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Lowell Feld

Lowell Feld is the creator and head of Raising Kaine, a Democratic political blog based in Virginia, and writes for Daily Kos. He is the author of the forthcoming book Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics, with fellow blogger Nate Wilcox.

Josh Israel interviewed Feld on February 1, 2008.

As I understand it you started Raising Kaine to help elect Tim Kaine in Virginia in 2005?

Right.

Had you had any blogging experience before that?

Before that I had blogged on national blogs, mainly just posting diaries on Daily Kos and some other national blogs. I had also been heavily involved with the Draft Wesley Clark movement in 2003. That wasn’t necessarily blogging. Blogging was sort of just really taking off at that point. It was still in its infancy a little bit — in its early stages I’d say, not really infancy, but definitely early stages. So at that time I was posting mainly on Yahoo! Groups and using instant messaging and e-mailing and things like that to communicate.

Those out-of-date methods now.

Yeah, exactly. Things are changing very quickly with the technology and with the way people are adapting to it. How many people are getting online and using this new technology is really astonishing. Just in the last four years, since I was involved, like I said, with the Clark campaign in 2003, it’s just incredible how much has changed. And that same year, of course, 2003 was the Howard Dean phenomenon. I would say that really kicked off the rise of the netroots and the progressive blogs, in many ways.

What motivated you to get involved?

I guess you asked why I got involved with helping Tim Kaine. Before that I was pretty much like I think a lot of people, pretty dismayed back in 2002 with just the state of the condition of the country, the direction of the country under George W. Bush. The war in Iraq was part of it, of course, but there were many other factors for me. The environment is a huge issue for me, global warming, health care, education, a lot of different issues. I was very concerned about the direction the country was taking. I definitely did not want to see Bush reelected in 2004. So, when I saw Wesley Clark I thought he would be a great candidate who could beat Bush. Frankly, I didn’t think some of the other Democratic candidates at the time, even though I thought they had a lot of admirable qualities, could beat George W. Bush. I thought Wesley Clark had national security experience, etc.

So I got involved at that point. I actually saw Wesley Clark on Meet the Press, so a traditional medium, in June 2003. I immediately went to the new media, you could say. I went online. I did a search. I don’t even remember if it was Google or not, but I did a search for Clark. One of the first things that I found was there was a Draft Clark Movement, which I had never heard of. What is a draft movement? There was also something called the Meetup for Wesley Clark. Turns out that there were thousands of Meetups for Howard Dean, for Wesley Clark, for taking care of your cat, whatever, everything. That was a huge phenomenon in 2003.

So I ended up a couple of weeks later going to a Draft Wesley Clark for President Meetup in Washington, D.C. There were a couple dozen people there. Then I went to the one the next month and there were like, I forget, about 50 or 60 people there, or more, maybe 100 people. There were cameras and reporters there. It was like a really big deal. I got involved that way. Then after Clark lost the nomination, I did my best for John Kerry, but after he lost to Bush, I was very upset and depressed pretty much that Bush was going to be president for another four years. This was at the end of 2004, after Kerry had lost. I was sort of sitting around thinking of what I can do to make a difference. It was going to be a bad four years.

I came to the conclusion, sort of, that expression, “Think globally; act locally.” I decided to get involved locally in Virginia, which I had never really done before. I had mainly been focused on national and international, both with my job with the Energy Department covering world oil markets, and just in general, my background. My studies were on the Middle East and international relations. I just was not focused on Richmond. I was focused on Washington, D.C., and Riyadh more than Richmond, frankly. But I decided to act locally. So I was like, “What can I do?” I tossed some ideas around with some friends and kind of decided blogging seems to be taking off. I like writing. I think maybe that’s something I’d be interesting in trying.

So I had no idea if it would succeed, or if anyone would even read it. I started this blog, Raising Kaine, which is a play on the name of the man Tim Kaine who was going to be the Democratic nominee — he was lieutenant governor — for governor. I started a blog up and it just started growing. Now it’s pretty big. It’s a pretty big blog. It’s the largest progressive community blog in Virginia. We get over 3,000 visits per day now.

