The News & TeleGraff

Lessig and Congress

I wrote up a piece for ThinkerNet today about Larry Lessig running for Congress:

The challenge, of course, that Lessig hopes to address, and yet the one that more than anything would challenge his happiness on Capitol Hill, is that Washington hasn’t yet caught up with Moore’s Law of doubling in size every two years -- Washington still operates on a long-time horizon.

Washington is set up to discourage innovation. No lobbyist’s job in Washington is to encourage the free exchange of ideas, the cause that Lessig has devoted his professional career to advancing. Corporations and associations see Capitol Hill as one more place to secure their own futures and seek competitive advantage. The truth of the matter is, given the scale at which Washington works -- where a single contract can reap billions -- the tens of millions spent on lobbying is a smart investment. The rapid growth of Congressional earmarks and pork (perhaps the only aspect of Washington that could be argued as obeying Moore’s Law) in recent years has only strengthened that truth.

As these things are today, the piece was partially overtaken by events: Lessig announced this afternoon he wouldn't run.

Random 'First Campaign' Links

Here are some other interesting links I came across this weekend amid my blog surfing:

• TechPresident.com's best web videos of the week. It's just amazing how much voter-generated content there is happening in this election. I just can't get over how many people feel moved in some way to devote not insubstantial time and effort to make their own viral videos.

• England's learning the hard way about what Richard Florida calls the "flight of the creative class": Its doctors, teachers, and engineers are fleeing the country at alarming rates. The Telegraph reports: "Record numbers of Britons are leaving - many of them doctors, teachers and engineers - in the biggest exodus for almost 50 years … More than three quarters of these professionals have settled abroad for more than 10 years, according to the study by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). No other nation is losing so many qualified people, it points out. Britain has now lost more than one in 10 of its most skilled citizens, while overall only Mexico has had more people emigrate." That last fact is a huge warning sign: Who wants to be second only to Mexico in fleeing residents? The global labor challenge is a huge challenge to every country—not just the United States and, as I argued earlier tonight, there's an ever-growing market for education and the educated.

• Marketing guru Seth Godin weighs in with a subtle political post: "It's too easy to criticize hope. And in the end, cynicism is a lousy strategy." This is a lesson the Clinton campaign (and others before it) are learning the hard way: Obama's message is compelling for reasons more powerful than "just words."

• Also another blogger picked up my Washington Post op-ed from December on politicians not understanding technology and got inspired to ask John McCain a question: "Can you tell us the difference between YouTube and MySpace?" I'll give a signed copy of "The First Campaign" to anyone who actually gets a chance to ask a presidential candidate that. Heck, I'll give a signed copy to anyone who asks ANY federal candidate that question. If you do, drop me an email. I'd love to hear the results.

Can We Still Recruit Sergey Brin?

I'm catching up on some blogging this week—the articles that I've had sitting open on my computer for a long time this month as I've been traveling and have yet to comment upon.

This is one: The New York Times piece on education overseas and how foreign countries are working with U.S. educational institutions to set up outposts abroad:

The American system of higher education, long the envy of the world, is becoming an important export as more universities take their programs overseas.

In a kind of educational gold rush, American universities are competing to set up outposts in countries with limited higher education opportunities. American universities — not to mention Australian and British ones, which also offer instruction in English, the lingua franca of academia — are starting, or expanding, hundreds of programs and partnerships in booming markets like China, India and Singapore.

And many are now considering full-fledged foreign branch campuses, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East. Already, students in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar can attend an American university without the expense, culture shock or post-9/11 visa problems of traveling to America.

For years India's IITs have been the envy of the international education community but a half-century after India began investing in its IITs, today other countries wishing to compete on the global talent market find no need to go through the lengthy, expensive, and intensive development of strong domestic educational institutions. As Qatar’s emir set out to improve its education system in the mid-1990s he founded the Qatar Foundation to attract the world’s best universities to the city. Instead of going through the arduous process of building great educational institutions and world-class professors, it would simply recruit those that already exist.

The thriving 2,500-acre Education City on the outskirts of Doha is steadily adding the U.S.’s best minds. To launch its School for the Arts, the Qatar Foundation invited Virginia Commonwealth University to open a new Doha campus—the Qatar state would underwrite the cost, VCU would provide the courses. In 2002, Cornell University opened a new medical college, followed a year later by a branch of Texas A&M University and a policy institute run by the RAND Corporation. Carnegie Mellon University opened its campus in 2004, and Georgetown launched a branch of its prestigious School of Foreign Service in 2005. In 2006, the brand new Qatar Science and Technology Park opened and next will come a teaching hospital and a communications and journalism school. All of the schools are a model of liberal arts education and all the more impressive for fostering a cultural of liberal tolerance and diversity within a Muslim nation—and all underwritten by the natural gas-rich nation-state at little or no cost to the participating U.S. universities. Nearby the new $2 billion Doha International Airport, scheduled to open this year, will provide a gleaming welcome to the country. Qatar’s approach to education—cherry-picking the best the U.S. has to offer and then using it to educated class after class of students equal in academic strength to anything in the U.S.—is unprecedented and a model for public-private educational partnership in the globalized New Economy. Whereas it once would have taken decades to build a world-class university, the Qatar Foundation made it so from day one.

