Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics

Preface

Preface In the spirit of openness and full disclosure that the Millennial Generation treasures, the readers of this book should be forewarned that two life-long Democrats wrote it. Both of us have shared a deep passion for politics and baseball, not necessarily in that order. Along the way, we rooted for the same political party, if not always the same baseball teams. We have also both been fortunate enough to pursue rewarding careers in the private sector. We did, however, take time out from those more personal pursuits to help orchestrate the successful resurrection of the Michigan Democratic Party after it was buried in the 1972 Nixon landslide. One of us, Mike Hais, supplied the survey research data for Carl Levin’s first successful campaign for the U.S. Senate, in 1978, against Senator Robert Griffin, the Republican minority leader. Mike then helped Congressman Jim Blanchard win the state’s gubernatorial election in 1982, ending a twenty-year Republican reign. The other author, Morley Winograd, was the state party’s chairman from 1973 until 1979, during which time the party recaptured a majority of the state’s congressional delegation and, for a brief moment in time, both houses of the state legislature . Together, with the help of the great men and women of the United Auto Workers, we turned the tables on the Republicans and their ticket-splitting strategy, honed to perfection by Governors George Romney and William Milliken in the 1960s and 1970s. We used that approach to elect Democrats by splitting off moderate Republicans from the increasingly conservative candidates the GOP was beginning to nominate, even back then. After the 1990 midterm elections, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) invited Morley, along with Doug Ross, another Michigan Democratic friend, to deliver a presentation entitled “How to Win ix Prelims.qxd 11/23/07 4:26 PM Page ix the White House in 1992.” The person sitting next to us taking copious notes was the vice-chair of the DLC, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas. As described in Taking Control: Politics in the Information Age (1996), Clinton used the speech and the mantra of “Opportunity, Responsibility, and Community” to do what most Democrats, including himself in 1990, thought could not possibly be done. That book, which Morley co-authored with Dudley Buffa, was also the first to identify an entirely new constituency in U.S. politics, based on the impact of information and communication technologies on how Americans were beginning to work and live. After the book’s publication, the Institute for a New California commissioned a series of trail-blazing studies of the California electorate that Mike developed and executed when he was vice president, Entertainment Research, at Frank N. Magid Associates, which identified and profiled “wired workers”—a term that the study made part of the political lexicon of the 1990s. In 1996, Taking Control was brought to the attention of President Bill Clinton. As photographed in Time magazine, the president handed a copy of the book toVice President Al Gore during one of their weekly power lunches and asked him to review its ideas and policy prescriptions. As a result, Morley was asked to assume the position of senior policy advisor to the vice president for the administration’s second term, with special responsibility for the National Partnership for Reinventing Government . In that capacity, Morley had an insider’s view of the workings of the West Wing, and some of those experiences became the source for a few of the stories we tell in this book. But despite our personal partisan perspective, in writing this book we have attempted to be as objective as possible. We have not failed to criticize our Democratic allies where we felt criticism was warranted, and we have attempted, along the way, to outline the best strategies that Republicans might pursue to extricate themselves from their current difficulties. We do so for the same reasons that have spurred our interest in American politics for all of our adult lives. America’s identity as a nation comes from its belief in the concept of democracy. Those fundamental values create a common bond that unites an otherwise heterogeneous population. Phrases such as “life, liberty , and the pursuit of happiness” or “in order to create a more perfect union” have been powerful enough to permeate every aspect of American Preface x Prelims.qxd 11/23/07 4:26 PM Page x Preface...