Understanding the Dean collapse

My friend Andrew Arends (who worked for the Clinton campaign in New Hampshire in 1992) writes:

“I think that Dean captured a large chunk of the popular appeal from last summer because he was the first leader to stand up and start to trash Bush. The Washington democrats have pussy-footed around with Bush – partly because of the viciousness of the White House response to anyone whose head is above the parapet but also because of the impact of 9/11 and the Iraq war and the potential (perceived) electoral consequences of opposing a president in a time of crisis.

But in the country there is a large constituency who really hate Bush. Dean tapped into their psyche and they responded favourably. Paul Krugman is the columnist who also has captured the emotional engagement of that large group of people in a similar way.

But then two things hit Dean. First, he needed to change the direction of his message and offer a positive, Presidential, message as we turned into the year and people began focussing on the elections themselves. This he did not do. He remained shrill and angry and in your face. An interaction with an Iowa Republican heckler a few weeks before the caucuses showed him up badly. Second, and here’s the paradox, his success in offering an image of a successful democratic candidate to the electorate by sticking it to the White House, helped to change an expectation that THIS election is winnable (and also needs to be won) but that he was not the guy who could win it. Others who are more electable like Kerry and Edwards, suddenly became the choices.”

The best photographer on the Net…

…is (IMHO) Sam Javanrouh, who lives and works in Toronto and whose weblog is simply ravishing. No other word for it. Every day there is another beautiful image. And it has an RSS feed.

The Dean Bubble

That chewing sound you hear is of me eating my hat. Like many others, I completely misread the significance of Howard Dean’s Internet campaign. There’s been a lot of similarly rueful reflection around on the Net, and here and there some really thoughtful pieces — like this one from Clay Shirky.

“The easy thing to explain is why Dean lost”, writes Clay, “– the voters didn’t like him. The hard thing to explain is why we (and why Dean himself) thought he’d win, and easily at that. The bubble of belief, which collapsed so quickly and so completely, was inflated by tools that made formerly hard things easy, tricking us into thinking that getting votes had become easy as well — we were all in Deanspace for a while there.”

Then there’s this piece by David Weinberger (of Cluetrain Manifesto fame). “I think Clay overstates the role of the Internet in our self-delusion”, he writes. “One big reason I thought Dean was going to win quickly was that the polls said he had a huge lead. So, the question isn’t simply ‘Why did Deaniacs think Dean would win easily?’ but also ‘Why did the electorate favor him on clipboards but not in voting booths?’ The answers to that question are not pleasant for any Dean supporter to contemplate.

And it wasn’t just the polls that led us to believe he was a happenin’ guy. In August, crowds of unprecedented size — 5,000, 10,000 — showed up to hear Dean speak. I traveled on the press bus for one leg of the ‘Sleepless Summer’ tour and heard two well-known, hard-bitten journalists for major media outlets whispering to one another: ‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’ ‘No, and so early in the campaign!’ Those crowds weren’t an Internet phenomenon, but they had a lot to do with convincing me that Dean’s support was wider spread than it has so far turned out to be. (Sure, I was naive, but it wasn’t an Internet naivete.)

So, I find myself agreeing with Clay’s warnings about how a candidate’s Internet campaign can create an unfounded perception of electoral strength, yet also worried that readers will come away with an exaggerated view of the Internet’s role in that perception. It wasn’t just the Internet that led us into false optimism.”

Then there’s Thomas Schaller’s Salon piece on “Dean’s Dizzying Descent” which points out some serious errors made by both Dean and his erstwhile campaign manager, Joe Trippi. What’s nice about these pieces is that they are (i) written by people who were, like me, sympathetic to Dean and (ii) represent honest attempts to explain why their authors got it wrong. The best way to make progress is to learn from one’s mistakes. Wish the Blair government could do it.

Primitive urges

It was a wind-chilled sunny day — just the kind of day for lighting a fire…

… and baking scones!

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Very nice they were, too.

Bird’s-eye view

Walking past the Natural History Museum yesterday on a glorious, sunny, brisk day, I dropped in on French aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s amazing Earth from the Air exhibition. As usual, I wound up watching the humans.

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Forgetting your own (domain) name

There but for the grace of God Department… “The Washington Post said yesterday that it had inadvertently allowed the registration for one of its Internet domain names – washpost.com – to expire. That lapse had the immediate effect of shutting down the e-mail system that reporters and other Post employees use to exchange messages with the world, something they were unable to do for much of the day.

In a message sent to newsroom employees over another computer server yesterday morning, Steve Coll, the managing editor of The Post, wrote that ‘Network Solutions, which manages Internet addresses, apparently notified The Post of the pending expiration via a drop-box that was not being monitored.’ Mr. Coll wrote that ‘all external e-mail has been disrupted and external senders are receiving delivery failure notices.’ In general, the cost of renewing an Internet domain name is under $100.

The Post said that it had been able to renew its registration for washpost.com by midmorning, before any outsider had a chance to lay claim to it. But the disruption to the newspaper’s newsgathering efforts was significant enough that Post editors were advising reporters to set up temporary e-mail accounts using Yahoo and Hotmail….” [New York Times story]

Apple’s chutzpah

Chutzpah was once defined as the state of mind that enables a person, after murdering both his parents, to appeal for sympathy as an orphan. So how about the Apple Superbowl ad? The sheer, unadulterated sassiness of it is, well, wonderful.

