Media
Media
Two New Hampshires: Canvasing for Edwards
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/06/2008 - 10:56Yesterday morning I rolled off the futon in my brother-in-law's basement in Hanover,NH and prepared to go canvasing. We gave Fiona the day off so she could play with her cousins and got a little bit of a late start as we worked out the play schedule. We had been told to help at the Claremont campaign office. The office manager was glad to see us. He's a young guy from North Carolina fully of energy and working hard to deliver as many votes for Edwards as possible. Like in Iowa, the Edwards campaign is being outspent something like five to one. Dan said that the Hillary campaign had five staffers covering Sullivan county and had recently brought in a bus and two fifteen people vans full of volunteers. Outside, there were Hillary and Obama supporters doing visibility. Sullivan County looked like it might be a hard place to canvas.
Kim's New Hampshire relatives call Claremont 'Brick City' because of all the old brick mills in town. Would the message of a son of a mill worker resonate in an area where so many mills have been closed? Dan asked us to go canvas in Newport. Newport is the county seat of Sullivan County. According to ZipSkinny, a great site that extracts census data based on zipcodes, Newport (03773), has a population of 7649. The median income is $38,573. .4%, or about 30 people, have incomes over $200,000.
As we went door to door, we met a mother with a bad back worried about about how she would provide for her daughter, a man fighting jaundice worried about his health care, and people concerned simply about getting by as their income slipped further and further behind. We met people that desperately need someone that will fight hard for them against the corporate special interests. There were a lot of people still undecided and we had some great discussions.
An Invitation to Innovate, and Collaborate
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/28/2007 - 19:23The following is a comment I added to Tracy Joan’s diary on DailyKos about the Edwards My Vote, My Voice contest.
I’ve been fairly critical of all the Presidential campaigns this time around, including the Edwards campaign, even though I’m supporting Sen. Edwards. I’ve felt that they’ve looked at the tools that contributed to some of the successes of the 2004 election cycle, but have missed what is really important, the invitation to innovate.
I believe this is a step in the right direction. The Edwards campaign is inviting people to, hopefully, come up with some innovative advertisements. However, I would like to push this even further. We are at our best when we work together.
I thought about this as I worked on my submission for the contest. I recorded my daughter asking a bunch of those hard questions that six year olds are likely to ask. No, not where do babies come from. She’s asked questions like “Why can’t some of my classmates afford to go to the doctor?”, “When will Joey’s daddy come home from Iraq?”, or “Do you think I’ll get to go see a glacier when I’m older”? I’ve recorded a bunch of these questions and spliced them together into a video. You can see the video on Blip.TV. You will note that it is tagged with a Creative Commons license, “Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike” This means that someone more creative than I am is free to take it, work with it, and come up with something even better, if they also share it and acknowledge they got it from me. It is part of the reason I like to use Blip.TV. Videos there can be downloaded in their original format and then edited with programs like Movie Maker of iMovies.
I haven’t added the final part of my ad. I’m hoping to get a clip of Sen. Edwards talking about the Moral Test of Our Generation:
America lives because 20 generations have honored the one moral commandment that makes us Americans.
To give our children a better future than we received.
I know that CarolinaGirl has put great videos up on vSocial, so I’ve contacted her to see if I can use extracts from one of her videos. Hopefully, she’ll get a chance to extract a piece I’m looking for and share it with me.
I think that represents the real challenge. Can we work together, to share ideas, scripts, video clips or anything else so that we can come up with an even stronger message reflecting why we believe John Edwards is the person we need in the White House? I’m up for it. I might even be able to get Fiona make a clip for people if you need it.
Have we been thinking about the Dean Legacy incorrectly?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/19/2007 - 19:24In my previous entry, I asked, “Will any of the campaigns in 2008 or 2012 show the sort of bold courageous leadership necessary to have a campaign that is of, by and for the people?” It reflects the way people seem to be thinking about the question, “what is Dean’s legacy on upcoming campaigns?” Maybe that isn’t the question we need to be asking at all.
Whenever I heard Gov. Dean tell people, “You have the power”, my mind always went to that scene in The Life of Brian, where Brian tells the crowd, “You are all individuals” and everyone responds as if by rote, “We are all individuals”. Too often, I attended Meetups where people talked excitedly about “having the power” and then asking the folks around them what they were supposed to do with that power.
It’s All About Change
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/18/2007 - 10:56This week the TPM Bookclub is talking about The Legacy of the Dean Campaign, and two books, The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House, by Garrett Graff and Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics, edited by Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter. I wrote one of the chapters for Mousepads and am participating in the discussion at TPM. Below is my first contribution to the discussion there.
Zephyr has written about the nature of power and language. Garrett has written about message and medium. I’d like to focus on another aspect of what happened. It’s all about change.
When you get right down to it, that is a fundamental aspect of any campaign. Do we stay with the status quo, or do we embrace change? Incumbents argue for the status quo, challengers argue for change. In a primary of different challengers, the question becomes who will be the most effective agent of change, and what will that change look like.
In some cases, we look at the rhetoric that the candidates offer. This one with change this, that one will change that. Yet, we should look deeper. What sort of change is the candidate bringing about in his or her campaign?
My experience of the Dean campaign was that everyone believed what Gov. Dean said when he told us volunteers, “The biggest lie people like me tell people like you, is that if you vote for me, I’ll solve all your problems. The truth is You Have The Power.”
The Law and Media Project
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/11/2007 - 11:26As is often the case, some of the most interesting discussions at conferences and symposia take place away from the main panels, and for me, the same happened at
the Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace. During lunch I found about the Knight Foundation grant to Yale Law School to ‘Train the
Next Generation's Leading Legal Journalists’. While the grant was announced last May, this was the first I heard of it, and was pleased to get more details.
Some of the goals of the program are to study law and media, to promote interactions between lawyers and journalists, to provide opportunities for journalists to teach at Yale Law and to prepare law students for careers in media.
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