Mediaville
The final 96 hours of Bob Dole's doomed presidential campaign were as poignantly disastrous as they were outdated. Dole's vow to campaign nonstop for the final four days of the election brought him to diners, VFW halls, town squares, and school gyms at odd hours of the day and night.
While Bill Clinton jetted around the country regally in Air Force One, Dole ended up having coffee with a handful of supporters. Mostly, he exhausted himself, sent out lots of diffuse and confusing messages, encountered spare and confused crowds, and generated waves of publicity about just how hopeless his chances were and how desperate his last barnstorming was.
It was a sorry collision of old politics and old media.
But what might have happened if Dole had turned to new, interactive media in those final days, as Clinton did in l992, when he appeared on Phil Donahue, Arsenio Hall, Larry King, and MTV to get away from and out from under the press' self-righteous reporting about his sex life?
Clinton's use of the talk-show format was adroit. By appearing before live audiences, he avoided the media's agenda - mostly controversy, sex, and character - and got to talk to the public, who were far more issue-oriented.
He got hours of TV time to show off his mastery of policy details and his seductive use of live questioners. In so doing, he legitimized the talk-show culture as an interactive political forum, and MTV as a substantial political power among the young.
Despite the public invitation to visit his Web site - an estimated 2 million people took him up on it, according to The Wall Street Journal - Dole was too culturally challenged to exploit new, interactive media or turn to it in imaginative ways.
It wasn't an age problem. There are older Americans online, enthusiastically and in great numbers. As was obvious in his hilariously clunky efforts to review movies, the divide Dole couldn't cross was cultural, not generational.
Too bad, because he not only missed a chance to boost his own campaign, but to show us some of the ways in which new media forms like the Web might come into play in future campaigns.
Instead of rushing all over the country for photo opps, for example, Dole might have announced that he was tired of media obstruction of his message, had had it with Bill Clinton's refusal to say one serious thing, and was frustrated by his inability to communicate his views more directly to more people.
Had he taken this approach in his final days, Dole might have told a startled press corps that he was going to go on his Web site and have a national gabfest for 96 hours with the American people. No media. No handlers. No campaign planes. He and his wife and staff weren't leaving their computers until Election Day, and would be on their touted Web site for the duration, posting messages, answering email, visiting live chat rooms, and appearing on computer conferencing systems.
Any person or group in the country who wanted to talk to him or ask him a question or hear his criticism of President Clinton should get to a computer, and he would try and respond. If he couldn't, he would have aides and volunteers do it. Every post would be answered, one way or the other.
If Dole got 2 million visits to his pretty but static Web site as things were, imagine how many visits he would have gotten in those four days!
Why it might have worked:
It would have been seen as a creative and exciting move, rather than a desperate one, and would have generated enormous publicity and attention, because it would have been out of character - as well as unprecedented. Dole's 96 hours on the Web would have been a sensational, internationally covered cultural and political event. It would have lit up the Web's 12 million residents as well, most of whom fell asleep at their keyboards at the mere mention of Dole's name.
It would have been practical - comfortable, cheap, and more focused, in that his staff and energies could have been directed toward one place rather than so many disparate ones. Since he could eat, and even rest, near the computer, his energy would have been higher, his messages better communicated.
It would have been effective. On a truly interactive Web site, Dole could have spread his messages in much the same way the controversial Dark Alliance series was disseminated by the San Jose Mercury News. Dole's statements, messages, and arguments would have been quoted and passed from conferencing system to Web to site to newsgroup.
People not yet online would have been curious, and some would have gotten to a computer. Or read printouts of discussions, or stories about them. And passed them around at work, in bars, bowling alleys, beauty parlors. Messages from Dole via the Internet would have become collector's items overnight. Every one of the people who communicated with him directly would have called a friend or family member to the screen, or talked to relatives and co-workers about the conversation.
In this way, the notion of the Net culture as a series of teeming hives of information and discourse could have been tried - and almost surely - proven.
Unfettered by all the barriers between candidates and the electorate - Secret Service Agents, distance and space, limousines, journalists - Dole could have had running discussions with tens of thousands of people via individual sites, email and newsgroups.
In a campaign that raised no substantive issues, hundreds could have been raised, discussed and debated on the Net, a powerful contrast to the tepid campaign that Dole and Clinton conducted. Issues could have been lined up in special topics and threaded discussions, and Dole could have sparked more freewheeling political discussion in a few days than we saw all year.
1996 was not the year of the Web, at least not politically. But more tantalizing than looking back over the campaign that was is to think of the campaign Dole might have waged, had he had the foresight to employ new media instead of old tactics.
