At Google's recent "I/O" developer conference in San Francisco, the company unveiled an intriguing new tool called Wave, which Google deems its attempt to "reinvent email for the 21st century." That is, however, an inaccurate and outdated way of thinking about what Wave really is. Wave is a web-based, open-source platform that is designed to seamlessly integrate communication and collaboration. That may sound a little vague, so take a look at it in action:

This is only a preview of the developer version, so it is likely to evolve significantly from where it is right now. But even in this early stage, it shows a huge amount of potential. Sometimes, Google releases things that elicit a brief "oh, cool" reaction but then fade from the radar screen. I think Wave will be different for a number of reasons, but the biggest is that it allows users to take advantage of the internet in a more natural and organic way, a way more in tune with the nature of the internet itself. After seeing the demo, Joe Trippi tweeted "Just posted the Google Wave demo on my blog - definitely check it out if you haven't yet. What do you think? Game changer?" and then later, "More on Google Wave. Did they just reinvent online communication?" The people at ReadWriteWeb, after doing a hands-on trial, write:

What we have seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg, but we can already envision how this could replace our internal chat room here at RWW, and how it could revolutionize the way employees in a company communicate. Wave definitely takes some getting used to, but once you get into the flow of things, regular email suddenly feels stale and slow.

While Google is busy reinventing how we collaborate together on the web, the White House is busy trying to bring these kinds of innovations into government. As part of the Open Government Initiative, which I blogged about a few weeks ago, the Obama Administration held a "Brainstorm" using IdeaScale. Once again, I like the top entries (athough they will, of course, be ignored), but this time the IdeaScale thing is just one part of a three-phase process which also includes a discussion phase, where users discuss the ideas brought up in the brainstorm, and then a "draft" phase where users will "Collaborate on crafting constructive proposals to address challenges from the Discussion phase." It's an ambitious evolution of the Administration's efforts in this sphere, and we'll be keeping a close eye on it. 

Related Programs Primary Program:  New Tools

Shortly after the presidential election in an interview with MSNBC, Simon predicted that President Obama's weekly addresses and other important remarks would be translated into different languages for a global audience interested in what Barack Hussein Obama has to say:

Rosenberg said it will be common for government agencies to host videos and blogs (as the Transportation Security Administration does already).

"You're going to see competition at the weekly Cabinet meeting between the DHS secretary and the HHS secretary over who had more views on their YouTube video, and who had more comments on their blog," he said.

Global Webcasting of presidential addresses and press briefings - perhaps translated into multiple languages - is likely to become routine. That policy could well filter down to other governmental agencies and even other governments, Rosenberg said.

He pointed to the example of David Cameron, the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, who stars in a series of "Webcameron" videos that touch upon his party's policies as well as his personal life. "You can watch videos of him washing dishes in his sink," Rosenberg said.

Fast forward to today and Obama's historic speech at the University of Cairo in Egypt. According to CNN:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (CNN) — Some of the new media tools that helped propel President Obama to the White House are going to get their first test run on the international stage Thursday, when he delivers a long-awaited speech to the Muslim world.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said administration officials are planning to use text messaging and social networking sites like Facebook to help engage the world, especially young people, during and after the speech in Cairo.

Gibbs said the goal is to "not only draw people in to see the speech but to have them discuss it as well" to keep the conversation going long after the actual speech is delivered.

For example, the U.S. State Department is planning to send text messages about Obama's speech to users worldwide who sign up at www.america.gov. The texts will be sent out in four languages — Arabic, Persian, Urdu and English — and will enable users "to reply and give feedback" in real time, according to Gibbs.

The White House, which usually sends out transcripts of presidential speeches in English, will release the transcript in 13 different languages this time around.

Administration officials estimate that there are 20 million users of Facebook in the Arab countries and are setting up live chats on that site in order to get a conversation going online.

As the CNN article notes, the speech was texted out in four languages spoken in countries with large Muslim populations: Arabic, Persian, Urdu (the literary language of Pakistan and spoken widely in India) and English. The speech transcript was released in 13 languages.

Now check out the new Web site -- america.gov. It's truly fascinating and I believe it could go a long way in improving America's global standing after eight years of arrogance and confrontation. You can visit an Arab-language version of america.gov, a Spanish-language version, a French version, Persian, Mandarin and more. Although I couldn't read all of the languages, I could discern that each version of america.gov has some different content targeted toward viewers in each country. For example, the Spanish-language Web site had pictures from Sectretary of State Hillary Clinton's delegation to the inauguration of El Salvador's new president.  

Clinton has tapped Alec Ross, who has written a paper with Simon and appeared at NDN several times, to implement the Department of State's digital diplomacy. Not surprisingly, Clinton recently recorded a YouTube address about the new tools and media that State is using to reach out to the rest of the world (scroll back up to what Simon said in his interview about Cabinet members recording YouuTube videos).

Two days after the presidential election, Simon posted a vlog with his prediction about how Obama would no doubt use his campaign's new tools arsenal and apply it to governing. There have been some hiccups along the way, but using social networking, texting, Web video -- all tools that we at NDN have strongly advocated for years in our New Tools Series -- is no doubt improving America's relationship with the rest of the world.

Watch Simon's vlog on how Obama will reivent the presidency here:

Related Programs Primary Program:  New Tools

USA TODAY reports that:

Some of the world's most popular networking services have gone dark in China, apparent victims of government censors in the days leading to a notorious anniversary.

Online users in China said Twitter, Yahoo's Flickr photo site, Microsoft's new Bing search engine and Hotmail, and other services were inaccessible on Tuesday.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square. Social media experts such as Laura Fitton suspect Chinese authorities may be blocking sites to tamp down discussions of the protest.

This is an issue I touched on recently when the Iranian government shut down Facebook ahead of its June 12 elections as reform candidates appeared to be gaining political ground through spreading word of campaign rallies and getting out messages through the social networking site Facebook.

Mobile technology and new tools to improve health outcomes, drive economic growth and foster democracy are issues that NDN is deeply involved in. As Obama Administration official Tom Kalil wrote for NDN affiliate, the New Policy Institute, in an October 2008 paper, Harnessing the Mobile Revolution:

With a few exceptions, the U.S. government is largely oblivious to the ways in which the rapid diffusion of mobile services (and other new technologies) could be used to improve the human condition. I believe that the next Administration should launch a major new initiative to harness the confluence of new technologies and innovative business models as a key component of its global development agenda. This initiative would be designed to serve as a catalyst for policy reforms in developing countries, promote an increased capacity for innovation by developing country entrepreneurs to meet local needs, and stimulate additional investments by philanthropists, foundations and companies. Such an initiative could reduce poverty, strengthen democratic institutions, and improve global health outcomes. It could also help restore some of the damage to America’s international reputation, boost America’s “soft power,” and position American businesses and workers to benefit from the growth of emerging markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This initiative would not be limited to mobile services, and might also include decentralized approaches to providing safe drinking water, new vaccines, therapies, point-of-care diagnostics, clean energy, and improved crops that are more productive, nutritious, and drought-resistant.

Kalil has joined the Obama Administration to do exactly what he advocated in his cutting-edge paper. Check back with NDN for more work on mobile technology, improved health outcomes, economic opportunities and new tools used to foster democracy.

In the meantime, read the entire Harnessing the Mobile Revolution here.

Related Programs Other Related Programs:  New Tools

Yesterday, TeleGeography released a new report projecting that by the year 2013,

• there will be 700 million broadband subscribers worldwide, an increase of 76%
• there will be over 2 billion new mobile subscriptions, an increase of 60%
• wired phone line subscriptions will actually decline slightly worldwide

Furthermore, much of this growth is coming from the developing world. NDN and our affiliate the New Policy Institute recently released a paper, Harnessing the Mobile Revolution, which explores just how big of an impact this explosion of mobile infrastructure can have in poor countries in improving healthcare outcomes, combating poverty, and promoting democracy. So we're very encouraged by these projections.

Another important thing to note is that by 2013, smartphones will be much more ubiquitous and even more capable than they are at present. There's a ton of hype around the immenent release of the Palm Pre and the 3rd generation iPhone, which is likely to remain the class leader, but Google also just announced that there will be between 18 and 20 new phones running their mobile OS, Android, by the end of the year (two are pictured here).

Android is a powerful and highly customizable OS which continues to develop impressively, but until now it has been hindered by its hardware matches. Android also features an application store similar to Apple's, and although Apple still pretty much owns the app space (which it created), Android's app store does have the appeal of being completely open and uncensored (on some phones, depending on the carrier), unlike Apple's regulated App Store, which sometimes intentionally limits the iPhone's functionality.

