The Clinton administration is using the Net in a pitched effort to perform an end run around the media.
In the basement of the rococo Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the West Wing, a college intern is diligently scrolling through the previous day's batch of 762 electronic-mail messages sent to the president over the Internet.
As he reads each letter, the intern tallies up the viewpoints on a special form. Haiti, health care, and welfare reform top the big political issues of the day. But, as usual, the biggest category of e-mail concerns Bill Clinton's overall job performance. As is typical, this batch is strongly running in the president's favor, nearly 2-to-1.
Why does the daily load of electronic mail consistently bring such fresh air in from the humid boil enveloping the White House these days? At first, senior staffers were puzzled. "People on the Net seem to have a very different impression of the administration than the people who read The New York Times and The Washington Post every day," says Jeff Eller, the director of the President's Office of Media Affairs.
At the time of my visit in August, opinion polls had the president's performance rating sinking fast below the 50-percent mark. Over the past year, Bill Clinton has been besieged by the media for everything from Whitewater to foreign-policy flip-flops. The traditional paper mail from voters is running close to what the polls show.
In a climate like this, I can think of only three possible explanations for why the presidential e-mail has been so flattering:
a) The Net is overrun with Democrats.
b) There's a common belief that flaming the president will result in a pack of Secret Service agents on your ass.
c) People on the Net are very well informed, and thus can more fully realize what a superb job the president is really doing.
Not surprisingly, people who work at the White House believe the answer is c. "There is a different flavor to e-mail as compared with snail mail," says Stephen Horn, the only full-time employee assigned to reading and summarizing the more than 5,000 Internet messages the president receives each week. "E-mail is generally more supportive of the president," Horn adds. "Perhaps people on the Net are more educated and can get around the spin in the press. They can get official documents firsthand. They can draw their own conclusions."
In short, opinion-making on the Net is unmediated.
To a certain group of techno-literate staffers at the White House like Eller and Horn, the Net is not just a mechanism for receiving mail. It is emerging as a full-blown forum for conducting the country's political affairs. While the vast majority of the public gets its dose of political information from television and newspapers, the citizens of the Net are plugged directly into their government. On a daily basis, subscribers to America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy, as well as other denizens of the Internet can download and read a stack of new policy papers, speeches, and transcripts of conversations put out by dozens of departments within the Clinton administration. In the past, only reporters and lobbyists saw these documents.
All this surfs the fine line between information and propaganda. And it could be viewed as either, depending on your political persuasion. White House staffers tend to view the Net as a ballast against the out-of-control mass media and Washington press corps. And they believe the public is sympathetic - that there is as much anger against the media as there is against government. These days, it is easy to argue that the prevailing tone of the political press - one of detached skepticism - has not only outlived its usefulness, but has grown into an infectious brand of cynicism that permeates society. "The press assumes that everything we do is either wrong or politically motivated," laments Eller.
By holding "town meetings" around the country and by establishing a growing presence on the Net, the Clinton administration is making a pitched effort to perform an end run around the media. Not surprisingly, the inside-the-beltway press corps does not like the idea of giving up its role as the filter through which the public sees its government. ABC News political analyst Jeff Greenfield, for one, believes that politicians who play with unmediated communications are playing with fire. "He who liveth by the unfiltered message," he proclaims, "dieth by the unfiltered message."
Bill Clinton's Net presence began in March 1992, a tumultuous political moment, when the Democratic primaries were getting underway and Ross Perot was beginning to emerge out of nowhere. Eller, then a campaign staffer, began uploading copies of speeches and other Clinton documents to forums on CompuServe and occasionally corresponding with voters. "I was surprised that people took the time to read all that stuff," Eller recalls. Until then, he had underestimated the public's growing dissatisfaction with sound bites and newspaper spin cycles. "People showed a real hunger for longer-form communications."
When Clinton was elected, one of his big themes was to reconnect the people to their government. Part of that was a mandate that all incoming mail be read and that responses be sent out to every letter asking for one. That was a tall order. Within its first three months, the Clinton White House got 3 million pieces of correspondence, more, staffers say, than the Bush administration had received in all of its four years.
By establishing the first Internet addresses to the White House, president@whitehouse.gov and vice.president@whitehouse.gov, the administration planned to give citizens another way to correspond. In June 1993, the addresses were made public; soon the White House began sending out paper responses to correspondees. In the year after that, the White House received a quarter of a million e-mail messages. On average, the daily e-mail load runs between 10 percent and 15 percent of the volume of paper mail.
White House staffers soon discovered the advantages of e-mail over paper. Whereas paper mail is usually shoveled into stacks of boxes, held for six months and discarded, e-mail is all neatly stored on the White House computer network where staffers can search by keywords such as "health care," "crime," "Persian Gulf," and so on. That enables staffers to instantly measure which issues are foremost on people's minds. Steve Horn says that he is considering CD-ROM as an archive medium. One such disc, he says, can hold a year's worth of presidential e-mail.
A team of five writers has drafted 300 different form letters, expressing the many policies and views of the administration. The White House uses these letters to respond to e-mail correspondents within a week. By contrast, goes the official line, writers of snail mail don't get their response letters for at least four weeks. Unfortunately, in my own little test case, response time proved much more sluggish than promised, and a reply to my e-mail from the White House took no less than a month to reach me.