Qatar’s bet, of course, is that by churning out smart students, by coupling higher education and research institutions with a science and technology park, by providing a first-rate airport and top-of-the-line health care, it won’t have to wait for local companies to grow strong—instead the strongest, most competitive companies in the world will instead beat a path to Qatar’s door.

Why does this article matter to presidential politics? Just as one can’t doubt that India and China aren’t racing the U.S. to the bottom but are instead battling for first place, don’t doubt that Qatar plans to come after the U.S. economy, its jobs, and its best minds—it already is. If the next president fails to address education in a major way, waiting four more years or eight more years for a new advocate in the Oval Office will prove costly to the U.S. economy. We can't be content to let the same old systems exist in a world where any leader with a checkbook can overnight build a rival to the U.S. system.

As the Times piece notes, there are also major immigration questions wrapped up in this. If by making it difficult for foreign students to enter the U.S.—as we most certainly have since 9/11—we're encouraging them to stay home, what price will that have on the U.S. economy in future years? Imagine if Sergey Brin had decided to stay in Russia or Europe rather than come to Stanford, where he met Larry Page and co-founded Google. How will our country's economy in the next decades be different if the world's best and brightest choose Qatar, Ireland, India, or China instead of Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown, or Columbia?

Winners and Losers

NAM's Shopfloor.org blog writes up an interesting "60 Minutes" piece from this last weekend about how Caterpillar is thriving amid a globalizing economy. Too often in government economic policy (and far too often on Lou Dobbs' show) we focus on stories about the "giant sucking sound," the closed factories, and the jobs heading overseas. We don't look closely at places like Caterpillar or companies like Tony Raimondo's Behlen Manufacturing, whose Chinese subsidiary and overseas growth has helped to employ more workers in Behlen's Columbus, Nebraska headquarters. In fact, the steel from Behlen's Chinese team, will make up this summer's Beijing Olympics basketball pavilion. That's pretty cool for the workers in Columbus, but it's not a big headline on the economic pages.

This is, in essence, the heart of a major problem for presidential candidates in the 2008 race: As the global market expands, it’s easy to see the losers—the shuttered factories, abandoned parking lots, and headlines of more pink slips. It’s harder to see the winners. A worker can’t see the new markets opening up overseas, and few noticed the founding in a dorm room by Michael Dell of the soon-to-be computer giant Dell—which has provided jobs for 78,000 employees and brings in nearly $60 billion in revenue a year. Since new companies and new jobs are harder to see, workers tend to focus on the negative economic changes they can see. "You know who you are if you’re going to lose a job. You don’t know who you are if you’re about to gain a job," explains Pat Cleary, a longtime executive at the National Association of Manufacturers. "People can really play on those fears."

If Barack Obama wants to really build a general election campaign on hope, I hope that he takes an optimistic view of the U.S. economy and its role in today's world—and understands that the more we can develop overseas the better it'll be for workers back here. He recently gave a major economic speech in Wisconsin and while much of the focus was on things like credit cards and bankruptcies, I hope that as more policy proposals come out we'll see that Obama's capable of a more nuanced view of the global economy than either John Kerry or John Edwards was in 2004. Edwards and Kerry helped to torpedo Raimondo's chance to become the U.S. manufacturing czar when they attacked his Chinese operation—failing to understand that creating jobs in China can also create jobs here in the United States. After all, today's landscape is anything but a zero sum economy.

UPDATE: Here's another interesting look at GE's experience and the benefits of the global economy.

Googlebombing McCain

It's only fitting that the candidate whose greatest YouTube moment is the "bomb bomb bomb Iran" sing-along might soon find some bombs of a slightly different kind turned on him.

One of the most effective "Googlebombs" in popular culture has been the linking of George Bush to "miserable failure," as Google itself has noted. Googlebombing, of course, isn't an accurate natural search result but instead one that relies on the way that Google calculates page rankings by linking specific phrases to search results. Thus a lot of people linking the phrase "miserable failure" to George W. Bush's biography ensures that Google thinks the words are related. As Google has explained in the past:

People have asked about how we feel about Googlebombs, and we have talked about them in the past. Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us. But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.

Now Google may be facing a new round of 'bombs. There's a movement afoot on Open Left to begin the Googlebombing of John McCain, the GOP nominee-to-be. Here are Open Left's five current suggestions:

1. John McCain. You Tube showing John McCain as a flip-flopper. Current Google rank:12. Is not a news site.
   

2. John McCain. Anti-McCain attack site featuring videos and McCain's connection to lobbyists. Current Google rank: 22. Is obviously an attack site rather than a news source.
   

3. John McCain. The original McCain Googlebomb tying McCain to Bush on Iraq. Current Google rank: 26. CBS News is the source. Title comes off as garbled in the Google search. Also, McCain is going to make this connection the basis of his campaign, so it might not be necessary.
   

4. John McCain: Crooks and Liars tag for John McCain. Current Google rank: 30. Will be constantly updated. It is a blog, but one with a great title when it comes to attacking a Republican nominee.

5. John McCain: Mother Jones article about McCain wanting to keep troops in Iraq for 100 years. Current Google rank: 76. Negatives: long and somewhat garbled title.

Googlebombs have historically been a tool/joke of the left. Can the conservatives online begin to generate some fun themselves at the expense of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?