It’s evolved over time. Now it’s a full-fledged community blog, which means that anyone can go on there, register an account, post a diary, just like on Daily Kos, MyDD, and a lot of other national blogs. It’s a group blog. I’m not the only one who posts diaries on there. There are probably about 10 people, at least half a dozen who regularly, frequently post on the “front page” of the blog. My motivation was pretty much because I wanted to make a difference. I felt like the country was going the wrong direction. I like writing and I’m interested in politics.

And with your help, Tim Kaine was elected governor.

Right. I think the Virginia blogosphere at that time, when I started Raising Kaine, was a pretty small and kind of sleepy little blogosphere. Everyone was sort of cordial, even the right wing and the left wing. It really started heating up during that election for governor in 2005 between Tim Kaine and Jerry Kilgore, the Republican. It got much more heated. More people came in to the blogosphere; the traffic grew.

I think the Democratic blogosphere did a great job that year in helping to frame the issues and helping to really focus in on Jerry Kilgore: who the guy was, what he represented, and to talk about how Kilgore was pretty much equal to George Bush. This was kind of our theme throughout the year. If you like George W. Bush, you’ll love Jerry Kilgore — sort of like that. We also talked a lot about how Tim Kaine would continue the policies of the super popular Governor Mark Warner at the time.

Waldo Jaquith was kind of the leader. He has a blog in Charlottesville, Virginia. I call him the blogfather of Virginia. He kind of started the progressive blogosphere in a lot of ways in Virginia. So he was kind of the leader at the time, and he’s still one of the major bloggers in Virginia, and a leader. I think that the blogosphere did play a role in helping to elect Tim Kaine that year. So, it was a great experience to see we could make a difference.

Then after Kaine was elected, it was sort of like, “What do we do next,” and we immediately turned our attention to 2006, which is a congressional year. We had George Allen running for reelection for U.S. Senate. He was really running for president of the United States. He did not want to be in the Senate. He hated the Senate. He said it was boring, compared it to a wounded sea slug. He was bored out of his mind. He wanted to be in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2006 campaigning for president. My friends and I, we were like, we’ve got to figure out a way to prevent this guy from getting into the White House. We thought he was a disaster as senator, and we thought he’d be a super disaster as president.

Then we came across Jim Webb, former Navy secretary under Ronald Reagan, interested in running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat. We contacted him and next thing you know we’re corresponding with Webb. One thing led to another and we ended up meeting with Webb in late December 2005 and then kicked off this Draft James Webb Movement, which turned out to be rather successful in the end. It ended up growing into the Webb Campaign, in part, but also into a huge grassroots movement and I would say netroots movement — grassroots people who use the Internet heavily. And to help to get him in, help raise money, help to get signatures to get him on the ballot, which was totally a grassroots effort, and to help him win the primary and then the general election against George Allen by 9,000 votes. So it was an exciting year, 2006.

Are you planning on drafting anyone else at the moment?

No. Drafting, you’ve got to be really inspired and excited to jump into that. It’s a lot of work. I ended up actually quitting my job with the federal government in March of 2006 so I could just devote 100 percent of my time to politics and to helping raise money. I couldn’t do that as a federal employee; I was sort of limited. Right now I’m strongly supporting Barack Obama for president. I’m not drafting him, but I’m supporting. I don’t need to draft him. He’s running.

I’m also a consultant for a congressional candidate in the 10th district in Virginia, Judy Feder. But again, she didn’t need to be drafted. She was happy to run again against Frank Wolf, who’s the incumbent Republican. I’m supporting other candidates around Virginia, but I haven’t jumped in to draft. Maybe if the need arises, we’ll see. It’s going to be kind of hard to top the Webb experience anyway. That was a great experience. I think he’s a great senator and he’s doing a fantastic job. So we’ll see.

