Posts by Ari Melber

Ari Melber served as a national staff member of the John Kerry presidential campaign and as a legislative aide in the U.S. Senate.

Obama Supporters Organize to Protest Candidate's Stance on Spying
Posted by Ari Melber on June 30, 2008 at 9:39 AM.

Barack Obama tapped his sizeable grassroots network on Saturday, coordinating over 4,000 "Unite for Change" meetups across the country through the campaign's social networking portal, MyBo. At the same time, however, other supporters worked furiously over the weekend to organize a new MyBo campaign to protest and pressure Obama. Many activists are outraged by the Senator's recent announcement that he will back a controversial bill to grant the Executive more spying powers and immunize telephone companies accused of illegal surveillance. Both efforts demonstrate how Obama's national network, which broke fundraising records and turned the first term Senator into an unlikely presidential nominee, can respond to top-down edicts and spring into action for self-organized protests.

Since launching last week, the protest group, "Senator Obama Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right," swelled to one of the ten largest campaign groups on Sunday. (FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which the Democratic Congress is poised to amend under White House pressure.) It is the largest group of its kind on MyBo, which focuses on local networking, official campaign events, and constituency groups like "Women for Obama." It looks like the group grew through the Obama network, with a few web mentions on liberal sites such as OpenLeft and TPM, and it urges Obama to reject the "politics of fear" and lead Democrats to oppose the White House bill. Blogger Mike Stark says the effort demonstrates the kind of civic engagement and "open government" that Obama espouses, even if it delivers the "sting of social networking" pushback during a tight campaign.

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Obama's Race Speech on YouTube Tops Cable News Ratings
Posted by Ari Melber, The Nation on March 26, 2008 at 11:08 AM.

One week later, it's clear that Americans heard The Speech.

About 3.8 million people have now watched Barack Obama's Philadelphia address through the campaign's official YouTube channel, which has over 40,000 subscribers. "It is the highest viewed video ever uploaded by a presidential candidate to YouTube, surpassing Mike Huckabee's Chuck Norris endorsement video," says Steve Grove, who directs News and Politics for YouTube. Aside from the Obama channel, which promotes videos through blogs, news sites and supporter networks, another 520,000 people watched excerpts of the speech uploaded by random YouTube users. Taken together, the total YouTube viewers for Obama's speech over the past week beat all the cable channels combined. Last Tuesday, about four million viewers tuned into one of the three cable channels to watch the speech.

This is not the first time that Obama's YouTube audience has rivaled cable news. His second most popular video ever, a rebuttal to President Bush's final State of the Union, drew 1.3 million views. The President's actual address reached 3.2 million homes through a Fox News broadcast, making it the seventh highest program on cable that week. It is not a direct comparison, since the Presidential address is widely promoted and broadcast on many stations. Yet without the bully pulpit of the White House and its built-in television coverage -- or the high cost of campaign ads -- a candidate can now reach supporters and interested voters with unfiltered, even substantive addresses.

Of course, Obama's most popular YouTube video was itself a response to videos of Jeremiah Wright that had riveted cable news and YouTube. "If it wasn't for the replaying of Wright's remarks on YouTube, Obama wouldn't have been forced to give the speech on race in the first place," contends Slate's John Dickerson, yet "Obama decried the YouTube era of politics that reduces everyone to small, grainy clips endlessly replayed on cable news." But YouTube, just like television, depends on the programming. Salacious clips can always draw viewers. What is remarkable here is the overwhelming public demand for deeper, unfiltered campaign information -- regardless of who voters support. So Obama was not decrying the "YouTube era of politics" in his speech, as Dickerson argues, so much as the way that political brawling and cable bickering become the lowest common denominator of our entire public discourse:

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MoveOn Endorses Obama, Clinton Loses Vote by 40 Percent
Posted by Ari Melber, The Nation on February 1, 2008 at 11:12 AM.

Today Barack Obama earned the endorsement of MoveOn, one of the largest grassroots membership organizations in the United States, after clobbering Hillary Clinton by 40 percent in Internet balloting. Obama led the final tally 70.4% to 29.6%, clearing the supermajority required for the endorsement. MoveOn, which has never endorsed a presidential candidate before, boasts that it has 1.7 million members in Super Tuesday states. The group has over half a million members in California alone – roughly one out of ten primary voters in Tuesday's largest state.