One Buffalo, Frozen

So I spent a very cold 24 hours in Buffalo earlier this week to do a fun "Meet the Author" interview with Bert Gambini, WBFO's music director and all-around expert interviewer. Bert has one of the best radio voices I've heard in a long time and he was fun to chat with before, during, and after the talk at the University of Buffalo.

You can listen here to the hour-long podcast.

Afterwards Bert took me to Wasabi, a local sushi restaurant hidden in a strip mall and I discovered that Buffalo actually offers pretty decent sushi. I was a bit concerned as I watched the storm blow up and start to snow hard but Bert assured me that the predicted six to eight inches (which ended up being only three) was hardly anything by local standards. Indeed by next morning everything was nicely plowed and the airport was running full speed—unlike, say, Washington where schools were cancelled across the region this week at the mere hint that there might be some sort of snow/sleet/ice falling from the sky.

UPDATE: Here's the UB Spectrum article on my talk.

Scoble Goes to Washington

Robert Scoble weighs into the debate today regarding Washington and tech:

Talking with Andrew Feinberg, editor of Capitol Valley Media, I was challenged several times about why I, other tech bloggers, and why Silicon Valley itself doesn’t get involved more in what’s happening in Washington D.C.

Politics and geeks rarely mix. Geeks want to build stuff. Politicians want to serve their constituencies and, often, that means regulating what the geeks are trying to do.

I've been arguing this point for over a year—one of the biggest threats to both U.S. competitiveness and technology is that too much of Washington doesn't get technology.

Washington's power structures today are built to limit and stifle innovation. No lobbyist in Washington is tasked with ensuring innovation. Instead the entire lobbyist crowd is focused on protecting each industry's or company's existing turf. That means that old power structures like the telecom companies have a huge leg up over the nascent efforts of Silicon Valley.

As I said in the Washington Post this winter, "In past generations, the U.S. government turned to men such as the brilliant and forward-thinking Vannevar Bush, who led the nation's science policy during World War II and got the government to invest in the programs and research that helped invent the computer age. Today, the nation's best minds quickly end up in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street, where their entrepreneurial spirit and lust for 'the new new thing' is powering an economy that's increasingly detached from the government overseeing it. This disconnect points to a major problem: The new economy still lacks a political infrastructure. The older industries are still the best organized, most entrenched and therefore most powerful. They can land the meetings with officials that lead to government loans; their armies of lobbyists can operate in the back rooms, slipping in tax breaks and increasing the competition for newcomers."

In "The First Campaign," I tell the story of Nancy Scola at SXSW:

Nancy Scola is another Democratic technology expert and five-year veteran of Capitol Hill, who at the 2007 South by Southwest technology conference in Austin, Texas, pleaded to a room of lap-top wielding geeks for more experts in the new world to become politically active. "You can't really overstate how poorly understood technology is in Washington," she told them. She pointed to the example of the 2006 Deleting Online Predators Act, whereby 410 House members voted to prohibit social-networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster from being used in libraries and schools so as to hinder the ability of child sex predators to gain access to them. It was a remarkably boneheaded bill that could have passed only in a body with no understanding of where the internet and online communities were headed.

We have too low of a bar for our leaders in understanding technology. Ted Stevens' "series of tubes" speech isn't funny—it's a sad commentary on our outdated political system's understanding of the future.

Will someone like Larry Lessig help in Congress? Yes is the short answer. The long answer is that he'd probably get incredibly frustrated dealing with the arcane and outdated way that legislation moves through Washington. Google's just learning the ropes here, after ignoring Washington for a long while itself.

What about all of the rest of the social web/Web 2.0 movement? Facebook now has a single rep in Washington. MySpace has its NewsCorp lobbyists. What about everyone else?

Washington and tech should have hugely mutually beneficial relationship—the internet is what will power the U.S. economy for the coming decades—but so far they're like oil and water. That's bad news for the country and bad news for the economy. And it's terrible news for geeks.

RELATED THINKERNET OP-ED: Who'll Be Tech's Voice in the Oval Office?

Bloggers MIGHT Just Be Journalists

An exciting signal moment for bloggers this week, as Joshua M. Marshall of Talking Points Memo won one of the biggest journalism prizes for investigative reporting. Marshall was awarded a George Polk Award for legal reporting for his site's leadership and reporting on the fired U.S. Attorneys scandal last year. The citation: "His site, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led the news media coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country. Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall (with staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration's bidding."

I've been having the "are bloggers journalists?" debate for three years, ever since my own foray into blogging at the White House, and I've argued that I think most journalists misunderstand the bloggers' side of this debate: Most bloggers aren't interested in doing journalism or being held to the ethical/moral standards of a profession they're not in. Instead, I think most bloggers are in it for fun—to share opinions, write about their lives, blow off steam, etc. At the top of blogging, there's a cream of bloggers who do act like journalists and expect to be treated as such, like Talking Points Memo.

As I've said, over the coming years I think the best newspapers are going to become a lot more like the best blogs and I think that the best blogs are going to become much more like the best newspapers. I'm happy to see that prediction coming true with moments like this where journalism recognizes that the medium where you publish isn't nearly as important as what you publish.

