Posts by Matt Stoller

Matt Stoller is a political activist/blogger in DC, and was an editor at MyDD from November 2005 until June 2007. He also consults for the Sunlight Foundation, FreePress.net, and Working Assets as well as proactively networking other progressive bloggers/internet activists and progressive professionals.

Obama Stands Up to Bush, the FCC, and Big Media
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on May 16, 2008 at 9:58 AM.

John Eggerton at Broadcasting and Cable has the story.

The fight over the Federal Communications Commission's Dec. 18 media-ownership vote set up a potential battle between the current president and a senator who wants to be the next one.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) Thursday urged the House to follow the Senate's lead and pass a resolution of disapproval, an unusual legislative maneuver that would invalidate the FCC's decision to allow TV and radio stations and newspapers to be co-owned in the top 20 markets, subject to some conditions.

After the Senate approved the measure, Obama, a co-sponsor of the bill, released a statement saying, "I urge my colleagues in the House of Representatives to expeditiously pass the legislation."

He framed the vote, as he has before, as standing up to "Washington special interests," a campaign theme. "Our nation's media market must reflect the diverse voices of our population, and it is essential that the FCC promotes the public interest and diversity in ownership," he said.

The FCC decision to consolidate yet more media was opposed by 99% of public comments. As Paul Rosenberg noted in this comments, this might be the single least popular decision by the Bush administration ever. But Obama, as he did with his media and tech plan, took this further, and called for diversity and representation for the public interest in media ownership.

With ownership levels for minorities and women in media in the low single digits, Obama is really saying that it's time to reshape our media system. In discussing Reagan, one of the great conservative media reformers, remember he made the following comment.

"I didn't' say I liked Ronald Reagan's policies," Obama explained. "What I said was that was the kind of working majority we need to form in order to move a progressive agenda forward."

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Disruptive Party Building: From a Straw to a Funnel
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on May 15, 2008 at 11:29 AM.

The evolution in field and the reimagining of politics continues apace. Back in May, 2007, I pointed to this quote from David Plouffe.

"Don't get me wrong," said David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager and Rospars's boss, "the Internet is a powerful organizing and fundraising tool, and it's getting more and more important every day, but it's still not the persuasion and message tool that TV is."

Though I criticized him at the time, I believe Plouffe was correct. Obama's speech on Wright was perhaps a singular messaging moment for the internet, and the pushback on the gas tax came from the internet. But by and large, the messaging from Obama has been TV messaging, and it has worked. Plouffe was correct about the internet's impact on field, as I noted at the time.

Social networks will be combined with voter files, which have seen dramatic improvements since 2000. And fundraising, field, and media will have converged. Candidates will be putting out youtube clips early to raise money, identify supporters, and win primaries. All of this has been tested already, and it works.

Rock the Vote, in 2004, registered 1.2 million voters with a simple online voter registration download tool. That's more than twice as much as they had ever registered in any other cycle, including the youth-spike year of 1992...

The number of 18-29 year old voters who voted in 2004 versus 2000 jumped from 15.8 million to 20.1 million, an increase of 4.3 million. With Facebook, MySpace, and Youtube turning intensely political, it's pretty clear that voter registration, and specifically, being able to count voter registration and compete over it, will be a killer app.

Finally, field will be at least in some part measurable and put online. Facebook alone has 22-24 million members, and is growing at 150,000 members a day. MySpace is over 100 million. And though it's unclear how many of these user accounts are citizens and how seriously they take participation in these public spaces, the fact that there are these public spaces, and that they are gargantuan, is a game-changer. My guess is that the opinion leaders in these communities are traditional pundits and stars, but it doesn't have to be this way, and bands and bloggers are in the mix as well.

If Rock the Vote experiences the type of growth of regular Web 2.0 startups like Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, etc, there's no reason that 18-29 year old voting block can't expand its share of the electorate by 3 or 4 points. This would swing Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Iowa, and Ohio. And it would put North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas into the swing category, while pulling New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania out of swing state territory.

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Obama's Consolidation of the Party
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on May 8, 2008 at 7:47 AM.

Brownsox blogs.

Over 1.25 million Indianans voted yesterday for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primary.

Over 1.1 million Indianans voted for Jill Long Thompson or Jim Schellinger in the Democratic primary for Governor of Indiana.

In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry received 969,000 votes in the state of Indiana...in the general election.