Can you talk a bit about the growth of online political donations over the last few years?

Well, it’s not the presidents you’re getting a little choked up about. It is amazing, the growth. Last year, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in my understanding, have raised more than $100 million each.

Not too paltry, huh?

No, not too paltry. I don’t remember exactly what Howard Dean raised in 2000, in the whole cycle, but it was much less than that. I think it was like — I could be wrong on this — $30 [million], $40 million at the most. It’s probably less than that actually. The political donations have skyrocketed. You had Ron Paul, who has only been polling in the single digits and also receiving single digits in the actual balloting. He raised, in one 24-hour period on December 17, $6 million. I believe he raised $18 million in the fourth quarter. This was really from small donors, not rich people. I think on December 17, I got a statistic that around 25,000 new donors came in and accounted for that $6 million. So that averages to roughly something like $250 a person. It’s not huge donations.

You’re seeing it just in January here: Barack Obama raised $32 million in the first 30 days of the month. That’s $1 million a day for the math-challenged. I think it was actually Joe Trippi last spring who made a comment that at some point there’s going to a candidate who’s going to inspire — I forget the exact number — I think he said like 100,000 people to give $100 or something. That’s $10 million right there. That’s all it takes now, for people to go online and practically just press a button, very little more than that, and they can donate money. They can also get involved in a lot of other ways.

So it’s been a lot easier to raise money. I think the netroots, the blogs, and all these new media have really been bringing in a lot of young people to the process. A lot of new people, and a lot of people who were disillusioned maybe, disenchanted with the political system and now are getting back. It’s also partly the circumstances the last eight years of George W. Bush, the war in Iraq, and a lot of factors. People are worried about the economy.

I think, to explain the tremendous surge in donations and involvement and excitement, you have to look at the social networking, Facebook and MySpace. You have to look at all the YouTube and online video, even things like Second Life, which is a whole other world, which I haven’t explored particularly.

There was Governor Mark Warner’s foray, right?

Yeah, I think he went in, and John Edwards had a Second Life headquarters, which was actually virtually vandalized by Second Life avatars from the right.

Well why should the Internet be any different than the rest of the world?

But that’s what goes on online. You get virtually vandalized.

I just pulled the FEC numbers. It looks like Dean raised about $51 million.

Total. Barack Obama raised over $100 million in 2007 and $32 million in the first 30 days of the month of January. So you’re talking about at least $130 million and still going on.

Something like three times.

At the end, I don’t know. If he continues this $1 million and it goes on for another month, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s much more than four years ago, and certainly inflation doesn’t account for that. It’s not because the value of the dollar’s been cut in half or a quarter. There’s a lot more going. You can’t just say it’s more excitement now either because there was a tremendous amount of excitement for Howard Dean and for Wesley Clark. So that’s not it either.

I think over the last four years, the online tools, the YouTube, social networking, all the things we talked about, the blogs, have mushroomed. State blogging, too, which, of course, I run a large state blog in Virginia, has grown by leaps and bounds. You’ve got excellent state blogs in almost every state in the country now, progressive political blogs I’m talking about. It’s encouraging people, definitely, to get involved and then to take action, including giving money.

One of the things that’s kind of interesting, historically, is that people giving money have sort of been perceived as those trying to gain access, trying to influence elected officials, dating back to the business community giving big bucks to Marcus Alonzo Hanna for the 1896 presidential campaign. What does a netroots donor contribution say to a candidate? Are they seeking influence or advocacy on behalf of some kind of personal gain?

In the case of Obama, let’s say, in January of this year, there were 170,000 new contributors that helped to raise the $32 million. It’s very hard to imagine that any one of those 170,000 people could have influence particularly.

It’s hard to imagine the candidate remembering all 170,000 of their names.