Buffalo

I'm off to Buffalo today for an author's talk tonight as part of WBFO's "Meet the Author" series.

If you care to listen, tune in to WBFO tonight
at 7 p.m.

More on Believing

Here's my latest Huffington Post article today pulling together some of the ideas I've been talking about on this blog: Believing Obama.

The GOP's Innovation Provider

I made much in "The First Campaign" about the lag between the Democrats and Republicans in terms of online energy and innovation. One needs to look no further than the presidential race this week, where Joshua Levy over at TechPresident.com asked yesterday, "Come on, I need me some McCain-iana! Can't someone do something online for John McCain?"

Today the Republican National Convention took an important step forward, naming Google as the event's "official innovation provider" and launched a new RNC YouTube channel to highlight convention video. The release explains: "As Official Innovation Provider, Google Inc. will enhance the GOP's online presence with new applications, search tools, and interactive video. In addition, Google will help generate buzz and excitement in advance of the convention through its proven online marketing techniques."

"Google and YouTube are synonymous with innovation, and our groundbreaking collaboration will set a new precedent for engaging and involving Americans in the Republican National Convention," Convention President and CEO Maria Cino was quoted in the release saying. "We also remain firmly focused on providing the eventual Republican nominee with every tool available to communicate his message to the American people—and this agreement is an important part of our efforts."

The Republicans have a lot of catching up to do online, especially if Barack Obama ends up as the nominee—his online fundraising base will be a huge advantage going into the general election.

Now the question for the GOP is: Now that they have an "innovation" partner, can they actually do anything innovative?

Full release after the jump.

For Immediate Release
Friday, February 15, 2008 Contact: Matt Burns
(651) 467-2008

2008 Republican National Convention Names Official Innovation Provider

Google Inc., YouTube Combining Forces with GOP to Create Tech-Savvy Convention

(SAINT PAUL, Minn.) - Embracing technology that will propel the 2008 Republican National Convention to the forefront of the digital age, the GOP today announced that Google Inc. will serve as the Republican National Convention's Official Innovation Provider. Convention President and Chief Executive Officer Maria Cino made the announcement in a unique video posted to the convention's new YouTubeTM channel (). The video is also showcased on the convention's website (www.GOPConvention2008.com), and highlights Google's cutting-edge, computer-generated SketchUpTM graphics of the Xcel Energy Center, where the convention will be held.

As Official Innovation Provider, Google Inc. will enhance the GOP's online presence with new applications, search tools, and interactive video. In addition, Google will help generate buzz and excitement in advance of the convention through its proven online marketing techniques.

The convention's official website, www.GOPConvention2008.com, will eventually feature a full-range of GoogleTM products, including Google Apps, Google MapsTM, SketchUpTM, and customized search tools, which will make navigating the site easier. The convention's YouTube channel will enable visitors to upload, view, and share online videos. These innovative technologies will also help the GOP streamline convention organization and expand its online reach across websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.

"As more Americans go online to learn about elections, we're pleased to work with the Republican National Convention to give citizens around the world easy access to convention information and new ways to engage in the event," said David Drummond, Google's Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer.

"This year, YouTube will bring a new dimension to this landmark event by enabling GOP visitors to share their unique experiences with the world through the power of online video," said Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder. "We look forward to working with the convention committee and watching the action unfold."

The 2008 Republican National Convention will be held at Saint Paul's Xcel Energy Center from September 1-4, 2008. Approximately 45,000 delegates, alternate delegates, members of the media and other guests are expected to attend the convention. Minneapolis-Saint Paul is expected to receive an estimated $150-$160 million positive economic boost from the event. For more information about the 2008 Republican National Convention, please visit our website at www.GOPConvention2008.com.

Happy Birthday YouTube!

Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" reminds us today to wish YouTube a happy third birthday. The domain was registered for the first time February 15, 2005. It made its public debut at the end of the year and by mid-2006 was one of the fastest growing sites online.

A point to ponder this Friday: The 2008 presidential election might have been a vastly different race except for the August day in 2006 when Virginia Senator George Allen, considered one of the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, looking straight into the camera held by a 20-year-old staffer, S.R. Siddarth, of his opponent’s campaign and uttering what was to become the most famous slur of the YouTube era. “This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere. And it’s just great. We’re going to places all over Virginia, and he’s having it on film and it’s great to have you here and you show it to your opponent because he’s never been there and probably will never come.” Then Allen looked around at the audience, paused for a beat, and proceeded to complete his political suicide. “Let’s give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.”

Siddarth, a senior at the University of Virginia of Indian descent assigned to track Allen, had struck gold. Macaca, as America would come to learn in the coming days, was the name of a long-tailed Asian monkey and an obscure racial slur. The video hit YouTube and quickly went from there to CNN and local TV news stations. Allen spent the rest of his losing campaign offering one apology or another. On Sean Hannity’s radio show, for instance, he said, “I take full responsibility. I’m not offering any excuses because I said it, and no one else said it. It’s a mistake. I apologize, and from heart, I’m very, very sorry for it.”

The power of the moment wasn’t just the words—which connected with the latent fear among voters that Allen was a racist—but in the video of him saying it. If Siddarth had merely had a tape recorder, the tape probably wouldn’t have had the same impact and it certainly wouldn’t have if it had just been a written summary of what Allen said.

