The downside, as with any interview, is you often lose the context of a single remark in a larger context. As a result, I’d like to share that context by sharing the exchange we had.

Jose: On our very first face-to-face interview, at a Starbucks
more than a year ago, you told me: “A lot of Republicans still think of the
Web as a very expensive brochure — like a slick direct mail. Here’s my own
paragraph of text that explains who I am as a candidate. It’s very
one-dimensional, almost very simplistic, purely a send-receive model.”

Looking at www.johnmccain.com right now, today, would you say the same thing of this site?

Me: In some ways, yes. In some ways, no.

His site is definitely an extension of the broadcast or send/receive model. The overwhelming majority of space on his home page is all about McCain, and not about how real people can get involved. It’s brand marketing, not word of mouth marketing. What little opportunity there is for community interaction or participation is buried in a small box below the scroll.

That said, they’re trying to move the yardstick a bit. They’ve opened up comments on the site (not sure if they’re moderated or not). They still have their McCainSpace social network and an action center. They’re just really playing those down.

As I said, the quote is accurate, but the context of my whole point about the difference between word of mouth and generic brand marketing was lost.

The advantage of an open community is it creates that word of mouth component to your otherwise traditional marketing efforts. TV, radio, print, and even web advertising serve a specific goal. They put your brand in front of people.

Empowering believers to extend that brand – to become your champions and carry your message on a personal level – is a key part of what Jose was discussing in the article. Had he been writing for AdAge, I’m guessing he would have kept more of that and less of the criticism of McCain’s otherwise uninviting presence.

People are trying to help McCain. The problem is McCain needs to take a cue from Jerry Maguire. Remember the scene with Cruise and Gooding in the locker room? Remember Jerry’s impassioned plea to Rod Tidwell? It applies to McCain.

Help us, help you!

Open your community. Invite us to be a part of your campaign, not just through scripted conference calls with bloggers, but through an active vibrant community that is – hold your breath – visible to the world. If you build it, they will come.

There is, however, one passage that jumped out at me as I was reading.

There’s a genius, too, to Meghan McCain’s style of saying so much without divulging anything truly intimate — a balancing act perfected by her dad on his Straight Talk Express. The more you talk, the more people start to feel as if they know you. The more you talk, the more you minimize the reverberations of any one thing you say.

The disdain the reporter has for McCain (both Meghan and her dad) is barely masked. Lines like the first one above are an example, as is the piece’s title – a take off on Credence Clearwater Revival’s famous song Fortunate Son. Given John McCain’s staunchly pro-war position, it’s obvious the writer is mocking Meghan’s similarity to the child in the song.

Some folks are born made to wave the flag,
Ooh, they’re red, white and blue.
And when the band plays hail to the chief,
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, lord,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son, son.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, no,

Ignoring the subtle digs at her and her dad, the reporter did, in that brief passage above, capture one fascinating aspect of the Internet. It’s the piece that most politicians and corporate clients don’t get and it bears repeating.

The more you talk, the more people start to feel as if they know you. The more you talk, the more you minimize the reverberations of any one thing you say.

Communications types who do not spend a lot of time online fail to get this. They assume that every word you say is going to be twisted, distorted, and manipulated. They worry that some random blog post will send stock prices or poll standings plummeting downward.

Yet that statement is the essence of this new era of Internet communications. Allowing people to see you, and to understand you, actually protects you from the random out of context quote. As your comfort with exposure increases, and you open your dialog more and more, you will guard against the misstatement. Your allies will have more ammunition to protect your back and your enemies will have less of a vacuum to fill with an errant remark.

For anyone interested in communications, I would suggest you read the McCain article for two reasons. First, it’s a perfect example of the veiled hostility visited upon anyone Republican by the mainstream media. Second, it does illustrate someone taking the right approach to their online brand – be who you are and accept the fact that not everyone is going to like you.

A lot has been written about the Thompson campaign in the past two days. I have read a bunch of post-mortems all focused on what went wrong, but I thought I would spend a little time telling you what went right. For people interested in online politics and the way candidates use the web, the Thompson campaign is a great case study in what can go well, and go badly in our world.

