| Seriously, he's spent at least a year covering both the Connecticut and national progressive blogospheres (here he is last July talking with Howie Kurtz about the "tremendous" impact blogs were having on the Lamont-Lieberman race)... shouldn't he be well aware of the fact that My Left Nutmeg is not and never has been Matt Browner Hamlin's personal site?
Dodd's tech staff comprises Tim Tagaris, 30, a veteran of the Democratic National Committee and last year's Senate campaign by Ned Lamont; Tim Cullen, 33, a former software developer who did similar online work in Dodd's Senate office; Matt Browner-Hamlin, 25, known in the blogosphere for his myleftnutmeg.com site; and Brett Schenker, 28, a political consultant who is considered an expert on discovering new technologies and making them work for campaigns.
As Matt himself noted in a comment, this was not the only factual error in Lightman's exceedingly sloppy article about the Dodd campaign's tech team (he also blatantly misattributed two quotes from different people to Matt and apparently completely mischaracterized a quote by Andrew Rasiej).
Nor is his latest article the only indicator of what has been a consistently demonstrated cluelessness about the blogosphere, and a fixation on the horserace numbers as evidence of how seemingly every effort of the Dodd campaign online or off is either "laughable" ("Dodd's Showing In Polls Laughable", January 31), "flat" ("Dodd's Flat Campaign Breaks Out Tough Talk", May 14), or leaves the campaign "attention starved" ("Attention-Starved Dodd Gets Tough With New Ad", May 23).
One need only look at Lightman's headline description of the campaign's team as "young" (four people straddling either side of 30 years old is hardly "young" for an internet team on a campaign) and his pejorative accusation that they were "defensive" during the interview to get an idea of where his biases lie.
But there's a more basic dishonesty - and/or complete ignorance of online politics - that lies at the core of Lightman's criticisms of the Dodd campaign's online efforts. The metrics he uses to compare Dodd to top-tier candidates - the number of eyes on Hillary's theme-song YouTube challenge, the number of friends Barack Obama has on MySpace, the poll numbers that (shock!) didn't move in the hours following the campaign's website revamp - reveal nothing about the actual impact of the campaign's recent efforts. For instance, their pioneering use of UStream to provide unvarnished, unedited live presentations of the campaign in action and behind the scenes, in tandem with the candidate's strong leadership on Iraq and other issues, has given Dodd some real traction online in the past couple of weeks. Look at opinion leaders in the blogosphere, and there's ample evidence that what they're doing is working. Such movement obviously takes time to percolate in the polls (or on YouTube or MySpace), and there's no guarantee that it will continue (watch the next dKos and MyDD straw polls if you want a better metric). But it's ridiculous to imply that Dodd's online efforts - which started up in earnest only a couple of weeks ago - are falling flat because there's no immediate bump.
Given Richardson's very subpar and haphazard performances recently and Biden's innate foolishness and increasing forays to the right on Iraq, Dodd stands a real chance of moving to the top of the second tier in the coming weeks. And if he does, it will likely be due in large part to the campaign's successes communicating directly to voters online in innovative ways - with about one quarter the staff of the top-tier candidates.
As usual, Lightman is not giving the Dodd team anything approaching a fair shake here. But more fundamentally, he is showing that he understands very little about how the blogosphere functions... or that if he does, he's willing to pretend he doesn't in order to slam his favorite target.
(Disclosure: I did a few hours of freelance graphics work for Dodd in February, but no longer do.) |
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