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The Internet is Changing American Politics Forever
The Internet is changing politics forever. It is not changing politics ten and twenty years down the line but it is changing politics and personal political involvement today. The effect is measurable and it is changing things. In fact it is going to be impossible to ignore.
The first presidential campaign where the Internet played a factor was Clinton Vs Dole in 1996 and the Internet was a mostly a Xerox of what mainstream paper and TV media had to say. Then the Presidential Campaign of 2000 and Bush vs Gore Internet news and research played a big role but was more about informing the public rather than motivating.
By the way Al Gore did invent the Internet demilitarizing it for civilian use anyway.
So Lets look at how is the Internet changing politics now in 2003 and next year in the 2004 election.
Education
American democracy can not survive without a well informed and educated public. The Internet is an incredible powerful tool to learn about the issues. You can learn the official statements from your elected officials. You can watch speeches and debates from CSPAN.org any time you want and you can actually fast forward and pause to get to the good stuff. You can look up voting record and campaign funding records in an instant. This does not require a trip to the library or to a local county clerk and search through huge books this can be done NOW. This kind of research was possible decades ago but it was much slower and harder to do.
Involvement
You can find groups that support the candidates and issues that are important to you. Politics has become something that your average voter listens to on the news and once a years or so they go and pull a lever or punch out some chads. Or do a half ass job punching out the damn chads. Tool like Meetup.com are becoming a massive tool to organize and get people involved in ways that we have not seen in my generation.
Non-biased
TV and Print news is filtered for length and the first and foremost purpose of the corporate media news is to sell advertisements and newspapers. Some are biased to the left and some are biased to the right and some just suck up to the corporations that own them but they are in the business to make money. The Internet allows you to hear from and interact directly with the people involved with the issues with out having to sit thorough a 30 second sound byte sandwiched between five minutes of ads. Politics have been dependent on the mainstream and corporate owned press to reach the voters. The Internet is allowing the politicians and voters an alternative and they can cut out the middle man.
Special interest groups
Not all issues are being championed by the established parties. In fact almost all political ideas started from special interest groups who championed issues. It does not matter if it is the NRA, NAACP, NOW, or the EFF you can find out about the group and issues they represent and get involved.
Fund raising
I first want to say that I am proud to be a Howard Dean supporter. If you like him or not he is changing fund raising and how campaigns are run. His campaign is going to be studied and emulated for years to come. He started out as a Governor from the small rural state of Vermont and he has challenged the established democrat Washington DC power base using the Internet to gather and mobilize supporters and raise funds. He has been creating online fund drives where supporters donate small amounts but thousands of supporters give repeatedly smaller amounts of money than large donors at two thousand dollar lunches. That is true grass roots campaign and when it scales up as he gets the nomination it can match and beat the high dollar contributions of the Washington DC insiders and the sitting president. Last quarter he broke all democrat fund raising records including President Clinton in 1996. with an average donation of $88 online and in person 188,165 voters donated a total of $14,786,510! That is how he is beating the big labor money of Dick Gepheart and the ketchup money of John Kerry. And when it scales up to the national level with a united Democratic Party with the Greens and Independents it can beat the oil money and tax cut kickbacks of the incumbent president. That is real campaign finance reform.
Contacting your representatives and candidates
The Internet allows you to find out how to contact your representatives and candidates. Steve Jobs of Apple has been quoted in saying that he hoped that the personal computer has helped more people write their congressmen (I actually have two female senators in Washington State) than helped the pentagon build more bombers. Building bombers is a big deal in Washington State because Boeing is still sort of here.
The Internet is changing how Americans are doing politics not in the dot-com Bill Gates future but NOW. Some people have said that Generation X know more about the Star Wars movies than who their senators are. Well I know who my senators are and my favorite star wars people is Admiral Akbar and Wedge.
Jake at October 3, 2003 
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Comments
w00t! Wedge!
Constantly turning down promotions just to say in the action.
Posted by: Matt at October 3, 2003 3:03 PM
