Abstract
In this chapter, I delve into detail about how we built a campaign both on the ground and on the Internet. Among other things, I will look at a critical and much debated question: How has the Internet, which has changed our lives in so many different ways, changed politics, and how will it do so in the future?1
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Notes
The argument of this chapter parallels that of one of first serious analyses of the Internet in politics, Michael Cornfield’s Politics Moves Online (New York: Twentieth Century Foundation, 2004). Cornfield argued that the Internet had not revolutionized political campaigns but, rather, was a new tool that enabled politicians and citizens to carry out usual political operations in a different although sometimes more efficient way. That’s basically the case for issue advocacy as well, as the Internet is most useful when it reinforces traditional field organizing.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), vol. 2, pt. 2, ch. 9.
James Q. Wilson, Political Organizations (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
James Q. Wilson, American Governmnent, 4th ed. (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1989), 216.
Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004).
Dave Karpf, The Move-On Effect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), xxix.
Richard Kirsch, Fighting for Our Health (Albany, NY: The Rockefeller Institute Press, 2011), 68.
I’m a little embarrassed that I had not thought of this possible explanation before, because I took courses with Leon V. Sigal, whose book Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking (New York: D. C. Heath and Co, 1973) pioneered the study of newspapers as bureaucratic organizations. While Sigal’s book is about a long- ago era in journalism, I highly recommend the book to organizers as a guide to thinking about how to deal with the press. I’m sorry I didn’t reread it before or during the HCAN campaign.
On how Washington gained power by accepting limits on his power, see Gary Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (New York: Doubleday, 1984).
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© 2013 Marc Stier
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Stier, M. (2013). Virtually Real. In: Grassroots Advocacy and Health Care Reform. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341976_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341976_4
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