Right. That’s just one month. You’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. So for any one individual to have particular influence when they’re giving a couple hundred dollars is really hard to believe. I think this is a democratization going on. I think this is really the way democracy is supposed to work. You’ve got an informed citizenry and an engaged citizenry. It’s not like someone coming in and giving you a million dollars. I mean, then, yeah, you probably return their phone call and you probably, if they want a meeting, you could gain access that way. I definitely understand that. I’m not saying I approve of it, but I understand it. But when you gave $100 and you’re one of a 170,000 people in one month, no I don’t.

It sounds really idealistic, but I think most people who give $100 or $50 or $25 are not looking for access. They feel like, just like I did when I started Raising Kaine, the country’s going in the wrong direction and they want to change something. They’re inspired by a candidate. What we’re seeing mainly in this cycle is people are inspired by a few candidates, on the right and the left. Barack Obama definitely online. Hillary Clinton is raising a lot of money, too. I think a lot of that’s coming from more traditional donors. The Clintons have an extensive list. They’re getting some donations online, too, but her support online is no where near what Barack Obama’s is in terms of number of people.

And that’s true for the major Republicans compared to Paul, right?

Ron Paul had a couple of what they call money bombs, a 24-hour period where they just tried to raise as much money as possible. He did raise a lot, like I said earlier. Mitt Romney, he’s a multi-million, mega-millionaire. He’s spending his own money pretty much. He hasn’t raised much online, I don’t believe. The Democrats, overall, are raising much more than the Republicans. John McCain I don’t believe raised much money at all during the summer and fall because he was kind of written off for dead. He’s not really a netroots phenomenon particularly. [Rudy] Giuliani was not particularly a netroots phenomenon at all. [Mike] Huckabee to some extent was.

Huckabee had access to a large list, several million, mainly a lot of Christian Evangelicals. I believe the list may have started with the movie The Passion of the Christ. This guy’s in Mississippi or somewhere in the South, who has this list. It’s huge, like millions of people on there who are social conservatives that he was able to tap into. So that’s not exactly blogging, or some of the other things I’ve talked about. All of the campaigns are definitely trying to use these tools. They’re all putting up videos on YouTube, they’re all using the tools. Some are just connecting with people more than others.

There seems to be sort of a perception that the Democrats, so far, have been more successful with this. Would you agree with that? Have you any idea, if so, why that would be the case?

Yeah, I agree, definitely. I think the reason is that the American people are not satisfied with the direction of the country right now, overall. If you look at the polling, it’s overwhelmingly people do not feel like the country’s headed in the right direction. Bush’s popularity ratings have been very low. Generally speaking, if you look at the turnout numbers for the primaries and the caucuses in different states, the Democrats have consistently been having larger turnout than the Republicans in South Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, every state, by far. If you just add up all the voters for Democrats and all the voters for Republicans, it’s not even close.

This doesn’t mean the Democrats are going to necessarily win in November, but right now the energy is on the Democratic side. I’ve seen polls that show Republicans are not as satisfied with their candidates. A lot of Republicans don’t really like John McCain, for example, who looks like he’s going to be the nominee. On the Democratic side, Democrats seem to be overall very pleased with their candidates, at least as of before John Edwards dropped out and several others dropped out. The polling I’ve seen indicated Democrats were very happy with their candidates. They’re very motivated for a change and this country’s direction. Some people are angry and that motivates people.

Then I was out at American University the other day to watch Caroline Kennedy and Ted Kennedy endorse Barack Obama, and there were about 10,000 people: 7,000 squeezed into the arena at American University and about 3,000 who couldn’t get in anywhere, and a lot of whom just sort of stood around outside with no video, no audio. They just wanted to be near to this event, in the cold. I think that tells you where the energy is right now. Honestly, no offense to any of the Republican candidates, but it’s hard to imagine 10,000 people standing out in the cold for hours. I’ve heard, actually, some of the American University students camped out overnight to go see Caroline and Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama. I just don’t see that right now on the Republican side.

I mean Fred Thompson was supposed to be the new Ronald Reagan or whatever for the Republicans, and he washed out. He was somewhat of a grassroots phenomenon for a while for the Republicans, but he just didn’t turn out to be a very good candidate. So I think in sum, the Democrats have the energy right now.