The proliferation of these phones is in some ways more exciting than the spread of cheap netbooks - mobile phones today are more powerful and can do more things than most computers just a few years ago. Look for more from NDN in the coming weeks on this critical issue, which is huge not just for American politics but for global society. It will be very interesting to see what happens as much of the world comes online.

New Tools and Technologies Can (and have) Fostered Democracy

How often do you check your Facebook page? What if you tried to log on and Facebook was blocked?

If you live in Iran, that's exactly what has happened: the government has banned Facebook ahead of the June 12 election there. Why? Because opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, taking a page from Barack Obama's campaign playbook, has used the social networking site as well as blogs and other new media and tools to appeal to Iran's Millennial Generation. 

Last October, UC Berkeley's Tom Kalil, now Associate Director for Policy of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote a truly compelling paper for NDN affilate, the New Policy Institute. The paper, entitled "Harnessing the Mobile Revolution," focused on how mobile devices and technology are improving health outcomes, enabling economic growth and fostering democracy in some of the world's most underdevloped countries. In his paper, Kalil wrote that the explosive growth of mobile usage, their increased performance and functionality and the role the Internet has played in allowing greater openess on mobile devices are all factors that have led to the trends mentioned above.

The section of Kalil's paper about how mobile devices can foster democracy is fascinating and illustrates exactly why Iran's repressive government has banned Facebook. From's Kalil's paper:

There are a growing number of examples of mobile communications being used to topple governments, improve election monitoring, report on human rights abuses,strengthen civil society, and democratize the flow of information. A few of the more prominent examples are described below. Of course, the spread of the Internet and mobile technology does not automatically result in democratization and the free flow of information. As documented by the OpenNet Initiative, more than three dozen states around the world “use various mechanisms of Internet filtering, targeting a broad range of websites addressing political and social topics as well as many Internet tools and technologies.” Authoritarian governments such as China’s are able to enlist global multinationals to help them. Leading Internet search companies engage in self-censorship to block politically sensitive information, and other leading IT companies have helped built China’s “Golden Shield Project” for Internet filtering and surveillance.

Second People Power Revolution

In January 2001, Philippine President Joseph Estrada was driven from office by hundreds of thousands of angry citizens mobilized by millions of text messages and e-petitions. After 11 pro-Estrada senators voted to block evidence of the corruption in an impeachment trial of the President (Estrada was taking money from an illegal numbers racket), citizens began to circulate messages like "The 11 senators are pigs! S&@t, Estrada is acquitted! Let's do People Power! Pls. pass.” Text messaging and cell phones become powerful tools for the people organizing demonstrations in the main thoroughfare of Manila, and one carrier reported that the daily volume of text messages increased from 45 million to 70 million. Estrada called it a “coup de text.”

Orange Revolution

In October 2004, the Ukrainian state used fraud and intimidation to move 2.8 million votes in the direction of Victor Yanukovych, the presidential candidate favored by his authoritarian predecessor Leonid Kuchma. This resulted in civil disobedience, sit-ins, and general strikes, with hundreds of thousands of orange-clad protestors gathering in the center of Kiev. Ukraine’s Supreme Court ordered a revote, and the opposition candidate Victor Yushchenko won the election. Analysts believe that the Internet and mobile phones played two important roles in the Orange Revolution. First, the Internet allowed an alternative media to flourish that was not subject to self-censorship or overt control by Kuchma and his allies. Second, prodemocracy activists were able to use mobile phones and the Internet to coordinate election monitoring and mass protests. Prior to the election, pro-democracy movements such as Pora (It’s Time) had created political networks throughout the country, including 150 groups responsible for spreading information and coordinating election monitoring, 72 regional centers, and 30,000 registered participants. This allowed Pora to mobilize protestors after widespread reports of electoral fraud.

NDN is doing more exciting work on the mobile technology front, so check back often. In the meantime, read Kalil's entire paper here, and if you're on Facebook, join NDN's Facebook page!

NDN is on a roll when it comes to showing up in some of the nation's top op-ed pages on some of the most important topics of the day.

Wrapping up the most recent leg of their tour for the new paperback edition of Millennal Makeover: MySpace, You Tube and the Future of American Politics, NDN Fellows Morley Winograd and Mike Hais had a strong showing with their cutting-edge work and commentary on the Millennial Generation, the largest and most progressive U.S. generation ever. 

To wit:

A New Generation Shapes a New Era, Politico, 4/6/09
...outside the Beltway, America’s demography is steadily and quietly changing in a way that will fundamentally reshape the country for decades to come. A new generation, the millennial generation (born between 1982 and 2003), is coming of age to make over or realign U.S. politics. 

The Republican Party ignores young 'millennials' at own peril, Los Angeles Times, 5/10/09
If the Republican Party thinks it has problems now, just wait. The party's incredibly poor performance among young voters in the 2008 election raises questions about the long-term competitiveness of the GOP. The "millennials" -- the generation of Americans born between 1982 and 2003 -- now identify as Democrats by a ratio of 2 to 1. They are the first in four generations to contain more self-perceived liberals than conservatives. 

Do you get the Millennial Generation? Christian Science Monitor, 5/15/09
MTV premièred in August 1981, seven months after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as America's 40th president. It revolutionized TV and the music industry as much as Reagan changed the country's politics. And now, just as the election of Barack Obama to the presidency signaled the end of that political era and the beginning of another, MTV is belatedly shifting gears as well.

Simon has also been featured very prominently in the Huffington Post:

Making the Case: 7 Reasons Congress Should Pass Comprehensive Immigration Reform this Year, Huffington Post, 4/30/09
At NDN, we believe the answer to whether Congress can pass reform this year is "yes."

The Economic Conversation Enters a New Phase: Putting Consumers Front and Center Now, Huffington Post, 5/14/09
This is a welcome turn in the national economic conversation from the plight of big institutions and the financial system to what is perhaps the most important part of the story of the Great Recession still not adequately understood - the weakened state of the American consumer prior to the recent recession and financial collapse.

NDN Vice President for Hispanic Programs Andres Ramirez had an important op-ed in a special section of Roll Call on the 2010 Census and the growing power of Hispanic voters:

Ramirez: Hispanics Poised to Flex Muscle in Politics, Policy, Roll Call, 5/18/09 
In particular, Hispanics stand to gain substantially from the census as the U.S. Hispanic population continues its rapid rise. And it is projected that Hispanics will represent at least 16 percent of the American work force by 2014.

NDN has an important new addition to our team, Nelson Cunningham, Chair of our Latin America Policy Initiative. Cunningham kicked off his chairmanship with a strong essay in the Chicago Tribune:

Hearing 'friend' in Trinidad, Chicago Tribune, 4/22/09
as Hugo Chavez...“friended” President Barack Obama at the 34-nation Summit of the Americas last weekend in Trinidad, he handed him a book about 500 years of neo-colonialist exploitation of Latin America by Europe and the United States. But the gesture was clear, as was the broad grin on Chavez’s face as he shook Obama’s hand on the summit’s first day. So was Chavez’s announcement that he would send a new ambassador to Washington, seven months after pulling out his last envoy in the waning days of the Bush administration.

And last, but by no means least, NDN Green Project Director Michael Moynihan weighed on on grist.org about one of the hottest debates in Congress:

Cap and Market This Year, grist.org, 5/14/09
The question is what does the compromise on auctioning credits mean? In my view, it is secondary to the greater goal of moving a bill forward. Accordingly, the deal reached by Chairman Henry Waxman and Congressman Ed Markey with other Members should be hailed as a victory by everyone who cares about the climate.

Stay tuned for more great reads!

Related Programs Primary Program:  New Tools We are in the midst of an explosion of new technologies and new media, which are in various stages of development and exploitation. They can make all the difference in ensuring that our voices are heard loudly and clearly.

We are in the midst of an explosion of new technologies and new media, which are in various stages of development and exploitation. In 2006, the New Politics Institute launched a campaign to encourage progressives across the country to immediately adopt four key new tools that are particularly important and ready for political prime time right now.

With the success of our first tools campaign, NDN and NPI have launched the second part of our campaign, unveiling four new tools. They can make a difference in ensuring that our voice is heard loudly and clearly at a time when decisions critical to the future of our nation are being made.

Go Mobile

 

Nine in 10 mobile phones are now Internet enabled, allowing candidates to send rich data directly to cell phone users. More importanly, 30% of users only have a cell phone, making traditional telemarketing techniques increasingly obsolete.

Reimagine Video

 

One innocent YouTube video single handidly sunk the political campaign of George Allen--and it wasn't even created by an opposition campaign. With the proliferation and decentralization of influential video, the 30 second ad spot needs to be reimagined.

Target Your Marketing

 

The Republican political machine rose to power by identifying and targeting segments of an audience. In order to compete, Democrats also need to better understand potential voting niches and target them directly.

