Tuning out the dot-coms

The public finds politics on the Web just like politics in real life: boring. Plus, don't count out Warren Tolman in the gubernatorial sweepstakes.

by Dan Kennedy

LOS ANGELES - When it comes to the Internet, politics are a little bit like groceries. Neither is particularly well suited to cyberspace, but that hasn't stopped people from trying to force the matter.

The end of the e-commerce boom was foreshadowed by Priceline.com's announcement last spring that customers would be able to put in bids on, say, boxes of Froot Loops, or lettuce. Wow! A head of iceberg for 49 cents! We're having salad tonight, baby.

Granted, the e-politics boom is a long way from undergoing a bust similar to the dot-com crash of several months ago. But given that the public has made clear its distaste for political news and information, the proliferation of politically-oriented Web sites, complete with ludicrously ambitious business plans, is surpassing strange. Vote.com, Voter.com, SpeakOut.com, Grassroots.com - anyone want to bet on how many will be around five years from now?

At two panel discussions here on Sunday, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, it quickly became apparent that there isn't even any agreement on what constitutes a political Web site.

One, sponsored by the Kennedy School's Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, kicked around a study of Internet-based news coverage of the Republican convention that found - surprise, surprise - that few people bothered to log in. "There was a great deal of supply and very little demand," said Shorenstein Center director Alex Jones. Yet the study, by George Washington University's Michael Cornfield, was top-heavy in its focus on established media such as NYTimes.com, CNN.com, and MSNBC.com; Cornfield didn't even bother to look at Salon and Slate, which may be the Web's two biggest producers of original political reporting and commentary. Then, too, the Shorenstein panel, oddly enough, included the New Yorker's Joe Klein, who quipped that he is "an employee of the only publication in America that does not have a Web site."

The other panel, sponsored by the Freedom Forum, was more oriented toward political participation - through the use of deep archives of information about candidates, interactive discussions, and even, ultimately, online voting. Unfortunately, the question-and-answer session devolved into a long, tedious debate over whether Internet-based voting can be made secure enough to prevent fraud. At one point Joe Mohen, the head of Election.com, which ran Arizona's Web-based primary and is handling online voting at this week's convention, was even challenged to put his company's software in the public domain so that Internet activists can examine it for flaws. Yeah, right.

All panelists agreed that the Internet is here to stay and that the sun will continue to rise in the east. (Okay, okay, the latter was merely implied.) Two observations, though, stood out as worthy of further thought.

One was Esther Dyson's rather hopeful scenario for how the Net might foster political activism from the bottom up. (Dyson, an original Internet visionary and the author of Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, spoke at both panels on Sunday, which may demonstrate the scarcity of common sense when it comes to these matters.) The kind of online politics Dyson envisions is not e-mailing the president, but, rather, using the Net to organize against a sewer line proposed for your street, or to get together with other parents to complain about the high-school French department. Such interactions, she predicts, will foster a climate in which the public demands more "responsiveness" from government and from politicians.

The other was PopandPolitics.com editor Farai Chideya's pessimistic view that the Internet is unlikely to spark a renewed interest in politics, since technology cannot undo the "disenfranchisement and disenchantment" millions of people feel. Ultimately, she warned at the Shorenstein Center event, "issues of technology" cannot be separated from "issues of society."

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Two years ago, Warren Tolman was so well-received as the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor that some party activists groused he should have been at the top of the ticket rather than Scott Harshbarger.

How soon they forget. When Governor Paul Cellucci recently challenged the likely Democratic candidates for governor to debate him on cutting the state income tax, he neglected to ask Tolman.

At a party for the Massachusetts delegation at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art, Tolman - now with the Boston law firm of Holland & Knight - made it clear he's a probable candidate in 2002. And that he wants to debate Cellucci, too.

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