Swing State Project

First on the videocast, I like Edward's podcast efforts more because I think they offer more content, but with a candidate like him, I fully understand why his team is blazing some new ground to get his face attached to his message.

While Edwards fielded a question about online communication and immediately started thinking about the ATM, he recovered nicely by bringing it back to message distribution and interaction. I think he gets it. He realizes that the middleman isn't needed, that instead of pestering the netroots to raise money to pay to distribute message, post-modern campaigns have more latitude to simply distribute message -- focusing on the content rather than paying for the cost of the container.

Now back to the dinner. That is a helluva a group of people to share a table with. Goddard provides an answer before many know the question, Stoller is a fucking genius, Sterling a sage, Klein is a glimpse of what is to come, and Willis is one of the most detail-oriented people to ever keep people focused on the big picture -- some of the best of the best. But as Garance pointed out, it would have been nice for some of the great female voices to be included.

At the end of the day, I don't find it very interesting who Edwards had or didn't have at dinner. I don't find it interesting that he was reaching out to bloggers -- both of the grassroots presidential candidates have figured this out. What I find interesting is that this might get enough play with the inside-the-beltway crowd that politicians who are running for something other than president will follow Edwards leadership and cut out the middleman when it comes to communication.

No matter where you are running, if there are bloggers who write about your district, you should have them over for dinner. While this makes complete sense for the presidential candidates (even their consultants figured this one out), it has been slow to catch on locally.

Looking at the 2008 Democratic Primary, two candidates have really focused on reaching out to the netroots. Democrats running for statewide or federal offices would be wise to rip off the best ideas these two candidates are using. Don't worry, both gentleman want Democrats to succeed and I think would be proud to have you steal their ideas.

The one thing both candidates have realized is that more people will visit other websites than will visit their campaign websites. Tagaris calls this "thinking outside the website" and is a test that quickly shows who gets post-modern communication and who is waiting for fossilization.

The problem is, there aren't enough of us who specialize in this. The smart candidates will have grabbed all of the blog-consulting talent with experience -- by the end of the summer.

So the problem that will face candidates is how to make it without reinventing the wheel -- without being able to hire the people who built the wheel the first time around.

My advice to every Democrat I won't work for is to follow the lead of the grassroots presidential candidates and the bad-ass senate candidate. Hire young people with sound political instincts and reverse engineer the best practices at the national level.

Congressional candidates are building message structures like they are running state-wide, senate candidates are running like they're running for president, and already people are campaigning for 2008. Some know what is going on, some are complete wankers, follow the best of the pack and local campaigns will shine.

But go locally. Plan realizing that Matt Stoller isn't going to have dinner with you. Localization is the key in 2006. Yes, Edwards can nationalize and Jon Tester will nationalize, but for 99% of the candidates the key is localization.