Leverage Social Networks

 

Independent of the Obama campaign, a FaceBook user created a a group that attracted 250,000 users in less than a month. This new type of online political self-organization can be harnessed to great effect--as long as politicos find a way to leverage social networks without damaging their autonomy.

Advertise Online

 

As much money was spent on Google search ads last year as was spent on ads on any television network, magazine publisher, or newspaper chain. Search is an effective new form of advertising that allows your message to get in front of people who are actively looking for it. And, search only charges fees when people actually click on your ad.

Buy Cable

 

Since 2001 more people watch cable television than broadcast during primetime. Advertising on cable offers more eyeballs and more precise demographic and geographic targeting at a lower price. Republicans began to take advantage of cable in 2004 and, by shifting significant advertising to cable, progressives can beat them at their own game.

Engage the Blogs

 

The Blogosphere and Netroots are a powerful asset for progressives. Dedicate someone in your organization to blog or consistently get your message out to the blogs, which act as conduits to many active constituencies, including the huge generation of young people.

Speak in Spanish

 

Spanish is the preferred language for nearly half of all Hispanic voters. Learning how to bring progressive values and ideas to this fast-growing group—using Spanish—is essential to reach an audience open to hearing from us.

 

 

To read all of the New Tools Papers, check out the full New Toolkit here.

Related Programs Primary Program:  New Tools Other Related Programs:  Age of Obama New Politics New Tools

In its continuing effort to bring our government into the 21st century along with the rest of us (excepting Republicans, who really put the OLD in G.O.P. these days), the Obama administration today launched a transparency and open government initiative. Check out this video of Valerie Jarrett introducing the initiative today: 

As one of the first "featured innovations" of this initiative, the Obama administration also launched a new Web site, data.gov. According to the introductory blurb on this new site,

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

Strictly speaking, there isn't really any *new* information here, but even though it is somewhat limited in scope at this point, data.gov is already a very powerful set of tools that makes it much easier to mine the vast depths of data generated by the government. They have already aggregated and indexed a staggering amount of information, and made it easily and instantly searchable.

Unless you've been desperately searching for all of the most current statistics on marriage and divorce rates in the U.S., you may have trouble getting too excited about this. But here's why it matters:

A former teacher of constitutional law, President Obama has so far received mixed marks on government openness and transparency. In particular, his decisions to keep past abuses covered up (see recent decisions not to release detainee abuse photos or the missing Bush emails), and even to continue controversial Bush-era policies on state-secret privilige, warrantless wiretapping, "national security letters", rendition and the use of black sites, tribunals, and indefinite detention, have been (justly) criticized by progressives.

But Obama has also done a lot to open up government, from his bottom-up campaign style to his virtual press conferences and citizens' briefing book. And while data.gov doesn't tell us anything new per se, it is a very powerful rejoinder to the myth that government need always be an inefficient, bureaucratic nightmare (one of the chief conservative rationales for privatizing everything). The government of the 21st century can be very different from that of the 20th, and with tools like data.gov, Obama is showing us how.

5/29/09

Please join us this Friday, May 29, at 12:15pm for a presentation of "Dawn of a New Politics" by Simon Rosenberg.

Simon Rosenberg has delivered his presentation "Dawn of a New Politics" all across the country over the past several years: At the DNC in Denver, twice for the House Democratic Caucus, on the Google campus, and recently before members and staff of the DSCC and DAGA, among many other gatherings.

This engaging, highly-produced presentation makes a big argument on how politics is changing in America today, and offers ideas and strategies for how progressives can replicate our 20th century success in this new and dynamic century.

Simon has recently updated the presentations with new arguments and slides, including new analysis of the forces behind the 2008 election. Even if you've seen the presentation before, this new version will be fresh and engaging!

We cordially invite you to join us-- either here in our event space, or via Web cast-- to be among the first to watch and engage with this revamped presentation.

The event will begin at 12:15, and the Web cast will start at 12:45p.m. Follow this link to watch the Web cast.

Please RSVP for the event (if you'll be coming to the offices... no need to RSVP for the Web cast).

Friday, May 29 at 12:15pm - NDN President Simon Rosenberg will deliver his presentation "Dawn of a New Politics," complete with new arguments and slides, including new analysis of the forces behind the 2008 election. Location NDN Event Space729 15th St. NW 1st Floor Washington, DC, 20005United States See map: Google Maps

Today's brief Google outage notwithstanding, it's pretty good these days for people who like finding things on the internet.

In its ongoing quest to index the universe, Google has just announced several advanced new search features. The most immediately obvious for Google users is the new “Show Options” feature, which allows you to refine your search results in real-time, instead of doing a separate advanced search. It also includes several ways to view your search and related searches, including the “magic wheel,” pictured here, and "timeline" views. They are also working on some experimental features, including “Google Squared,” which returns your results in tables, the most important information coupled with each result.

Google isn't the only one making it easier to quickly find what you're searching for. Twitter's search feature has undergone some improvements over the last few months, making it much easier to pick the social network's collective brain. And cool new tools like Twitscoop allow a virtual real-time cross-section of what people on the world's third-largest social network are thinking and talking about.

Instant access to so much information, and along with it the ability to have one's own voice heard by others around the world, have already altered politics forever, making it easier both to be informed and to participate, which is one of the biggest arguments that NDN and the New Politics Institute have been making for years.

But these developments are not just changing our politics -- they're changing us, too. A recent article in The American Scene, "Your Brain is an Index," explores the way that instant searchable access to so much information is rewiring our neurons. Citing the same Atlantic article by Nicholas Carr I wrote about a few weeks ago, the author of the American Scene piece speculates that,

Reading on the web is almost certainly affecting the way we process information, but it’s not making us stupid. Instead, it’s changing the way we’re smart. Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes. These days, it’s not what you know — it’s what you know you can access, and cross reference.

The comments at the bottom are are pretty great. Some of my favorites:

"I could barely get to the end of this article before Tweeting and sending some emails. True Story and great read."

"This reminds me of a Richard Feynman anecdote. I don’t recall all the details (though I could look them up!) but basically he was auditing a graduate-level biology class and did a presentation on some topic of anatomy. He got a lukewarm response because it turns out he was just presenting a bunch of info that the “real” bio students had already had to memorize. His reaction was basically that it seemed like a waste of brain cells to memorize stuff that’s just as easily looked up."

Kevin Drum from Mother Jones is less optimistic, saying that he likes this argument, but,

...unfortunately, I can't think of any evidence at all to suggest it's true. Understanding "broader categories" — the context into which individual pieces of knowledge fit — requires you to read books. Full stop. Maybe someday it won't, but it does now...I'd love to be wrong about this. But I'm not. If you want to understand the world, not just collect endless factlets, you still need to read books. If you do, the internet makes you smarter. If you don't, it makes you dumber.

I think both sides of this argument have some merit. I definitely agree that constantly searching for indexed information can make it harder to focus on single topics for sustained periods, but I also think the benefits probably outweigh the costs. Furthermore, there isn't really anything about the physical, bound-paper book that possesses magical intelligence-imbuing properties; Devices like Amazon's new, larger Kindle, which will be used to display textbooks as well as newspapers and blogs, may be a sign of where learning is headed in the digital age.

One thing is for sure. There is no use railing against this trend; rather, we need to work to better understand it and how it is changing our minds, our societies, and our politics. I'll close with a quote from the most recent New Yorker about the rise of "neuroenhancing" study drugs:

...But it’s not the mind-expanding sixties anymore. Every era, it seems, has its own defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy. And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus.

1/18/09 AFP Link to Article:  Change.gov Coming to the White House "Obama is going to change the game with government the way he changed the game with politics," said Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a Washington-based progressive think-tank.

1/18/09 AFP Link to Article:  Change.gov Coming to the White House "Obama is going to change the game with government the way he changed the game with politics," said Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a Washington-based progressive think-tank.

11/4/08 Wired Link to Article:  Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency "He’s run a campaign where he’s used very modern tools, spoke to a new coalition, talked about new issues, and along the way, he’s reinvented the way campaigns are run," says Simon Rosenberg...

11/4/08 Wired Link to Article:  Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency "He’s run a campaign where he’s used very modern tools, spoke to a new coalition, talked about new issues, and along the way, he’s reinvented the way campaigns are run," says Simon Rosenberg...

Just a brief new tools update for today (I'm busy working on an exciting project for NDN, to be revealed soon!). NDN and NPI created the New Tools series as an easy-to-understand crash course in new media for progressives of all stripes. With that in mind, we have assembled all of our New Tools papers in one place, organized by subject, to make things even easier. You can now find them all at newpolitics.net/toolkit. 

