FDR-at-warmsprings-dot-null

YHB has been mulling over a bunch of ideas about FDR and the internet, and I have yet to come up with anything like a coherent essay. As it turns out, though, I have a blog! And a Tohu Bohu of a blog as well. So here are some of the things I’m thinking about. I figure that if I haul out a bunch of planks, take a look at how big they are, and then start hammering, well, it’ll turn into a birdhouse sooner or later, right?

So. First is this: FDR made a national political career through the mail. This was deliberate and detailed, and reeks of electoral genius. There were three or four really critical things about this that haven’t been duplicated to anything like the extent. First and most important, when he blasted out a thousand or so letters, he asked the person receiving the email to write back with his ideas. Many more people wrote back than would have responded otherwise. Then he wrote back to those people, with a letter that mentioned the ideas in the first response.

Let me be clear: His staff wrote those responses. They weren’t form letters, but they were awfully close to being form letters: structures were determined in advance, and whole paragraphs were boilerplate. Staffers trained to write like FDR wrote a specific response to each letter.

Of course that made the correspondent likely to support FDR politically at the conventions. It also gave him a reputation for being personable and for being in touch with the national scene. This reputation was both true and useful: the bigger the reputation, the more people wrote to him, and the more people wrote to him, the closer in touch with the national scene he could be. And he was personable—and he did read and respond to an amazing number of letters himself, even it is was a small percentage of the whole. And he had somebody really good analyzing the incoming letters and passing on to him good information and data.

The relationships built up this way were not just about a particular election; he started doing this stuff when he was a State Senator, continued it during his time as an invalid, and it lasted for the rest of his life. Some people felt that they were helping him win an election (or a nomination), and others that they were helping build the party, and others just passing along useful information. In the aggregate, they did win the election, they did build the party, and they did get information to the FDR White House (which undoubtedly understood the daily lives of Americans better than any other).

So. That was FDR.

Here’s the thing. I get a fair number of emails from Howard Dean, from various campaigns and Democratic organizations, and it is amazing to me how few of them ask for anything other than money. I understand about fund-raising, and I’m not against it. I understand that people who give money to a campaign or a party are much more likely to vote; that is a relationship, too. But the secondary effect, the effect on the reputation, is lacking. I’m not going to enthuse to anybody about a campaign that graciously took my money.

What I’m wondering is how, in a country of three hundred million people, the majority of whom have email and connection to the internet, can a candidate have anything like what FDR had?

A local candidate can, and it seems to me that not enough of them do. A state legislator, a small-town or even medium-sized town mayor, even a US Rep should be able to put campaign resources into maintaining that kind of correspondence. It would have to be in private emails (to the extent that any emails are private); I think the downsides of a state legislator engaging people in a public forum like a web site comment thread would be substantial. But if I got an email from my local rep (who got it from the national Party, who has both my email and my ZIP code) asking for information on a particular local topic, I would very likely reply. And if I believed that my emails were getting a reply that was not a form letter, I would be more likely to keep emailing, and to support that candidate in upcoming elections. But that’s a few hundred emails a day at most: call it two people part-time. Expensive, but cheaper than a television ad, and there’s the chance that you can use interns or volunteers.

But how does a national candidate field thousands of emails a day? How does he (or she) keep the voter thinking that there is a real connection?

I’m thinking of all this, by the way, as a tool for politicians. Why do I care? Well, to some extent I’m just interested in politics and how it works, much as some people are interested in trains or stamps. In addition, I care about government and policy, so like to see candidates who support policies I like or who govern or legislate well succeed in politics. I think it matters who wins elections. But in addition, I am a Madisonian. I believe in the invisible hand of the political marketplace. It’s not an all powerful hand, but it’s there. And one of the ways that the invisible hand puts its big invisible thumb on the visible scales of governing is that cynical attempts to curry favor with voters tend to produce actual policy results.

Michael earlier asked about ways to use mail as a tool for voters, which is an excellent question but altogether different. Or not altogether. A politician who opens those communications pathways will find that they run in more than one direction. A candidate whose staffers are reading emails from constituents in a cynical attempt to manipulate their votes is a candidate with informed staffers. Those staffers may suggest cynical attempts to keep those votes with cynical applications of good governance and effective legislation on issues that matter to those letter-writers. Which is how it’s supposed to work.

Right now, if Michael writes to his Senator or Governor, his Representative, his State Senator or State Representative, or a candidate for any of those positions, the best he can really hope for is that it will be tallied correctly as being for or against a particular piece of legislation, policy or nominee. It’s possible, of course, that it will be actually read, and it’s possible that it will be read by the office-holder, but the odds are strongly against it. Probably it will be scanned by somebody interested only in producing a statistical summary of the mail. Now, FDR’s people produced statistical summaries, too. I’m not against those. But the paradigm in which those letters are read produced the letters that YHB doesn’t want to bother writing.

And, sadly, if I received an email from my State Senator asking for my thoughts on an issue before state government, I would assume it was a trick to get my email address, and I would delete it. Probably. I don’t know how you would get started, to the point where I knew that my State Senator had a reputation for responding to such responses.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.