Do you think the energy is what’s driving the online activism or the online activism is what is driving the energy, or some combination?

Yes, they definitely reinforce each other. People feel a certain way, but where did that come from? Part of it comes from, maybe if you watch it on TV, they see the war in Iraq, or they go online and they read and they’re in these somewhat self-reinforcing communities of likeminded people. There is something called the “echo chamber” effect online where you get people all sort of pulling in the same direction and it does tend to move people toward the polls, right or left.

People right now on the left, broadly speaking on the progressive Democratic side, are fired up. As Barack Obama likes to say, “fired up, ready to go.” They really are. They’re ready to go. They’re ready for change. They get information online, they find out how to organize, how to take their energy and apply it. They find out there’s a rally here or there. They find out there’s something they can do online or phone banking opportunities or whatever. They take advantage of that.

So, I think it’s both directions. Once you find out that you have power — sort of what Howard Dean said in 2003, “You’ve got the power” — people find out they do actually have some power and they have tools to enable themselves to use that power. Then they get more involved, they get more excited and they talk to their friends and they talk to other people and maybe they get involved. It becomes a self-reinforcing phenomenon.

Television is a very passive medium. Traditionally, the way it was, especially with just broadcast TV, it just beams a signal into your living room, or whatever into your TV, and you sit there and you receive it. You don’t do anything back to it. You don’t interact with it besides that. You might start talking to the anchorman or whatever, but you know you’re starting to lose it at that point. But on the Internet, the whole thing is interactive. By design and by nature it’s interactive. You could sit there and just stare at it. There are a lot of people who are called lurkers who just sort of read the blogs or whatever but they don’t really ever get involved. But a lot of people do. A significant percentage of people do get involved. They post diaries of their own and comments of their own and they join in the conversation.

I know you at some point during the web campaign became netroots coordinator, and on your site I saw there was a disclaimer on your post identifying yourself as such. There have been some controversies with bloggers being paid campaign staffers not identifying themselves as such. Do you think there should be any kind of ethical rules, sort of a self-policing universe?

Well, I think there should be ethics. I did that because I felt like that was the right thing to do. I was not told to do that by the campaign. In fact, I specifically brought that up when they hired me, or when I had my interview or whatever. I asked them if I needed to do a disclaimer and their response was pretty much “it’s up to you.” They didn’t feel it was particularly essential to do that. I felt like I owed it my readers of Raising Kaine to tell them where I was coming from. That’s my personal view.

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, or more. There are millions of bloggers out there. There’s no way we’re going to be able to enforce a universal standard, like a code of ethics for journalists or whatever. That’s my personal view. I think that bloggers should, generally speaking, yes, declare if they’re working for a campaign and being paid. That’s just the way I see it. I don’t know if that’s necessarily the right answer. For me, it is. There could be circumstances where, for whatever reason, someone just doesn’t necessarily want to or feel comfortable to state. It’s hard for me to imagine. I think in almost any case, if you’re getting paid, you should state that. That’s my personal view.

Right now, there’s no code of ethics really, and I don’t see there becoming one. I can’t imagine how you would enforce it. Ultimately, if a blogger is working for a campaign and they do something that causes controversy, it could potentially hurt the campaign. Just like any other campaign staffer, they’ve got to take that into account and the campaign has to take that into account, too. Remember in early 2007, John Edwards hired a couple bloggers and ended up, I don’t know if they were fired or they resigned or whatever, but they left the campaign because it turned out that they had obviously written a lot of things over the years and some of them were considered offensive. There was a rightwing Catholic group, the Catholic League I believe it was called, objecting to some of the writings.