On a related note, we're updating and expanding the New Tools series for 2009. In addition to revisiting some of our older papers, we'll be adding a few to the roster. We've got some ideas, but we'd also like to know: what new media tools are you most interested in learning about or using more effectively? Please send your ideas for the next generation of new tools papers to dboscov-ellen@ndn.org, or leave them as comments below this post, and help us help progressives stay ahead of the curve!

 

Just a brief new tools update for today (I'm busy working on an exciting project for NDN, to be revealed soon!). NDN and NPI created the New Tools series as an easy-to-understand crash course in new media for progressives of all stripes. With that in mind, we have assembled all of our New Tools papers in one place, organized by subject, to make things even easier. You can now find them all at newpolitics.net/toolkit. 

On a related note, we're updating and expanding the New Tools series for 2009. In addition to revisiting some of our older papers, we'll be adding a few to the roster. We've got some ideas, but we'd also like to know: what new media tools are you most interested in learning about or using more effectively? Please send your ideas for the next generation of new tools papers to dboscov-ellen@ndn.org, or leave them as comments below this post, and help us help progressives stay ahead of the curve!

 

As Published in Mother Jones, November-December 2007 Related Programs Primary Program:  New Politics Staff Authors:  Peter Leyden Staff Authors:  Simon Rosenberg Publish Date:  10/29/09 Today's progressives face a political opportunity as great as any seen since. Abstract: 

The 2008 elections are not just about the next four years, but potentially about the next several decades, argue Rosenberg and Leyden, who urge progressives not to simply think about a 50-state strategy, but a 50-year one. The collapse of the conservatives has provided an unusual political opening, they observe, while major shifts in technology and media, demographics, and the challenges the country faces have combined to give progressives an even rarer opportunity to restructure politics for the long term.

The article lays out a grand strategy for how today's Democrats could build a lasting electoral majority and today's progressives could seize the new media, build off new constituencies like Hispanics and the millennial generation, and solve the urgent governing challenges of our times.

A CONSERVATIVE PRESIDENT who is deeply unpopular with Americans. A country facing profound economic and security challenges. New technologies upending old media. A cohort of new immigrants and a bulging generation of young people ready to transform the political calculus.

2008? No, 1932, the tail end of the Hoover administration. And you know how that one turned out. FDR and his fellow progressives took on the challenges of their day and built the domestic programs and international institutions that ushered in an era of unrivaled prosperity and stability. They used a new medium—radio—to reach citizens, and fashioned a new majority coalition from the emergent demographic realities of their time.

Today's progressives face a political opportunity as great as any seen since. The election of 2006 may well have marked the end of the conservative ascendancy that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. George W. Bush now has the potential to do what Herbert Hoover did in the 1920s—tarnish his party's brand for a generation or more.

As in FDR's day, a new media is emerging, one that will ultimately replace the broadcast model of the 20th century. A new American populace is emerging, led by the arrival of the millennial generation and a new wave of immigrants, particularly Hispanics. And once again, the nation faces massive challenges—from climate change to health care in the era of biotech and preparing young people for a global economy. On the eve of the 2008 election, it's worth raising our sights beyond what it would take for a Democrat to win the presidency, and begin thinking about what it would take to bring about deeper, more lasting changes. The stars have aligned to give progressives a chance to permanently shift the conversation about the nation's values. The question before us now is, Do today's progressives have what it takes to do what FDR and his allies accomplished 75 years ago—seize the new politics, take on the big challenges, and usher in a new era?

IN A WAY, the story begins with those fireside chats of FDR's. As the 20th century progressed, American politics became increasingly organized around broadcast media. But now top-down, one-to-many communication is giving way to a very different kind of media—diffuse, participatory, individualized. In 1980, more than 50 million people watched the network evening news on any given night; in 2005 the number was down to 27 million. By 2010, as many as half of all voters will have the ability to skip commercials thanks to TiVo and other digital video recorders. Last year, 100 million videos a day were being downloaded from YouTube, and its owner, Google, had $10 billion in ad revenues, surpassing CBS.

This is good news for progressives. The GOP's success in old media—think Morning in America, Pat Robertson, Willie Horton, Rush Limbaugh, Swift Boat—was essential to its ascent, while the emergent blogosphere and social networking sites play to progressive strengths. (Finally, decentralization and lack of hierarchy are an asset rather than a liability.) And though TV will be around for some time, it is going through seismic change as video migrates to cable, satellite, the Internet, and cell phones—79 million Americans will have phones capable of handling video by 2009.

These technologies have revolutionized our lives in many ways, but one of the consequences is only beginning to be understood: As media become more participatory, so can politics. In the broadcast era, a presidential campaign consisted of quick stops on an airport tarmac (for local evening TV news coverage), 200 young people in a headquarters (largely to shepherd the candidate to more TV coverage), and a constant scramble for the perfect 30-second spot.

Howard Dean's 2003 campaign was the first to put forth a truly 21st century, post-broadcast model—one that saw people as partners in the fight, not just as couch potatoes to be convinced or donors to be solicited. It took advantage of new tools—blogs, early online video, and the kind of voter databases that Republicans had mastered decades earlier. But most important, it put at its very core the notion that average people could be trusted to take action on behalf of the campaign.

Dean lost, but his campaign model survived—and today is becoming the new norm. This year, every one of the major Democratic candidates is running an Internet-oriented campaign, relying on the web for fundraising, organizing, and messaging. And even as the new tools are changing the way political insiders do business, they are also opening the system to new players: Organizations started by people with little or no experience in politics, such as MoveOn, Daily Kos, and ActBlue, are growing as powerful as the 20th century institutions that preceded them. Last year a 26-year-old Facebook user decided to rally support for Barack Obama. Within a month he had 278,000 supporters signed up. In 2003, it took Howard Dean six months to get a little more than half that many registered on his website.

This new paradigm represents a profound threat to the politics of privilege. Funding expensive broadcast campaigns forces political leaders to raise enormous sums of money, giving large corporations and wealthy individuals disproportionate influence. Republicans and Democrats have both played this game, but the Republicans consistently won; now, using Internet fundraising, Democratic Party committees consistently out-raise Republicans. The two leading Democratic presidential candidates raised $60 million in the second quarter of 2007—60 percent more than the $38 million for the two leading Republicans. By July, Barack Obama already had 258,000 donors to his campaign, more than any presidential campaign ever had at that point. Embracing this model has allowed the progressive movement and the Democratic Party to become much more authentic champions of the middle class, dependent as they now are on the financial support of average people.

THE OTHER massive trend transforming politics is the changing composition of the electorate. Some shifts, such as the exodus to the sub- and exurbs, to the South and West, the aging of the baby boom generation, and the shift from industrial to a digital culture, have been much discussed. Others, like the emergence of the millennial generation, the boomer babies and young immigrants born from 1978 to 1996, are less well known. They number approximately 80 million, 3 million more than their parents' generation, and we should expect to see them transform society, culture, media, and politics just as profoundly. They are the most diverse American generation ever, with nearly 40 percent from minority groups; chances are that within their lifetime, the term "majority" will become almost meaningless when applied to race.

Already, indications are that this generation is politically engaged, votes in high numbers, and leans overwhelmingly Democratic. In 2004, people age 29 and under would have given Kerry a landslide of 372 electoral votes had they been the only ones voting. In the 2006 congressional election, that same age group went for Democrats over Republicans by 22 percent—an almost unheard-of margin. Conventional wisdom has it that if a generation votes for one party in three consecutive elections, it tends to stay with that party for life. If that's true, the stakes are high for 2008.

But the millennials' impact will show up beyond the ballot box. Polling data indicate that they are unusually civic minded (they volunteer at the highest level recorded for youths in 40 years, according to one study) and hold a wide range of progressive values: Large numbers of them are concerned with the environment, support gay marriage, prefer a multilateral foreign policy, and even believe in government again. (Sixty-three percent think government should do more to solve the nation's problems.) This generation is poised to become the core of a 21st century progressive coalition.

The other critical new constituency gets a lot of attention, but not often for its potential as a voting bloc. At 15 percent of the population, Hispanics are now the nation's largest minority group and the fastest-growing part of the electorate. By 2050, one in four Americans will be of Hispanic origin. In the border states, Hispanics already make up 30 to 45 percent of the population—and between 10 and 30 percent of the voters—but their influence extends throughout the country. Two of the states with the fastest-growing Hispanic populations are Georgia and North Carolina.

Hispanics have traditionally thrown their support to Democrats, but between 1996 and 2004 the gop doubled its share of the Hispanic presidential vote to 40 percent. Then, in what may become known as one of the great strategic mistakes in American politics, conservatives waged a national campaign to demonize immigrants. In 2006 Hispanics went nearly 70 percent for Democrats, up from 58 percent for Kerry in 2004; their share of the electorate increased by 33 percent from 2002.

