John Edwards' campaign wanted to be Dean 2.0, counting on netroots support to power him to victory. But his online momentum has stalled.
From the moment Edwards launched his 2008 campaign by posting a video of his announcement speech on YouTube, he seemed poised to win the title of most internet-savvy presidential candidate. His slick-looking website, his wife Elizabeth's regular posts to the top-rated political blog DailyKos, and his hiring of high profile veterans of Howard Dean's 2004 internet-fueled run like Joe Trippi and Matthew Gross all signaled that Edwards would be making a strong play for netroots support. In the campaign's early days, the media breathlessly covered the campaign's online know-how and swallowed the hype that Edwards '08 would be Dean version 2.0 - bigger, smarter, and better at using the internet to harvest money, volunteers, and votes.
Things haven't quite turned out that way for Edwards.
When a prominent internet strategist for John Edwards was interviewing prospective bloggers to work on the former Senator's 2008 campaign for president, he wooed one potential hire over baklava in New York City. It was January 14, 2007, just three weeks after Edwards' official entry into the race, and the candidate spoke that day at a Martin Luther King Day commemoration service at Riverside Church in Harlem. The strategist told the blogger, Lindsay Beyerstein, author of the left-wing blog Majikthise, that Edwards' campaign would tap the power of the internet in revolutionary ways.
As Beyerstein put it, he proclaimed "how John Edwards was going to be a different kind of candidate. We, a new generation of Internet-savvy activists, had finally come of age. We were going to help Edwards run a campaign that was totally outside the Beltway." He promised the Edwards campaign "was going to be a decentralized grass-roots operation," and before leaving the cafe, offered her a job as Edwards' official blogmistress.
From the moment Edwards launched his 2008 campaign by posting a video of his announcement speech on YouTube, he seemed poised to win the title of most internet-savvy presidential candidate. His slick-looking website, his wife Elizabeth's regular posts to the top-rated political blog DailyKos, and his hiring of high profile veterans of Howard Dean's 2004 internet-fueled run like Joe Trippi and Matthew Gross all signaled that Edwards would be making a strong play for netroots support. In the campaign's early days, the media breathlessly covered the campaign's online know-how and swallowed the hype that Edwards 2008 would be Dean version 2.0 - bigger, smarter, and better at using the internet to harvest money, volunteers, and votes.
Things haven't quite turned out that way for Edwards. Looking at fundraising totals tells part of the story. True, Edwards posted decent figures by raising approximately $3.3 million via internet donations in the first quarter of 2007, out of an overall haul of $14 million. That was approximately three times as much as he raised online while running for president in the first quarter of 2003.
But in the second quarter, Edwards' fundraising numbers dropped, as his $9 million total came up $5 million short of what he was able to raise from January through March. His rival Obama, by contrast, has blown Dean's 2003 figures out of the water. During the second quarter of 2007, he raised nearly four times as much as Dean's second quarter 2003 total - $32.8 million, of which $31 million can be used for the primaries. $10.3 million of Obama's haul, or about a third, was from online donations, compared with $3.5 million for Edwards. He outraised frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who took in only $27 million overall, with $21.5 million in primary dollars. And he beat Edwards in the fundraising race by more than 3-1, including more money raised online than Edwards collected from all sources.
Edwards also has lagged behind in his total number of contributors, another crucial way to measure the breadth of a candidate's support. In the first quarter, Edwards reported contributions from 40,000 individual donors, versus Obama's 104,000 and 50,000 for Clinton. In the second quarter, Edwards gained an additional 60,000 donors, but Obama added more than 154,000, for a year-to-date total of 258,000 who have made 358,000 individual contributions. In comparison, throughout Dean's 2004 campaign, he attracted approximately 318,000 donors who anted up 454,000 times. Clinton declined to release her donor numbers for the second quarter in advance of the July 15 reporting deadline.
