Opinion

WELCOME TO THE MACHINE

The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web and the Race for the White House

by Garrett Graff

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Those worried about the future can relax. A new generation has arrived, armed with the computing expertise to solve the problems that vexed their elders.

Just ask Howard Dean’s former Vermont webmaster and campaign staffer Garrett M. Graff , who knows American success is easily accomplished if only we can move past the crafty campaign consultants, old media types and assorted bugaboos who’ve kept us from the more enlightened world of “The West Wing,” “that seven-year-long celebration of what politics and national discourse could have been.” Oh, and YouTube can help, too.

While Graff concedes that the 2008 election will address the quibbles like Iraq, Iran, North Korea, homeland security and abortion (somehow the economy doesn’t warrant a mention), “every one of these issues . . . pales in comparison to the question [of] what role will America play in a globalized world.”

What this means is predictably vague, but certainly involves the Web. As proof, Graff offers the YouTube video of then-Sen. George Allen calling a volunteer from his opponent’s campaign who was following Allen around with a video camera “macaca,” which may or may not have been a racial slur, in a clip that was seen millions of times, and likely cost Allen his Senate seat. As if that’s not enough, Graff also cites a friend born in Lebanon who “was following the conflict not by reading the foreign dispatches in The New York Times or The Washington Post, but by reading blogs written by ordinary citizens . . . She felt the information was better and the opinions more ‘true’ than anything she could find in the press.”

Case closed.

What’s telling in Graff’s account, if not purposefully so, is his cheerfully entitled sense of his own membership in what he deems the “tech-savvy generation – more diverse, more educated and more interconnected than any before it.”

This comes across most directly in the section on education, where we receive “the good news . . . that the solutions to the education problems facing the United Sates are readily known and widely accepted.” Knowledge is not one of those solutions: “If a student for some reason needs to know when the Battle of Gettysburg was fought . . . Google knows.” Happily, we already know what we need to: While “66 percent of [D.C. schoolchildren] fail to graduate high school . . . [j]ust across the Potomac River . . . Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia is a national powerhouse in science education.” From this, he concludes that “The economic future of the United States requires a lot more TJs and a lot fewer of D.C.’s ongoing failures.”

Problem solved.

Mostly, though, Graff seems nostalgic for an imagined past of more simple, honest and personal politics, when Dewey and Truman crisscrossed the country by train, “hearing from ordinary citizens about their hopes and fears,” away from “the vacuous promises, charges, countercharges and veiled negative attacks that make up modern political discourse.”

Perhaps in the midst of the 600th debate of this cycle (scheduled for some time next week, I think), we’ll actually see the country turn from an industrial one into one set free by this “new world [where] politicians who have spent centuries isolated from direct responsibility are now accountable for almost every word they say anywhere at any time. The digital playing field is a difficult adjustment for a system that doesn’t particularly love actually being held responsible.”

It’s through such inchoate arguments that Graff advocates for “this new world where ordinary people sitting at home in front of their blogs could help take down the Senate majority leader.” But outside of his childish fantasy of achieving a more honest politics through YouTube, most such attacks serve the same coarsening purpose they had for centuries – ginning up a cheap controversy and attendant mob to distract attention from more important issues and ideas.

If Graff is a guide to the future, America is in more trouble than he thinks.