This could herald a national shift akin to what happened in California in the 1990s, when Republican governor Pete Wilson backed a harsh anti-immigrant referendum, pushing many Hispanics permanently into the Democratic camp and significantly increasing the number who voted. Partly as a result, California—the home of Nixon, Reagan, and the antitax revolt—is a reliably blue state run by a very progressive legislature, and its Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has essentially become a progressive.

TODAY THESE NEW demographic realities are creating an opening for progressives to craft the next great electoral strategy—one that has Democrats building on deepening strongholds in the Northeast and Pacific West, while bringing together enough progressive and progressive-leaning voters throughout the rest of the country to forge a real 21st century majority.

This new strategy, as scholar Thomas Schaller has noted, is essentially the long-overdue progressive response to the GOP's Southern Strategy, which ripped the South from Democratic control and was critical to the right's recent ascendancy. At its heart is the recognition that the South has gone from a core Democratic area—a position it held from the time of Thomas Jefferson—to a Republican-leaning, though competitive, region. Population growth along with changing party allegiances nationwide now allow Democrats to make up the ground lost in the South in other regions, confirming that, as Howard Dean has argued, Democrats need a 50-state approach.

The good news is that this new strategy is already yielding results. Forty-one states have either a Democratic governor or senator. The gop can only claim the same in 38 states. In 2006 the Senate fell to late wins in the red states of Montana and Virginia, and the House because of crucial victories in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Ohio.

The ultimate test of any national electoral road map is whether it can deliver the White House—and this one finally looks like it may. Let's start with the much underappreciated fact that Democrats in each of the last four presidential elections have won 248 of the 270 votes needed for victory by sustaining a lock on 15 states in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. The gop, meanwhile, has held 16 less-populous states, for a total of 135 votes, in each of these same four elections.

Add to this reliable Democratic base the heavily Hispanic states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Florida (whose Hispanic population, incidentally, is no longer majority Cuban or majority Republican), all of which went for the Democratic presidential candidate in at least one of the last four elections and are now much more Democratic because of the epic shift in the Hispanic vote. Winning the four Southwestern states would put the party at 277 Electoral College votes—more than enough for victory. Adding Florida would put it at 304. If you throw in swing states where Democrats have scored impressive wins in recent years—Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia, maybe even Arkansas—Democrats could construct a durable majority of 354 electoral votes: landslide territory.

The new strategy takes the same regional approach that worked to win Congress, creating a strategic alignment among Senate, House, and presidential aspirants not seen among Democrats in a long time. But it also does something else that is critical: By freeing Democrats from the need to win significant victories in the nation's most conservative places, it will allow progressives to be progressive, to avoid some of the brutal ideological battles that can cripple a movement, and most important, to take risks and think big.

BUT POLITICS is not an end in itself; what counts is what you do with the power once you have it. Democrats, from the new Congress to the presidential field, are in the early—emphasis early—stages of creating a new approach not just to strategy and tactics, but to governing as well. All the Democratic hopefuls are talking about dramatic changes—some suggest "transformational" shifts—for health care, immigration, energy, and national security. And Congress has at least begun the laborious process of orienting governance away from the myopia of the Bush era, with steps like raising the minimum wage and passing new ethics rules while launching formal discussions about globalization and climate change.

But pushing through the changes that made up the New Deal and the Great Society required big ideas—and also big majorities, the kind that often need to be built over time. Here too there is reason for optimism. Going into this election, the Democrats have the wind at their backs; polls find that voters prefer a Democratic president by a 12- to 24-point margin, a gap bigger than at any time since Watergate. Dems picked up 31 House seats, 6 governorships, and 6 Senate seats, plus more than 300 statehouse seats across the nation in 2006. If the Democratic advantage holds for this coming election, there is a chance to not only solidify those gains, but expand on them, especially via an unusual opening in the Senate, where no fewer than 21 Republicans are up compared to only 12 Democrats. This presents a chance to significantly improve on the current 1-vote margin—toward the magic 60 that can break filibusters?

Ultimately, a real movement would achieve something broader than just an electoral majority—a permanent shift in the ideological orientation of the country. Before the New Deal, more than 50 percent of the elderly lived in poverty. Social Security changed that, and despite talk of privatization, eliminating it altogether is off the table. The political and societal changes of the '60s couldn't be rolled back either: Nixon expanded the Great Society and even launched the Environmental Protection Agency.

There's a progressive strain of Republicanism that reaches back to Teddy Roosevelt and to Abraham Lincoln before him. It has been recessive for the last quarter century, but with the right sequence of events could express itself once more. Already there are some early signs: Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently relabeled himself an independent. Goodbye gridlock—hello bipartisan cooperation?

AT THE TIME of his election in 1932, FDR had offered very few concrete ideas on what his administration would do about the collapsing economy that he faced. However, he more than made up for that with entrepreneurial panache. In the famous first 100 days after his inaugural, he pulled together a "brain trust" of experts from many fields and had them hammer out practical solutions, drawing on decades of progressive thinking and borrowing from many political ideologies—from socialists all the way to his Republican antagonists. They adopted a routine of constant, rapid trial and error, with a clear bias toward what worked.

With time, the country stabilized and the New Deal took shape. With the Depression vanquished, President Roosevelt went on to become the global leader who shook hands with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta and helped reshape the world's political and economic architecture, laying the foundation for what would become the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Bretton Woods Accord on global currencies. And progressive innovation did not stop with FDR: From the GI Bill to the Peace Corps to Medicare, from the labor movement to civil and women's rights, it continued for the better part of a century, transforming America and the world.

FDR and his cohorts mastered the new politics of their time: used the new tools, built a new coalition, created a new agenda. They developed a grand strategy to take on the challenges of the moment, and built the foundation for a long era of progressive dominance.

The time is right for 21st century progressives to do the same. Our moment may be analogous to 1932, or it might be closer to 1900, the start of the classic Progressive Era that brought us women's suffrage and the income tax. In either case, we need to think about the current opportunity not just as the span of one presidency, but as the possible beginning of an era measured in decades. That's what it will take to begin to deal with the planet's changing climate, restore America's standing in the world, raise people out of global poverty, stabilize a shifting global economic order, incorporate the best and mitigate the worst of biotech, and so much more that needs to be done.

This is not any old moment in history. It has the potential to definitively mark the end of a conservative period and the start of a progressive one. It's not inevitable. It will take real leadership on many fronts for many years to come. But for the first time in a very long while, it's truly possible.

We've done it before. We can do it again. Let the new progressive era begin.

File:  The_50-Year_Strategy.pdf Image: 

As Published in Mother Jones, November-December 2007 Staff Authors:  Peter Leyden Staff Authors:  Simon Rosenberg Publish Date:  10/29/09 Today's progressives face a political opportunity as great as any seen since. Abstract: 

The 2008 elections are not just about the next four years, but potentially about the next several decades, argue Rosenberg and Leyden, who urge progressives not to simply think about a 50-state strategy, but a 50-year one. The collapse of the conservatives has provided an unusual political opening, they observe, while major shifts in technology and media, demographics, and the challenges the country faces have combined to give progressives an even rarer opportunity to restructure politics for the long term.

The article lays out a grand strategy for how today's Democrats could build a lasting electoral majority and today's progressives could seize the new media, build off new constituencies like Hispanics and the millennial generation, and solve the urgent governing challenges of our times.

A CONSERVATIVE PRESIDENT who is deeply unpopular with Americans. A country facing profound economic and security challenges. New technologies upending old media. A cohort of new immigrants and a bulging generation of young people ready to transform the political calculus.

2008? No, 1932, the tail end of the Hoover administration. And you know how that one turned out. FDR and his fellow progressives took on the challenges of their day and built the domestic programs and international institutions that ushered in an era of unrivaled prosperity and stability. They used a new medium—radio—to reach citizens, and fashioned a new majority coalition from the emergent demographic realities of their time.

Today's progressives face a political opportunity as great as any seen since. The election of 2006 may well have marked the end of the conservative ascendancy that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. George W. Bush now has the potential to do what Herbert Hoover did in the 1920s—tarnish his party's brand for a generation or more.

As in FDR's day, a new media is emerging, one that will ultimately replace the broadcast model of the 20th century. A new American populace is emerging, led by the arrival of the millennial generation and a new wave of immigrants, particularly Hispanics. And once again, the nation faces massive challenges—from climate change to health care in the era of biotech and preparing young people for a global economy. On the eve of the 2008 election, it's worth raising our sights beyond what it would take for a Democrat to win the presidency, and begin thinking about what it would take to bring about deeper, more lasting changes. The stars have aligned to give progressives a chance to permanently shift the conversation about the nation's values. The question before us now is, Do today's progressives have what it takes to do what FDR and his allies accomplished 75 years ago—seize the new politics, take on the big challenges, and usher in a new era?

