Gavin Newsom on Facebook

Had a mention by San Francisco Chronicle political columnists Matier and Ross:

Meanwhile, Bob Brigham, who watches such things, reports that Newsom's Facebook Web page just logged in its 5,000th "friend."

Apparently, 5,000 is an astronomical number for a politician's friends list. Although it doesn't approach the numbers logged by Barack Obama (753,347) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (143,827), it's still almost double the registrations of Sens. Dianne Feinstein (2,791) and Barbara Boxer (2,141).

And who was Gavin's 5,000th friend? None other than Chelsea Clinton.

I'd have more to add, but I'm too busy watching such things. Here's the current friends or supporter counts for other elected officials of note:

X - Antonio Villaraigosa
21 - Ron Dellums
26 - Carole Migden
58 - Joe Nation
139 - Chris Daly
533 - Jackie Speier
1,476 - Mark Leno
1,985 - Phil Angelides
2,141 - Barbara Boxer
2,791 - Dianne Feinstein
4,786 - Nancy Pelosi
143,827 - Hillary Clinton
753,347 - Barack Obama

Don't know what's up with Mayor Villaraigosa coming so late to the party. You'd think he'd at least not what to get spanked in the facebook primary in his re-election and definitely not in a contested gubernatorial primary.



-By Bob Brigham

Appearance on Arthur Bruzzone's San Francisco Unscripted Television Show

I had the opportunity to appear on San Francisco Unscripted with Arthur Bruzzone to discuss the Online Revolution of Political Campaigns:

A Silent revolution in political campaigning is underway. The Obama campaign is the first candidate to fully exploit its potential. Bob Brigham, one of a handful of online specialists, takes backstage with his take on tactics, techniques and technology of campaigns.

-By Bob Brigham

San Francisco Chronicle Front Page Story on Bloggers and the CDP Convention

Carla Marinucchi looks at this year's California Democratic Party Convention: Bloggers descend on Dems' gathering:

This year, a record 50 Internet-publication bloggers will join the estimated 400 credentialed "mainstream" media in the press room to track the doings of seven Democratic presidential candidates and 2,100 California party delegates this weekend.
[...]
Experts say the increased presence of bloggers at such traditional events will be closely watched to track their growing influence and analyze how their coverage shapes the candidates' strategies in the 2008 presidential election.

Bob Brigham, 29, an Internet strategist and blogger for Calitics, a liberal Web site that provides commentary on Democratic politics, said the intensity of the "netroots" coverage "stretches the debate in terms of breadth and depth" and has the potential to create immediate ripple effects among a hardcore dedicated political audience.

"If someone has a breakaway speech like (Howard) Dean had four years ago, it could be a paradigm shift in the conventional wisdom about the race," said Brigham, who produces regular commentary on Calitics under his "blogswarm" sign-on. "And if someone gets booed this year, it won't be an item in a sixth paragraph of a news story -- it will be on the front page on all of the blogs."

Some tradition consultants "get it" and others a scared fools.

Blogger coverage at a state political convention has the potential to reach "hundreds of thousands of Democrats in our party, and we are so much more because of it," said Eric Jaye, a Democratic strategist who is advising Charlie Brown, a Democratic House candidate who challenged Republican Rep. John Doolittle of Rocklin (Placer County) last fall and will do so again in 2008.

"It has put races in play that would not have been in play and taken huge parts of America that were no-go zones, and it's turning them from red to blue," Jaye said of the Internet activity among activists. "Thanks to the blogosphere, we're becoming a national party again -- not just a party of two coasts."

But one key state Democratic strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of concern for riling the netroots crowd, warns that such efforts are potentially positive and negative.

Netroots commentary can frequently be intensely personal, even "totally mean and irrational," the strategist said, with some bloggers finding power in their ability "to assassinate political characters online."

"It's amplified by the anonymity, and it can be scary that it's so irresponsible," the insider said. "And it's pulling the mainstream media in that direction."

No wonder the mainstream media is being pulled in a different direction.

one key state Democratic strategist, *speaking on the condition of anonymity* (whined about blogs because they are) "amplified by the anonymity"

No wonder the key strategist fool is worried about people being mean, they are a complete idiot and don't even realize it. The blogs are filling the vacuum created by Democrats who listen to people like that.



-By Bob Brigham

Washington Post -- Above the Fold -- Story on Ellen Tauscher

Juliet Eilperin and Michael Grunwald have the featured front-page Washington Post story on Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher:

The Woman in the Middle
Moderate Democrat Is New Target of Liberal Bloggers

The Democratic majority was only three weeks old, but by Jan. 26, the grass-roots and Net-roots activists of the party's left wing had already settled on their new enemy: Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Calif.), the outspoken chair of the centrist New Democrat Coalition.