On May 22nd, I was sitting at Inova Fairfax hospital as my wife was rehydrated. A vicious stomach flu was circulating through the house and had brought my wife and son down. As we sat there that evening, I received an e-mail on my Blackberry from the brother of a friend of the Thompson’s. A few days earlier, they had seen an article in the Washington Post wherein I chastised my party for not using the Internet effectively.

I had been sweating the fallout from that article for two days. I was not exactly loved by the RNC for my critical assessment of their online operation. That article, which was about 180 degrees removed from the series of conversations I had with the reporter, was not going to help.

The Thompson team, however, agreed with my assessment that campaigns could use the Internet differently and wanted me to come out to “The House” to chat about it. We agreed to meet the next day despite what would become a full-blown case of the flu. The Thompson team, it seems, had circulated that same flu about a week earlier and none of them were afraid of catching it again.

On May 23rd, I met with Team Fred and after a three hour discussion of new and innovative ways you could use the Internet to supplement a traditional campaign, I left with an assignment – build a Presidential website in the height of a media storm, that would withstand a huge rush of traffic the moment it launched, and do it all in 10 days.

The Launch

On June 5, 2007, we launched ImWithFred.com. The site was originally envisioned as a simple splash page that would gather low hanging fruit – early donors and supporters looking to sign up. A requirement that all forms be pre-populated so visitors would not have to fill in information more than once threw in a wrinkle and we ended up building personalization into a splash page – not something most people would do. We also ended up building tools that would allow viral recruitment for both donors and volunteers.

Now these tools were hardly new or innovative, but the combination of designing the data architecture, doing the graphic design work, cutting up the site, coding it all, and allowing time to test for bugs in 10 days (over Memorial Day weekend, no less) was about the craziest thing I have ever tried. The data architecture alone had to support huge traffic, and getting the servers provisioned, hardened and tested would eat into our ability to deploy a test environment. Doing all of this over the holiday made me very popular with the development team.

Speaking of the team, I have to give credit to Dan Hopkins, Blaise Hazelwood, Todd Zeigler, Ken Smith, Brian Lyle and the gang that pulled this together. They did an outstanding job getting the site launched under those conditions and rarely complained (to me at least).

On Hannity and Colmes, Fred announced his website url and the flood came in. We took a lot of heat for the thin site, but we didn’t have time for much else. Had we had a month to design, build and test, we could have done more. Given the time we had, and the limitations of working under the “Testing the Waters” rules, I thought we did fine. We attracted over 100,000 unique visitors, raised over a quarter million dollars, and added nearly 30,000 names to our list in the first 24 hours.

On June 12, we rolled out the Fred File, added Fred’s bio, and added tools to spread the word through traditional media by contacting talk radio and newspapers. I was traveling back from a meeting in Colorado that night on a flight that was seriously delayed. I ended up doing the go-live countdown from a seat just inside the arrival gate at Dulles airport on their wi-fi connection. We made the rollout about 30 minutes ahead of Fred’s appearance on Leno that night.

The blog was a hit almost instantly and led me to believe the path we had chosen was right. Fred’s commentaries were getting a lot of comments and I saw the beginning of an online community I’ve never seen around a GOP candidate’s online operation. What’s more, nobody wrote a single word about what supporters were saying online. Nobody accused us of endorsing the random beliefs espoused by the occasional nut, and nobody on the campaign had to answer a single press call (that I am aware of) about the blog or anything said on it.

ImWithFred.com Version 2.0 – The New McKinley

Described inappropriately as ImWithFred.com 2.0 by some creative types, the actual site was finished the week of July 9th. We had been asked to shoot for having the live site ready the first week of July (timed to be released with the announcement). The site was delayed by a week. The announcement was delayed by two months.

Originally I saw the campaign’s Internet operation as the modern day equivalent of McKinley in 1896. As Fred took his message to the people, they could, at the same moment, come and visit him sitting on the front porch of this virtual house. FDT could simultaneously campaign in Iowa and around the world, by carrying the coffee shop conversations online – posting about questions he was asked at a rally, or continuing to develop regular, and lengthy posts about the issues we face.

While the pundits will discuss and debate exactly where the campaign went wrong, the one thing I believe they misunderstand is the way the Internet could have, and should have, shaped this campaign. That misunderstanding contributed to the “Fred is lazy” storyline early on.