The irony of the moment is that Allen, who went into the race with a vastly stronger operation and piles of cash, probably would have won the race if he’d spent the final four months of it lying on a beach not campaigning. It was only his actions on the campaign trail, captured on video and uploaded to the web for all to see, that kept him from reelection. The loss moved Allen from the role of presidential heir-apparent to presidential after-thought, landing him on the scrap heap of failed ambitions. As a popular former governor and senator, Allen would have been a formidable presidential candidate and as the only top-tier social conservative in the race, he might easily have found himself the front-runner in terms of money, support, and organization.

We might never have seen the battle of recent weeks over the "real" conservative in the GOP nomination race if only George Allen had kept his mouth shut and YouTube hadn't existed.

Anyway, happy birthday YouTube!

You Gotta Believe

I got talking with a friend yesterday about Barack Obama's speaking style and the contrast on primary nights between his speeches and those of Hillary Clinton or John McCain, who despite his best efforts always looks like he's giving a speech with his teeth gritted.

Four years ago, I was lucky enough to be on the floor of the FleetCenter in Boston to watch his keynote to the Democratic National Convention and as part of my research for my big article on Barack Obama over a year ago, I watched him speak many times, and even more since then. What's been great about seeing him speak so many times is the chance to watch people react to him for the first time.

Truly great speakers offer a chance to believe—it's the same whether you're talking about pulpit preachers, televangelists, politicians, Oprah or Dr. Phil. The interaction between the crowd and the speaker is also key—you need the interplay between both to really create the unique environment that allows for just that second of believing.

On the Dean campaign, one of Joe Trippi's favorite sayings was the old baseball slogan, "You Gotta Believe." It appeared at many of our rallies and one of the iconic images from the campaign is Trippi with a "You Gotta Believe" sign thrust high over his head—for a moment even Trippi believed. I remember the highlight of the campaign for me was the final rally of the Sleepless Summer Tour in summer 2003 in Bryant Park, New York, where we packed over 10,000 people into the park. As night fell and Dean took the stage, we reached the million-dollar online fundraising goal for the trip and the crowd went wild. Governor Dean's speech that night was basically the same he had given a thousand times at that moment but the play between his energy, the setting, and the crowd was magical. I never believed more in that campaign than I did at that exact moment.

What Obama does so well is offer that moment of belief—that, dare we say, hope—to crowds as he speaks. For just the moment of the speech, you want to believe everything he says—that the world he describes is one that we can achieve.

As George Packer wrote in the New Yorker recently: "Obama spoke for only twenty-five minutes and took no questions; he had figured out how to leave an audience at the peak of its emotion, craving more. As he was ending, I walked outside and found five hundred people standing on the sidewalk and the front steps of the opera house, listening to his last words in silence, as if news of victory in the Pacific were coming over the loudspeakers. Within minutes, I couldn’t recall a single thing that he had said, and the speech dissolved into pure feeling, which stayed with me for days."

If Hillary or McCain wants to beat Obama, they need to get better at offering that magical moment of hope. Hillary offers a good story, you believe that she can make change, but by and large she's too practical to offer too much hope. She, as Packer says, represents the art of what's actually possible.

Hope, that moment of believing, is perhaps the gift of the young and the naive, but when you look back over the great speakers of American life, like JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., few things aren't possible when you offer inspiration and energy at the level they did. The question for this election: Can enough people believe for long enough to get Barack where he needs to be?

King of Hearts

For Valentine's Day today, I thought I'd dig up one of my favorite articles from my college days on the Crimson: The story of the King of Hearts, the guy who picked those slogans to go on the candy hearts everyone gets today.

Each year in Cambridge, NECCO churns out some 20 million pounds of the candy hearts, about 8 billion total. Production runs just about year round and then they're stored in warehouses until Heart Day approaches. Don't think too much about that latter fact.

Author, Author!

A few other "The First Campaign" press-related tidbits:

• I was the subject of WETA's "Author Author" interview last week, where we talked about the book's meaning and the transformation of this ongoing political election. I don't look my best on camera but it's a good interview nonetheless.

• Podcast-wise, you can listen to me being interviewed on "America's Business with Mike Hambrick," the official radio show of the National Association of Manufacturers. My relationship with NAM was one of the more interesting twists of the book: While ideologically we don't agree on much, one of my best sources/idea-bouncer-offers in writing "The First Campaign" was Pat Cleary, who at the time headed up communications at NAM. We found that we agreed on a ton of issues regarding trade, the economy, education, and even health care. I ended up featuring the story of Tony Raimondo, a member of NAM's board of directors, quite prominently in the book. American business has a lot in common with the progressive left on many of the First Campaign issues and it'll be interesting to see whether a thoughtful Democrat nominee can reach across the aisle and build some support in the business community. NAM, by the way, has an excellent blog that covers many of the First Campaign issues: Shopfloor.org.

• Lastly, in the same realm, I have another piece this week at Internet Evolution's ThinkerNet blog, examining the challenge to American online leadership.

