Planting Liberally

The book launch for Dispatches from the Religious Left is coming up on Tuesday, Oct. 14.  In anticipation of the event, I'm running a series this weekend on a few essays from the book.  Yesterday I wrote about PastorDan's essay on the role of the Religious Left (PastorDan responded here), as well as Rev. Debra Haffner and Timothy Palmer's essay on a theology of sexual justice.

The third part of the book is dedicated to "getting from here to there", and is a bit more nuts-and-bolts-oriented than the first two parts.  It includes the essay my wife and I wrote on new media, which focuses on helping religious organizations find their voice online.  However, since that material is probably pretty familiar to many blog readers, I'm instead going to focus on the contribution by Frederick Clarkson (who is also the editor of the book), titled "Three wheels that need not be reinvented".

Fred's main argument is that the Religious Left must get more involved in electoral politics.  By way of contrast he points to the Religious Right, which actively participates in party primaries, registers voters, and maintains high-quality voter lists that persist from one cycle to another.  All of these ingredients help the Right exert power far beyond its numbers, and Clarkson argues that the Left must respond in kind in order to realize its vision.  His chapter profiles three progressive political organizations in Massachusetts, and offers them as organizing models for Religious Leftists.

The first organization is Neighbor-to-Neighbor, a statewide organization whose goal is to register voters in low-income communities in order to boost turnout and elect progressive representative.  The organization has a "Working Families Agenda" which it uses to engage and register voters throughout the year.  At election time, these efforts are reinforced by personal contact.  In this way, Neighbor-to-Neighbor keeps its constituents engaged across election cycles, and is able to build a high-quality voter list which forms the basis for electoral efforts.

The second organization is Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts, an alliance of volunteer-run chapters throughout the state.   PDM was founded in the wake of Robert Reich's unsuccessful bid for governor in 2002.  Reich's run was a rallying point for progressives in a very un-progressive year, and in some ways helped pave the way for Deval Patrick's dramatic upset victory in 2006.  PDM's goal is to elect progressives in Democratic party primaries - which, in many areas in Massachusetts, is really where the election is held, since voters overwhelmingly back Democrats in the general election.

The third organization is MassVote, née BostonVote.  MassVote encourages non-profit social service agencies to register and mobilize their constituents, in order to build support for their programs within state government.  The organization has developed an innovative set of resources to conduct this kind of registration and mobilization at low cost, and within the rules for electioneering by non-profits.  This last point should be emphasized: the organization doesn't encourage its member agencies to engage in partisan activity; instead, agencies do non-partisan voter registration and education work.  That work brings more progressive voters to the polls, and elects progressive representatives; but that's incident to the target voter population, rather than the result of any particularly partisan activity.  (Disclosure: A few years ago MassVote was a prospective client for the company I worked for at the time.)

Clarkson wants the Religious Left to adopt some of these models and integrate it into its own work - while following IRS rules.  As MassVote clearly demonstrates, it is possible to create a progressive electorate without stepping outside the boundaries of 501(c)3 regulations, simply by targeting non-partisan voter registration, mobilization, and non-biased education efforts at progressive voter populations.

Fred's essay is a good starting point for prodding religious organizations to participate in electoral politics.  However, I think the Religious Left will need to build some infrastructure - both theoretical and organizational - in order to realize this vision.

For starters, we will need to create and promote what I call a "theology of participation" - an argument that democratic participation by our congregations is not just ok, but in fact necessary.  Many liberal congregations are already committed to social justice in a variety of ways, so I don't think this will be a particularly hard sell.  On the other hand, some liberal congregations are also instinctively allergic to politics in the pulpit, and congregants might become incensed at anything which appears to violate the spirit of separation of church and state separation.  Religious leaders who want to register and mobilize their congregations should be clear about a few key points: first, that democratic participation is a profound act of bearing witness to one's value system; second, that it is a way to support the church's social justice mission; and finally, that the congregation is not endorsing any party or candidate, and that it is up to individual congregants to decide which candidate or party will best support social justice.

