August 2006 Archive

Only in Florida can a campaign be sidelined by Mother Nature - and campaigns are trains that, by themselves, are forces to be reckoned with. After Ernesto cancelled the debate for Tuesday, the Davis/Smith campaigns have had a field-day regarding whether or not to commit to another debate.

As reported in the Miami Herald, the Smith campaign decided not to commit to another debate because of the planned campaign stops in Northern Florida. The Davis campaign got a chance to give a shot about Smith’s connections with US Sugar. It was reported in the Palm Beach Post that Davis was ready as of 2pm Wednesday to be at the debate, but by 4pm, the Smith campaign decided that it would not work to be in West Palm Beach and still handle the campaign schedule they had already planned.

Is this horse-hockey?
Being on campaigns now for a bit of time, the time for prep and getting all of the practice in is extremely demanding on a campaign. I can speak to the stressors and efforts put into the Kerry and Deutsch campaigns to prepare for their debates - especially trying to get all of the advisors ready and to agree on what is the best spin on a topic. But, Rod is a natural orator. He was materful in the previous debate - and impromptu has never been his weak point.

Could it be that the efforts of ads, mailers and the previous debate (that is more than likely replying over and over again on PBS) was enough that Rod does not need any more visibility? With the Strategic Vision Poll out (reported by FLA Politics) yesterday, is it suprising the Rod is feeling the momentum that precludes a showing on local television? The amount of votes Rod is going to gain from this North Florida run that he has not already won is miniscule - compared to what exposure he might get given a focus on a West Palm debate. Think about the additional coverage he would get from WSVN and other local stations in a rich Democratic region like Broward County… Or could it be that Labor Day Weekend is not the best time to expect people to see candidates on television - especially since they would be heading out for a holiday with the family, and not sitting in front of the TV.

Truth be told, the race is almost over. After Labor Day, the decision will be made. The people coming out more than likely have already made their mind. The question is - who do you support?

Tags: Rod Smith, Jim Davis, Florida Governor

Unfortunately for the blog wave, I have been under a rock working on a number of different issues - this weekend had me taking care of affidavits, enjoy a trip to the Finger Lakes and then working non-stop on an NSF proposal for a community-based project for The Cooper Union due at 5pm today. So when I fired up my FeedDemon, suffice it to say I was surprised to see so much ruckus kicked up by Aldon Hynes’ compassionate post, to Rick Klau’s support, to Markos’ and Zack’s somewhat “pitch him over the rail” commentary. Reading through the comments on Daily Kos, I was blown away from the assertion that Nicco would ever be considered a traitor, simply because he might be “working for the enemy”.

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Got home late last night and watched the streaming video of the Florida Democratic Governor debate between Congress Jim Davis and State Senator Rod Smith. As I watched, I tracked the performance of each candidate on each issue discussed gave my estimate of who performed in each issue to help me better understand the stance. Prior to watching, Davis came into the debate with assumptions of being stiff and not as strong a debater as Smith, whereas Smith would be more in his element.

After watching, and knowing about the race, I would suggest that Smith won over Davis - even though Davis did perform better than expected. The first half was light - and Davis was able to position himself as a straight-talker and more animated than I expected. If I wanted to play a little Oliver Stone, I might suggest that Smith even stumbled and played behind to gain some sympathy for his “nervousness”. But once the two were able to ask questions of each other, Smith’s abilities began to overshadow Davis. And, whereas Davis might have tried to point out how Smith had the backing of big, bad US Sugar - it came off sounding weak. Smith, who initially came off kind of “off” was able to pound on Davis two major points - you did not do your job AND you are a Washington outsider. Incredible as this seems, Davis, who originally used the concept of not being a Tallahassee insider to point out his strength, now found Smith using it to demonstrate how out of touch he was with the issues in State. His technique of discussing his family and being a parent was a nice tactic, Smith’s use of “there’s another Washington answer” during the debate was a deft touch to keep Davis positioned outside the Florida mainstream during the debate.