Ten Thousand Years

So I've been blogging about the will.i.am "Yes We Can" video about Barack Obama, and my dad sent me the next generation:

It's a very amusing seemingly pro-McCain parody of the same video. This is exactly the type of fascinating campaign that we've watched unfold online this election—where voters on one side weigh in and inspire others with derivative content to post their own user-generated content. Thanks to the incredible technology now available on a laptop, it can all happen very quickly. This video went up two days ago and already has over 800,000 views. Will.i.am's is quickly approaching four million just on YouTube.

None of this is happening with sanction from the campaigns. They're just encouraging it without actually assisting it. One facet of the web: It happens to candidates generally. They're the ones getting dragged into the first campaign by people like these video creators.

Googleplex

I spent Friday and Saturday at the Googleplex in Mountain View, where I spoke about "The First Campaign" as part of Authors@Google on Friday and then attended a conference by the American Democracy Institute on Saturday and moderated a panel on open source government.

The 'Plex was fascinating to see in person. You can see my full Google Flickr set here. Here was my favorite:



The sign over the desk in each lobby constantly scrolls through the active searches on Google. It shows approximately one out of every 100 Google searches, filtered for porn. The top search on Google? Yahoo. I stood there quite a long time watching the waves of search terms. There really is someone interested in everything.

The rest of the campus was much as you would expect an office to be that had fun toys and lots of food. There were well-stocked mini-kitchens everywhere, 17 restaurants on campus (all of which are free), a big sand volleyball court, and even a endless lap pool. Free laundry facilities, bike racks, and pianos dot the buildings. The workforce was, as one might expect, overall very young but there were certainly some people who had been with Google a number of years. Overall it was very much like a cool dorm for grown-up geeks.

We toured the solar panels on the roof, which provide about 30 percent of the peak power usage for the campus. There was a ton of emphasis on green, including that evidently Google will pay any employee who buys a hybrid a $5,000 bonus (which, with most hybrids, would make them price competitive with non-hybrids).

The only real surprise? It was dirtier than I thought it would be, since there's such an overabundance of free food on campus there was a bit of that other side of dorm life: The left-over dirty dishes piled in random corners and hallways.

Hillary's Zazzle Problem

A large chunk of this presidential election is shaping up to be about tone—big change vs. little change, hope vs. experience. To see how these ideas are manifesting themselves among voters, one needs to look no further than Zazzle.com, the online site where people can design their own bumper stickers, buttons, and t-shirts.

Search for Obama and you'll find the first page of results packed with inspirational t-shirts, many with the theme of "Yes We Can." Through the first five pages of search results (as of this morning) the results are uniformly positive. There are "Yes We Can" t-shirts, bumper stickers, and buttons, "Republicans for Obama"-themed swag, "Latinos for Obama" stuff, "Barack to the Future" t-shirts, and many just with his face or the campaign's official logo. There's nothing about any other candidates. The depth and breadth of the slogans and voter-generated content is impressive.

Hillary's Zazzle page couldn't be more different. Many of the items are negative (the bumper sticker here being just one example) and a good number of items are actually about Barack Obama. In fact, on the front page of results only approximately one-third of the items are pro-Hillary. The lead item is a t-shirt for "Billary" and the fourth and fifth items are both Obama paraphernalia.

Zazzle appears to be another solid example of how Hillary's campaign just doesn't inspire voter-generated content in the way that Obama's campaign does, which is a good proxy for grassroots fervor. Just like on YouTube, where we've seen the emergence of multiple pro-Obama viral videos without any real answer from the Clinton side.

If Barack goes on to win the nomination, as appears increasingly likely this morning with his sweep of the Potomac Primary last night, it will because of the "people-powered" support he's getting online thanks to his online fundraising and energy on sites like Zazzle.

Ceding Ground

I wrote a follow-up piece this morning for Internet Evolution's ThinkerNet page arguing the role of the U.S. as internet leader is under threat:

Despite being the country most responsible for inventing and building the Internet, the U.S. is now in danger of being overtaken in the world it created. Thanks to poor government leadership on the issue so far this decade, the U.S. is falling further behind industrialized nations in broadband penetration.

As we proceed through one of the most interesting presidential elections in generations, we must remain focused on how these candidates will help ensure the nation's economic competitiveness in an era where data can move so effortlessly across borders and oceans.

Remaining preeminent in Internet technology can't just be the work of Silicon Valley and tech entrepreneurs in Seattle, Austin, New York, or Boston. We must remember that the Internet has always advanced because of ongoing investment in research and technology by federal and state governments. Today's worrisome situation is due to the fact that the government has in recent years seemed uninterested in addressing issues like broadband access, the digital divide, and fostering new generations of technology.

I discuss in "The First Campaign" at some length the challenge of the digital divide and our sparse tech infrastructure and so I couldn't agree with this commenter more: "We (probably) still have the lead in terms of companies formed around Internet applications, but you're absolutely right, if we fail to make it easy and cheap and powerful and flexible for all citizens to use the Internet, and if we fail to continue to invest (belated thanks to Al Gore for pushing the early funding), then we will lose the next generation."

This election should be all about the "next generation" and how they (we) will we compete in this new world.

Me@Google

On Friday I was in Mountain View for an author's talk at Google headquarters. More on that later but for now, here's the video:

What I'm Up To

I'm just landing in Washington briefly today amid a busy week of book stuff. I'm leaving tomorrow (on Virgin America! Who-hoo!) to fly to San Francisco to speak on Friday at the Googleplex for an author's talk and then for a weekend conference.