That is stunning. The primary has been exceptionally good for party building. Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship.

Voter Registration: Obama has launched a 50 state registration drive.

"That's why I'm so proud that today our campaign announced a massive volunteer-led voter registration drive in all 50 states to help ensure every single eligible voter takes part in this election so we can take back Washington for the American people."

I have heard from several sources that the Obama campaign is sending out signals to donors, specifically at last weekend's Democracy Alliance convention, to stop giving to outside groups, including America Votes. The campaign also circulated negative press reports about Women's Voices Women's Vote, implying voter suppression.

Obama Organizing Fellows: Here's Obama describing them:

Basically what we've done is we've been attracting so much volunteer talent, so many young people who have gotten involved in the campaign, that we wanted to give a handful of them an opportunity to have some more intensive training. So we've asked them to apply for fellowships. I think they're called Obama Fellows. They will get intensive training, and they will be put on staff and will have an experience, starting in June.

These are unpaid positions, and they will be used to do field organizing, message, and helping to "continue to build the movement". This is pure leadership development, though it continues the class-based diminution of talent by refusing to pay, a problem outlined in Crashing the Gates.

Money: MyBarackObama.com: With 1.5 million donors, this campaign has blown away anything we've ever seen in terms of grassroots fundraising. The technology is all centralized, so Obama knows the name, address, giving patterns, and occupation of every donor out there, as well as social networking information, like who the best raisers are.  He has bypassed Actblue, and will probably end up building in a Congressional slate feature to further party build while keeping control of the data.

One email from Moveon to their full list can bring in between $100k to $1M for a candidate, with $1M being the very top end of the range. With one good email to his list, in a few months, Obama will probably be able to bring in $1-3M for a Senate candidate under attack or split that among several. 10-20% of the money going to Senate candidates this cycle might come from Barack Obama's internet operation. Stunning.

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West Virginia Secretary of State Disenfranchising Thousands of Obama Voters?
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on April 29, 2008 at 5:00 AM.

I got a call today from Mark Levine, the election protection attorney for Donna Edwards and one in whom I have a good amount of trust, and he told me about a brewing problem in West Virginia which will probably end up disenfranchising thousands of Obama voters. Here's the nub of the issue. West Virginia has an open primary, which means you can vote even if you are an independent. However, if you are a Democrat or a Republican, you are automatically given a normal ballot in a primary. If you are an independent, you are pointed to a touch screen device which does not list a Presidential choice.

If you are an independent, you have the option of requesting a Democratic or Republican ballot so you can vote in the Presidential primary, but you have to request it. And unless you know to request it, you will end up with no vote in the Presidential primary. The Secretary of State has decided not to inform people of this fact, which will leave potentially thousands of voters in West Virginia who came to vote for Obama without a choice.

Independents, in other words, are being disenfranchised. There's a full press release on the flip.

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Politico Reporter Plays Fast and Loose with Anti-War Organizer's Words
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on April 26, 2008 at 1:41 PM.

Journalist Martin Kady II wrote a story today in the Politico that I criticized here.  Here's the specific problematic passage.

Leaders of the anti-war movement are also accepting that their best hope is a symbolic vote.

We're advocating putting as many of the provisions in the first round" of the legislation, said John Isaacs, executive director of Council for a Livable World, which is part of a larger anti-war coalition led by MoveOn.org. "We recognize that ultimately the wars are going to be funded, ... that some type of supplemental will be passed.

John Isaacs denied saying that this would be a symbolic vote, and it's quite obvious that a war funding could have conditions - a timeline for withdrawal for instance - attached, obviating the point of Kady's paragraph.  Furthermore, I have confirmed with Moveon that neither Eli Pariser, Nita Chaudhary, or Ilyse Hogue spoke with the Politico for this article.

I am emailing Martin Kady II to ask him which leaders of the anti-war movement he means, why he quoted a member of a different group to represent Moveon, and whether he will provide the full context of Isaacs's quote.

UPDATE:  I have gone back and forth with Kady numerous times, and he will not provide me with information on which anti-war leaders he or other Politico reporters talked to, nor would he provide evidence to back up his claim about anti-war groups.  Furthermore, when pressed, he changed the wording from 'leaders' to 'members' when characterizing the anti-war proponents he apparently is citing.