Early online promise fades
It's not for lack of trying to recreate Dean's magic that Edwards is coming up short in the fundraising department. Edwards has signed up several veteran Dean staffers, including Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi. One of Edwards' first announced hires for 2008 was Matthew Gross, who serves as Senior Advisor for Online Communications. Gross was Director of Internet Communications for the Dean campaign and launched the first presidential campaign weblog, Dean's Blog for America. Since 2004, Gross had relocated to Greensboro, N.C., an hour's drive from Edwards' national campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill. He was close at hand, and seemed a natural pick.
Next, Team Edwards needed a head blogger. The Dean campaign had Zephyr Teachout, an outspoken staffer in her early thirties who became the most prominent voice on Blog for America. Edwards wanted similar star power. So they put the word out into the blogosphere.
Back to Lindsay Beyerstein, of Majikthise, who was one of the first to be offered the job. As told to Salon, on that January afternoon, she immediately sensed trouble. "I'm probably not ... the person you want," she said. "I mean, I'm on the record saying that abortion is good and that all drugs should be legalized, including heroin. Don't you think that might be a little embarrassing for the campaign?" Beyerstein is also an atheist, and blogs about her religious views regularly. "(He) assured me that my controversial posts weren't a problem as far as the campaign was concerned. They were familiar with my work."
Incredibly, Beyerstein was promised she wouldn't even have to abandon her personal blog. "He noted, he hadn't given up his own blog, and neither had another member of the Edwards Internet team." In the end, she declined the campaign position, noting that "a bunch of Internet staffers with private blogs sounded like a disaster waiting to happen."
In mid-February, blog trouble did strike the Edwards campaign. The two bloggers ultimately hired, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, came under withering fire for things they'd previously posted to their personal political blogs. Anti-religious charges against the bloggers were leveled by right-wing attack dogs like Bill O'Reilly, Michelle Malkin, and William Donahue, president of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
Clearly, these hires were not properly vetted by Edwards' staff, since bloggers' words are available on the internet for all to see. Despite the candidate's declaration of support, within a week's time, both bloggers had quit. The episode hurt Edwards by giving his right-wing critics ammunition to say he supported anti-religious bigotry, but the effects on his standing in the liberal blogosphere were a wash. He drew praise for publicly supporting the bloggers, but their quick resignations left a bad taste in some corners - those who persisted in believing Marcotte and McEwan had been forced out.
Edwards would continue to stock up on former Dean staffers. On April 19, former Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi announced on the Edwards campaign blog that he had reconsidered his retirement from politics and was signing on as a senior Edwards adviser. This move followed the earlier hire of Trippi's most senior associate from his consulting firm, Daren Berringer, as Edwards' national field director. In addition to advising Edwards on strategy, Trippi was said to be joining the media team and helping to create Edwards' television, internet and radio ads. In a July 1 profile, the New York Times' Adam Nagourney reported that Elizabeth Edwards had advocated hiring Trippi "in large part to address her concern about lackluster fund-raising by the campaign."
Another of Edwards' major internet hires was Ben Brandzel, brought on board as Director of Online Communications. Brandzel was formerly Advocacy Director for MoveOn.org, and an organizer for Dean. Brandzel's arrival was followed by a Memorial Day stir when the campaign's online team asked anti-war Edwards supporters to stage protests at Memorial Day events. On a new website created by the Edwards campaign called supportthetroopsendthewar.com, people were urged to "buy a bunch of poster-board and markers," and "at a picnic or with family and friends, make signs that say ‘SUPPORT THE TROOPS — END THE WAR.’ Bring them to your local Memorial Day parade. Then take a digital photo of yourself and your family or friends holding up the poster and tell us about it. We’ll include it in a ‘Democracy Photo Album’ on our site."