On top of this theology of participation, congregations will need to layer a set of practices to encourge participation.  These practices begin with voter registration drives.  They also include basic education, especially for local elections.  Congregations should ensure that their members know when the election is as well as the meaning of various offices on the ballot is.  Finally, within certain boundaries, congregations can help their members learn about the candidates who are running for office.  This last step will require a great deal of delicacy, as it's entirely easy to cross the line from voter education to candidate endorsement - even without intention.  Some congregations may want to eschew this step entirely, or may want to simply encourage their members to obtain a copy of the ballot a week or two before the election and to educate themselves.  (Or to organize their own ballot parties.)

On top of this level of activity within congregations, the Religious Left should build organizations which can aggregate this activity and harvest the results across election cycles.  Congregation-organized voter registration drives should be harvested into long-lasting and well-maintained voter lists.  Those voters, in turn, should be engaged about important issues year-round, and should be targeted for mobilization at election time.  This kind of work is too far outside the mission of individual congregations.  And it is not particularly well-suited to single-issue groups like the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.  So new, multi-issue issue groups will need to be built.

In some ways, this three-tiered approach to voter registration and mobilization - beginning with theological foundations, proceeding to routine practice, and culminating in aggregation and professional cross-cyclical efforts - is just the beginning.  As a movement with a broad commitment to social justice, the Religious Left can, and should, be heavily involved in building progressive power outside of the voting booth.  In particular, the Religious Left should incubate labor organizing and community organizing efforts; leaders should encourage their congregations to support these organizations in meetings and on picket lines, and should offer meeting space or other resources where necessary.  Not only are these efforts non-partisan, but they are profoundly faithful acts of social justice, which will have a strong foundation in the theological tradition of the vast majority of Religious Left congregations.  (Indeed, many liberal congregations are already doing this kind of work, and have been doing it for a long time, much to their credit.  I'm merely arguing for more of this kind of work, and for liberal congregations to be more pro-active in seeking out and supporting this kind of capcity-building social justice work, where it makes sense.)  In most cases, this kind of work will ultimately result in more power for the progressive movement, but that is just the natural result of empowering marginalized people, rather than an explicit act of partisanship.

Fred Clarkson has been arguing for a more electorally engaged Religious Left for a long time.  He's seen the Religious Right's efforts to build power in Republican Party committees and primaries in person.  The kind of voter registration and mobilization efforts he advocates for - and many others - are long overdue.

This weekend, in anticipation of the book launch of Dispatches from the Religious Left, I am running a series on a few selected essays from the book.  Earlier today, I posted my review of PastorDan's essay on the role of the Religious Left.  This post is about an essay by Rev. Debra Haffner and Timothy Palmer: "Towards a theology of sexual justice."

Sexual justice, as defined by this essay, is quite broad:

Indeed, the full scope of sexual justice embraces anyone who is concerned with gender equality, reproductive rights and health care, and the right to privacy, not to mention education, equality of opportunity and the dignity of all persons.

These issues are far too important to far too many people to sweep under the rug in seeking the support of an ever-elusive "Religious Center", as Jim Wallis argues.  So how is the Religious Left to support sexual justice?

The essay urges Religious Leftists to support a wide array of positions under the umbrella of sexual justice, including comprehensive, age-appropriate sexuality education; full access to sexual and reproductive health services; and full inclusion of women and LGBT individuals in public life.  Additionally, the essay calls for better awareness and understanding of adolescent sexuality and sexual and gender diversity.

The key to this agenda is the development of a "theology of sexual justice".  Haffner and Palmer's organization, the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing, has done considerable work in framing sexual justice in a religious context.  The theology which has emerged from this work focuses on personal relationships, integrity, and justice.  The essay discusses this theology with particular regard for children and adolescents (who need help learning about sexuality and making good decisions about personal relationships); women (who deserve agency); and LGBT individuals (who have a right to full inclusion in public and religious life).

