Once upon a time, money and media didn't matter that much in presidential politics. The year that all changed was 1896.
As Cynthia Crossen pointed out in her excellent Deja Vu column in the Wall Street Journal, for most of the history of the Republic, presidential politics was pretty much a clubby operation. Connections and reputation mattered a whole lot more than money and media. The guy who changed that was Marc Hanna.
Hanna was an Ohio industrialist who helped William McKinley raise more than twice as much money as any candidate had raised before. He was once reputed to have said, "There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember what the second one is."
Hanna raised money for McKinley to help him defeat William Jennings Bryan by going out and finding a few people who had a lot of money and convincing them to give large donations. It's a principle that's familiar to anyone who has led a successful fundraising campaign for the United Way or to get a new roof for the church.
The result of Hanna's aggressive and effective tactics was that political campaigns, especially at the presidential level, were changed forever. From 1896 on, big donors were a key to successful campaign fund raising. With more money, candidates could run slicker campaigns.
Within fifteen years, political campaigns were using what they called "press agents." Most of the time these were men who had worked at newspapers and were adept at what we would now call public relations.
Most of the major communication that was carried on in public about presidential campaigns was carried on in the newspapers, so this was entirely appropriate. That would soon change.
In 1920, Calvin Coolidge hired one of the great advertising men of all time, Bruce Barton, to help handle his campaigns. Coolidge didn't get nominated for the presidency in 1920, but Barton wasn't worried about that. He was satisfied with Coolidge being the Vice-President to Warren Harding for the time being.
In 1922, Harding became the first president to use the radio. His dedication of the Francis Scott Key Memorial in Baltimore was broadcast on June 14. 1922 was also the year of the first radio commercial over WEAF in New York City.
Calvin Coolidge became president when Warren Harding died on August 2, 1923, and Barton's job became making Coolidge credible. He launched a public relations campaign that tried to make Coolidge appear much like Theodore Roosevelt. It worked. In 1924 Coolidge was elected in his own right in what many campaign historians refer to as "the radio election."
By the close of the 1924 campaign, the combination of the importance of fundraising and the power of media had begun to come together. Media - newspapers and radio at this point - would continue to become more and more important.
After World War II a new medium began appearing in American households. It was television. 1952 brought the first major televised coverage of the political parties' nominating conventions. The 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates demonstrated the power of television in political campaigns.
Surveys taken on the morning following the debates found that folks who had listened to them on radio thought Nixon was the winner. But those who had witnessed the debates on television felt that Kennedy had performed better and were more likely to vote for him.
After Kennedy's election the basic strategy for campaigns stayed the same for a while. You raised big money from big donors and used that money for sophisticated campaign messages that appeared on television and radio and in the newspapers.
In 1972, the Democratic nominee, George McGovern, became the first national candidate to raise a lot of small donations. His medium of choice was direct mail.
Then came the Internet. 1996 was the first national election where the Internet played any role at all. That was the year that candidate Bob Dole gave out an incorrect URL address in the debate with Bill Clinton. Even so, the site generated two hundred thousand dollars overnight.
Two years later, a former Navy seal combat veteran, professional wrestler, radio host, and mayor named Jesse Ventura put the Web to use in his outsider campaign to be elected the Governor of Minnesota. He used the Net to organize events and keep people posted about what was going on.
The Net became a kind of "advance man" for Jesse as he toured the state. He demonstrated that the Net could be used for fundraising and basic communication, but also as part of an organizing strategy.
The fund raising potential of the Net seemed pretty marginal until 2000, though. That's when Senator John McCain raised two million dollars in Web donations in just two days.
The Net kept becoming more important. Researchers from the University of Washington and the State University of New York's Institute of Technology studied campaign Web sites for the 2000 mid-term elections. They announced two kinds of findings.
First, just like for the rest of life, the Web was becoming more important in politics. More candidates had Web sites. More citizens used those Web sites to gather information about the candidates. The researchers found that: "The Web sites themselves were getting more sophisticated … going beyond brochureware to Webware."
They found that Web sites were enabling mobilization and facilitating online donations, just as they had done for Jesse Ventura and John McCain. Increasingly campaign sites linked to other political sites.
By 2004, the stage was set for Howard Dean. Why Dean?
Howard Dean was the former Governor of Vermont. He opposed the Iraq War and support he received for that fueled the idea that he might make a successful run for the Democratic nomination for President. He had limited visibility and hardly any money.
Often necessity, or sometimes desperation, becomes the "Mother of Invention." According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Dean complained to his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, that he didn't have any money. "We have to use the Internet," was Trippi's reply.
If Dean had had higher visibility, come from a larger state, or had access to more potential large donors, he might never have seized on the Net the way he did. But he had none of those things.
If there was going to be a successful Dean campaign, the Internet would have to be part of it. Luckily for Howard Dean, both people and technology had moved quite a way between 2002 and 2004.
Almost two thirds of American households were on the Web, and over ninety percent of Americans had Web access, either at home or at work. More important, an increasing percentage of them had conducted financial transactions online, which made them more likely to be comfortable making donations that way.
There were some new technological tricks available, too. One of those was something called Meetup.
Meetup was a business that was originally set up to help people with a common interest connect with each other. As a Meetup Vice-President, Myles Weissleder put it, "It wasn't created as a political tool . . . It was built for knitters and Elvis fans and pug owners."
Meetup knew that their service might have some interest to activist types or politicians. They approached several of the Democratic candidates. Dean's folks were the only ones who took them up on the idea of using Meetup to organize local get-togethers.
It was the bonanza for Dean. At first, Meetup gatherings registered 4500 supporters, but just a month later 80,000 people had registered for Dean get-togethers all across the country.
This was something new. It wasn't just coordinating public events, it was giving folks a way to organize their own events. Involvement became something of a theme with the Dean campaign. He solicited feedback from his supporters, even for significant decisions like whether or not to opt out of federal campaign financing.
The other techno-tool that played into this was something that goes by the name of blog. Blog is short for Web log. A Web log is a kind of a diary.
The first ones were news-type documents that contained links to other stories. Many blogs are commentary with lots of links. The Dean campaign used blogs as a way to get information out and to share testimonials and comments from supporters.
This wasn't just one, official, blog, either. The Dean campaign Web site had links to blogs that were set up independently. It wasn't long before the other Democratic candidates were using both Meetups and blogs.
That's the problem with generating competitive advantage based on technology whether you're in politics or business. The competition can copy technology pretty easily. They can copy it even more easily if they have more money.
Ultimately, Howard Dean's campaign for the Presidency died the death of most campaigns for the Presidency. The question, now, is what will we see in the next few months from politicians running for office in 2004?
Since 1992, campaigns have been very tightly controlled from the top, so that they are consistently "on message." You can expect that to continue with two traditional politicians like George W. Bush and John Kerry. But it won't continue without a certain amount of tension from the folks who want more participation and more say and who know about the technology that makes it possible.
The participation genie may be out of the bottle. You probably won't see much change in the presidential campaigns, because the folks there are too traditional and too tied to things that have worked for them for years, but watch what happens in state and local races.
The next big change in how the Net will affect political campaigns is in the area of participation. We've seen the beginnings, starting with Jesse Ventura and running through Howard Dean's presidential bid. Watch for the little guys and the ones without connections to big money to show us new ways to make folks a real part of the action.