IN A WAY, the story begins with those fireside chats of FDR's. As the 20th century progressed, American politics became increasingly organized around broadcast media. But now top-down, one-to-many communication is giving way to a very different kind of media—diffuse, participatory, individualized. In 1980, more than 50 million people watched the network evening news on any given night; in 2005 the number was down to 27 million. By 2010, as many as half of all voters will have the ability to skip commercials thanks to TiVo and other digital video recorders. Last year, 100 million videos a day were being downloaded from YouTube, and its owner, Google, had $10 billion in ad revenues, surpassing CBS.

This is good news for progressives. The GOP's success in old media—think Morning in America, Pat Robertson, Willie Horton, Rush Limbaugh, Swift Boat—was essential to its ascent, while the emergent blogosphere and social networking sites play to progressive strengths. (Finally, decentralization and lack of hierarchy are an asset rather than a liability.) And though TV will be around for some time, it is going through seismic change as video migrates to cable, satellite, the Internet, and cell phones—79 million Americans will have phones capable of handling video by 2009.

These technologies have revolutionized our lives in many ways, but one of the consequences is only beginning to be understood: As media become more participatory, so can politics. In the broadcast era, a presidential campaign consisted of quick stops on an airport tarmac (for local evening TV news coverage), 200 young people in a headquarters (largely to shepherd the candidate to more TV coverage), and a constant scramble for the perfect 30-second spot.

Howard Dean's 2003 campaign was the first to put forth a truly 21st century, post-broadcast model—one that saw people as partners in the fight, not just as couch potatoes to be convinced or donors to be solicited. It took advantage of new tools—blogs, early online video, and the kind of voter databases that Republicans had mastered decades earlier. But most important, it put at its very core the notion that average people could be trusted to take action on behalf of the campaign.

Dean lost, but his campaign model survived—and today is becoming the new norm. This year, every one of the major Democratic candidates is running an Internet-oriented campaign, relying on the web for fundraising, organizing, and messaging. And even as the new tools are changing the way political insiders do business, they are also opening the system to new players: Organizations started by people with little or no experience in politics, such as MoveOn, Daily Kos, and ActBlue, are growing as powerful as the 20th century institutions that preceded them. Last year a 26-year-old Facebook user decided to rally support for Barack Obama. Within a month he had 278,000 supporters signed up. In 2003, it took Howard Dean six months to get a little more than half that many registered on his website.

This new paradigm represents a profound threat to the politics of privilege. Funding expensive broadcast campaigns forces political leaders to raise enormous sums of money, giving large corporations and wealthy individuals disproportionate influence. Republicans and Democrats have both played this game, but the Republicans consistently won; now, using Internet fundraising, Democratic Party committees consistently out-raise Republicans. The two leading Democratic presidential candidates raised $60 million in the second quarter of 2007—60 percent more than the $38 million for the two leading Republicans. By July, Barack Obama already had 258,000 donors to his campaign, more than any presidential campaign ever had at that point. Embracing this model has allowed the progressive movement and the Democratic Party to become much more authentic champions of the middle class, dependent as they now are on the financial support of average people.

THE OTHER massive trend transforming politics is the changing composition of the electorate. Some shifts, such as the exodus to the sub- and exurbs, to the South and West, the aging of the baby boom generation, and the shift from industrial to a digital culture, have been much discussed. Others, like the emergence of the millennial generation, the boomer babies and young immigrants born from 1978 to 1996, are less well known. They number approximately 80 million, 3 million more than their parents' generation, and we should expect to see them transform society, culture, media, and politics just as profoundly. They are the most diverse American generation ever, with nearly 40 percent from minority groups; chances are that within their lifetime, the term "majority" will become almost meaningless when applied to race.

Already, indications are that this generation is politically engaged, votes in high numbers, and leans overwhelmingly Democratic. In 2004, people age 29 and under would have given Kerry a landslide of 372 electoral votes had they been the only ones voting. In the 2006 congressional election, that same age group went for Democrats over Republicans by 22 percent—an almost unheard-of margin. Conventional wisdom has it that if a generation votes for one party in three consecutive elections, it tends to stay with that party for life. If that's true, the stakes are high for 2008.

But the millennials' impact will show up beyond the ballot box. Polling data indicate that they are unusually civic minded (they volunteer at the highest level recorded for youths in 40 years, according to one study) and hold a wide range of progressive values: Large numbers of them are concerned with the environment, support gay marriage, prefer a multilateral foreign policy, and even believe in government again. (Sixty-three percent think government should do more to solve the nation's problems.) This generation is poised to become the core of a 21st century progressive coalition.

The other critical new constituency gets a lot of attention, but not often for its potential as a voting bloc. At 15 percent of the population, Hispanics are now the nation's largest minority group and the fastest-growing part of the electorate. By 2050, one in four Americans will be of Hispanic origin. In the border states, Hispanics already make up 30 to 45 percent of the population—and between 10 and 30 percent of the voters—but their influence extends throughout the country. Two of the states with the fastest-growing Hispanic populations are Georgia and North Carolina.

Hispanics have traditionally thrown their support to Democrats, but between 1996 and 2004 the gop doubled its share of the Hispanic presidential vote to 40 percent. Then, in what may become known as one of the great strategic mistakes in American politics, conservatives waged a national campaign to demonize immigrants. In 2006 Hispanics went nearly 70 percent for Democrats, up from 58 percent for Kerry in 2004; their share of the electorate increased by 33 percent from 2002.

This could herald a national shift akin to what happened in California in the 1990s, when Republican governor Pete Wilson backed a harsh anti-immigrant referendum, pushing many Hispanics permanently into the Democratic camp and significantly increasing the number who voted. Partly as a result, California—the home of Nixon, Reagan, and the antitax revolt—is a reliably blue state run by a very progressive legislature, and its Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has essentially become a progressive.

TODAY THESE NEW demographic realities are creating an opening for progressives to craft the next great electoral strategy—one that has Democrats building on deepening strongholds in the Northeast and Pacific West, while bringing together enough progressive and progressive-leaning voters throughout the rest of the country to forge a real 21st century majority.

This new strategy, as scholar Thomas Schaller has noted, is essentially the long-overdue progressive response to the GOP's Southern Strategy, which ripped the South from Democratic control and was critical to the right's recent ascendancy. At its heart is the recognition that the South has gone from a core Democratic area—a position it held from the time of Thomas Jefferson—to a Republican-leaning, though competitive, region. Population growth along with changing party allegiances nationwide now allow Democrats to make up the ground lost in the South in other regions, confirming that, as Howard Dean has argued, Democrats need a 50-state approach.

The good news is that this new strategy is already yielding results. Forty-one states have either a Democratic governor or senator. The gop can only claim the same in 38 states. In 2006 the Senate fell to late wins in the red states of Montana and Virginia, and the House because of crucial victories in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Ohio.

The ultimate test of any national electoral road map is whether it can deliver the White House—and this one finally looks like it may. Let's start with the much underappreciated fact that Democrats in each of the last four presidential elections have won 248 of the 270 votes needed for victory by sustaining a lock on 15 states in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. The gop, meanwhile, has held 16 less-populous states, for a total of 135 votes, in each of these same four elections.

Add to this reliable Democratic base the heavily Hispanic states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Florida (whose Hispanic population, incidentally, is no longer majority Cuban or majority Republican), all of which went for the Democratic presidential candidate in at least one of the last four elections and are now much more Democratic because of the epic shift in the Hispanic vote. Winning the four Southwestern states would put the party at 277 Electoral College votes—more than enough for victory. Adding Florida would put it at 304. If you throw in swing states where Democrats have scored impressive wins in recent years—Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia, maybe even Arkansas—Democrats could construct a durable majority of 354 electoral votes: landslide territory.

The new strategy takes the same regional approach that worked to win Congress, creating a strategic alignment among Senate, House, and presidential aspirants not seen among Democrats in a long time. But it also does something else that is critical: By freeing Democrats from the need to win significant victories in the nation's most conservative places, it will allow progressives to be progressive, to avoid some of the brutal ideological battles that can cripple a movement, and most important, to take risks and think big.

BUT POLITICS is not an end in itself; what counts is what you do with the power once you have it. Democrats, from the new Congress to the presidential field, are in the early—emphasis early—stages of creating a new approach not just to strategy and tactics, but to governing as well. All the Democratic hopefuls are talking about dramatic changes—some suggest "transformational" shifts—for health care, immigration, energy, and national security. And Congress has at least begun the laborious process of orienting governance away from the myopia of the Bush era, with steps like raising the minimum wage and passing new ethics rules while launching formal discussions about globalization and climate change.

