Page 198 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Campaigns for Office in 2000
information technology was symbolic. Given his standing as underdog to
the incumbent Vice President, the campaign’s first goals were to convince
a network of donors that Bradley was a serious candidate, just as Dees-
Thomases had persuaded the mass media that her efforts were serious
and had the potential to be successful. The Bradley campaign relied sub-
stantially on the web site for that job, displaying photographs of Bradley
on the campaign trail and other documents designed to signal his vi-
ability. Lynn Reed, his Internet director, describes the tactic as follows:
“People were asking us, ‘Are you crazy? How can you take on the sitting
Vice President?’ In order to raise enough money, we had to convince po-
tential fundraisers that we were for real. They could look at the web site
and see pictures of Bradley out on the campaign trail. So at the beginning,
we were trying to persuade a select group of people that this was a real
campaign.” 192
As the campaign matured, strategy for the site shifted toward attempt-
ing to engage supporters and potential supporters, along the lines of the
Boxer and Ventura models. In particular, campaign officials hoped to
create a mechanism for interested citizens to become involved. Reed says
that the campaign attempted to provide Bradley supporters “as much
additional information as possible ... so that we can communicate with
them and have a longer conversation than just that 30 second chunk
of television time.” 193 An archive of documents, issue papers, and bio-
graphical information at the web site therefore had a different focus than
television advertising, which was aimed at attracting citizens’ attention
to the campaign. Bradley’s strategy was to use television to attract the
attention of the public, and then to use the web to engage those who
proved interested.
Bradley collected electronic mail addresses of citizens through its web
site, and eventually amassed a list of about 85,000 “volunteers” this
way. 194 During the campaign, Reed said, “[T]he biggest lesson that all
of us learned was from the success of the Jesse Ventura campaign last
year. That wasn’t so much the web site but their use of e-mail to organize
folks, to get them to come out to campaign events, to communicate with

interview by Diane Johnson for the author, Nov. 20, 2000; and Rebecca Fairley
Raney, “Campaign Lessons from the Bradley Camp,” Inter@ctive Week, July 3, 2000,
pp. 26–27.
192 Reed, personal interview.
193
Published interview with Lynn Reed, Freedom Channel, December 9, 1999,
http://www.freedomchannel.com.
194
Reed, personal interview.
181