The essay explicitly rejects the narrow biblical view of these issues.  For example, in addressing abortion: "Scripture neither condemns nor prohibits abortion.  It does, however, call people to act compassionately and justly when facing difficult moral decisions.  Scriptural commitment to the most marginalized means that pregnancy, childbearing and abortion should be safe for all women."  The essay ends on a hopeful note, noting positive trends that suggest that liberal views of sexual justice are ascendant.

This kind of theological argumentation is, I think, a valuable contribution from the Religious Left.  While the Religious Right has carefully worked to close the door on theological debate of political issues, the Religious Left can blow the door off its hinges.  Certainly, this kind of debate can begin with direct biblical argumentation: the Bible does not say much about abortion, and it says almost nothing about homosexuality - and even less about how we understand it today.  But the debate is much broader, and in this sense the diversity of the Religious Left is a key strength.  For while the Bible might or might not condemn abortion, there are many people for whom the Bible, or the New Testament, is simply irrelevant, and these people have a right to make a theological argument about the issues of the day.  A healthy public theological debate about political issues can only diminish the influence of the Religious Right.

However, I think the essay stops short, in that it treats sexual injustice as merely a platform promoted by a select few leaders of the Religious Right.  In my view sexual injustice is much more; it draws on a crisis of identity and a fear of new and confusing realities among the rank-and-file.  Fear of the sexual other is interwoven throughout conservative culture, at least as far back as the days of post-World War II redbaiting, according to Rick Perlstein's Nixonland.  And it is certainly has a pernicious and sinister influence on our politics today.

But while in the political realm it is ok, and perhaps even necessary, to forthrightly reject this kind of fear, and to contrast it with open-ended inclusion, the job of a religious movement is very different.  Fear of the sexual other, and a crisis of sexual identity, is a personal and pastoral problem.  It is something which liberal religious ministry can tackle; it is a job which liberal religious leaders throughout the country are probably already doing within their own congregations.  I would also argue that it should be part of the mandate of the Religious Left, to address and mitigate this spiritual crisis outside the boundaries of liberal religious congregations and in society as a whole.  Not only would such a project be a valuable service to society as a whole, it would also redound to the benefit of the progressive movement, as it would undermine the foundation of the Religious Right.

I admit that I don't know much about how the Religious Left would go about addressing this problem outside the boundary of liberal religious congregations.  It's not an easy problem on an individual level, and I can't imagine the project gets easier on a national scale.  But I'd certainly welcome suggestions, and I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on Haffner and Palmer's thoughts about a theology of sexual justice.

My copy of Dispatches from the Religious Left arrived today and, since the book launch is next week, I thought I'd crack it open and review some of the essays this weekend. The book is divided in three parts: "Envisioning a more politically dynamic Religious Left", "Memos on hot button issues", and "Getting from here to there". So my plan is to review one essay from each chapter over the next few days.

First up is "Religious Left: Changing the Script", by Daniel Schultz, better known to many blog readers as Pastor Dan of Street Prophets.

PastorDan's essay is characteristically blunt and honest. It opens with a none-too-subtle reproach to Religious Leftists: "What the Religious Left is doing is not working!".

The prognosis is that, for a variety of reasons, the Religious Left is not an effective political movement in the way that the Religious Left is. This ineffectiveness stems from a tendency to get mired in small-bore issues and miss the forest for the trees; an eagerness for spiritual development coupled with ambivalence about politics; and the storied theological diversity of a movement which includes some number of Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews, and Muslims - and many others.

The prescription, according to PastorDan, is to develop and articulate a progressive political theology for the Religious Left. By way of contrast, he refers to Walter Brueggemann's identification of the dominant political theology in a 2005 Christian Century article - "the script of therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism that permeates every dimension of our common life."

