Newsreel Essay: Barack and Kevin 2.0

‘This is gastric juices churning’ is how Roy Cohn, infamous McCarthy offsider and US right-wing king-maker, describes politics in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America. ‘This is intestinal … bowel movement and blood-red meat. This stinks. This is politics. This is the game of being alive.’

Cohn played the politics of the deal and the threat, the weighing of favours and recrimination, the radioactive drip of innuendo. His ‘game of being alive’ was one where power was exercised by the fixers, the accumulators of secrets, off-stage from the public drama.

This remains a persuasive conception of politics: that it is a world of deceptive surfaces and vicious realities. Unless you’re a player yourself, you never know exactly what is going on, only occasionally does your eye catch the flash of something bright in the wings: the television documentary made after an administration has been voted out of office, with the former advisers, unable to hide their delight at revealing how the trick was done, confiding, ‘Listen. This is what actually happened’; the inclusion on a Senate ticket of a candidate no-one has ever heard of, but who has worked tirelessly in the dark places of the party machine and has now been granted his moment in the light, only to return, once elected, to the meeting rooms and bars in which he plies his craft.

The fixers flourish in old, two-party-system representative democracies such as Australia and the United States. Here political enmity has the rigid narrative of a Passion play—there’s good and bad and someone’s got to be the Saviour. Though the politicians are the mummers, it’s the backroom party professionals who keep the production on the road. Happy to maintain the pretence of rage in order to keep elections ‘us and them’ affairs, restricting access to the resources of government, they encourage the endless recycling of the tropes of difference long after these have any real correspondence to life in Melbourne, Ipswich, or Ohio.

As the stardust settles from Barack Obama’s victory and inauguration, and as we enter year two of life under Kevin Rudd, it seems appropriate to ask the question: Is the Cohn-esque notion of politics as an insider’s fix—‘I don’t want to know what the law is,’ he is supposed once to have said, ‘I want to know who the judge is’—finally passing? Are we witnessing the beginning of its end, and, if we are, do we have the internet to thank?

The 2007 federal election was the first in Australia where Web 2.0—that collection of sites and software devised expressly to facilitate social (and business) interaction between networks of users—was fully put into the service of political campaigning. Taking the politics of personality to a new level, Kevin Rudd invited Australians to become his ‘friends’, the first step down the path to becoming ALP voters, and join his MySpace and Facebook networks and log into his website, Kevin07.com, where they were then subjected to policy release by video download. John Howard, like an old uncle dragged onto the wedding-reception dance floor, reluctantly joined in the jamboree and invited us to connect to the somewhat stodgy www.pm.gov.au. Meanwhile, over on YouTube, countering the controlled policy announcements of the parties, we saw a range of far less respectful and vastly more entertaining campaign ephemera such as doctored ads, ‘mash-ups’, and political comedy from artists such as the rappers The Axis of Awesome.

In the United States, the basic figures describing the online component of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign are staggering: their email list held up to 13 million individual addresses; about US$500 million in campaign funds was raised online; a million people signed up for SMS messaging from Obama; 3.2 million people signed up as supporters on Facebook, and around 2 million became members of the MyBarackObama.com social network.[i]

Impressive as they are, these statistics don’t convey the way the technology was integrated into old-fashioned grassroots campaigning. For example, MyBarackObama.com didn’t just seek donations and sell the Democrat message, it was also used to recruit and train people to act as local campaign organisers and to connect them with fellow travellers—35,000 volunteer groups were eventually created. Unlike the McCain-supporting inhabitants of the Republican blogosphere, Obama supporters were encouraged to get up from their computers, out into the community, and into the ears of their fellow citizens … and then to hurry back and upload their photos and videos of the experience.

Clearly, then, Web 2.0 has the capacity to be a powerful organisational tool in a political campaign, particularly when, as in the case of Obama, that campaign is sold as a ‘movement’ that the voters partly ‘own’—an approach whose lineage encompasses both the civil rights push of the 1960s and postmodern advertising. By the end of the present election cycle there will no doubt be a new set of web-based phenomena for political parties to entice foot-soldiers to join their cause.

Is the impact of Web 2.0 any more profound than a simple oiling of the wheels of political campaigning? As argued by online advocates such as those at <deliberativedemocracy.net> and <thickculture>, can Web 2.0 facilitate discussion between people and their representatives in a way that genuinely alters party politics and democracy as we currently understand them?

Obama and Rudd have been happy to fan these expectations of change. In his book The Audacity of Hope (Text Publishing, 2006), Barack Obama writes of the importance of deliberative democracy and the urgent need for effective, post-partisan government. While some of this is common campaign-speak—politicians always promise to ‘govern for all’—the initial actions of his presidency, such as retaining Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and revamping the White House website, have shown at least some commitment to these ideals. Here in Australia, the Rudd government has run several ‘community cabinets’ and, of course, that eisteddfod of big ideas, the 2020 Summit (of which little has since been heard, except from those who weren’t invited).