Style points go to Davis in the debate for performing better than I expected. And Smith, in the debate, still had his almost Baptist minister-like energy, but by the end of the debate, I had begun to get tired of the fast delivery and a sense of over-confidence. His last line in the closing somewhat unnerved me - regarding how Davis had not earned the right to be Governor and (in contrast), he had.

Who will be the best person for the job? I would say that Davis makes me feel that we will be the thoughtful Governor, but Smith has a record of deomnstrating how to handle the issues between working as a minority party with the majority working against him. He knows the system and more than likely would be able to work it much more effectively than Davis, who has been outside the social structure that is Tallahassee. While Smith has the backing of US Sugar (which I have seen first-hand the ability of their negative campaigns), he came across much stronger and more with a strong understanding of the issues and mechanations of Florida politics. Advantage goes to Smith, though I wonder what people in South Florida will say in the coming days.

UPDATE: Fla Politics has a great run down of all of the articles out today on the debate.

What follows are my notes from the debate - and my conclusions on who won the points on each of the issues raised.

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As the 2006 campaign is coming into the primaries, I recently lunch with a friend from Conde Nast who asked my opinion on whether social networks would have a significant impact on the upcoming 2008 Presidential Election. After our lunch, I glanced at my email inbox and found a newsletter from the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet which quoted an article (from researcher Riki Parikh) entitled “Will the MySpace Phenomenon Change Politics?“.

Just this week, the KerryPAC sent out a job description on looking for an Online Communications Director who would be “responsible for online community outreach and organizing, including strategy development, working with external/internal blogs and social networking sites, online organizing, e-mail campaign creation, and Internet-related project management.” In my start-up consulting business, I recently met with a company that was trying to offer something that resembled Essembly-lite. And just yesterday, the IPDI announced a conference on the issue of social networks entitled “Person-to-Person-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Online Social Networks and User-Generated Content in Politics” on September 15th in Washington, DC.

What was amusing about the synergy these threads is that social networks is becoming the topic de-jour
in the political realm.

Will MySpace and YouTube change the way the Beltway does politics? IMHO - Nah.
Every day, in the past two years, I have heard about MySpace and YouTube - this week, Fortune had an article on the “MySpace Boys”. YouTube founders were getting fawned over on Good Morning America and other magazines. The impact of videos on the YouTube site are sited as contributory reasons for Lieberman’s downfall to the Lamont Internet-friendly campaign.

But I would bet that when you ask any seasoned campaign professional - what will the real impact of social networks be in the political process, I believe you will hear in 2008 social networks will be a nice hype story, but the networks will not be as effective as they can be in terms of what is needed for political campaigns. And, because the campaign cycle is already upon us, campaigns will not work to use these networks effectively due to their high human cost and low return.

But I make one caveat - the only way social networks will have some REAL impact will be if campaigns dedicate the energy/resources to make them effective OR to let their supporters within these networks have REAL control over the messages in a fashion as described as virtual precinct captains.
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Interesting post by Stirling Newberry at BOPNews.com regarding the true motivation behind Lieberman’s loss…

This race isn’t really about the war - it is about lying. People feel they have been lied to - about the economy, about how sound the housing market is - one rural route was packed with for sale signs for homes - but it is the war that they have proof positive they were lied about. They want someone who can stand up to Bush - who is not “the President” but “that President” - and someone who won’t lie to them any more. Lieberman’s campaign, desperate to keep the election close, or even win under depressed turn out - has lied about Lamont’s past, about his own record on the war - and now about their site being hacked. (my emphasis)

Interesting point. I wonder if the anger that is tapped here is truly from the national feeling - or a personal frustration at Lieberman (after the general impression of inevitability of his re-election). As I read the previous blog posts, I see very little extolling support for Lieberman, and a lot of people expressing their anger at him. With the blogosphere leading and the mainstream media reporting on the Cinderella story of Ned Lamont and drubbing of Lieberman, is it any wonder why he became the focus of the Dems anger at this time?