Ryan Grim, who helped Kady write the story, instantly sent me the full quote by John Isaacs, which, as you can see, undercuts Kady's article.

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Countering Petraeus' Iraq Spin
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on April 6, 2008 at 7:58 AM.

This week is a tremendous messaging opportunity on Iraq for anyone who wants to take it. General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker are testifying in the House and the Senate on Tuesday and Wednesday about the surge. The goal from our perspective should be to pose the question of whether our presence in Iraq is making us safer, rather than focusing on levels of violence and the tactical questions surrounding the surge. Barack Obama frames it correctly with this question.

Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also wants a quick end to the war. On Friday, he said: ""We still don't have a good answer to the question posed by Sen. (John) Warner the last time Gen. Petraeus appeared: How has this effort in Iraq made us safer and how do we expect it will make us safer in the long run?"

By far the worst framing is done by Carl Levin, speaking about the surge.

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Do Americans Really Want a War Hero for President?
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on March 28, 2008 at 4:44 PM.

McCain is obviously hinging his whole campaign on his POW time in Vietnam, with this spot closing with 'An American President Americans Have Been Waiting for'. This is a frequent tool he deploys when he speaks with the press, saying things like 'I haven't been questioned this hard since Hanoi'.

I can't help but think that it's a foolish narrative. 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 all saw the candidate without military service elected over the candidate who had served, in several cases heroically. There's a standard conservative narrative about America, one that existed before Hollywood but has been perfected by the entertainment business. In that narrative, baseball was a pastoral sport untainted by money until greedy city corruptors got their mitts on it, rural America is a place free of sin and greed, war is glorious and divine, segregation was an anomaly, businessmen are self-made, and Americans want a hero for a leader. It's the Horatia Alger myth spun in various webs outward, a timeless perfection that is America.

Liberal myths look different, and focus on love of country not as the embodiment of perfection but as the embodiment of our own capacity to improve who we are. This demands an honest understanding that yes, we have flaws. The story that Obama and Clinton tell by their very presence is about our ability to change direction, include those who are different, and build a diverse messy democracy that works. It's a much more real and beautiful story in my opinion, and it's also more powerful at this moment when we are confronted with immense tragedies, many of which are of our own making. And people know this. There are no Rambo style movies coming out anymore emphasizing the indestructable muscle bound American heros and dominating the culture. The top eight grossing movies of 2007 were Spiderman 3, Shrek, the Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, I am Legend, the Bourne Ultimatum, and National Treasure: Book of Secrets. All of these emphasize either flawed heros doing battle with themselves, an incompetent, overpowered, or actively malicious state, the apocalypse, or an ironic challenge to mainstream cultural norms as the route to happiness. This is just not a good environment for an excessively sincere call to serve instruments of national power.

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Will Racial Prejudice Send Old Democrats Running to McCain?
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on March 14, 2008 at 6:36 AM.

Here's the first bit of evidence I've seen on how race will matter from the primary to the general.

The vast majority of Democratic voters say they would support either Obama or Clinton over McCain. But in an Obama-McCain matchup, 14% of Democratic voters say they would support McCain, compared with 8% who would do so if Clinton is the nominee.

One-in-five white Democrats (20%) say that they will vote for McCain over Obama, double the percentage who say they would switch sides in a Clinton-McCain matchup (10%). Roughly the same number of Democrats age 65 and older say they will vote for McCain if Obama is the party's choice (22%). Obama also suffers more defections among lower income and less educated Democratic voters than does Clinton.

In addition, female Democrats look at the race differently depending on the matchup. While 93% of women in the party say they would vote for Clinton over McCain, just 79% say they would support Obama over McCain.

A quarter of Democrats (25%) who back Clinton for the nomination say they would favor McCain in a general election test against Obama. The "defection" rate among Obama's supporters if Clinton wins the nomination is far lower; just 10% say they would vote for McCain in November, while 86% say they would back Clinton.

While race is often considered the most important factor, I do not actually think that is the case here.  The most obvious parallel, where a sizeable chunk of Democrats chose to vote for an incredibly hawkish maverick style politician with an undeserved reputation for liberal politics, was the 2006 Lieberman-Lamont race.  I in fact said that the 2006 Senate race at the time was a test run for John McCain's campaign, and all campaign strategists working on the Presidential race noticed exactly what the limits were of the liberal coalition at that time.

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Watching the Senate Rot in Slow Motion
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on February 16, 2008 at 8:44 AM.