The campaign still had to do the things necessary to win – talking to, registering, IDing, and mobilizing voters. Nobody questioned that. That the campaign strategy was written off as “relying entirely on the Internet” was simply not accurate.

The idea, from my perspective, was to harness the power of the Net to build a robust community that would become an integral part of the ground game. The Bush-Cheney campaign had begun the process of enabling volunteer action online. It pioneered activism tools that allowed voters to create and run phone bank and canvass operations from their home. It allowed people to participate on their own terms, rather than forcing them to attend a Saturday morning walk.

I saw this campaign as the natural evolution of that effort, but it would go further in the one arena where BC04 fell short. The Bush campaign was innovative in allowing people to participate in the mechanics of the campaign, but it never developed the community that could interact, inspire, and spur each other into action. I felt in 2004, and still feel today, that is the missing pieces required to fully realize the benefit of these applications.

The Thompson web operation would be different. With Jon Henke, Howard Mortman and William Beutler constantly opening new channels through local, state and national blogs, and the campaign site providing a vehicle for those attracted to participate in the campaign, we could reach the tipping point where engaged people are empowered to contribute in ways never attempted by the GOP.

Buy In

When I first met with Linda Rozett, Mark Corallo and Ed McFadden, I was distrustful. I unfairly stereotyped them as traditional communications people. It has been my experience in dealing with campaign Communications staff that they have developed a sort of impenetrable cocoon around themselves. Any thought that runs contrary to the way they did things on their first campaign is somehow filtered out as a bad idea. I would describe it as a mild form of mental illness. It’s a cognitive dissonance of the first order and it seems to afflict nearly all of them.

Mark, Ed and Linda didn’t fit that mold. They understood that we needed to be part of the dialog on blogs and online forums like Townhall, but they also understood the need to drive traffic to our own property and to develop a community. The chatter about Fred online, the traffic to the site, and the money coming in led me to believe the theory was right and we could introduce a paradigm shift.

I knew from my RNC days and the Bush days that buy-in for a radically different approach would be critical. I was pleased to see that everyone in the campaign from Fred and Jeri through Linda, Mark and Ed was onboard. It really did make a difference.

The Little Red Truck

Unfortunately, the staff turnover that began in the late summer had an almost immediate effect on the Internet operation.

As the Communications team focused on traditional media tactics, their attention increasingly turned away from the Internet. The commentaries became less frequent, online initiatives were no longer part of the equation.

In October, we began discussions of an end of quarter fundraising drive featuring a real-time disclosure of our success. The concept was shot down over concerns that it would place too much emphasis on money. As we moved through November, we began to hear rumblings of Fredsgiving Day – a third party money bomb effort scheduled the day before Thanksgiving.

It was unclear whether the campaign would support the effort. There were concerns (voiced by many online) that the timing was off – nobody would pay attention the day before the holiday. In the event the campaign decided to jump in, we went ahead and built the little red truck to track contributions that day. It was never deployed.

It was late in December when the little red truck finally saw the sunlight. Over the next three weeks, that little red pickup helped the campaign raise 1.25 million dollars. Had it been unveiled sooner, who knows what might have happened.

Lessons Learned

I share all of this anecdotally in the hopes of illustrating something for GOP campaigns (and more broadly for campaigns in general). I’m afraid that the withdrawal of Fred Thompson will lead people to conclude that the model was wrong. I really don’t feel it was.

As I said, I think the Thompson Internet operation, in the early days, and in the final days, was really second to none. Political campaign professionals should study the Thompson effort not as a case study in what went badly, but as an example of what was going very well, and could have been extraordinary had it not been for the media’s obsessive demand for ‘the tried and true tactics of the 1980s’.

As an example of the strength of Thompson’s online effort, look at the Thompson campaign blog and you’ll see something remarkable for GOP candidates – comments. And not just a few comments, but hundreds and even thousands of comments.

Rudy’s blog doesn’t allow comments. Romney’s gets a few per post. Ron Paul just recently launched a blog (despite the fact that blog software is largely free). He currently gets between a handful and a few dozen comments.