Integrity is a tough quality to measure - especially when you consider that it is not measured by the winds, but by a personal code. I wonder - does Joe actually think that the war is good or is it support for the Administration policies? The people that I know, who know him personal, speak of his incredible integrity and the fact that he would not be so duplicitous. His belief in the country and the threats that exist lead me to believe that he is strong on his convictions, even when faced with a vocal group of constituents who disagree with him.

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Interesting - learning about Lieberman’s website going down - yes, you could potentially call this “hacking”, but when you are under a large amount of traffic - as long as the traffic is coming from many different hosts, this would not be counted as a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

Let me see “the facts” - which, by the way, are snipets of information gleaned from the blogosphere

• The Leiberman website suffered from delays on Monday night and crashed by 7am Tuesday morning (Stanford Advocate)
• According to Dan Geary, there were numerous requests for “web pages, FTP files, and emails” which swamped the server. (MSNBC)
• The Joe2006.com server was on a shared machine which hosted 70+ other sites (DailyKos)
• The Joe2006.com server more than likely was on a low-cost solution that could have had a large bandwidth allocation (gleaned from multiple blogs and from MSNBC)
• Joe2006.com email server is hosted at the GoDaddy/SecureServer service provider (DNS Stuff)
• The Lieberman/Lamont primary was the most contested race on Monday/Tuesday which would have had a large amount of traffic on Monday and Tuesday (see previous post about web traffic)
• Today, the Joe2006.com website is hosted at a different IP address (68.178.232.95) as I gleaned from pinging the server

So what do I see? Actually, not enough for a conclusion. Simply - I would want to see the server logs on machine hosted at IP address 69.56.129.130 (the original site of the Joe2996.com site). Dan suggests that he got a deluge of FTP (port 21), emails (port 113/25) and web requests (port 80). Since the machine will track via logs. If there is an attack, it would have logs to show for it.

My guess is that the server was having problems because shared servers are reknowned for having limited number of web clients to handle traffic. No amount of bandwidth can address not enough web server processes to handle the enormity of requests. Just this week, one of my clients (www.goodnightburbank.com) just launched a new episode of their show. Interestingly - we have over 100GB of download purchased, but the site would not load for many people. What I discovered was the virtual/dedicated server only had a max of 10 http clients available for spawning and had no growth for increased need. Once I increased the settings, I was able to handle the enormity of the requests and the site was running smoothly once again.

What? What are you saying?
Best way to explain is using a supermarket analogy. When the supermarket is in normal operation, two cashiers are usually enough to handle the number of customers - and if each customer has ten items, then there is a set amount of time to go through each of the items and handle the transaction. And if the items are all the same, small size, then the time can be estimated pretty consistantly. But what happens when suddenly a hurricane is announced and everyone comes into the supermarket to purchase items. And not only toothbrushes or sliced luncheon meat, but big bags of dog food and gallons of water?

Now the store has only a set number of employees in the store, and a subset of them can actually run the cash registers. You can see that even though there might be an increase in throughput by the cashiers, the large number of requests would queue up and come to a standstill with long lines filling the interior of the store. Now add one more behaviour - after 10 minutes of waiting, people begin to leave the store in anger and disgust.

What I have just described is what happens between a web browser and a web server, if the web server is the cashier bank and the web browser is a single customer. The groceries are the various components of the webpage that are being requested by your web browser. In the case of the Joe2006.com homepage, there were 16 images that were separate from the actual page and unknown number of background images that also needed to be loaded. On top of this, the code running the website was not simply a web server - it was also a dynamically generated website which ran PHP (which is notoriously known as a processor hog). And, even if they did try to switch over to a new server which could handle the processing - the DNS timeout (telling the computers on the Internet to go to a different machine) would not have propogated (read: happened) in a time. Am I surprised the website ran slow? Not at all.