Progressive blogs -- including two new ones, Ellen Tauscher Weekly and Dump Ellen Tauscher -- were bashing her as a traitor to her party. A new liberal political action committee had just named her its "Worst Offender." And in Tauscher's East Bay district office that day in January, eight MoveOn.org activists were accusing her of helping President Bush send more troops to Iraq.

Yes, I've been part of the coalition seeking to hold the Democratic Caucus together by holding Congresswoman Tauscher accountable.

Why are they going after Ellen Tauscher?

She has annoyed the left by supporting legislation to scale back the estate tax, tighten bankruptcy rules and promote free-trade agreements. She served as vice chair of the pro-business Democratic Leadership Council, which many liberal activists dismiss as a quasi-Republican K Street front group. And she voted to authorize the Iraq war, although she did so with caveats, and she was quick to express her displeasure with its execution.

But liberal groups such as the Children's Defense Fund and the League of Conservation Voters give Tauscher impeccable report cards, while the National Rifle Association gives her straight F's.

"It's not just about her voting record," said Bob Brigham of San Francisco, an activist who recently started the Ellen Tauscher Weekly.

The latest blog wars began simmering in December after Tauscher led a New Democrat delegation to meet with Bush about bipartisan cooperation, irritating the Net roots. They boiled after her former chief of staff, Katie Merrill, posted a scathing piece on a California Web site attacking the Net roots for attacking Tauscher. Outraged activists immediately began mobilizing for a fight in 2008. "I didn't even know who Tauscher was 5 mins ago, but now I support a primary challenge against her," one typical commenter replied.

Brigham says it's never wise to tell the Net roots not to do something: "That's the worst move you can possibly make."

So where do we go from here? The ball is clearly in her court and she can either follow the Jane Harman path or the Joe Lieberman path.

But Kos points to Harman as a perfect example of how the Net roots can keep Democrats in line. He said Harman used to be a constant irritant, a go-to quote for reporters looking for a Democrat to tweak liberals -- until she had to fight off a primary challenge from the left in 2006. "She's been great ever since," he said. Now Harman even writes on the liberal Huffington Post blog.

Kos can imagine a day when Tauscher still holds her seat but is no longer distasteful to the left. "That's what victory would look like -- a more responsive representative," he said. So when Tauscher praises Pelosi as "perfect on substance, perfect on optics," it's hard to know if that's a result of personal evolution, political trends, or blogospheric pressure, but it's music to Kos's ears. It's helpful to Democratic leaders, too.

Said Rosenthal, the Working for Us founder: "We want them to understand what we're doing helps and enhances the majority."

Indeed.



-By Bob Brigham

Mother Jones Profile: Real Time Politics

Andy Isaacson did a profile story on me for Mother Jones Magazine:

Real-Time Politics
News: Bob Brigham and other bloggers like him are putting the fight back into Democratic campaigns:

There is a discussion of Paul Hackett and the OH-02 Special Election (which made for a Mother Jones cover story a few weeks ago).

Earlier this year, Brigham and a 29-year-old Midwesterner named Tim Tagaris discovered Paul Hackett, a former Marine running in a special election for an Ohio congressional seat in a predominantly Republican district. The Democratic leadership, which traditionally targets resources to races deemed statistically winnable, had written off the Ohio race. But Hackett was that rare thing in electoral politics today—a straight talker, particularly on Iraq, which appeared to earn voters’—and bloggers’—respect. And in Hackett’s framing of the issues (“Democrats are for limited government because they don’t want government in our bedrooms”), Brigham and Tagaris saw a strategy that could win. They galvanized the liberal blogosphere, which turned out volunteers, mobilized people from all across the country to the district, and raised around $600,000 for the Hackett campaign from the netroots, greatly out-raising the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and forcing the National Republican Congressional Committee to spend money on a fight it hadn’t planned for.

The bloggers' effectiveness as a rapid-response team proved decisive in the Hackett campaign. When a conservative muckraker kicked off a “swift boat”-style smear campaign against Hackett—charging that the Marine had never seen combat—Brigham credits Tagaris with invalidating the claim and shutting down the stratagem within a day. On another occasion, at 10pm on the Saturday before the election, Brigham and Tagaris got wind of a video that Jean Schmidt, Hackett’s opponent, was set to air the next day, claiming that she’d never met Tom Noe. Noe was George W. Bush’s chief Ohio fundraiser, and he was then embroiled in a campaign finance and money laundering probe known as "Coingate." Alerted to the tape, Brigham and Tagaris speed-dialed bloggers across the country and set them to work digging up evidence to show that the two had, in fact, met. By the next morning they had proof, and they delivered it at a prime-time televised press conference on the courthouse steps.

