After the first House bailout vote went down in flames, I posted a K Street Cafe entry suggesting that it was ideology – not the flood of emails and phone calls to congressional offices – that determined the outcome. I noted that it was not fear of voter backlash that motivated legislators, as 77% of the “no” votes came from House members who had nothing to fear since they won their last election with more than 55% of the vote. In today’s Washington Post Outlook Section, writer Eve Fairbanks offers more data to support this theory by pointing out that none of the freshman House Republicans, who are closely aligned with the conservative Republican Study Committee, voted “yes” on the first bailout vote. She suggests it was conservative ideology that dominated their decision-making process.
So what turned it around the second time? Certainly the tax sweeteners and higher FDIC protection limits motivated some, but there was more evidence in the weekend papers that our K Street Café colleague, Colin Delany, said it perfectly with his blog entry last week: it’s all about relationships. Those people who built a relationship with a member of Congress and communicated their interest in the legislation influenced the outcome. This is a crucial lesson in grassroots advocacy: there is a significant difference in legislators’ minds between those people with an opinion and those with an interest. READ MORE »
Crossposted on Mediafuturenow.com.
My colleague Brad Fitch writes in the K Street Café about the bailout plan, “What’s Driving Citizen Outrage?”. Fitch takes a smart look at the factors underlying the passion, and recognizes a true “grassroots” advocacy campaign when he sees one. In fact, the bailout may be one of those seminal – and rare – political events where the citizenry is truly engaged in an uncoordinated explosion, and Fitch cites the 2006 immigration debate, the 1998 Starr Report and the 1989 Congressional pay raise as the only seriously comparable recent examples.
Wired magazine makes an analogous point in its coverage of the case, in “Online Bailout Outrage Jumps to Streets, and Into Lawmakers’ Inboxes”. It seems that the major advocacy groups organizing massive email, letter-writing and telephone campaigns are being eclipsed – at least this time around – by the virality of individual journalists and bloggers and websites launching often comical but all-too-effective pitched battles. As just one example, Wired mentions BuyMyShitPile.com, a parody site organizing collections of junk for submission to the government to also be redeemed in the junk mortgage bailout. (As of this writing, BuyMyShitePile claims stated value of its “junk” assets at $801,501,210,139.11.) READ MORE »
“The Hill” reports today that the bailout vote in the House this week was a “Crushing Failure for Lobbyists.” Hill offices are reporting a huge surge in constituent communications. Even earlier this week, I posted a blog that showed an increase in constituent communications as a result of free media coverage of the story. However, a quick analysis of the voting patterns for this week’s House votes suggests it was not grassroots pressure, lobbyists’ arm twisting, or even fear losing election that drove members. It was good-old-fashioned “conscience.” These folks just did what they thought was right.
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Posted by: Alan Rosenblatt
Rather than respond in the comments to a question from JK on my last post, Millennials at the Gates, asking for evidence of the reshaping of American politics, I will respond here.
I understand JK’s hesitation about waiting for the evidence. After all, I was a full-time academic for many years. I remember back in 1992 when I was on the Political Science conference circuit talking up Rock the Vote’s voter registration drive. I kept getting comments like, “We hope we are wrong, but young voter turnout programs never work,” from political scientists. Well, they were wrong. Rock the Vote register a million first time voters and for the first time since the 18 year olds got the vote, turnout in the 18-24 group went up.
I also like to remind people that many who waited until the evidence for television’s impact on politics found themselves on the losing end of a TV campaign by their opponent. If we wait for the evidence to arrive, we will always be behind the curve. READ MORE »
Posted by: John Wonderlich
I’m John Wonderlich, program director at the Sunlight Foundation.
For this introductory post, I’d like to do two things: explain a bit about what I do, and explain what I’m doing here.
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Cross-posted on e.politics
A tough question came up in a conversation with a visiting group of Danish communications professionals last week — how do you actually measure the effectiveness of social media outreach? At that moment, the questioner seemed to be looking for some grand sweeping mechanism, but I think the reality is much more complicated: how you measure social media depends on what you’re trying to make it do.
Trying to Grab Hold of a Cloud
Here’s the problem: as with so much communications work, the effects of social media outreach can be quite diffuse. Say your advocacy campaign has a video on your issue out on YouTube — how do you measure the influence it has on the public mind? Some thing with that network of activists you’ve laboriously built up through Facebook — how do you find out how much good they’re actually doing you?
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It all started with a conversation.
A few months ago I was chatting with some colleagues about the lack of a comprehensive resource online for public affairs professionals to keep up to speed on with the latest trends, tactics and strategies in our industry. There are certainly plenty of resources for political pros on how technology is shaping campaigns and elections, but relatively few on how the Internet and social media is changing the way public policy is formed and shaped.
We called on some of the best and the brightest – practitioners and observers in the public affairs realm — who are known for staying on top of the major transformations taking place in our industry to engage in an ongoing dialogue about how the nature of advocacy is changing. It is essential that all of the stakeholder groups in the issue advocacy world are involved - so we invited representatives from associations, think tanks, corporate goverment affairs offices, interest groups, the media, and from some of the key industry organizations in Washington DC including the Congressional Management Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.
The result is K Street Cafe - a collaborative blog made up of expert contributors who can provide context and analysis of the changing nature of advocacy, and the difference these changes make in the formation of public policy.
So you might ask - why the name K Street Cafe? Doesn’t K Street conjure up some of the negative images we have about how public policy is formed? Yes. But we intend this blog to be conversation about how K Street is changing - away from images of fat cats, smoke filled rooms and back room deals toward a K Street that is open, transparent and with a much broader participation from the public.
Of course, cafes have long been centers of spirited dialogue. We trust this blog will host vigorous conversations on a variety of subjects. And we hope you will join us in the conversation.
