Today, rumors of new polls spread claiming that Ned Lamont is pulling ahead in the Democratic Primary in Connecticut. Nancy Skinner blogged about how Dick Cheney has come in to raise money for her opponent at a $1,000 a plate fundraiser and she has lost her voice dialing for dollars.

Last week, I was at DemocracyFest in San Diego, and had some great discussions with Christine Cegelis about the lessons learned from her campaigns. The key message is that we will not bring about change by doing the same thing that the incumbents have been doing for the past couple decades.

We must stop focusing on raising lots of money to do big media buys. Yes, it is important to be on the air, but that isn’t what makes democracy strong, or will help bring about a change in the balance of power. We must use emerging technologies to help bring us back to the retail politics that made democracy strong in our country.

First, let’s think about the importance of volunteers. I don’t know how many hours a typical volunteer puts in on a campaign, but Christine spoke of volunteers that would put in twenty hours a week for a couple months leading up to the election. Let’s say that you needed to pay these people to do the work they are doing, and you paid $10/hour. A thousand volunteers, doing a hundred hours of work at ten dollars an hour is the equivalent of a million dollars. We should be focusing more on this sort of ‘fundraising’. It helps rebuild democracy.

At the Lamont campaign, their advertisements have been viewed on YouTube alone more than 150,000 times and volunteers are out making their own advertisements. We’re not talking about an advertisement that is shown on broadcast television that people with Tivo’s skip over. We’re talking about advertisements that people go out of their way to watch. Meanwhile, Nielsen is reporting new record lows for the least-watched week in the history of their ratings of broadcast networks.

Back to Nancy Skinner’s campaign, I hope she gets her voice back soon. I hope she raises the money she needs. But, even more so, I hope that she raises an army of volunteers that will spread her message effectively around her district and online.

(Full disclosure: I work for Ned Lamont’s campaign)

By: Roger Hurwitz
Cambridge, MA

The killings and capture of its soldiers, first by Hamas and then by Hezbollah, gave Israel the need to respond, but left it the choice of how. Israel leaders took each case as an opportunity to destroy, dismantle or, at least, permanently cripple an enemy. On this view, the question is not whether Israel chose disproportionate force to coerce the return of its soldiers. Rather, can Israel achieve its larger ambitions and how much will civilians on all sides suffer for its attempts?

The Israel strategy is relatively simple: Degrade and deter the enemy through assassinations and bombing; make life hell for the other inhabitants, so they will turn on the enemy. In the meantime, no negotiations with anyone, but encouragement for people on the other side to start civil wars. In terms of a purely self-interested calculus, the first problem is that this strategy seldom works and sometimes backfires.

Two great films that shed very interesting lights on our current situation in America.

The Conversation (1974 USA 113mins)

Source: NLA/CAC Prod. Co: Paramount Prod: Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Roos Dir, Scr: Francis Ford Coppola Phot:Bill Butler Ed: Walter Murch, Richard Chew Art Dir: Dean Tavoularis Mus: David Shire

Cast: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford

Nashville

United States, 1975
U.S. Release Date: 6/11/75
Running Length: 2:39
MPAA Classification: R (Profanity, sexual situations, nudity, violence)
Theatrical Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Cast: Ronee Blakley, Henry Gibson, Ned Beatty, Lily Tomlin, Geraldine Chaplin, Michael Murphy, Karen Black, Keenan Wynn, Keith Carradine, Shelly Duvall, Scott Glenn, Barbara Baxley, Barbara Harris, Gwen Welles, David Arkin
Director: Robert Altman
Producer: Robert Altman
Screenplay: Joan Tewkesbury
Cinematography: Paul Lohmann
U.S. Distributor: Paramount Pictures

This past week, I attended two different conferences, the Games for Change conference, (06-G4C), and the Media Giraffe Project conference (mgp2006).

In many ways, they were the same conference. They both talked about the changing media landscape and what could be done to harness this change to bring about a more just and democratic world.

Yet within both of these conferences, there seemed to be two different conferences. The bifurcation could perhaps best be summed up with the old quote from George Bernard Shaw, that Robert Kennedy is so well known for adapting, “Some see things as they are, and ask why? I see things as they should be and ask why not?”

These were the two conferences. To play with stereotypes for a moment, one conference was of old white men asking why things were the way they are. Why is newspaper readership declining? Why is civic engagement declining?

The other conference was of wild eyed idealistic bloggers, dreamers, and assorted teachers asking why don’t we start teaching people the excitement of analyzing, understanding, and ultimately creating our own media? Some people even spent time talking about ways we can start doing this.

Granted, this is an over simplification, not meant to disparage old white men. Some people would probably call me an old white man, even though I was wearing a shirt that said ‘blogger’ instead of a suit. Yet this gets to where the real beauty of the conference was, when people from the two different conferences met one another and shared concerns and ideas, a sort of Project Harmony for media mavens.