The Daily Background

One of the things I love about the internet is that you can communicate with people you’d normally never meet or talk to offline. Just to give an example (and to awkwardly drop a name), I had an amicable conversation with Ben Smith, one of the (better) reporters over at The Politico last night over AOL Instant Messenger. We talked a bit about Giuliani and he shared a bit of insight on him that I normally wouldn’t have gotten without the internet.

Here’s another example from today. Thanks to social networking, people like me get to “rub shoulders” with people like Howard Dean’s 2004 Presidential campaign manager, Joe Trippi. I did just that today on Facebook. For your interest, I’m posting some excerpts from the conversation several college students (including myself), Trippi, and one of the reporters over at The National Journal’s Hotline (Marc Ambinder) were having about transformational politics versus transactional politics (essentially democratized and distributed politics versus top down politics).

Trippi:

[Gore] is completely capable of running a transformational campaign — That is exactly what he is doing right now on Global Warming.
[…]
The question about Gore is does he become transactional again once he becomes a candidate and has something to lose?

My response:

Just to expand on this point a bit… I think you’re very right with regard to Gore running a transformational campaign right now, as he’s starting to train his “climate ambassadors” (other people who will give a more generic version of his slideshow presentation all over the world with weekly updates to make sure the science is up to date), and this represents a more distributed, democratized effort. It’s still top-down, but there’s a big sense of people getting involved and taking more action on their own rather than waiting for detailed instructions.

I think one of the things about campaigns that aren’t centered around a particular figure (ie the climate campaign versus somebody’s presidential campaign) are easier to get people involved in and feel like they have a stake in, and thus more likely to become transformational (although there are bound to still be a lot of people who assume that Gore is just using the whole situation to make a political comeback). People really invest in transformational campaigns because they see themselves as part of a movement, not as just supporting an individual.

Trippi:

Arlen — what is interesting though is it still took a personality (Gore) to really get something transformational going on Global Warming.

I agree that sometimes the person that starts it all gets in the way — just isn’t capable of leading it anymore, This often happens with CEO’s of successful start ups. But its a rare thing for something transformational to not start with a leader.

James MacGregor Burns definition of a transformational leader by the way is:

“A transformational leader stands on the shoulders of his followers, expressing coherently those ideas which lie inchoate in the hearts of the followers — and in the process makes his followers into new leaders”

Is that not what Gore is doing right now? We all know we are screwing up the planet - deep in most of us is the inchoate idea that we should do something about it — but it just sits there — and then Al Gore comes along and a bunch of people take up the slide show and become new leaders.

So what if a Presidential candidate spoke to the things that lie inchoate in the American people — things they know they have a responsibility to do something about — and new leaders emerge across the country. What would that be like? Is one of them the Faouk? The guy that started the Obama Facebook gtoup?

Too early to tell but I think something really big is going to happen this cycle.

My response:

Joe, you’re right of course, that makes total sense about leaders or personalities being needed to kickstart a transformational campaign (of any kind). I wouldn’t be surprised if the modern environmental movement has seen more development in the last 6 months than it’s seen in the last six years.

How cool is that? Major props to National Journal’s Marc Ambinder for setting up a forum where people like me can interact with people like Trippi- an internet pioneer in his own right (Trippi is largely credited with Dean’s groundbreaking online campaign which showed people that serious money could be raised online).

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog