Reflections from Dean '04 regarding Obama's MySpace Challenge (elevated from comments)

This issue [Obama's MySpace Brouhaha] reminds me of questions that we had to deal with all the time on the Dean campaign. We called people like Joe Anthony "centers of gravity"-- people who had built up their own Dean communities. We wanted centers of gravity as close to campaign as possible without imploding.

At first, new centers of gravity were exciting, but very perplexing, and our tiny team debated options. We quickly ran into an odd clarifier--the law. Because of legal concerns about campaign coordination, we were told early on by our lawyers that we had two choices: to have a manager/agent relationship with grassroots supporters, or to not direct grassroots supporters actions at all. In February and March, Dean Nation was blogging, and New York for Dean and others were creating posters and strategies of their own: some of them were clamoring for direction, and we hardly had enough time to answer the phone and incoming emails.

The question--whether to have none or all control--answered itself. We simply couldn't have a manager/agent relationship and still have all this flowering of intelligent political energy: we chose to be hands off, talking with people but not telling them what to do. As part of this, we had to train the press--when Georgia for Dean sends out a press release, it is not a Howard Dean press release, it is a Georgia for Dean press release. The training of the press took awhile, but they learned. Teaching people who'd worked in politics for a while that "no, we will not vet that flier you are going to pass out to 1,000 people" also took awhile ("you MUST tell me whether this is an okay message"), but led to what I think is the most important thing in a democracy: people taking responsibility. Local groups, centers of gravity like Joe Anthony, took responsibility because they knew we wouldn't. Some got exhausted after a few months of intense work, others did not--and not all relationships were handled well, as we fumbled for solutions for the hardworking volunteers. The issues became more difficult when paid staffers, on the ground, would be working with unpaid supporters who had done far more extraordinary, creative, and difficult work for months--we found that grassroots growth often slowed in states once we put in a paid staffer.

We made hundreds of mistakes. Here are two. In March 2003, we signaled that we were going to give a group an "official" status and then changed our position. Our first impulse was to provide the group what they wanted, but after realizing that the "official" group was far more bottlenecked than the unofficial ones, we reneged. We admitted we made a mistake, but people were understandably angry. The second was much later--the fall of 2003. A policy group started in order to help Dean develop policy positions, or at least do collective research. We effectively shut the door on them--I think we weren't ready to open up that much, and didn't know how to do collective policy, and the founders were annoyed, because I (and others) had initially been very excited. Of course they continued on their own, but without the active enthusiasm of our staff.

But we also had some real successes. Trippi--rage as he might over a few things Aziz might mischievously post--did not try to control the Dean Nation blog. The Friendster pages set up for Dean (yes, there were a handful) were one of our top referrers, and we had rare, but nice, interactions with the founders. The thousands of local Meetup groups were run by unpaid, very hardworking, very creative volunteers. The vast majority of our centers of gravity we communicated with, but did not try to control.

There were a few big exceptions, where we tried to fudge the line. Students for Dean, an amazing group with 20,000 members by the time we started working with them, was created by three college students. It was clear it couldn't keep up their site (which had many features ours didn't) without some financial support--two of the founders were getting hired away by field staff (poached by our own campaign!) and the other couldn't afford not to work for the summer. So we offered him jobs and brought them in, giving them more autonomy than most staffers because that is what they needed to be persuaded to work for the campaign. Of course nothing is that simple--as the campaign stiffened towards the end, Students for Dean lost the staff and autonomy they'd been promised--but the general approach really worked, and the on-site blending of Students for Dean and Dean Students led to the largest young person organization in decades (Generation Dean, a name created by two South Carolina students--who we asked for permission to use). If Students for Dean had turned us down (which they almost did), then we would have continued to link to them, and gone forward.

I think a similar approach could have worked with the Obama campaign's approach to Joe Anthony--try figure out if they could give Joe what he wanted--and it sounds like they started down that path and then, inexplicably, stopped. If it is true that they asked him for an offer (and Joe Rospars' blog post doesn't contradict this), then why didn't they counter offer?

If they did, I don't care how much Joe Anthony asked for--the new media team probably didn't have $40,000 (its a rare web team that has a free hand with money), but they should have counter-offered what they could. If he'd asked for $200,000 and they had only $500 they should have returned with the $500 offer. It is difficult to figure out an amount in any bargaining circumstances, and money in politics is downright bizarre--whether or not the figure was too high, one should be generous with people trying to figure out how to interact with the campaign. I was happy to see that Rospars did not accuse Joe Anthony of over-asking. Relatedly, the "itemized list" was presumably an effort to appear professional--an effort by Anthoney to show the campaign that he was not bilking them. My heart goes out to someone staying up all night, asking friends' advice, trying to work out the key to the vague promised thing--the contract. How much should I ask for?

The mistake of the campaign, may be, perversely, a result of too much success--the brilliant social networking site and tools may have created a dependency on keeping a loose leash on the conversations, or on "having the conversation on our ship" as Matt Gross might say, lulling the campaign into a habit of being able to make decisions about what could and couldn't be said. Perhaps the 5,000 on-site groups made them think it was possible to have mass support and and semi-vetted statements about Obama. It is not. Rospars' post about the success of the Obama web tools suggests that there is a desire (so understandable, if impossible!) for the web strategy of the campaign to live and breathe on the site, on the grounds, in the gardens built by the web team.

Joe Rospars is a friend of mine, and, as Micah said, a straight shooter, and I'm generally sympathetic with the open fumbling of campaigns towards making hard decisions. I wish his post was a little more open, but I know how hard that can be on a campaign with many vetters.

One thing his post reveals is that the Obama campaign had chosen a different general strategic approach than the Dean campaign did--one that would have had our lawyers, among others, quaking in their boots. At least as regards the Myspace page, they had decided to create management/agent relationships with this particular center of gravity. The campaign had login access and control over content (at least for a while). It may have wanted to shift into the role gently, but it perceived itself as the agent finally responsible for the Myspace content.

Our Dean lawyers' early advice was based on fear of FEC problems, but it turned out to be generally sound for grassroots relationships in general: for each relationship, choose whether it is one of absolute control, or no control. In those with no control, you can still communicate, but don't command. In the long run, clear roles won't confuse the press and the thousands of people writing in--at first, perhaps, and on the margins, but they will learn. When in doubt, no control is better, just as it is in friendships--your friends will do everything they can to represent you well and be your supporter, until you start telling them what to say about you.

I hope this episode is a lesson for the Obama campaign, but also others - a reminder that having grassroots support means autonomous individuals who do not just work, but speak.