Kerry is not using the internet enough to get his message out

I_like_chicken

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Tue Sep-21-04 03:54 PM
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Kerry is not using the internet enough to get his message out

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/20/red.blue.tm/index.html

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The campaign also keeps a close eye on the blogs, using them, just as it uses Limbaugh, to mainline information to the G.O.P. faithful. "Blogs are what talk radio was a few years ago," says Bush campaign communications director Nicole Devenish. Her staff members regularly write, along with the message for the talk-radio circuit, the one that will go out to blogs and websites that link to the Bush campaign site.

Bush staff members rely on technorati.com and truthlaidbear.com, which track political blogs and websites to see what items in local papers, on websites and in blogs are getting the most hits. "If a story moves up through the rankings and linking, we can know," says one of the Bush staff members assigned to alert the rest of the team about which stories are moving through the blogosphere. "We can get indicators about stories before they break elsewhere. It's like an early-warning system."

<snip>

But some Kerry advisers think he has missed an opportunity to rally voters to his cause using the Net. "I don't think this campaign really understands the new technology," says one. "Yes, they raised money with it, but they don't see it as an organizational tool." The reason, he says, is that the team still steers by the stars of the New York Times and the TV networks. Senior adviser Mike McCurry reads the Daily Kos and a few other blogs, but most Kerry aides don't and instead rely on one staff member to provide an overnight summary. The Internet is not their medium. "It's not where they live. It's not how they talk to each other," says the adviser. "The Kerry camp hasn't moved. It's where campaigns were 20 years ago. They are going to do it the way they did it in '88 for Michael Dukakis. They are going to do it on TV, but broadcast television is damned near irrelevant for the rest of the cycle. Things move too fast now."

That failure is strange because the Democrats have seen the changes coming from a long way off. It was Clinton, after all, who played the sax on Arsenio and talked about his underwear on MTV. The Democrats invented the war room, having learned from the evisceration of Dukakis that every attack must be answered.
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DU is also mentioned in the article, see if you can find it.

One thing I don't understand is that Bush always plays to his base, and it seems to work, yet the democrats don't do that. If it works for Republicans, why won't it work for Democrats. I personally think Kerry should start playing to his base more and work on getting out the vote, instead of using a message aimed at people who don't bother to listen to ANYBODY(ie undecidedes). So stop worrying about how you appear on CNN, and start talking to your base(ie DemocraticUnderground).