PastorDan echoes Brueggemann's argument that the Religious Left must offer a "counterscript" to this dominant ideology. He doesn't so much spell out what that progressive political theology is, but suggests, in a somewhat roundab
out fashion, a way to get there. The key idea is that the Religious Left should be "questioning assumptions, imagining new possibilities, keeping an eye on the human bottom line of public policy." This process suggests an honest examination of conflicted feelings on issues ranging from sexual diversity to social welfare programs, and to use that examination to probe long-held assumptions more deeply. For example, PastorDan suggests that conflicted feelings about safety in the age of terrorism could lead to an examination of the assumptions embedded in our national security state, and from there to a productive re-imagination of the transformation of that apparatus.

This process is not the stuff of winning electoral politics, exactly, and PastorDan is quick to admit that he is not calling for the development of a robust political machine which can answer the Religious Right, dollar-for-dollar and demagogue-for-demagogue. Indeed, he argues that while the role of the Religious Right has always been to provide clear answers, that of the Religious Left should be to ask questions, to be "astronauts of inner space".

This chapter is rather difficult, both because it's a bit on the abstract side, and because its prescription is challenging. Asking difficult questions, suited though it may be to the Religious Left, is a good way to mint new enemies, and is not a good way to notch up victories. Those who are hoping for a powerful, organized political religious movement that can provide the same kind of volunteer firepower to the Democrats that the Religious Right provides to the Republicans won't get a lot of sympathy from PastorDan. That doesn't mean he's wrong, but it's likely to give a lot of people (myself included) some pause.

To be sure, I don't think we want a Religious Left that is in every way similar to the Religious Right. To begin with, the last thing we need in this country is a second copy of the Religious Right; more to the point, it just won't work. Religious progressives, by an large, will not participate in a movement that works in lockstep with a political party.

At the same time, it seems to me that asking questions is just limiting the Religious Left a bit too much. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the chapter, but it seems to me that PastorDan assumes a dichotomy between asking questions and providing answers, and based on that assumption, imagines that the Religious Left must be a constant long-term thorn in the side of the political system, rather than an agent of potential short-term victories. I think it's a false dichotomy, although I admit that I'm not entirely sure what the mechanics of asking questions while providing answers looks like. To return to the earlier example, it certainly would have been a tall order, in the post-9/11 days, to simultaneously ask difficult questions about our national security apparatus and to illuminate a hopeful path into a safer and more sane world. That's still pretty difficult, seven years after the fact.

In any case, I'm curious to hear what you think - is PastorDan's diagnosis correct? Is asking questions a sufficient role for the Religious Left, or is it too narrow? And if it is too narrow, what's the proper role for the Religious Left?

Dispatches from the Religious Left will be released in about a week, on Oct. 1, 2008.  The book contains a wide variety of thoughtful essays on what the Religious Left is and how it should move forward, including a brief chapter on new media that my wife and I co-write.  If you happen to be in New York on Oct. 7, please drop in for the book launch:

Tuesday, October 14, 2008
7:00pm - 10:00pm
Middle Collegiate Church
50 East 7th St., New York, NY
RSVP: http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?ei d=25908349317

This will certainly be a fascinating event, with featured speakers including Chris Hedges (author of "I Don't Believe in Atheists", and "American Fascists"); Rev. Debra Haffner (Director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing); and Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou (Associate Minister for Missions, Social Justice and Community Action at Middle Collegiate Church).  Frederick Clarkson, the book's editor and one of the main contributors at Talk2Action, will also be appearing.  The event will be moderated by the Rev. Jacqui Lewis, Senior Minister at Middle Collegiate Church, and will feature the church's gospel choir.

I won't be speaking, although you will get to see me in a suit, which, apparently, is still something of a shock to my college friends.  And I imagine there'll be a pretty lively Q&A.

It's quite exciting to be able to attend this event; I view this book as an answer, of sorts, to Michael Lerner's call for a movement of spiritual progressives in The Left Hand of G-d, with plenty of specifics.  I hope to see plenty of MyDD readers there!