First of all, I'm really glad we elected Jim Webb a Senator from Virginia. He has worked on some essential topics, including military contracting, Iran and prisons, that few politicians will touch. And he's far better than the racist and somewhat sadistic George Allen, who in his youth apparently used to beat people with pool cues.

That said, Webb has been incredibly underwhelming as a Senator; his response to the State of the Union last year was stunningly good, with a promise that Democrats would show Bush a different path if he refused to change policies on Iraq. Unfortunately, there was no follow-through whatsoever, and Webb's credibility has been shot full of holes, with bad votes on FISA, tax policy, and censuring Moveon members like me (AliceDem in the comments reminds us of his poor votes on the Peru Free Trade agreement and his letter asking the FCC to allow more media consolidation). He has in some ways become a sad joke of a figure, a heroic figure neutered by his own deference to the authoritarians he ran against and at one point in his life, worked for. He endorsed George Allen and George Bush in 2000, and in some ways, he still does.

I expect him to be a great Senator one day, but as of yet, this environment is designed precisely around his weaknesses, not his strengths. Though he is willing to take on tough issues, he is unable to make any progress. Military contracting, Iran, the Webb amendment on Iraq - all have been stymied, with record disapproval from the public against Democrats for their failures. It's as if he cannot bring himself to use actual leverage against the Commander-in-Chief, because that's not how one does business.

What I find especially interesting is how his failed leadership has had such a devastating impact on his staff. Mark Levine details a conversation he had with a Webb staffer on the FISA legislation. It's a long and interesting conversation, and it shows how frustrated this staffer really is at the pressure received about his vote on this and other matters. As it happens, I have worked a bit with this staffer, and I like her very much, but it is clear that the lack of dialouge from Webb with the liberals who got him elected has created a tense and difficult environment and filtered down.

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Al Wynn Attacks Donna Edwards Because...She Didn't Recieve Child Support
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on February 8, 2008 at 10:12 AM.

This is getting really ugly. Below is a new robocall on Donna Edwards by Al Wynn, attacking her for not being a member of the DC bar and for having tax liens against her.

This is a pretty standard tactic from a desperate opponent who is using a subtle attack on women to shore up his base. What the robocall doesn't say is that at the time Edwards had financial problems, she was a single mother who wasn't getting child support and did not have health insurance for herself (though she did for her son). A medical problem threw her into debt, which took a long time to pay off. Wynn is also trying to make it appear as if Edwards was thrown out of the DC bar, when what happened is she simply stopped practicing law and so stopped paying dues. The robocall ends by saying if Donna can't take care of her own finances, how is she going to handle the Federal budget.

Most of the accusations are outright misleading or just not true, but there's a deep irony here, and it leads to Wynn's ugly past. It's not just his irresponsible votes against the estate tax repeal, or massive energy subsidies that blow a whole in budget. Wynn has been foreclosed on at least twice, and his divorce in 2000 was so messy that his ex-wife accused him of moving out during Christmas and then arranging to have the house foreclosed on and skipping child support payments. His ex-wife also joined the campaign of his Republican opponent. How Wynn treated his wife and daughter, and his petty financial problems, are not interesting or important, except that he is now misrepresenting Donna's personal life experiences to stay in office.

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Obama Wins Indonesia and More Primary News
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on February 5, 2008 at 10:15 AM.

* Obama wins 75% of the votes from Democrats abroad in Indonesia.

* Clinton is up by 10 in the latest SurveyUSA poll in California. There are lots of polls out there, but I have one piece of advice. Don't stake your hopes on Zogby, ever.

* I got this NAACP Presidential questionnaire filled out by Obama and Clinton. They have almost no policy disagreements, except Obama doesn't include green energy in his budget proposals. I find Michelle Obama's statements about whether she'd support Hillary Clinton in line with the general arrogance of the Obama campaign.

* The kids are loving this one (to your right) on the youtubes. It really is awesome, though not quite as good as 'You and I' by Celine Dionne.

* Be aware of the womenfolk. Cato at Dailykos discusses the Boston Obama rally with breathless excitement.