Interesting insight into Hutton’s past

From Paul Foot, writing in today’s Guardian:

“In August 1973, the Derry coroner, retired Major Hubert O’Neill, completed the inquest into the 13 unarmed people killed by the British army on Bloody Sunday. The jury returned an open verdict. Off the cuff, Major O’Neill described the killings as “sheer unadulterated murder”.

That was too much for the young barrister representing the Ministry of Defence. He lectured the coroner as follows: “It is not for you or the jury to express such wide-ranging views, particularly when a most eminent judge (Lord Chief Justice Widgery) has spent 20 days hearing evidence and come to a different conclusion.” The barrister’s name was Brian Hutton.

Whatever the outcome of the Saville inquiry, set up in 1998 to investigate the Bloody Sunday killings, everyone now accepts that the one-man Widgery tribunal was seriously flawed. So it follows that Brian Hutton quite early in his career was sticking up for one judicial whitewash and that, 30 years on, was playing the lead role in another one…”

The next whitewash

Is it any wonder people have lost trust in their politicians? Over in Washington, Dubya is suddenly demanding “to know the facts” about Iraq’s WMD for all the world (as Jonathan Freedland points out) as if he were “an aggrieved American voter, somehow hoodwinked into the war with Iraq”. In London, as late as last week, Tony Blair was denouncing the idea of an inquiry as ludicrous, unnecessary, etc. But now, suddenly (and immediately after Washington decides it has to have an inquiry), there is to a British inquiry too.

It will be a typical British affair too — held in secret and run by a panel consisting of two trusty political has-beens, a retired soldier and a former diplomat who has spent most of his professional life in the company of spooks. And it is to be chaired by Lord Butler, the former Cabinet Secretary who defended the Tory government’s supply of arms to Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war and was hoodwinked by Tory liars Jonathan Aitken and Neil Hamilton. This forensic genius is to preside over an inquiry with sclerotic terms of reference, designed to make sure that the Blair government’s decision to go to war on false premises will not be questioned. Ye Gods! Who do these people think we are? The Liberal Democrats were right to boycott this secretive farce.

Microsoft eyes Google — the John Markoff version

This lovely illustration…

Image (c) the New York Times

… caught my eye. Here’s an extract from John Markoff’s article:

Later this year, Microsoft is expected to unveil its own search technology, which Mr. Gates says will help Microsoft catch up with Google. Last week, Microsoft released a test version of a special set of software buttons for its browser designed to direct users to its MSN search and related services. For Google, though, the greater threat is that Microsoft will decide that Internet search, like the Web browser before it, should be an integral part of future versions of the Windows operating system.

For the moment, though, Google’s lead seems formidable. Last year, Rick Rashid, a Microsoft vice president in charge of the company’s research division, came to its outpost in Silicon Valley to give a demonstration of an experimental Microsoft Research search engine. Shortly afterward, however, Mike Burrows, one of the original pioneers of Internet search at Digital Equipment who later helped design Microsoft’s experimental search engine, quietly defected. He joined Google.

But even if it can protect its technological lead, will Google still succumb to Microsoft’s marketing muscle?

Google shares the intense Silicon Valley work ethic that characterized companies like Netscape. Its new headquarters, on a spacious campus once occupied by SGI, a computer maker, are just across the freeway from Netscape’s original base.

But many veteran Silicon Valley executives are skeptical about Google’s ability to hold its corporate culture together once it goes public later this year. The initial public offering, much anticipated, is expected to create hundreds of instant multimillionaires among its regular employees, but will leave many others hired as contractors without significant gains. As a result, some people fret that Google is fostering a class society in its ranks.

So far, though, the disaffection is limited largely to the company’s Adwords business, which is aimed at creating and placing its focused search advertising. That operation has grown rapidly with temporary workers. “The Adwords environment is brutal,” one Google executive said.

Clearly, though, keeping its ebullient esprit de corps so robust after the I.P.O. will be difficult, say those who have gone through similar roller-coaster rides in Silicon Valley.

“The challenge Google faces is figuring out how to retain a high rate of innovation” in the face of a disruptive event like the I.P.O., said a former Netscape executive, who also worries that the two young founders, for all their brilliance, may not fit well into the kind of management team needed to run Google as a fast-growing public company.

Although Google has clear vulnerabilities, Microsoft is seen in Silicon Valley as a powerful but not particularly creative competitor. Beyond its core business in Office and Windows, Microsoft has no major recent successes to point to – but it has a growing list of disappointments. These include its Xbox video game player and Ultimate TV set-top box.

In other words, rivals have fought Microsoft and lived to tell about it. “At TiVo, we managed to stare down that $40 billion barrel,” said Stewart Alsop, a venture capitalist who helped finance the creation of TiVo’s digital video recorder, which allows TV viewers to easily record hours of video programming for viewing at other times. “We dodged that particular bullet,” Mr. Alsop said, when Microsoft “shut down Ultimate TV and got out of the business.”

Other executives who compete with Microsoft said Google’s position might be more defensible than Microsoft executives believe.

“The good news for Google is that what they do has many branches,” said Rob Glaser, the chief executive of RealNetworks, which competes with Microsoft in the software for playing video and digital audio on personal computers. “It’s not easily replicable in one step.”

The two big questions, it seems to me, are: (1) Will Google lose its innovative ethos after its IPO? and (2) will it become the next Netscape (and would legislators allow that to happen)?