How to prove who did what?
Get the server logs. Real simple - and if the machine crapped out - it will be because the traffic load. If there were strange FTP requests or email requests, that would prove something was up. And, you can tell if they switched servers to a better machine to handle the load, because other DNS servers will know when the information changes for the IP address and the TTL (time-to-live: how often it checks for changes iin the IP address). But my gut tells me that they were suffering from a underpowered server - not too little bandwidth.

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One of the questions I have been asked in the past two years was what it was like in the trenches when the campaign suddenly began to take off. As I have written in the archives, the change was astounding - but none so remarkable as what occurred on the night of the 19th. As all know, Kerry pulled off an incredible feat in winning the primary in Iowa - but what is not known is how difficult it had been to get Kerry to recognize the power of his own voice when helping the Internet side of the campaign. The image below is a data set I have talked about in the past, and now feel comfortable enough to share since this lesson is becoming more commonplace than before.

The Impact of Kerry saying JohnKerry.com on National Television

(click to see larger image)

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After going through my candiate emails (and trust me, there are a lot of them), I began to evaluate the rationale of the content (similar to what I did for the English eCampaigning in 2005). In going through the emails, I began to notice a trend that should be noted such that the other candidates are better equipped for the upcoming online battle ahead. To this end, take a look at this quick and dirty assessment of emails I have been keeping track of:

HillaryClinton.com
One of the interesting things about the frequency of the emails coming out, is that their specficity of action has become more targeted. In the last three months, Hillary (and her staff have) discussed:

• Sign a petition to fire Don Rumsfeld - which is code for “Iraq”
• Sign a petition for Plan B Emergency Contraception - which is code for “abortion”
• Sign a petition for Stem Cell Research - which is, well actually, about stem cell research (and “abortion”) and sent twice to confirm
• Sign a petition to support Minimum Wage
• Contribute to NY Dem Mike Arcuri - which connects back to her Contrinution server and helps identify NY voters and others that would support candidates other than herself
• Sign a petition to support Net Neutrality
• Sign a petition in support Homeland Security - which is code for “defense”
• Have a House Party for Hillary - which is code for “super supporter”/influencer
• Sign a petition supporting Family Planning

All in the past three months. And note, almost no request for money for her - only for Mike Arcuri.

JohnKerry.com? In comparison, in the past three months, Kerry has sent:

• Requests to contribute to races he supports - which goes back to his contribution server
• Sign a petition for the Kerry-Feingold amendment
• Cheerleading emails ending with “Make a Contribution”
• Call your Senator on Iraq - with a “report back feature” on the page
• Support Enviromental Candidates fundraiser - back to his contribution server

And what about the other candidates? Well, Joe Biden’s “Unite Our States” has:

• Asked for contributions
• Wished the list a Happy July 4th
• Talked about his recent trip to Iraq
• Told me when he would be on “Meet the Press”
• and asked me to read his speech, download a plan and then sign his petition on Energy Security

Why do you act?
Why the analysis? Consider the trends above - note that for every issue discussed, if you were to “sign the petition” or do the action requests, do you think your action results in an action within the campaign? Or are you saving the staff time and energy by keying in your details and signalling the campaign your interest “hot buttons”?

One of the greatest challenges we faced during the primaries of Kerry Campaign was how to inspire people to donate via online donations. In a crowded field of ten candidates and a front-runner found in the wintery hills of Vermont, we were frustrated with equal parts of growing our list and successfully burning it out with continued fundraising emails that were not very effective. With our limited budget and dwindling timeframe, we discovered that we had to optimize our email performance with the limited services and tools we had. So what is happening now?