In the end, of course, Hackett lost the race; but he came much closer than anyone had expected—thanks in large part to Brigham and the liberal blogosphere.

As a profile, he then gets to focusing on me:

The experience emboldened Brigham, who publicly denounced the DCCC as “irrelevant” and hailed the Hackett race as a model for future grassroots Democratic campaigning, and that “big, bold action not backing down will earn the respect of voters”—even conservatives. (Brigham has a tendency to speak in measured sound bites, as you might expect of somebody who's spent much of his young adult life, as he has, working on political messaging.)

Bob Brigham engages in real-time politics the way an aggressive mutual fund manager trades stocks. A Montana native who was introduced to computers around the time he was learning his ABCs, Brigham briefly went to college—where he was a lobbyist for the student body—but dropped out in 1996 to work on a political campaign. “I was able to learn traditional politics right at the point as Internet was maturing,” he says. “Being at that nexus allowed me to take principles underlying traditional political campaigning and couple them with the potential for online politics.” In 2004, Brigham blogged for Democrat Ginny Schrader during her unsuccessful run for Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District. During this time he met “DavidNYC,” Swing State Project’s respected founding blogger, who was using the blog to raise money for Schrader. Swing State Project began focusing on swing states in the 2004 Presidential election, but has since put an emphasis on federal and state races in districts that people might not consider even to be competitive. Brigham, along with Tagaris—“the only two people using blog diaries to drive political messages in congressional races”—asked David if they could join forces with him.

Brigham’s approach to politics follows, he suggests, from having grown up in a generation bombarded by—and cynical about—commercial messaging. The Internet allows for real-time politics and supplies a new benchmark for measuring success, he says. “If we only take stock and evaluate our success the morning after election day, we only get one chance every two years to see how we’re doing. The mindset I advocate is to ask yourself every day whether we won on that given day. What that brings about is an end to compromising in hopes of winning an election and enforces best practices … on a daily basis.”

If the 2004 Presidential Election marked a coming of age for bloggers, who for the first time became highly visible and respected political players, 2005 has been a year for maturation. The bipartisan debate over Social Security last Spring, the blogopshere’s first large policy fight after mostly electoral battles, united the Democratic netroots and illustrated the power that 600 united bloggers can wield in shaping and spreading political messages. (“We had the perfect line,” says Brigham, referring to the slogan thought up by blogger Matt Stoller, after a Christmas Eve conference call, to counter Presidents Bush’s fear-mongering on the issue. “’There is no crisis.’”)

You'll be shocked to discover I got a little cocky when discussing Montana:

As for his next electoral battle, besides supporting Hackett in his new bid for Ohio Senator, Brigham is primed for the Democratic primary in Montana, a “marquee” race that he says offers the starkest choice of the competing directions for the party. John Morrison—“as typical of a Democratic Leadership Council candidate as Joe Lieberman”—is squaring off for a shot at a winnable red-state senate seat against Jon Tester, a state Senator. Tester, Bingham argues, also represents the past “but further back—the type of populist farmer who built this country. He’s also the future of the Democratic Party, which to a large degree [lies] out west.”

The liberal blogosphere is rallying solidly behind Jon Tester. MyDD and DailyKos bloggers Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsa flew out to Montana to meet the candidate and gave their blessings. Tester’s campaign has hired Montana blogger Matt Singer, who runs the blog Left in the West “Left in the West,” to do its online outreach.

Brigham plans to return to his home state with laptop packed. “I fully intend to raise serious hell before the primary,” he says, eyes lit up. “I have no problem going negative on John Morrison, as a member of the DLC, to the point where he has to change his name and leave the state after the election. The future of the party is decided in the primary. And he’s the past.”

Emphasis mine.

-By Bob Brigham

OH-02: Mother Jones Cover Story on Paul Hackett

I was mentioned a few times in David Goodman's great story on the Ohio 2nd Special Election: The Democrat Who Fought

IN THE FINAL WEEK of the campaign, the big guns arrived in southern Ohio. The Republican National Committee dispatched staff from Washington to shore up Schmidt’s faltering bid, and the National Republican Congressional Committee swamped the airwaves with a half-million dollars’ worth of attack ads accusing Hackett of, among other things, supporting higher taxes when he was on the Milford City Council.