Walking past the thousands of people, I was immediately struck by how young everyone was. I would estimate that 75 percent of the crowd was under 35, and it may have even been higher than that. Many were clearly college kids (BU, Northestern, BC, Suffolk, Emerson, Umass Boston, and scads of community colleges are in the immediate vicinity). Of course this rally was taking place late at night on a Monday, so a lot of older people probably didn't feel like getting home at 12:30 AM like I just did. Anyway this bodes well for Obama because most MA polls are probably vastly under sampling these younger voters who have only unlisted cell phones, and who appear ready to hit the polls en masse tomorrow.

Young people have more time to go to rallies, so it's not clear to me that this is an advantage. Todd Beeton went to the Hillary town hall and he found it boring and oriented towards women. And I have certainly heard this a lot.

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MoveOn Considers Making a Democratic Endorsement
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on January 31, 2008 at 1:23 PM.

I alluded to the creative class institutions moving to Obama yesterday, and sure enough, Ari Melber reports on the biggie.

Spurred by John Edwards's withdrawal from the race on Wednesday, MoveOn surveyed a sample of its members to gauge endorsement interest, according to a source with knowledge of the group's operations. Then MoveOn set a deadline of 11 am Thursday for members to back a virtual endorsement vote. If a majority support the idea, virtual balloting will run overnight, open only the group's 3.2 million activists, and an endorsement could be announced by Friday.

MoveOn has never endorsed a candidate for President. Last cycle, it required a 50 percent threshold for its presidential endorsement, and Howard Dean fell 6 points short. But now MoveOn has raised the bar to 66 percent-- a supermajority that will be hard for either candidate to meet. MoveOn members were largely split between Obama, Edwards, Kucinich and Clinton during its three virtual town halls about public policy last year.

Melber notes that MoveOn's relationship with DC politicians is strained, and I hear this all the time. Lobbying groups that work with MoveOn are often deeply ambivalent, seeing the brand as both a liability and an asset. Staffers on the hill don't like getting deluged with phone calls, and politicians have become quite cold since the Petraeus flap. I went to the Iowa caucuses with MoveOn's Adam Green, and randomly, Dick Durbin was at my caucus as an observer, and he was not particularly nice to Adam after he heard he worked at MoveOn. And then of course there's the censure itself. That the Village in DC hates MoveOn is a good thing for the group, since the public hates DC and occasionally politicians have to actually interact with the public. But it does put the group into an interesting position.

I think it's likely that MoveOn members will go for Obama, simply because Hillary Clinton has failed to account for her Iraq vote and has failed to lead on any progressive issue in the Senate. Obama has a tribal pull on MoveOn members, both generationally and culturally, but this could have been offset by an ideological argument from Clinton, one she didn't make. If MoveOn goes for Obama, Clinton will be reaping her own harvest.

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Rep. Conyers: Impeachment Is Not Off the Table
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on January 29, 2008 at 6:35 AM.

Today at the Progressive Media Summit I managed to catch a conversation between Rob Kall of OpedEdNews and House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers on the potential impeachment of both Bush and Cheney. The video starts in the middle of a sentence, but other than that, it's pretty clear cut. It's an interesting dialogue in which Conyers goes back and forth on his own authority and ability to bring impeachment charges, his political arguments against it, and finally, his firm statement that Bush could do plenty to justify impeachment and that the option is not 'off the table'. You get to see a fascinating and very human interaction between a highly intelligent activist and a sitting Congressman with immense power who is vaguely irritated at having to answer questions, but also intensely interested in answering them.

The transcript is as follows:

John Conyers: Two impeachments rather than one. They've either got to be simultaneous or serie atum.

Rob Kall: Serie atum would be the way to do it. First Cheney, then Bush. History teaches us, let's start with Gonzales. We went to Gonzales, and he's gone. They went to Agnew, he left. Then they went to Nixon, and they started doing hearings on him. It never went to a vote in the Senate. And I don't think it ever would. All we need to do is get the hearings opened up where they can't say 'sorry, executive privilege, then you've got the tools, which is what Impeachment is, it's a tool.

John Conyers: You know who's been in more impeachment hearings than anybody in the House or Senate?

Rob Kall: You?

John Conyers: Right.

Rob Kall: And you wrote a book on impeaching Bush, too.

John Conyers: A couple, yes. Well there must be some compelling reason that I'm not doing it right now.

Rob Kall: Pelosi, Pelosi keeps coming to mind.

John Conyers: How could she stop, well, she could stop me because actually it goes through a special committee on the House, but, Pelosi can't stop me from anything, really.

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