Nov. 13, 2006 – Page 2960
News flash: A group of political operatives from both major parties have joined forces to form a dot-com venture in cyberspace.
Wait a minute.
I feel as if I wrote that story back in 2000. And know what? I did write that story in 2000. It’s still in the Slate archives. Only a lot of the political dot-coms I wrote about — Politics.com, SpeakOut.com, Voter.com — are no longer around or gave up trying to turn a profit.
So forgive me for being a little skeptical when I heard the news about the launch of HotSoup.com. This is the new political Web site founded by former White House spokesman Joe Lockhart, former Al Gore strategist Carter Eskew, and Bush-Cheney operatives Matthew Dowd and Mark McKinnon. The site bills itself as “the first online community that joins opinion drivers from across the spectrum.”
“We had this idea of reconstituting a campfire chat, but over the Internet,” Dowd told me recently, while running Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s re-election campaign in California. “The idea is to get people around who might have the opposite views and get them to have a discussion without it becoming shrill.”
In the age of the great divide between red states and blue, the people behind HotSoup believe there are some purple people who may want to understand one other. But this may defy the logic that has driven the success of political sites on the Web so far this decade. “In this highly partisan age, an awful lot of people in politics just want to hear what they already believe,” observed Larry J. Sabato, a University of Virginia political science professor. Hence we had Virginia’s GOP Sen.
HotSoup is just one of what will surely be a new wave of political Web sites seeking to position themselves for the presidential primaries in 2008. (Count CQPolitics.com among them.) Just as the politicians who mastered the use of radio, TV and other media gained advantage in years past, operatives have been consumed with every facet of the Internet medium. And 2006 has been a trendsetter.
What is different this time around is the technology has matured. The Federal Communications Commission reported in July that the number of high-speed Internet connections in the United States increased by 33 percent last year to more than 50 million lines. We saw the impact this had on politics in the midterm elections last week as campaign videos posted on YouTube.com spread over this social network and changed the tenor of several important races.
The rise of social networks is another big change that may influence Politics-dot-com Version 2006. Could the same technology use patterns that drove teeny-boppers to flock to MySpace and Facebook and other “networking” sites also drive the over-18 voting-age set? “Politics is behind the marketplace in general, but the same trends eventually happen in politics,” said political consultant Phil Noble, founder of PoliticsOnline.com, one of the longest-running political Web sites. “You have 100 million users doing anything and a politician would have to be stupid not to pay attention.”
The mainstream media has also taken notice. MSNBC has already partnered with HotSoup and has plans for sharing content, cross promotion and coordinating on news specials. Tammy Haddad, vice president in Washington for MSNBC TV and executive producer of “Hardball,” said the cable news operation wanted to keep tabs on what people in the heartland were talking about. “This is the way politics will be decided,” she said. “If you look at 2008, so much of it will take place on the Web. This is our community. We’re interested in what people have to say.”
HotSoup has some hot backers — it’s funded by the founders — and has recruited bold-faced names to post their views, such as former Rep. Dick Armey, the Clintons and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. But Chip Smith, another of the founders and a former Gore strategist, said that instead of leading the discussion from the top down by experts, “the community is deciding what is relevant.”
Time will tell which political Web sites will achieve critical mass.
But the whole prospect of another dot-com boom prompted a stroll down memory lane and a review of the landscape of the past six years. SpeakOut.com — launched with such advisers as former Democratic Rep. Tom Downey of New York; former national GOP chairman Rich Bond; and Ronald Reagan’s communications guru, Michael Deaver — is now a nonprofit site. Voter.com, once billed as “a revolution in political Web sites, bringing the latest interactive technology together with up-to-the-minute political information,” went belly-up in 2001.
The domain name Politics.com is now for sale. That site, launched in 1999, hired retired ABC News political director Hal Bruno as a senior analyst. Bruno recently told me he has no idea what happened to the Web site after the dot-com crash. “I was one of the lucky ones who got most of the money they owed me,” he said. He’s glad he didn’t take the stock options.
Contributing editor Elizabeth Wasserman is a Washington freelance writer. She can be reached at ewasserman@cq.com.