I don’t think this indicates a lack of supporter enthusiasm as much as it indicates that the campaigns have created a blog with nothing to say on sites that are so scrubbed of interesting content they’re alsmost sterile. Most of the posts are rehashed press releases, rehashed campaign e-mails, or occasionally a video so overscripted it becomes almost completely unwatchable.

Most campaigns think of comments as a way for people to respond to the post. Almost nobody on the GOP side sees this as a way for their supporters to network, to share ideas, or to brainstorm ways to help the campaign.

Most Republicans fear the rogue comment that will be used to tarnish their campaign. What they fail to realize is in a vibrant community that rogue comment is always surrounded by dozens of voices or more shouting them down. If anything, they typically dispel arguments that your base is crazy.

For the rabidly partisan Democrats reading this, please don’t mischaracterize this post as “Republican Internet guru just discovers blogs and comments.” That is not at all the point. The point is something much larger that I have been shouting at my party for several years now – they need to trust and engage the people. Since the people are online, they need to engage people online. There are just as many Democtrats who need to learn this lesson (cough, cough, Hillary, cough, cough).

They need to build online operations so they invite people to the discussion rather than turning them off of it. Get candidates to write, in their own words, frequent posts. Understand that a ground game is critical, but it must be viewed in terms of ROI. A thoughtful, honest post from a candidate may be discussed and passed around by thousands of people online. It takes little time to write if it’s sincere and not obsessive studied and focus grouped.

If your candidate honestly doesn’t have time to write, have staff carry a video camera and a MacBook to post from the road. Forgo the hair, the makeup, and the lighting. You’re on a bus 50 miles from Waterloo. Nobody is going to believe that your makeup is perfect and so is the lighting. Be real. We don’t expect perfection, but we do expect honesty.

My last piece of advice is this… In your interview process, ask your Communications Director to name his five favorite blogs. If they can’t, ask them for a suggestion on how best to target communications to specific demographic segments using banner ads. If they can’t answer either of those questions, don’t hire them. They don’t get what’s going on in the world around them.

Here are the results from Iowa courtesy of the less than conservative New York Times

Fred D. Thompson	15,904	13.4%
John McCain	15,559	13.1%

If I remember my Electoral Politics 101, if you win by one vote, you still win. That’s just the way it is. If a guy has 50,050 votes and another has 49,950, and you round the math, they both have 50%. However, absent a recount, I guarantee you the guy with 50,050 is going to be sworn into office.

So I find it incredible that the mainstream media continues to report that Fred “tied for third” with John McCain. It’s just irresponsible.

I have run into David in several circles, but never really have sat down to discuss politics or technology at length with him. I don’t know what kind of guy he is. I had always, however, read what he had to say – agreeing with him occasionally, and disagreeing completely almost as often.

In the last few weeks, however, he has gone from someone I can agree with to someone for whom I have absolutely no respect. His post on RedState banning Ron Paul’s angry, vocal minority was ridiculous.

I agree with Captain Ed. Generally, Republicans need to welcome Ron Paul (and all others willing to wear a Republican banner) to the debate and the discussion. If Ron Paul doesn’t win the nomination, we need him to actively endorse and support the winner so that his supporters will use their energy to defeat Hillary.

Personally, I recognize that Paul’s support is very, very real, especially in the politics + tech sphere. He is the people-powered Howard Dean candidate of 2008 which I’ve been saying we need to “prove” the importance of an effective Internet strategy. He is that Revolution.

First, Paul is not a people powered movement. People powered movements have people. Dean in 2008 had people. He was surging in the polls and imploded. Paul has never garnered more than a single digit in any polling not conducted on a website. His “popularity” is a creation of, by, and for the Internet. I play video games online, that doesn’t mean dragons and aliens exist in the real world. Ron Paul may be able to organize his minions to stuff the ballot box on MSNBC, but can he deliver a single person to the polls?

Second, and much more important, a revolution of anti-Semitic, racist, white supremacist, black helicopter Republicans is absolutely not what we need to “prove” anything. Sending a crystal clear message to these people that we a) will not tolerate them and b) absolutely do not want them in the party is what we “need” to do. Erick Erickson is right.

If David All wants to bring in these people to beat Hillary, he can have at it. Thanks, but I’ll pass. The media already paints the GOP as angry white guys enough without David bringing these guys in to help.

