what is influence?

Bill Rehm in comments to my dysphoric post below raised this important and basic question:

Define influence. Are you seriously arguing that the decision re: which blog software to use has any import at all?

I don't see it. Were we shaping Dean's policy positions? I doubt it. Would I want to be? Sorry, that's not my line of work. I support the man and respect his positions, although I didn't agree with all of them.


The definition of influence may vary between people, but here's mine: influencing the items on the agenda. Not the proposed policy solutions per se, but rather what the issues are that we want our politician to address.

For example, in the context of beating Bush - we all wanted Dean to come out swinging on the Plame Affair. He didn't, and a vital opportunity was lost. Another issue we wanted Dean to go after was the mistreatment of the military under Bush, which Dean partially addressed but never really developed into a coherent "Repblicans are soft on defense" argument. Kerry has succeeded in this recently and is being rewarded for it at the polls.

A more nuts and bolts example is the fact that the campaign advertisements were terrible. We all had universal agreement on this fact - but the campaign was utterly tone-deaf. The "switch" commercials were frankly too insider-y and came far too late in the game. Imagine what would have happened if the campaign had listened to Dean Nation's collective proposal of a "I am Howard Dean" commercial? And if that ad had played at the Superbowl?

The true measure of influence is an ability to change the priorities of the campaign - in actual campaigning as well as setting the policy agenda. In neither of these were we sucessful. The netroots were a goldmine of ideas in comment threads, of which the best ones floated to the top to become full-fledged posts. Had the campaign skimmed the best of these ideas, put them on the o-blog and refined them with additional feedback, so much more could have been achieved.

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