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In the last couple of weeks, I have begun to notice a steady increase of emails from the various players in the 2006 and upcoming 2008 election cycle. Ranging from my frequent email missives from Hillary and John, I am seeing:

• Russ Feingold - using GetActive to send out emails to get people to sign his petition for healthcare and announcing his new website
• Evan Bayh - using a Articulated Man-like design to send out emails from his newly revamped website
• Senator Joe Biden - using a Articulated Man design and GetActive to send out media alerts

Additionally, I get email from:

• State Senator Rod Smith - running for Florida governor
• Congressman Jim Davis - Smith’s Democratic primary competitor
• AG Charlie Crist - Republician front-runner for Florida governor
• FL Senator Bill Nelson - Senior US Senator for Florida
• Senator Maria Cantwell - running for Senate in Washington state
• Former Governor Howard Dean - for the DNC
• Congressman Rahm Emanuel and Congresswoman Nanci Peloci - for the DCCC
• My “friends” at the GOP and the RNC
• Democracy for America, True Majority and MoveOn on the left
• RightMarch on the right

And so many other players. One thing I noticed is that all (of the Democrats) are beginning to follow the basic premise of emails gained from the Dean campaign. Seen cribbing from the echoDitto site, most are beginning to use this basic format of links in the body and such. But, what seems to be missing from some - and especially from Republicians like AG Crist - is a succinct, engaging narrative that poses a problem that is solved by our involvement. Getting us to engage and invest in the solution makes us stronger supporters in the long run.

I have to give credit to some of the players - like BlueStateDigital (behind the emails from Rod Smith) and Mayfield Strategies (behind the content from Hillary, Cantwell, Casey and others) - they are generating well-written and engaging content. What worries me is that others - like Bayh, Biden and Feingold - who are trying to position themselves for the upcoming fight - are not winning the discourse. They are getting missives out there - but little engagement. Where are the real problems that we could solve with you - the candidates?

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I was chatting with a friend of mine who happens to be a very strong supporter of the Lamont campaign. Senator Lieberman, who I have come to understand to be a person of high integrity from friends and associates who have worked with him, has been lambasted for his position on Iraq (which I personally do not agree with). His argument seems core to his belief system, which I understand to be the essence of integrity. While I may not agree with his point of view, I could respect him. My friend, on the other hand, could not.

To help in our discussion, I searched for the definition of “integrity”. After hearing
this word being brandied about this campaign season either as a badge of honor or a failing in others, I wondered if I really knew what the word integrity actually meant.
Looking at Merriam-Webster site, I found this definition:

INTEGRITY
Function: noun
1 : firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : INCORRUPTIBILITY
2 : an unimpaired condition : SOUNDNESS
3 : the quality or state of being complete or undivided : COMPLETENESS
synonym see HONESTY

What was especially interesting was the synonym: HONESTY

HONESTY
Function: noun
1 obsolete : CHASTITY
2 a : fairness and straightforwardness of conduct b : adherence to the facts : SINCERITY
3 : any of a genus (Lunaria) of European herbs of the mustard family with toothed leaves and flat disk-shaped siliques
synonyms HONESTY, HONOR, INTEGRITY, PROBITY mean uprightness of character or action. HONESTY implies a refusal to lie, steal, or deceive in any way. HONOR suggests an active or anxious regard for the standards of one’s profession, calling, or position. INTEGRITY implies trustworthiness and incorruptibility to a degree that one is incapable of being false to a trust, responsibility, or pledge. PROBITY implies tried and proven honesty or integrity.

In our conversation, my friend suggested that integrity and honesty does not necessarily equate - especially in politics. It is often perception rather than truth that becomes reality. Stated in a different way, honesty can be overshadowed by marketing political expedience - especially if the “firm adherence to a code” is the goal of being elected or re-elected. What leads to my respect for Senator Lieberman is his firm adherence to his views and the fact that while the winds of politics has shifted, he still is strong on his position and is standing his ground. While I do not agree with his position, I can respect the fact that he has put thought and deliberation in order to form his point-of-view.

The Challenge
If you are a staunch believer of the principles of your party and country, but
your position is not aligned with with those in the party, how should you act?
If defense of your opinion/reputation could be at the detriment of your party or yourself, what should you do? When forced to defend oneself from outrageous
allegations, do you shy away from the battle for your values for the good of the party?

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