I’m guessing David was about 8 or 10 during the 1992 convention, but the angry right was embodied by Pat Buchanan’s speech to the delegates in Houston. It was that speech, as much as anything else, that cemented our brand as reactionaries and zealots. It has taken us 15 years to recover from putting the radical ideologies of an extremist on display.

Arguing that we need people in our coalition who preach the “Zionist conspiracy” as a political philosophy (which is what Erick was railing against, and the reason for the ban) misses the point completely. If David actually believes that the lunatic wing of the right will fall into line to support the eventual nomination of Romney, Giuliani, Thompson or McCain, he needs an adjustment to his political instincts. As Erickson pointed out, Paul himself said during the CNBC debate that he would not support the GOP nominee.

Not right now I don‚Äôt. Not unless they‚Äôre willing to end the war and bring our troops home… No, I‚Äôm not going to support them if they continue down the path which has taken our party down the tubes.

I find it odd that Paul calls it “our party” having run on the Libertarian ticket for President the last time he ran. It seems he only wants to affiliate with the GOP when he thinks there is electoral advantage. His minions probably don’t share that tendency and would likely vote for the Libertarians’ quadrennial sacrifice.

What would cause David to believe that Paul’s supporters would ever get behind the GOP? That argument is almost as laughable as the one he used to defend Google and MoveOn.

Arguing that Google was simply protecting MoveOn’s trademark was laughable. That may be the justification that Google used, but it forgets one thing – our constitution and judicial system have always protected political speech above all else. Political e-mail is exempt from CAN-SPAM for exactly that reason. Commercial speech and political speech are treated completely different under the law.

David’s argument that Google was right to act as it did undermines that. He could have, just as easily, called on Google to recognize the value of political speech as the government does. He could have called on them to recognize that nobody has the right to hide behind a trademark to throw grenades at a candidate. Instead, he knelt at the alter of Google and jumped in bed with Joan Blades.

Erick Erickson theorizes that David’s problem is two-fold. First, David is more committed to the technology than the cause, and second, he is simply trying to grab onto the story to get attention.

Erick presents these in the opposite order, but I’ll tackle them this way, and one at a time. The more troubling of Erick’s charges is that David may be more devoted to technology than to the GOP. That, I would argue, is a harder charge to make stick. David has, to his credit, served a fair number of GOPers and spent some time in the trenches. Do I think he’s still a little wet behind the ears, and needs a bit more experience? Yes. Do I think he’s likely to look back on some of these positions some day and think, “What the hell was I thinking”? Absolutely. But do I believe that he has put a love of Google and a desire to see some marginal Republican achieve success online (even at the expense of the greater party)? I really don’t.

I’d like to suggest that Erick’s first instinct may have been the correct one. As I have said, David is, by all accounts, a master of self-promotion. It’s entirely possible that he made a conscious choice to take the contrarian position solely to further his agenda of making David everything that David can be. If that’s the case, he certainly wouldn’t be the first. Ann Coulter has made an entire career of being annoying just to get press.

That said, I have no respect for that. I dislike Ann Coulter and now refuse to give her a dime or a minute of my attention. She has advocated some ridiculous positions, and made the GOP look terrible for no reason beyond her own advancement. I think David has done the same. He has advocated against basic political speech rights of a candidate under attack, and argued (allegedly in pursuit of an “Internet victory”) for the rights of racists and anti-Semites to use anyone else’s platform as they please.

Does he do it out of some misguided technologist passion? I just don’t buy it. I think David is calculating, and has come to the conclusion that taking these positions gets him noticed. I think that’s why he took his post against RedState and circulated it to the media (as Erick alleges).

Back in May, David and I were quoted in the same WaPo story railing against the GOP and its inability to develop an “A” game online. It appeared front page, above the fold. It made me, with more than 20 years serving my party, a bit uncomfortable. You’ll notice I have since shown more restraint in my criticism. While I still believe we need to do more online, I am spending more effort helping candidates do it right than I am telling people what we’re doing wrong.

I believe that David took from the experience a completely different lesson. I think he discovered that when it comes to the press, the squeaky wheel gets the attention. I have noticed a significant increase in his tendency to not only get his name in print everywhere he can, but to promote any mention of himself via e-mail and blog.