But pushing through the changes that made up the New Deal and the Great Society required big ideas—and also big majorities, the kind that often need to be built over time. Here too there is reason for optimism. Going into this election, the Democrats have the wind at their backs; polls find that voters prefer a Democratic president by a 12- to 24-point margin, a gap bigger than at any time since Watergate. Dems picked up 31 House seats, 6 governorships, and 6 Senate seats, plus more than 300 statehouse seats across the nation in 2006. If the Democratic advantage holds for this coming election, there is a chance to not only solidify those gains, but expand on them, especially via an unusual opening in the Senate, where no fewer than 21 Republicans are up compared to only 12 Democrats. This presents a chance to significantly improve on the current 1-vote margin—toward the magic 60 that can break filibusters?

Ultimately, a real movement would achieve something broader than just an electoral majority—a permanent shift in the ideological orientation of the country. Before the New Deal, more than 50 percent of the elderly lived in poverty. Social Security changed that, and despite talk of privatization, eliminating it altogether is off the table. The political and societal changes of the '60s couldn't be rolled back either: Nixon expanded the Great Society and even launched the Environmental Protection Agency.

There's a progressive strain of Republicanism that reaches back to Teddy Roosevelt and to Abraham Lincoln before him. It has been recessive for the last quarter century, but with the right sequence of events could express itself once more. Already there are some early signs: Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently relabeled himself an independent. Goodbye gridlock—hello bipartisan cooperation?

AT THE TIME of his election in 1932, FDR had offered very few concrete ideas on what his administration would do about the collapsing economy that he faced. However, he more than made up for that with entrepreneurial panache. In the famous first 100 days after his inaugural, he pulled together a "brain trust" of experts from many fields and had them hammer out practical solutions, drawing on decades of progressive thinking and borrowing from many political ideologies—from socialists all the way to his Republican antagonists. They adopted a routine of constant, rapid trial and error, with a clear bias toward what worked.

With time, the country stabilized and the New Deal took shape. With the Depression vanquished, President Roosevelt went on to become the global leader who shook hands with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta and helped reshape the world's political and economic architecture, laying the foundation for what would become the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Bretton Woods Accord on global currencies. And progressive innovation did not stop with FDR: From the GI Bill to the Peace Corps to Medicare, from the labor movement to civil and women's rights, it continued for the better part of a century, transforming America and the world.

FDR and his cohorts mastered the new politics of their time: used the new tools, built a new coalition, created a new agenda. They developed a grand strategy to take on the challenges of the moment, and built the foundation for a long era of progressive dominance.

The time is right for 21st century progressives to do the same. Our moment may be analogous to 1932, or it might be closer to 1900, the start of the classic Progressive Era that brought us women's suffrage and the income tax. In either case, we need to think about the current opportunity not just as the span of one presidency, but as the possible beginning of an era measured in decades. That's what it will take to begin to deal with the planet's changing climate, restore America's standing in the world, raise people out of global poverty, stabilize a shifting global economic order, incorporate the best and mitigate the worst of biotech, and so much more that needs to be done.

This is not any old moment in history. It has the potential to definitively mark the end of a conservative period and the start of a progressive one. It's not inevitable. It will take real leadership on many fronts for many years to come. But for the first time in a very long while, it's truly possible.

We've done it before. We can do it again. Let the new progressive era begin.

File:  The_50-Year_Strategy.pdf Image: 

As Published in Mother Jones, November-December 2007 Staff Authors:  Peter Leyden Staff Authors:  Simon Rosenberg Publish Date:  10/29/09 Today's progressives face a political opportunity as great as any seen since. Abstract: 

The 2008 elections are not just about the next four years, but potentially about the next several decades, argue Rosenberg and Leyden, who urge progressives not to simply think about a 50-state strategy, but a 50-year one. The collapse of the conservatives has provided an unusual political opening, they observe, while major shifts in technology and media, demographics, and the challenges the country faces have combined to give progressives an even rarer opportunity to restructure politics for the long term.

The article lays out a grand strategy for how today's Democrats could build a lasting electoral majority and today's progressives could seize the new media, build off new constituencies like Hispanics and the millennial generation, and solve the urgent governing challenges of our times.

A CONSERVATIVE PRESIDENT who is deeply unpopular with Americans. A country facing profound economic and security challenges. New technologies upending old media. A cohort of new immigrants and a bulging generation of young people ready to transform the political calculus.

2008? No, 1932, the tail end of the Hoover administration. And you know how that one turned out. FDR and his fellow progressives took on the challenges of their day and built the domestic programs and international institutions that ushered in an era of unrivaled prosperity and stability. They used a new medium—radio—to reach citizens, and fashioned a new majority coalition from the emergent demographic realities of their time.

Today's progressives face a political opportunity as great as any seen since. The election of 2006 may well have marked the end of the conservative ascendancy that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. George W. Bush now has the potential to do what Herbert Hoover did in the 1920s—tarnish his party's brand for a generation or more.

As in FDR's day, a new media is emerging, one that will ultimately replace the broadcast model of the 20th century. A new American populace is emerging, led by the arrival of the millennial generation and a new wave of immigrants, particularly Hispanics. And once again, the nation faces massive challenges—from climate change to health care in the era of biotech and preparing young people for a global economy. On the eve of the 2008 election, it's worth raising our sights beyond what it would take for a Democrat to win the presidency, and begin thinking about what it would take to bring about deeper, more lasting changes. The stars have aligned to give progressives a chance to permanently shift the conversation about the nation's values. The question before us now is, Do today's progressives have what it takes to do what FDR and his allies accomplished 75 years ago—seize the new politics, take on the big challenges, and usher in a new era?

IN A WAY, the story begins with those fireside chats of FDR's. As the 20th century progressed, American politics became increasingly organized around broadcast media. But now top-down, one-to-many communication is giving way to a very different kind of media—diffuse, participatory, individualized. In 1980, more than 50 million people watched the network evening news on any given night; in 2005 the number was down to 27 million. By 2010, as many as half of all voters will have the ability to skip commercials thanks to TiVo and other digital video recorders. Last year, 100 million videos a day were being downloaded from YouTube, and its owner, Google, had $10 billion in ad revenues, surpassing CBS.

This is good news for progressives. The GOP's success in old media—think Morning in America, Pat Robertson, Willie Horton, Rush Limbaugh, Swift Boat—was essential to its ascent, while the emergent blogosphere and social networking sites play to progressive strengths. (Finally, decentralization and lack of hierarchy are an asset rather than a liability.) And though TV will be around for some time, it is going through seismic change as video migrates to cable, satellite, the Internet, and cell phones—79 million Americans will have phones capable of handling video by 2009.

These technologies have revolutionized our lives in many ways, but one of the consequences is only beginning to be understood: As media become more participatory, so can politics. In the broadcast era, a presidential campaign consisted of quick stops on an airport tarmac (for local evening TV news coverage), 200 young people in a headquarters (largely to shepherd the candidate to more TV coverage), and a constant scramble for the perfect 30-second spot.

Howard Dean's 2003 campaign was the first to put forth a truly 21st century, post-broadcast model—one that saw people as partners in the fight, not just as couch potatoes to be convinced or donors to be solicited. It took advantage of new tools—blogs, early online video, and the kind of voter databases that Republicans had mastered decades earlier. But most important, it put at its very core the notion that average people could be trusted to take action on behalf of the campaign.

Dean lost, but his campaign model survived—and today is becoming the new norm. This year, every one of the major Democratic candidates is running an Internet-oriented campaign, relying on the web for fundraising, organizing, and messaging. And even as the new tools are changing the way political insiders do business, they are also opening the system to new players: Organizations started by people with little or no experience in politics, such as MoveOn, Daily Kos, and ActBlue, are growing as powerful as the 20th century institutions that preceded them. Last year a 26-year-old Facebook user decided to rally support for Barack Obama. Within a month he had 278,000 supporters signed up. In 2003, it took Howard Dean six months to get a little more than half that many registered on his website.

This new paradigm represents a profound threat to the politics of privilege. Funding expensive broadcast campaigns forces political leaders to raise enormous sums of money, giving large corporations and wealthy individuals disproportionate influence. Republicans and Democrats have both played this game, but the Republicans consistently won; now, using Internet fundraising, Democratic Party committees consistently out-raise Republicans. The two leading Democratic presidential candidates raised $60 million in the second quarter of 2007—60 percent more than the $38 million for the two leading Republicans. By July, Barack Obama already had 258,000 donors to his campaign, more than any presidential campaign ever had at that point. Embracing this model has allowed the progressive movement and the Democratic Party to become much more authentic champions of the middle class, dependent as they now are on the financial support of average people.