"We've learned that the key to achieving change in Washington without compromising core values is having a galvanized electorate to back you up," said Executive Director Eli Pariser, "and Barack Obama has our members 'fired up and ready to go' on that front."

Obama welcomed the endorsement on Friday. "In just a few years, the members of MoveOn have once again demonstrated that real change comes not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up. From their principled opposition to the Iraq war – a war I also opposed from the start – to their strong support for a number of progressive causes, MoveOn shows what Americans can achieve when we come together in a grassroots movement for change," he said in a statement. "I thank them for their support and look forward to working with their members in the weeks and months ahead," he added.

Organizers said they would "immediately" begin mobilizing on behalf of Obama, leading turnout programs and phone-banking members of MoveOn in targeted states. The group made seven million "GOTV" calls for Democrats in the mid-term elections, and it has an extensive voter file database.

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Hillary Clinton Leads In Yet Another Worthless Poll
Posted by Ari Melber on October 8, 2007 at 6:20 AM.

This post, written by Ari Melber, originally appeared on The Nation

Hillary Clinton now leads her rivals in the crucial state of Iowa -- according to a meaningless poll released this weekend. Just last week, of course, politicos were buzzing about another worthless poll that showed Barack Obama leading the Iowa pack. These polls will continue to fluctuate wildly because it's very hard to determine likely caucus attendees at this point. But most Iowa polling is worthless anyway, since it doesn't factor in the state's unusual caucus and "viability" rules. (For more details, see my piece last week, Obama Leads in Worthless Poll.)

Even the professionals have trouble keeping all these polls straight. Here's how the AP described the Democratic horse race this weekend:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has taken the lead among Democratic presidential candidates in an Iowa poll, an encouraging sign of progress toward overcoming a big hurdle in the race.

And here's how the AP described the race, well, this weekend:

[Clinton is in] a much closer race in Iowa, where she is in a tight three-way contest with Barack Obama and John Edwards.

Clinton leads Iowa! No, it's a tight three-way race! No, Obama leads Iowa!

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Cut Cheney a break?
Posted by Ari Melber on February 15, 2006 at 12:06 PM.

This commentary originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

The Cheney shooting is inspiring many reporters to finally confront the Bush Administration. White House press briefings are newly "combative," reporters are shocked the White House kept them in the dark about something, and TV anchors sound like they won't let this story be stonewalled to death. But just as things are heating up, some critics want to contain this rare outbreak of assertive journalism.

And not just Cheney apologists, who whine that the "Cheney-hating press corps" should cover other news and the shooting "affects no one," but serious writers like HuffingtonPost's Robert Schlesinger. He argues this exercise will only distract from more important issues, so people should give Cheney "a break."

Now I also wish the media confronted Bush's policy failures with same vigor it covers shark attacks and hunting accidents, but that's no reason to give the Vice President "a break" when he shoots someone in the face, refuses to disclose it, sends out surrogates to joke about it, and now, after causing two trips to the ICU, still won't come before the public to answer questions on the growing scandal. (Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board is worried this "cover-up is worse than the crime.")

Of course, the shooting is not as constitutionally damaging as illegal domestic surveillance. It's not as deceitful as the lies that led us to war in Iraq. It's not as scary as Cheney's support for torture. All those issues merit more public outrage and media coverage. But they are not in direct competition for a finite amount of outrage and coverage. If anything, a sustained public discussion of one problem is likely to lead into others. For journalists, this could encourage a reassessment of how to cover this dishonest Administration, or at least unloading the emotional "baggage" of being bullied for so long, as Arianna proposed." For citizens, one salient incident can become a constructive metaphor for larger failures. Craig Gordon explores this idea in today's Newsday, with some hard data to explain the opinion landscape:

Already, some are questioning whether Cheney's accidental shooting of Austin lawyer Harry Whittington on Saturday will harden into metaphor, like Jimmy Carter confronting a rabbit on a golf course or Gerald Ford's stumbling - relatively insignificant events that crystallize the public feelings about a presidency. In this case, secrecy surrounding wiretaps and questions of competence surrounding Hurricane Katrina and Iraq could become wrapped up in the errant shot of a vice president whose approval ratings are among the lowest in the administration - just 24 percent in a recent CBS News-New York Times poll.

So the next time you hear this scandal is not receiving the perfectly proportional amount of coverage it deserves, don't sweat it. Cheney is finally in a corner for something, and he deserves every minute of it.