I think Erick missed the target, but hit the tree. I think David is more committed to David than to the cause.

Update: Right after I posted this, I received an e-mail from a friend suggesting I take a look at David’s Facebook profile pic (below).

Pictures are normally worth a thousand words. In this case, 1,416. That image says everything I did, but it’s much more eloquent.

When the evil doer in question is a Republican, the headlines look like this:

GOP Rep. Mark Foley Resigns Over E-Mails

If you doubt my assertion that the Politico was subjective in choosing not to say “Democrat Filner charged with battery…”, look at this paragraph.

Filner is the latest member of Congress to have a run-in with law enforcement. In July, Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) had a loud confrontation with Capitol Police officers at a Capitol doorway, and he later apologized for the incident. In a now infamous incident, former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.), slammed her cell phone against the chest of a Capitol Police officer who asked her for identification because she was not wearing her special member of Congress pin. Also last year, Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) was arrested for driving under the influence when he rammed his car into a steel barrier outside the Capitol. He later underwent rehabilitation for alcohol and apologized to the Capitol Police.

Notice the attempt to conflate “a loud confrontation” with two incidents of assault and one of DUI? I have loud confrontations with people all the time. It’s the hot-tempered Irishman in me. Hell, I had one with the people at UPS the other day for refusing to honor their guarantee when my next day package was not delivered the next day.

When Democrats assault airline employees and police officers, or run their car into barriers and blame it on prescription medication, it’s a bipartisan problem. When Republicans break the law, it’s a ‘culture of corruption’. Is it any wonder the public perception of crime committed by the two parties tilts heavily against the GOP? The media is complicit in characterizing it that way.

Of course, the story isn’t quite as good, but how could it be?

Who is John Durham?

Apparently this AdAge article has been making the rounds.

John Durham, who led internet strategy for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, was impressed with Mr. Thompson’s grasp of the YouTube medium. “He is smart enough to understand he needs to cede a certain amount of control for a certain amount of visibility,” he said.

That identifier seems to have thrown a few people off. Not the least among them are the former Bush-Cheney eCampaign staff – most of whom had never heard of Durham.

To clear the confusion, John Durham was a vendor – under the name Pericles Consulting – that we used for a single advertising initiative. We were unhappy with the results, and chose not to use him again. Ironically, one of the reasons was because of his staff making claims in newspaper articles that they were either a) intimately aware of our strategies or b) claiming they were driving our processes. Both claims were false.

It is unfortunate that the AdAge people would be so careless in the verification of facts and the characterization of Mr. Durham.

Today’s campaign Web sites are evolving into complete portals about the candidates. In addition to the appeal for money and candidate bio, you’ll find pictures, videos and social networks. More often than not, a candidate’s site will even include links to outside news articles about the campaign, or at least those that don’t put it in a bad light…

As candidates deal with the Web, they will start to learn that many Web users have an extremely high opinion of themselves and the online lifestyle they are now leading. Last week, Joe Biden responded via a Webcam to a question posed to him via YouTube. The response was called “a milestone in presidential politics” by one blogger, as though it marked the first time a candidate had ever been asked a question by a citizen.

The rest of the article is full of similar fluff. It’s pretty ridiculous actually. The worst of it is probably this passage:

The [Vote Different] ad came to the attention of political reporters (them again) as well as the Drudge Report and as a result, millions saw it. So now there is a new concern: that the Web will be home to similar kinds of video hit pieces for which no one will claim sponsorship.

But I think we’ll be OK. Someone, somewhere always manages to smoke these things out.

Oh, I see. It was because of political reporters that millions saw it. What would we ever do without them? Bloggers had been talking about this thing for more than a week before the media took notice. It’s a good thing the God-given powers of MSM came to shed light on this for the ignorant masses. What I find more appalling is his disregard for the fact that it was those same bloggers with “high opinions of themselves” that did the “smoking out”.

Don’t see the connection? It all has to do with MySpace, and my unique ability to get the strangest sound bites on television or in print.

If you don’t have your ears peeled for my ramblings on octogenarian cheerleaders and how they relate to online politics, I’ve created a special section to highlight the quirky comments that make the news. Check them out here.