THE OTHER massive trend transforming politics is the changing composition of the electorate. Some shifts, such as the exodus to the sub- and exurbs, to the South and West, the aging of the baby boom generation, and the shift from industrial to a digital culture, have been much discussed. Others, like the emergence of the millennial generation, the boomer babies and young immigrants born from 1978 to 1996, are less well known. They number approximately 80 million, 3 million more than their parents' generation, and we should expect to see them transform society, culture, media, and politics just as profoundly. They are the most diverse American generation ever, with nearly 40 percent from minority groups; chances are that within their lifetime, the term "majority" will become almost meaningless when applied to race.

Already, indications are that this generation is politically engaged, votes in high numbers, and leans overwhelmingly Democratic. In 2004, people age 29 and under would have given Kerry a landslide of 372 electoral votes had they been the only ones voting. In the 2006 congressional election, that same age group went for Democrats over Republicans by 22 percent—an almost unheard-of margin. Conventional wisdom has it that if a generation votes for one party in three consecutive elections, it tends to stay with that party for life. If that's true, the stakes are high for 2008.

But the millennials' impact will show up beyond the ballot box. Polling data indicate that they are unusually civic minded (they volunteer at the highest level recorded for youths in 40 years, according to one study) and hold a wide range of progressive values: Large numbers of them are concerned with the environment, support gay marriage, prefer a multilateral foreign policy, and even believe in government again. (Sixty-three percent think government should do more to solve the nation's problems.) This generation is poised to become the core of a 21st century progressive coalition.

The other critical new constituency gets a lot of attention, but not often for its potential as a voting bloc. At 15 percent of the population, Hispanics are now the nation's largest minority group and the fastest-growing part of the electorate. By 2050, one in four Americans will be of Hispanic origin. In the border states, Hispanics already make up 30 to 45 percent of the population—and between 10 and 30 percent of the voters—but their influence extends throughout the country. Two of the states with the fastest-growing Hispanic populations are Georgia and North Carolina.

Hispanics have traditionally thrown their support to Democrats, but between 1996 and 2004 the gop doubled its share of the Hispanic presidential vote to 40 percent. Then, in what may become known as one of the great strategic mistakes in American politics, conservatives waged a national campaign to demonize immigrants. In 2006 Hispanics went nearly 70 percent for Democrats, up from 58 percent for Kerry in 2004; their share of the electorate increased by 33 percent from 2002.

This could herald a national shift akin to what happened in California in the 1990s, when Republican governor Pete Wilson backed a harsh anti-immigrant referendum, pushing many Hispanics permanently into the Democratic camp and significantly increasing the number who voted. Partly as a result, California—the home of Nixon, Reagan, and the antitax revolt—is a reliably blue state run by a very progressive legislature, and its Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has essentially become a progressive.

TODAY THESE NEW demographic realities are creating an opening for progressives to craft the next great electoral strategy—one that has Democrats building on deepening strongholds in the Northeast and Pacific West, while bringing together enough progressive and progressive-leaning voters throughout the rest of the country to forge a real 21st century majority.

This new strategy, as scholar Thomas Schaller has noted, is essentially the long-overdue progressive response to the GOP's Southern Strategy, which ripped the South from Democratic control and was critical to the right's recent ascendancy. At its heart is the recognition that the South has gone from a core Democratic area—a position it held from the time of Thomas Jefferson—to a Republican-leaning, though competitive, region. Population growth along with changing party allegiances nationwide now allow Democrats to make up the ground lost in the South in other regions, confirming that, as Howard Dean has argued, Democrats need a 50-state approach.

The good news is that this new strategy is already yielding results. Forty-one states have either a Democratic governor or senator. The gop can only claim the same in 38 states. In 2006 the Senate fell to late wins in the red states of Montana and Virginia, and the House because of crucial victories in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Ohio.

The ultimate test of any national electoral road map is whether it can deliver the White House—and this one finally looks like it may. Let's start with the much underappreciated fact that Democrats in each of the last four presidential elections have won 248 of the 270 votes needed for victory by sustaining a lock on 15 states in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. The gop, meanwhile, has held 16 less-populous states, for a total of 135 votes, in each of these same four elections.

Add to this reliable Democratic base the heavily Hispanic states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Florida (whose Hispanic population, incidentally, is no longer majority Cuban or majority Republican), all of which went for the Democratic presidential candidate in at least one of the last four elections and are now much more Democratic because of the epic shift in the Hispanic vote. Winning the four Southwestern states would put the party at 277 Electoral College votes—more than enough for victory. Adding Florida would put it at 304. If you throw in swing states where Democrats have scored impressive wins in recent years—Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia, maybe even Arkansas—Democrats could construct a durable majority of 354 electoral votes: landslide territory.

The new strategy takes the same regional approach that worked to win Congress, creating a strategic alignment among Senate, House, and presidential aspirants not seen among Democrats in a long time. But it also does something else that is critical: By freeing Democrats from the need to win significant victories in the nation's most conservative places, it will allow progressives to be progressive, to avoid some of the brutal ideological battles that can cripple a movement, and most important, to take risks and think big.

BUT POLITICS is not an end in itself; what counts is what you do with the power once you have it. Democrats, from the new Congress to the presidential field, are in the early—emphasis early—stages of creating a new approach not just to strategy and tactics, but to governing as well. All the Democratic hopefuls are talking about dramatic changes—some suggest "transformational" shifts—for health care, immigration, energy, and national security. And Congress has at least begun the laborious process of orienting governance away from the myopia of the Bush era, with steps like raising the minimum wage and passing new ethics rules while launching formal discussions about globalization and climate change.

But pushing through the changes that made up the New Deal and the Great Society required big ideas—and also big majorities, the kind that often need to be built over time. Here too there is reason for optimism. Going into this election, the Democrats have the wind at their backs; polls find that voters prefer a Democratic president by a 12- to 24-point margin, a gap bigger than at any time since Watergate. Dems picked up 31 House seats, 6 governorships, and 6 Senate seats, plus more than 300 statehouse seats across the nation in 2006. If the Democratic advantage holds for this coming election, there is a chance to not only solidify those gains, but expand on them, especially via an unusual opening in the Senate, where no fewer than 21 Republicans are up compared to only 12 Democrats. This presents a chance to significantly improve on the current 1-vote margin—toward the magic 60 that can break filibusters?

Ultimately, a real movement would achieve something broader than just an electoral majority—a permanent shift in the ideological orientation of the country. Before the New Deal, more than 50 percent of the elderly lived in poverty. Social Security changed that, and despite talk of privatization, eliminating it altogether is off the table. The political and societal changes of the '60s couldn't be rolled back either: Nixon expanded the Great Society and even launched the Environmental Protection Agency.

There's a progressive strain of Republicanism that reaches back to Teddy Roosevelt and to Abraham Lincoln before him. It has been recessive for the last quarter century, but with the right sequence of events could express itself once more. Already there are some early signs: Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently relabeled himself an independent. Goodbye gridlock—hello bipartisan cooperation?

AT THE TIME of his election in 1932, FDR had offered very few concrete ideas on what his administration would do about the collapsing economy that he faced. However, he more than made up for that with entrepreneurial panache. In the famous first 100 days after his inaugural, he pulled together a "brain trust" of experts from many fields and had them hammer out practical solutions, drawing on decades of progressive thinking and borrowing from many political ideologies—from socialists all the way to his Republican antagonists. They adopted a routine of constant, rapid trial and error, with a clear bias toward what worked.

With time, the country stabilized and the New Deal took shape. With the Depression vanquished, President Roosevelt went on to become the global leader who shook hands with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta and helped reshape the world's political and economic architecture, laying the foundation for what would become the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Bretton Woods Accord on global currencies. And progressive innovation did not stop with FDR: From the GI Bill to the Peace Corps to Medicare, from the labor movement to civil and women's rights, it continued for the better part of a century, transforming America and the world.

FDR and his cohorts mastered the new politics of their time: used the new tools, built a new coalition, created a new agenda. They developed a grand strategy to take on the challenges of the moment, and built the foundation for a long era of progressive dominance.

The time is right for 21st century progressives to do the same. Our moment may be analogous to 1932, or it might be closer to 1900, the start of the classic Progressive Era that brought us women's suffrage and the income tax. In either case, we need to think about the current opportunity not just as the span of one presidency, but as the possible beginning of an era measured in decades. That's what it will take to begin to deal with the planet's changing climate, restore America's standing in the world, raise people out of global poverty, stabilize a shifting global economic order, incorporate the best and mitigate the worst of biotech, and so much more that needs to be done.

This is not any old moment in history. It has the potential to definitively mark the end of a conservative period and the start of a progressive one. It's not inevitable. It will take real leadership on many fronts for many years to come. But for the first time in a very long while, it's truly possible.

We've done it before. We can do it again. Let the new progressive era begin.

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