Sounding suspiciously like a typical MoveOn.org e-mail appeal, the idea drew fire from the usual right-wing suspects, but also condemnation from veterans groups and mainstream newspaper editorials. Elizabeth Edwards wisely amended this plan by subsequently asking supporters not to protest on the Monday holiday, only the weekend before, because "Memorial Day itself is not supposed to be a day of protest. It's a day of honor." Lesson? What works in an advocacy group's e-mailed action alerts, directed at a narrow group of activists, doesn't always translate into effective ways to promote a presidential campaign.
Edwards' critics on the right had tasted blood during Bloggergate, and from that moment on intensified their efforts to malign his personal character in the hopes of derailing the Edwards campaign. They seized upon the existence of a two-minute video called "I Feel Pretty" that had been uploaded to YouTube in November, 2006 by an unknown Edwards skeptic.
The video contains behind-the-scenes footage of John Edwards arranging and fixing his hair for two agonizingly long minutes with the help of a female stylist, assumedly prior to a campaign appearance. It's set to the tune of "I Feel Pretty," from West Side Story. Fairly tame stuff, as campaign gaffes go. The footage is similar to unguarded candidate moments like those captured in the classic campaign trail documentary "Feed," shot during the 1992 New Hampshire presidential primary.
Unfortunately for Edwards, it reinforced the pre-existing storyline established by his political opponents ever since he stepped onto the national stage - that he was a blow-dried phony, more hairspray than substance. Larry Sabato of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia said Edwards risked being labeled a "pretty-boy," and longtime Roll Call columnist Norman Ornstein called the video "one of the more politically devastating things I've seen." The Republicans have spent years trying to paint him as the "Breck Girl," and somebody on Team Edwards should have immediately realized how dangerous this video might be.
Instead, the Edwards campaign has worked hard since the start of the 2008 campaign to drive traffic to YouTube, assuming that viewers who visited the site to learn about John Edwards would primarily view the campaign's own videos. In one of them, Edwards tells viewers, "I've come to the conclusion I just want the country to see who I really am - not based on some plastic Ken doll you put up in front of audiences." And until April, total viewership of all Edwards' video content on YouTube remained about steady with the number of viewers who had stumbled onto the single "I Feel Pretty" clip.
Then, on April 17, Edwards gave his critics a surprise gift. News broke that he had gotten two $400 haircuts during the first quarter, and according to his finance reports, the campaign had paid for both. Edwards claimed he had sat for the cuts in hotel rooms, on the campaign trail, and hadn't known they would be that expensive. He said it was a billing mistake for the campaign to have picked up the tab, and quickly reimbursed his treasury $800.
But his haircuts still became the political punchline of the moment. Leno and Letterman milked it, Edwards' right-wing enemies pounced, and rival candidates took aim. Unlike other Edwards missteps, such as the news that he had accepted a large salary from a New York-based hedge fund for the super rich during 2005, the haircut flap had accompanying visuals. Predictably, views of the "I Feel Pretty" video soared.
As of July, it's now the first thing that pops up when someone does a simple search for "john edwards" on YouTube. It's been viewed over 800,000 times, with more than 300,000 views clocked during the first two weeks that news of Edwards' $400 haircuts broke in mid-April. By comparison, it took only 400,000 YouTube views of former Sen. George Allen (R-VA)'s infamous "macaca" moment to help seal his loss to Jim Webb in 2006.
How badly have the haircut brouhaha and his other stumbles hurt Edwards? According to polls compiled by the site RealClearPolitics, his average standing in national polls has fallen from 17.8 percent in April to 11.5 percent by mid July. In the liberal blogosphere, Edwards' defenders have consistently condemned attention given to the haircuts as proof that the mainstream media is out to get a candidate whose policy positions are seen as hostile to corporate interests. But most admit the story has done damage. On June 18, DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga posted a commentary called "No freakin' Clue," about the vulnerabilities of all the major Democratic presidential candidates. He singled out Edwards' ineffective response to the haircut mess as his campaign's biggest gaffe to date. The post drew nearly a thousand comments, and half were about Edwards' hair.