With the Internet reaching to the far corners of the globe, the day's e-mail brings tidings from abroad. This past February 4, a message from Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt became the first e-mail correspondence from one head of government to another:
From @SEARN.SUNET.SE:ADMCB@HHS.SE Fri Feb 4 03:52:19 1994 Received: by WhiteHouse.Gov (5.65/fma/mjr-120691); id AA13582; Fri, 4 Feb 94 03:52:19 -0500 Date: Fri, 4 Feb 1994 09:51 +0100 From: Carl Bildt ADMCB@HHS.SE Subject: From PM Carl Bildt/Sweden to President Clinton To: president
Dear Bill,
Apart from testing this connection on the global Internet system, I want to congratulate you on your decision to end the trade embargo on Vietnam. I am planning to go to Vietnam in April and will certainly use the occasion to take up the question of the MIAs....
Sweden is - as you know - one of the leading countries in the world in the field of telecommunications, and it is only appropriate that we should be among the first to use the Internet also for political contacts and communications around the globe.
Yours, Carl
Some people have no use for diplomacy, however, and flame the President instead - to the fullest extent imaginable. "It's no joke to threaten someone's life," says Horn. Such letters, he says, are immediately forwarded to the Secret Service (see "In Jail for E-mail," Wired 2.10, page 33). Sometimes, the agents will trace the writers back through the Internet, find out where they live, and pay them a visit. Many of these purported terrorists have turned out to be kids joking around.
In addition, there's technically nothing to prevent White House staffers from establishing an electronic dossier on you. They could easily extract your name and store it along with your specific political views in a special database file. Horn notes, however, that this database would be forbidden for use by the president's reelection campaign to, say, solicit contributions.
The White House e-mail system is only the start of a much larger Net presence under development at the White House and at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which began working with the Clinton administration under a pro bono contract and is currently funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. At the entrance to the AI Lab's space in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a cryptic, new-media poem scrawled on a white board:
The revelation will not be televangelized.
The revelation will be e-mailed.
The retaliation will be tallied.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
Doesn't revolution mean going full circle?
No one seems exactly sure who wrote it or what it means. But the disjointed statements express a certain subversiveness befitting a place where a barrel-bodied robot on wheels roams the halls, bumping into things while sputtering in a metallic voice: "Don't-follow-me-I-do-not-know-where-I-am-going."
The prevailing view at the AI Lab is that control by the mass media over all things political is coming to an end. In its place will be a back-to-basics, Jeffersonian conversation among the citizenry. "It is the opposite of TV blasting stuff out to people's living rooms," says John Mallery, who leads a team of students and researchers setting up an Intelligent Information Infrastructure for which the White House is a test site.
For starters, the MIT team has helped create a White House document server on the World Wide Web (http://www.whitehouse.gov/), the portion of the Internet that allows for the display of snappy graphics and multimedia information. The heart of the system is a series of home pages for Cabinet secretaries and other government decision makers.
Jonathan "Jock" Gill, a former Lotus Development Corp. manager who now works in the Office of Media Affairs, is hepped up about using technology to cut through the thick fog of cynicism in America. He believes that the Net can greatly expand the "idea space" in which public discourse happens. Instead of watching a few talking heads on TV, citizens can sit at their computers and engage in two-way conversations with each other and with government officials.
By encouraging the creation of these home pages, Gill's goal is to "give everyone in government a name, a face, and a contact point." The reason the public seems disconnected from government in recent years, he says, is that it has grown beyond the reach of the ordinary citizen. "How do you participate with something you can't find and can't know?" says Gill. "Building relationships this way is conducive to building community."
Mallery's team at the AI Lab has ambitious plans to achieve a vision like Gill's. One effort, says Mallery, is to create a natural-language system that can automatically extract the substance of incoming e-mail and build a representation of the knowledge contained in the texts. These systems might keep track of opinions and discussions within electronic communities - allowing people to find and connect with like-minded individuals around the world. They might also help mediate between viewpoints and move debates toward consensus. A knowledge representation for debates about universal health coverage might include the overall goal and branches leading down that summarize ideas about how to achieve the goal.
In the end, says Mallery, much of human culture will be accessible online, resulting in what he calls a new "electronic Zeitgeist." But AI researchers have been working on this kind of knowledge representation problem for nearly 40 years. And there is certainly no guarantee that it will be solved any time soon.
For now, the big question seems to be whether this new forum for political communications really makes a difference. Will we really be participating in self-government? Or will we just be made to feel that we have a say in what goes on? To test it, I decided to send some e-mail to the president:
You probably have two choices. Accept the congressional plans that promise 95 percent coverage, and "call it" universal, pointing to the phone companies. Or you can say that universal service - meaning 100 percent - was unrealistic to begin with, given the experience with the phone industry.
I believe this is an appropriate parallel that you should look into.
Sincerely, Evan Schwartz Boston, Mass.
Less than a week later, presumably after my e-mail made its way up to the eyes of the president himself, this story lead appeared on the front page of The New York Times:
BOSTON - Suggesting that he is ready for compromise on health care legislation, President Clinton on Tuesday softened his call for insurance coverage for all Americans, saying 95 percent or 98 percent might do. "We know we're not going to get right at 100 percent," Clinton said.
Then, this from The Associated Press the following day:
The President felt the need to clarify his position after he told the governors conference in Boston Tuesday that "we know we're not going to get right at 100 percent." Clinton told reporters he could compromise on how to achieve 100-percent coverage, but that numbers like 95 percent or 98 percent that he tossed out a day earlier only reflected congressional negotiations and practical realities - not a reduced goal.
Until this moment, Clinton never addressed the issue of what "universal coverage" really meant, in terms of a percentage. I'm under the impression that my e-mail may have helped convince Clinton to get more realistic about his health care policy. I'm going to have to start writing that guy more often.
Top 10 Reasons Why the White House staff Likes the Internet
This list provided by Tom Kalil, the David Letterman of the Clinton/Gore administration.
