A great campaign website also mobilizes the voters to become more actively involved in shaping public policy, not just by voting, but by voicing their opinions to policymakers, the media, and their own personal networks. This broader view of a campaign website or, more appropriately, a political website has yet to be taken up in earnest by most of the candidates. As I alluded to in an early post about Barack Obama's petition drive to pressure Senate Republicans up for re-election to overturn the President's veto of the supplemental war funding bill, real presidential candidates lead people to take control of their own country. They do not just ask voters to give them their votes. This is the difference between a visionary candidate and a candidate who is "in it to win it."

So how does Governor Richardson's website measure up? To paraphrase a question often asked by Stephen Colbert, is it a good website or a great website (yes, I realize it could be a terrible website, but I really wanted to reference Mr. Colbert here).

Remember, a good website effectively presents the candidate's experience, issue positions, and plans for the future. And it provides opportunities for voters to deepen their relationship with the candidate, while giving the press a steady diet of inside information from the campaign.

Richardson's site provides a welcoming and thorough narrative of his life and experiences. The About Bill section is crisply designed, with a secondary navigation menu that presents itself like a timeline of a man whose life has been steeped in public service at the very highest levels. From his origins as the son of an American dad and a Mexican mother who spent much of his childhood growing up in Mexico City, Richardson is immediately cast as someone very different from our current President, a man who barely stepped out of this country before he came to office. From here, the website walks you through Richardson the Congressman, Richardson the diplomat, Richardson the UN Ambassador, Richardson the Energy Secretary, and Richardson the Governor. It is impossible to peruse this section without getting the sense that this man has an impressive resume for the job.

Moving to the issues section, the site lays out the major issue areas, each in its own page with a good amount of supporting materials available for download on his top priorities. The key areas are, in the order presented on the site, Iraq, health care, energy, the environment, immigration reform, the economy, and a realistic foreign policy. His top priority issues (Iraq, health care, and energy) are visually distinguished by fancier and larger page headings, compared to the other issues. Also, these top three issue pages include a lot of extra materials for downloading, including speeches, press clippings, talking points for activists, and documents detailing his policy proposals and his expertise. And he does not hold back on his positions: troops out of Iraq in 2007, reducing demand for oil by 50% by 2020, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2050, etc.

As many candidates are embracing the (relatively) new web opportunities available on their own websites, this site contains a blog, a social networking community, and a multimedia library. The blog not only allows for reader comments, but because it is integrated with the social network platform, anyone who registers can create their own blog. This is an exciting change in presidential politics, though Richardson is not the first among the candidates to allow this. Still, in a matter of a few minutes, I was able to create my blog and publish my first post. There appeared to be no delay, no approval process. The age of presidential candidates loosening their tight grasp on the message has begun.

So, I think it is clear that the new Richardson website is a good website. But is it a great website? Let's dive into the Action Center to see how it looks.

For the most part, the Action Center is dominated by opportunities for voters to deepen their relationship with the campaign. These opportunities include contributing money, signing up for email alerts, volunteering for the campaign, various activities relating to the social network, and writing letters to the media.

This last action opportunity, writing the media, could have gone either way. If it was just asking us to write the media to say how much we love Bill, it would not make the "great" threshold. But they offer more here. At the moment, clicking on this action reaches a page asking for only one thing: write the media to tell them you support Richardson's plan to bring peace to Iraq and bring the troops home. Using a ZIP code matching system, I was matched to the media outlets in my market and provided a tabla rasa. That is Latin for blank slate. I am using this fancy Latin phrase because the letter form is already filled with a classic speech from Cicero, in Latin of course, which I am expected to replace with my own words. (I wonder how many people will end up submitting this letter without noticing it is in Latin.) To its credit, though, the site provides talking points and tips on writing a good letter right next to the form.

This is one way a candidate can use his/her website to mobilize citizens to take immediate actions to shape public policy long before Election Day. Another would be to ask citizens to send a message to Congress about some impending decision. While there is no opportunity like this provided in the Action Center, like Obama, Richardson has a call to action on his homepage. If you scroll down on the homepage (right away, this raises a flag for me because items below the fold are rarely seen, let alone acted on), there is a call to sign a petition to de-authorize the war. While Obama is still calling on citizens to sign a petition to get the 16 Republican Senators up for re-election to overturn the President's veto of a bill that has already been abandoned by the Congress, Richardson is calling for a forward looking action. And rather than asking for signatures only from people living in the appropriate Senators' states, this petition is available to all to sign.

Now leaving aside the fact that such petitions may not be the most effective way to influence Congress, between the petition and the call to write the media, the website strongly focuses grassroots citizen action on speaking out against the war. Will this be the only call to policy action during the campaign? Or will there be future calls to provide health care to all, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or some other pressing national issue?

And will the campaign stick with petitions or switch to a grassroots advocacy email system that lets activists send messages directly and individually to their Congressional delegation? And will the candidates who fail to win the nomination continue to use their political websites to mobilize grassroots action after they are out of the race and the election is over? Time will tell.

So for now, the Richardson website is clearly good and potentially great. How great it is will depend on how committed it remains to leading citizens not just to vote for Bill but to take control of the nation's policy agenda before, during, and after the election.