Both leaders have also established their own ‘personal’ post-election websites: Barackobama.com and KevinPM.com.au. Each claims to promote a two-way flow of information with the citizenry; each also attempts to maintain election levels of interest in their protagonists. Skirting the mass media, they enable political parties to deliver messages in an unfiltered form to self-expanding networks of individuals. Barackobama.com, for example, links into sixteen social networking and content-sharing websites, including Flickr and Digg, as well as the usual suspects in Facebook and MySpace. It provides videos and blogs, as well as textual explanations of policies.

Rudd’s new site gives us the Prime Minister and his ministers in direct-to-camera, and clearly unrehearsed, explanations of policy decisions. It also hooks into five networks, the most recent being the SMS-updating Twitter. This texts messages to KevinPM subscribers, such as that of 19 November 2008, which gave us the insight that Kevin is ‘Honoured to be speaking at the Kokoda Foundation dinner tonight in Canberra’. Not really a ‘Yes we can!’ moment, but nice in an Iced Vovo sort of way.

The sites also make provision for individuals to email comments to the leaders. KevinPM directs the user to the ‘Get in Touch section, where you can submit comments and feedback directly to my team and me’; Barackobama.com provides several ‘contact us’ email options.

Neither site, however, despite the claims of Obama and Rudd, has the capacity to coordinate an online discussion of any meaningful kind between the leaders and the citizens they represent. While we could put this failure down to politicians’ incorrigible desire to control the message, it has to be admitted that any attempt to foster such discussion comes up against two sticky problems, namely, size—how to have direct policy debate with a population numbering in the millions?—and the web itself, where interaction takes place over thousands of kilometres but is gossamer thin. The new technology allows policy to be communicated from the top down in ever more alluring ways, but genuine internet-facilitated policy discussion remains elusive.

Beyond this, even if the technology could facilitate effective online policy debate, would that really drive fundamental change in the conduct of our democratic politics? Probably not, and for reasons that come back to our reluctance to be exposed to political conflict. The US and Australian representative democracies institutionalise conflict so as to enable their citizens to avoid it; the costs are low levels of community debate and, as a result, an inability to determine where the deep fractures in our society might lie, and if they can, or should, be bridged. US and Australian citizens need to be prepared to engage in that sort of discussion, a form of deliberative democracy, before the internet will be gainfully used to facilitate it. Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum does not apply here: the medium is not the message.

The deliberative ideal is that citizens come together in their communities to debate among themselves, and with experts and politicians, the major policy problems facing their neighbourhood, state or country. Deliberative democrats acknowledge that any discussion over an important political issue is going to be conflictual, but also argue that, while this conflict must be managed so all voices are heard equally and are not drowned out by the loud, the angry, the wealthy, it should not be avoided. And though there are legitimate limits to public debate—emergencies requiring quick decisions, or the sub-clausal minutiae of regulations—in town hall meetings in the north-eastern states of the United States, participatory budget processes in Brazil, and consensus conferences in Denmark, along with examples from many other parts of the world, people are already beginning to explore ways in which they might meet with their representatives to debate significant issues such as health and education provision, taxation and welfare, defence and immigration.

The internet helps expand this process by disseminating information and overcoming the tyranny of distance. For example, I am able to sit in Melbourne and use the web to see and engage with the views of farmers in the Riverina and consumers down the river in Adelaide on our national water policy. Without leaving my chair I can quickly discover the parameters of the debate and stick in my own two cents worth. The problem from the view of deliberative democracy is that I can also turn my computer off. I can jump to another site. I can choose to interact only with those who reinforce my views. I don’t have to deal with the inevitable conflict that ensues when there are competing visions over how to apportion limited resources. As Cass Sunstein found in the studies brought together in his book Republic.com 2.0, the ‘group polarization’ the internet appears thus far to foster, especially through blogs and some of the networking sites, entrenches extreme positions and makes genuine debate harder to achieve between those whose foundational beliefs may be in conflict.[ii]

Compare this with a meeting held at my local town hall last year to discuss the building of a freeway through, or, to be more precise, under, our neighbourhood. Views were expressed that I found unpalatable and ill-informed; others I agreed with; all of them I had at least to contemplate. Voices were raised. Gastric juices, no doubt, flowed. Not everyone who should have been there was there. Not everyone who should have spoken was given a chance. It was certainly imperfect. But, if for nothing else, it was important for this one thing: we were forced to face up to the reality of our fellow citizens—good, bad, ugly, and occasionally unhygienic. We couldn’t hide behind an internet pseudonym or blog persona, we couldn’t just turn off, we couldn’t choose to talk only with our own; we were present and we were arguing and, in a true deliberative democracy, you’ve got to find a way to live with that.

Barackobama.com and KevinPM tentatively hold out the promise of a reformed democracy, and hence the downgrading, if not the demise, of Cohn-style backroom operators. Certainly these sites, and government websites more generally, can help improve the level and quality of policy material made available to citizens, and thus present an opportunity to deepen the quality of citizenship in our countries. However, until their twittering, electronic networks can replicate the experience of having to stand face-to-face with someone you might completely disagree with, might never normally meet, and listen to their point of view with civility (however clench-jawed), there can be little hope that the net alone will fulfil the promise of a new, deliberative democratic era.

Notes
i. Jose Antonio Vargas, ‘Obama raised half a billion online’, Washingtonpost.com., 20 November 2008. Back to article

ii. Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0., Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007. Back to article