Hackett had his own secret weapon, though. With a conspiratorial flourish, he ushered me into the Goldminer’s Inn, a dive around the corner from campaign headquarters and the lair of what he called “the insurgents.” Huddled in a smoky corner were Bob Brigham and Tim Tagaris of Swing State Project and Matt DeBergalis of the liberal fundraising website ActBlue.com. They had come from California, Massachusetts, and northern Ohio armed with laptops, cellular modems, and digital cameras, their weapons of choice in rallying the online troops.

The bloggers were cocky about what the netroots—the online version of the grassroots—could deliver. Brigham, a tall, skinny 27-year-old software designer clad in well-worn low-slung jeans declared, “We can move people, money, and message, and do it 24/7. We’re non-state actors, and this is postmodern politics.” His dispatches from the candidate’s living room, his car, and from the bar were posted by his and other widely read blogs such as Daily Kos and MyDD; in all, he said, more than 50 bloggers had helped raise money and turn out volunteers for Hackett.

The insurgents delivered big time: They out-fundraised the national Democratic Party, hauling in some $500,000 of the campaign’s $850,000 total, with nearly 9,000 people giving an average of $50 each. In a show of blogforce on the campaign’s last day, Swing State Project put out the word at 10:30 a.m. that Hackett needed $30,000 for get-out-the-vote operations. Six hours later, $60,000 had poured in and Brigham had to tell people to stop giving.

The next story demonstrates progress in the Democratic Party:

The insurgents are unmoved. Brigham invokes DNC Chairman Howard Dean’s 50-State Strategy: “You gotta fight everywhere to win anywhere.” They point out that between 2000 and 2004, more than a quarter of House seats were unchallenged or only lightly contested by Democrats. Jerome Armstrong, who runs the popular MyDD blog, wrote on tompaine.com, “Paul Hackett was the first step in resuscitating the party after the 2004 defeat.… Let’s run 232 Hackett-like operations against the Republicans in the elections of 2006, and plenty of swing-district wins will walk out of the wilderness on Election Day.” (In early August, DCCC chairman Rahm Emanuel announced that in 2006, the committee will double the number of Democratic challengers it funds—to about 50, out of 231 Republican-held seats nationwide.)

On the night I visited the Goldminer’s Inn the bloggers were in high dudgeon. Alternating swigs of beer and draws on his cigarette, the frenetic Brigham insisted, “I support fighting Democrats who aren’t ashamed to be Democrats and who aren’t members of the DLC,” the Democratic Leadership Council that is the ideological home of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman. Hackett, listening in, piped up, “What’s the DLC?”

That same night, Hillary Clinton and the DLC were in Ohio. But it wasn't because they were helping, or even aware, of the biggest race in the state. They were busy with business as usual while we were changing the narrative of the midterm election cycle and proving that by ignoring their advice Democrats can be competitive anywhere in America.



-By Bob Brigham

MSNBC Looks at the Changing Nature of Campaigns

Tom Curry notices the times they are a changing:

The work of such bloggers as Bob Brigham of Swingstateproject.com points toward a day when the traditional campaign — tailored by Washington-based consultants, centered on 30-second TV ads, with fund-raising driven by Washington-based party committees — might become obsolete.

The significance of what Democratic bloggers doing is proven by the attention Republican and conservative operatives are paying to them.

Assessing the blogger’s role in the Hackett race, David Keating, executive director of the Club for Growth, a conservative group that supports low-tax candidates, said, “It’s a tremendously significant development. The fact that several hundred thousand dollars is raised by people outside the party system is significantly helpful to any candidate.”

“We’re looking at what they did to learn as much as we can,” he said.

"The blogosphere's most profound impact in Ohio was its ability to raise money and to give Hackett the tools to get his voice heard, when traditionally a candidate like that would never have had that kind of money and simply wouldn't have been competitive," said Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democrat Network.

Clearly, the barriers to competitiveness are far easier to circumvent with the internet.

A self-employed communications consultant, Brigham, worked for the campaign of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, as well as for Democratic congressional candidate Virginia Schrader last year in Pennsylvania, and did a stint working for the Democratic Party in Montana.

What Brigham and fellow blogger Tim Tagaris did for Hackett’s campaign, apart from helping raise money and generating excitement about the potential for an upset victory in Ohio, was to use their blog to respond to efforts to question whether Hackett had really served in Iraq.

While it was the money that has caught everyone's attention, an internet styled networked campaign also has as much potential to progress from the top-down structure in other departments, especially communications and field.




-By Bob Brigham

CNN Political Play of the Week

This is pretty cool, CNN's Political Play of the Week:

Netroots activism. Ever hear of it?

You will. Because this week marks its arrival as a force in American politics. It can claim the political Play of the Week.

The blogosphere is supposed to be the realm of anarchy. Bloggers are said to be fierce individualists, spouting off online. Sitting in the park. Alone.