In the end, everyone involved felt like it just wasn’t going to work out. You can put any disclaimer you want there and say, “The writings that I’ve written in the past in my life do not in any way reflect the views of John Edwards.” But people are going to say: “Wait a minute. John Edwards hired you. Didn’t he read your writings from the past?” It’s just like hiring anyone else. You’ve got to vet people. I think it’s more than ethics. Practically speaking, your behavior could affect the very candidate you’re supporting. There are potentially real impacts in real life. You should take that into account.

Last question, I’ll sort of plug you. You have a book coming out, Netroots Rising?

Yeah. In late June, I’m coming out with a book on the netroots. Praeger Publishers is the publisher. I co-authored the book with Nate Wilcox who worked for Mark Warner when he was running for president and is a political consultant. He’s from Texas. The full name of the book is Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists is Changing American Politics. I think it will be interesting. I think so far we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on the book. We’re going to take people through some of the highlights from 2002, 2003, up to through 2007 really, of some of the best moments of the netroots and the blogs and the citizen activists. The web campaign certainly gets prominent treatment in the book. There’s a chapter on the Wesley Clark campaign, a lot on Howard Dean.

I think it’s an interesting book, myself. I think it’s an interesting topic, which is why I was happy to co-author it. I appreciate the plug. This is my first book so it’s all kind of a new experience. How do you market a book? Like I said, I think it’s an interesting topic and it’s only going to be continuing to grow as far as I can tell in terms of people’s involvement online. Traffic keeps growing.

The corollary question there would be sort of in 2004 we saw meetups and money; in 2008 it’s MySpace and YouTube. What next?

That’s the thing. Four years ago, did anyone foresee YouTube? When the infamous “macaca” video, George Allen in the 2006 campaign against Jim Webb, when he confronted the tracker, we had someone videotaping George Allen and the young man was of Asian-American decent. S.R. Sidarth. George Allen turned to him — this was in southwest Virginia, the Breaks, Virginia, in a state park. The crowd was all white, mostly men. It was like about 50 people or something, I believe. He specifically singled out Sidarth, pointed at him, and of course the rest was history. It was captured on video. We posted it on YouTube. The blogs and the mainstream media picked up on it. Of course, that became a huge story.

In 2004, did anyone foresee something like that happening? In 2004, 2005, George Allen would have made those comments and what would have happened? S.R. Sidarth wouldn’t have been there at all because we wouldn’t have had a tracker probably following Allen around with a video camera. Even if we did, he would have come back and he would have said this is what happened, maybe showed people on the campaign the video, maybe tried to shop it around to the mainstream media outlets. You couldn’t just post it. There wasn’t a YouTube. You couldn’t foresee that YouTube would develop necessarily in 2004. You didn’t foresee that Facebook was going to develop.

In four years from now, who knows what’s going to be. Cell phones are developing very rapidly as a communication method in terms of political campaigns. Text messaging is a big deal now. I’m sure that will continue to develop. Second Life, who knows? Maybe that will become the big thing. Everyone will be an avatar and you’ll have virtual campaigns in 2012. I don’t know.

They’ll need to get better security for their online, Second Life campaign headquarters if they do that.

You’ll have Secret Service avatars. I can just see this now. What’s amazing is that radio lasted for decades and really dominated, then you had television, decades of that. Here you have, just in a few years, so rapidly, new technologies coming on and just coming to almost dominate, penetrate almost every household in America. Cell phones, 10 years ago, who had a cell phone? Even five, six years ago, I don’t think they were as ubiquitous as they are today. Who had high speed Internet connection five years ago? Very few people. It was mostly dialup. A lot of people had AOL.

Things change very rapidly. To try to predict what’s going to be in four years, it’s hard to know. I think you’re going to have somewhat of a mashup of all these different media. You’ve got TV shows online. You’re going to have TV becoming more interactive where you can actually talk back or do something with your TV. Now, of course, you can decide when you want to watch a show. It’s not like it’s beamed at you and you have to watch it right then and that’s it. You’ve got TiVo and all these other things. The way we interact with communications technology is changing very rapidly. I would not even venture a guess in four years. It may be like Star Trek in like eight years. I don’t know.