In other book news, I was in Austin yesterday for Super Tuesday speaking at the LBJ School for Public Affairs (here's the article on my talk) and contributed pieces this week both to the Huffington Post on the Obama "Yes We Can" video and to Internet Evolution's ThinkerNet blog on "Who'll be Tech's Voice in the Oval Office?"

Obama most liberal? Hardly.

Normally I’m a big fan of National Journal—it’s the most thoughtful, considered, and nonpartisan news source in Washington—but I think they really blew it with their new article on Barack Obama being the “most liberal” Senator.

Each year they offer a giant, data-heavy look at the relative liberalism and conservatism of the voting records of each member of Congress, House and Senate. This year they chose to release the ratings just days before the Tsunami Tuesday primaries in what one can only imagine was an attempt to maximize their exposure. As Charlie Green, NJ's editor, said, "We thought it would be irresponsible to keep those scores under wraps during the height of the presidential primary season." Of course by releasing only two of the 100 senators' scores, NJ robs us of any real context in which to evaluate these standings. [They planned to also release McCain's, since he is still in the race, but he didn't vote often enough to 2007 to get counted. More on that in a minute.]

According to their ranking, Barack Obama has seen a thirteen-point swing towards "liberal" in his three full years in the Senate from a ranking of 82.5 (16th overall) in 2005 to 95.5 (1st overall) in 2007. Now I’d wager that this has little to do with beliefs and a lot to do with two factors: how often he’s voting and who is in the majority. His vote was much more crucial in 2007, when the Democrats held a super-slum majority in the body, than it was in 2005 or 2006 when he was in the minority.

Moreover, campaigning for President requires a lot of time not in the Senate, that’s why Bob Dole resigned from the body in 1996 when he was running. A quick glance at the Washingtonpost.com’s vote database of top vote missers and you see that, excluding the ill Tim Johnson, McCain missed the most votes, followed by fellow presidential contenders Biden and Obama.

National Journal admits that Obama didn't vote on fully one-third of their "key votes" and that McCain, who overall missed over half of the 2007 votes in the Senate, didn't vote enough often for them even to rank him.

To give a baseline here: In the 109th Congress (2005-2006), Barack Obama missed less than two percent of the votes. Hillary missed 2.5 percent and McCain missed nine percent. That's far fewer than any of them missed in 2007, meaning that the rankings from previous years are probably more representative of their actual beliefs and policy stances.

All told, Hillary Clinton scored an 82.8 (overall ranking 16th) in 2007, up from 70.2 (32nd overall) in 2006, but below her highest ranking of 88.8 (8th overall) back in 2003. She missed 17 out of the 99 NJ "key votes" and missed 23 percent of the 2007 votes in total. Obama in 2006 had an 86 (10th overall) and in his first year in Congress had a 82.5 (16th overall). Both of them saw a ten point swing from 2006 to 2007.

I imagine that Obama and Hillary only showed up last year to vote when it mattered, i.e. when they were most likely to vote with the Dems on a crucial matter. Votes where Obama's or Hillary's vote wouldn't have made a difference or where they wouldn't have needed to stand strong with the 51-seat majority probably wouldn't have necessitated a trip back from the trail. In fact, according to NJ and Washingtonpost.com, both senators missed fewer of the key votes than they did votes overall, underscoring that these were specially selected votes they attended.

And what about the actual differences between Hillary and Obama, the "key" matters that ended up making one a "moderate" Democrat in the low 80s and the other the "most liberal"? All told, they differed four times out of the 99 votes—Hillary voted with the conservatives five times in 2007 and Obama voted once. On the one time Obama voted with the conservatives, on a March measure to "express the sense of Congress that funds for U.S. troops in the field should not be cut off," Hillary did as well. On one of the five votes where Hillary voted with the conservatives, on a July 19 measure to "waive a procedural objection to providing legal immunity to people who report suspicious activities," Obama didn't even vote. So we're left with precisely three registered policy differences between Obama and Hillary that yielded National Journal's ratings. Hardly seems like a damning indictment of either one of them.

The exact same specious ranking happened to John Kerry in 2004 in National Journal's vote rankings, where he missed so many votes that they actually changed the ranking system this time to exclude candidates like McCain who were out on the trail too much. The same thing is probably true from 2004: The votes where Kerry showed up, and thus the ones where he was measured, were the ones most important to him and the Party—and thus the ones where he's most likely to vote with the Dems.

I think National Journal erred by blowing this annual ranking into a giant six-page article in the February 2nd edition. Hillary, Barack, and McCain should all be considered in the greater context of their body and their Senate colleagues, not as outliers a month before everyone else.

Crackberry Here I Come

So I've wanted an iPhone since it was released—I was in Israel with a bunch of geeks the day it actually came out and we talked all week about the "Jesus Phone"—but I've long resisted the urge to get a smartphone since I don't really want to be able to get my email at every moment of the day. When I finally set out last week to buy an iPhone, it turns out that AT&T doesn't offer ANY coverage in the state of Vermont (I still have an 802 cell phone number) and so I can't get an iPhone with my existing phone number even though I don't live in Vermont anymore. It seems unfathomable to me that AT&T can get away with not offering coverage in AN ENTIRE STATE and still call itself a national network, but c'est la vie. So I'm stuck with a Blackberry or switching to a 202 number. I decided my Vermont heritage was more important than the Phone To End All Phones, but I'm not thrilled with the result.

