K Street Cafe

Congressional offices this past week reported getting swamped by emails and calls from constituents who are angry about the $700 billion bailout that Congress will vote on this week. Congress.org, which offers a free service allowing constituents to e-mail and write their Member of Congress, sent over 100,000 communications last week on the topic – one of the biggest turnouts for a topic in the last few years. But what is really driving that outrage? Congressional offices sometimes deride grassroots campaigns that originate with groups seeking to influence legislative outcomes. (Some staff seemed perturbed that the Founding Fathers included the phrase “petition the government for a redress of grievances” in the First Amendment.) This kind of surge, however, is hard to ignore. Citizens read about the bailout, see a number that is hard to conceive of, and get angry. It’s easy to understand why people get angry when you see the number: $700,000,000,000.

The lesson out of this surge in citizen advocacy is two-fold. First, content and issues are still powerful drivers of advocacy. In February 2003, Moveon.org got millions of people to call and fax Senate offices to oppose the War in Iraq, virtually disabling the Senate phone system (which said as much about technology in the US Senate as it did about advocacy). A few months later, Moveon.org tried a similar campaign opposing the Bush tax cuts and got much less of a response. The moral of the story is that it’s easier to get someone worked up over a war than it is over a tax cut. Similarly, when people hear the words “bailout of Wall Street” mentioned about a gazillion times on cable news, the populace gets a tad miffed.

Second, as much as we see the growth in power of the Internet, mainstream media is still a powerful driver of advocacy. This story may be fanned by the Internet, but its mainstream media – newspapers, television, talk radio – that is the first source of information for the public. In the last 20 years only a few issues have sparked this kind of constituent outrage: immigration reform in 2006; the Starr Report in 1998; congressional pay raises in 1989. In all these cases the kindling that began the fire were from old-fashioned, ink-on-paper newspapers. While there is ample evidence in the last 12 months that the Internet may play a crucial, if not determinant, role in this presidential election. Don’t say your prayers too soon over Grey Lady of the New York Times. She and her sister papers can still work John Q. Public into a lather.