Like Bob Brigham. He and his partner Tim Tagaris run a Democratic blog called swingstateproject.com. Brigham is in San Francisco. Tagaris is in Ohio.

They never met until this year when they discovered a cause, or more precisely, a candidate -- Democrat Paul Hackett, running in a special election for an Ohio congressional seat that most national Democrats wrote off as hopeless.

While Tim and I have spend dozens of hours on the phone and sent countless emails, it is true that we never actually met until the OH-02 Special Election.

The liberal blogs got organized.

"A hundred to 150 bloggers helped raise money, turned out volunteers, got people down to the district and emailed their friends in Ohio," said Bob Brigham of swingstateproject.com.

Ever hear of a blogswarm?

According to CNN blog reporter Jacki Schechner, "This was a pretty decent example of a lot of people getting behind one thing at exactly the same time." A blogswarm.

A word I wouldn't have expected to hear on CNN a year ago.

On the final day of the campaign they needed $30,000. "So Bob from Swing State sent out an email, made phone calls, said, 'Here is what we need, we need $30,000 in a very short period of time.'" Schechner said. "And the next day, ActBlue delivered a check for $60,000."

ActBlue is a Web site that raises money for Democrats.

In the end, Hackett lost. But he came a whole lot closer than Washington pros expected him to.

"This was a success," Hackett said in his concession speech. "We should all be proud, so let's rock on."

People often compare the Internet to the Wild West. Here's an update.

"The lone gunslingers of the blogosphere could work as a posse, and that's what let us raise an army," Brigham said. And carry off the political Play of the Week.

Crooks and Liars has the video

UPDATE: Now on Youtube.



-By Bob Brigham

Washington Post Takes Notice of Netroots in OH-02

Dan Balz and Thomas B. Edsall write:

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) warned fellow Republicans yesterday not to ignore the implications of the party's narrow victory in Tuesday's special election in Ohio, saying the public mood heading into next year's midterm elections appears to helping Democrats and hurting Republicans.

"It should serve as a wake-up call to Republicans, and I certainly take it very seriously in analyzing how the public mood evidences itself," Gingrich said. "Who is willing to show up and vote is different than who answers a public opinion poll. Clearly, there's a pretty strong signal for Republicans thinking about 2006 that they need to do some very serious planning and not just assume that everything is going to be automatically okay."

Democrats have a huge opportunity this cycle.

In his campaign, Hackett used television ads to emphasize his service in Iraq, including images of Bush speaking about the value of military service, while in interviews with the news media he hammered the president and the war. His words against Bush and the war produced strong grass-roots support, and yesterday liberal bloggers said they helped raise $500,000 for Hackett, the bulk of his $750,000 campaign funds.

"We raised a ton of money for Hackett," said Bob Brigham of the Swing State Project site ( http://www.swingstateproject.com ), who served as "coordinator of the liberal blogosphere" for the Hackett campaign.

It was a lot of fun.


-By Bob Brigham

On CNN Discussing the Blogosphere

Live, from New York, it's the Personal Democracy Forum! And CNN:

[JACKI SCHECHNER, BLOG REPORTER:]Now bringing in with me now or joining me now, rather, is Bob Brigham who's in from California. He came out for the forum. He's part of Blogpac.org. They're organizing a lot of local blogs online.

But first we wanted to ask you, why come out for a forum like this?

BOB BRIGHAM, BLOGPAC.ORG: It's priceless to be able to meet the people in person that you interact with on line. And the friendships that are cemented with real world interaction will have consequences for decades to come.

SCHECHNER: Now we were talking a lot about where blogging is heading in the future. There's been a lot of talk of national politics. But you've got a particular interest in local politics. How do you think that's going to play out?

BRIGHAM: In 2004 the buzzword was nationalization with the blogs. In 2006 the buzzword is going to be localization. People are working locally, bloggers are organizing locally. Leavemychildalone.com is organizing school district by school district. In Philadelphia, the bloggers are organizing around a candidate for D.A. Seth Williams (ph) and bloggers are beginning to interact with the people geographically they live closest to and work together as a team.

SCHECHNER: Now a forum like this you think that you're preaching to the choir. That it's a lot of people who are into the same thing. But you think there's some untapped potential out there. Who do you think are the most interesting political bloggers or who could be the most interesting political bloggers who aren't actually blogging right now?

BRIGHAM: There's a lot of great talent in the blogosphere currently. But as we see more and more people begin to blog, people with institutional knowledge who have been following local politics for years, who might have worked a campaign or two in college, as they begin to blog, with that institutional memory, I think we're going to see even more of an explosion in the dialogue.

-By Bob Brigham