What should the Edwards campaign have done about its hairy YouTube situation? Credited to Chuck DeFeo, e-campaign manager for Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, the concept "flooding the zone" means to upload a torrent of random videos to YouTube as soon as a damaging video surfaces. The videos should share the exact same titles and labels as the already existing, damaging YouTube clip, since the aim is to make it difficult for users to find the video they're searching for.
So for starters, Team Edwards could have flooded the zone. Not by following DeFeo's strategy entirely, but by encouraging their supporters to upload their own videos about how the price of a candidate's haircuts is a distraction from more important issues. Or they might have uploaded some new, campaign-produced content, and worked to get it noticed.
Like devising a video starring John that took the vanity issue head on by spoofing it. Media guru Mandy Grunwald put a variation of this tactic to effective use for Hillary Clinton in her recent YouTube parody of the Sopranos finale. The campaign could have orchestrated a viral reaction, by directing supporters to forward the clip to friends and embed it as a video link within posts and comments on high-traffic blogs. All in the hopes that something unrelated to "I Feel Pretty" would end up the most-watched John Edwards video on YouTube.
At the Democrats' CNN/YouTube debate on July 23, the Edwards campaign unveiled a new, 30-second spot designed for YouTube that might have fit the bill nicely. Appropriately set to the song "Hair," from the Broadway musical, the video features scenes of the Iraq War, Bush's "Mission Accomplished" moment, and Hurricane Katrina victims. At the end, the spot asks, "What really matters? You choose." Better three months late than never.
Several of Edwards' other initiatives as an e-candidate haven't lived up to their hype. He got a lot of press for his early presence on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, as well as the sheer number of sites where his staffers set up campaign pages, more than two dozen in all. A few months into the campaign, many of the same pages had negligible traffic, and some hadn't been updated since their creation.
Similarly, Edwards got buzz mileage out of being the first candidate to start using Twitter, a site that lets you post short, two-sentence snippets about what you're doing at any given moment. But, as skeptics of the service have noted, who really cares? Aren't the same people who want to follow what John Edwards is doing every hour on the hour already rabid enough about his campaign not to need any more hand-holding?
Although Joe Trippi hasn't yet turned Edwards' internet fortunes around, he recently made news starring in, what else, a YouTube video for the campaign. He and deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince attempted to make a pecan pie using John's mother's homemade recipe, during a fundraising push timed to coincide with the candidate's 54th birthday. They posted the video showing them baking and burning the pie to YouTube, featuring a cameo from Elizabeth seeking donations. "We brought in close to $300,000," said Trippi. "All we spent was a couple of bucks for the milk and eggs." But so far, only 39,696 views. And increasingly, that number counts.
Can Edwards Catch Up?
It may be that the Edwards staff, technically proficient and experienced with online organizing as they are from their work on Dean's campaign, aren't doing anything especially groundbreaking with their internet strategy. It's possible that the self-inflicted wounds John Edwards has suffered over supposed issues like haircuts and hedge funds have dented enthusiasm for his candidacy online, just as they've dragged down his standing in national polls. Or it could just be that Edwards is no longer the freshest face in the race. In 2008, it's Obama who's the newcomer, and the candidate most likely to inspire passionate involvement on the part of folks who have never worked on or donated to political campaigns before, whether online or off.
Ironically, only days after announcing the hire of yet another Dean campaign veteran, former political director and Joe Trippi protege Paul Blank, Edwards explicitly told reporters they should look to Dean's implosion as a reason not to count him out of the race. "Money will not decide who the nominee's going to be," Edwards said in an AP interview, spinning his lackluster recent fundraising totals. "Everyone will remember Governor Dean who out raised everyone else by more than 2-to-1 and wasn't able to win the nomination." In order to avoid Dean's fate, Edwards had better hope his campaign learns a lot more lessons fast about the perils and possibilities of campaigning in the YouTube era.
(The full version of this article, "John Edwards Needs a Reboot, But Obama's Got Buzz," is available at The Latest Outrage.)