I've spent a chunk of time this weekend trying to set up my new mobile device with some cool applications, but I had trouble finding a site that offered the must have Blackberry apps, so here's what I've downloaded and installed to get my Blackberry up to snuff:

• Facebook Mobile. Exactly what it says.

• Opera Mini, a much better web browser than the one that comes pre-installed on the Blackberry, it allows you to see actual web pages. I haven't mastered it yet but I like it so far.

• TwitterBerry, which lets you update your Twitter account straight from your Blackberry without using SMS (thus saving your monthly text message quotient). Then if you use TwitterSnyc with Facebook, you can get Facebook to automatically draw from your Twitter updates, saving you from updating in both places. Dorky, I know, but it lets me do more with two applications I don't do enough with now. Twitterberry would be a brilliant solution, but it doesn't appear to work so for now I'm just using the Google Talk application to Twitter.

• Googles Maps Mobile, which is scarily accurate in tracking my location even without any GPS capability in my phone. Using cell phone towers to triangulate it can place you with a 1,000 meters but when I'm in my apartment it gets me to within a block of my actual house. Yikes!

• And I quickly set up my Google Reader for mobile too. One of my biggest challenges in tech life is keeping up with my reader feed and the chance to do even some of that on the Blackberry is pretty cool.

That's it. We'll see how my first week on the 'Berry goes. I'll be on the road for all but 24 hours of the next eight days, so I think it'll come in handy.

I wonder when the GooglePhone will come out with all of these handy Google apps preinstalled....

Yes, We Can

A year ago as I was reporting "The First Campaign," tech/politics pioneer Andrew Rasiej predicted that 2008 would be remembered for the "voter-generated content" that transformed the election.

Now the Black Eyed Peas and Jesse Dylan (son of Bob) may not count as ordinary voters, but their new music video "Yes We Can" is a model for the types of things that people can do today in the first campaign that never would have been possible before.

The video overlays Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" speech after the New Hampshire primary with music and accompaniment from stars like John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Common, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Scarlett Johansson, Tatyana Ali and Nick Cannon. It's a perfect example of the types of content that never would have seen the light of day just four years ago—where could you have bought enough TV airtime to air a 4:30 television ad? How could you possibly have gotten enough nationwide exposure to make it possible?

"I'm blown away by how many people wanted to come and be a part of it in a short amount of time. It was all out of love and hope for change and really representing America and looking at the world," will.i.am told ABCNews on Friday.

The video, which just hit the web this weekend, has begun to go viral. I've seen it on Twitter and Facebook already. The video views on YouTube are crossing the 100,000 mark and who knows how many times the original video has been viewed on YesWeCanSong.com. This goes to another theme of the First Campaign: Creativity moves people. The roadblocks of traditional TV advertising typically meant that you didn't have to grab people's attention like you do in the web era. On the web, unless something makes you stop and say "That's fascinating" you won't pass it along to someone else. Going viral means creating great content.

This isn't the first time the phrase has become a rallying point. Originally Cesar Chavez's motto for the UFW's 1972 hunger strike, "Si Se Puede," it has become a nearly universal labor union rally chant. Four years ago, Dean for America's theme song was LeAnn Rimes' "We Can," which played at every rally and on endless loop at headquarters as our hold music.

The theme of "We Can" perfectly sums up the hope of an insurgent campaign—it's not a front-runner's slogan. Too often today politics is merely about the achievable, while the dream is always to do the impossible. No one enters public service to fight tooth and nail in a bitter partisan environment for the lowest common denominator change.

Politics is all about doing the impossible—and that's the theme into which Obama's campaign is trying to tap.

$32,000,000

I predicted right before the Iowa caucuses that one of the biggest impacts of "The First Campaign" would be how it would change the fundraising equation. What used to be a multi-week effort to get dollars in the door after a major win has been shortened to just hours. We saw this in 2000 on John McCain's campaign and in 2004 with Howard Dean and John Kerry after he secured the nomination.

Nevertheless Barack Obama's announcement this weekend that he raised $32 million in January—roughly a million dollars a day mostly online from small-dollar donors—is stunning. That's more money than any Republican candidate raised in the ENTIRE third quarter and more than Al Gore raised in the entire year leading up to his 2000 primary bid.

As Jeff Zeleny reports, some 170,000 new contributors gave just in January, pushing their total number of contributors up over 600,000—a stunning testament to the grassroots energy behind Obama today.

If Obama manages to catch Hillary it's going to be largely thanks to this incredible online money machine. Traditional bundling and fundraising techniques just can't compete with the speed of this primary season, meaning that candidates' bank accounts will be made or broken online. As one financier told Zeleny, "When you get $32 million in one month, it is not because you have bundlers working.... It is because you have an avalanche of small donors operating online. It's a revolution. People like me don't achieve those kinds of numbers."

What makes that number so much more powerful than Hillary's big dollar donor base is that they can keep donating $25 or $50 every time they get excited, meaning after every win or every inspirational email campaign.

If Obama performs well on Tuesday, just imagine the wealth that might start flowing!