Having spent a fair amount of time on My.BarackObama.com and at Obama volunteer rallies over the last couple of weeks, I think it's safe to report that Obama's grassroots are reasonably well-organized. However, its grasstops could use a bit of help.

Perhaps this is an artifact of living in the Boston area, where you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a dozen Obama supporters. But from all appearances, Obama volunteer organizers in the area are slowly getting overwhelmed with the tidal wave of demand for volunteer opportunities. Recently I spoke with an organizer who told me that he had posted a small phonebanking opportunity on My.BarackObama.com at some unholy hour, like 3 am; he had a dozen volunteers by 11 am. As far as I can tell, he and a handful of other organizers are making a heroic effort to keep up with this demand, but they just don't have sufficient support from the campaign.

Now, in some ways this is just a problem we have to grin and bear - I don't expect Obama to put many resources in Massachusetts, and I'm actually a little surprised that there's even a single Boston field office. (It's dedicated to funneling volunteer power to New Hampsire, and registering students here so that they can absentee vote back home.) But there is a lot more that the campaign can do to support its volunteer leaders, particularly through My.BarackObama.com.

If you've explored the site in any depth, you've probably seen that My.BarackObama.com is a pretty good, action-oriented community site. There are some lightweight social networking features there, similar to what you'd find at DFA-Link or PartyBuilder - the ability to create groups, to blog, and to establish friendships with other users. But the real bulk of the site is dedicated to allowing you to find and attend events, raise money, and make phone calls for the campaign. This site answers a basic question - "how do I get involved?" in a very detailed way.

Where My.BarackObama.com fails, though, is in helping people who are very, very involved take the next step up, and help organize their fellow volunteers. There are a number of features volunteer leaders could make excellent use of, and which the site could provide. For example:

• Leadership roles within groups
• Private messaging between leaders
• Event planning for leadership-only events, especially organizing meetings
• A public email address for leadership - e.g., cambridge@my.barackobama.com - which all leaders can access and which volunteers can easily use to contact leadership
• An issue tracking or project-management system - similar to dotProject, or Mantis - which is integrated into the public email address and which leaders can use to process requests and keep each other appraised of various ongoing projects
• Document sharing features

In many ways what I'm suggesting is that the Obama campaign add something like the 37Signals suite of office communication tools into its system, and then open up those tools to a limited set of "super-volunteers", perhaps on an invite-only basis.

Now, I'd doubt that the campaign has the time it requires to pull something like this together in time for it to make a difference. However, this is the kind of thing that a group of volunteer web developers could pull together without some effort, using open source tools like Drupal and, when necessary, pulling in functionality from Google Documents and other sources.

I'd be curious to hear whether or not there are already efforts like this underway, or whether there are enterprising web developers looking to slap something like this together. And I'd certainly like to hear from super-volunteers - is this something you could actually use, or have you already found a solution on your own? Please use the comments to let me know.

One way or the other, I hope the lessons learned from this campaign don't evaporate after election day. The political social networking tools in the progressive universe, having evolved from DFA-Link, to PartyBuilder, and now My.BarackObama.com, have come a long way, but there are still more improvements that should be added, in order tohelp embattled volunteer organizers next time around.

Yesterday Jack and Jill Politics announced the launch of the Voter Suppression Wiki, complete with an intro video from Baratunde Thurston (who used to co-host Drinking Liberally with me):

The goal of the wiki is simple: to document and expose reported cases of voter suppression, whether they be targeted at veterans, students, folks on foreclosure lists, or otherwise. The wiki also includes an action center to help activists get involved in preventing voter suppression. Anyone can register and contribute to the wiki - in fact, I did just that this morning, adding a link to Pollworkers for Democracy to the action center page.

Congratulations to Jack and Jill, as well as others involved in helping set up the wiki, including Jon Pincus. This is a great resource for pulling together all of the sundry voter suppression effort going on across the country, and for helping activists fight back.

Recently the Obama campaign quietly released the Neighbor to Neighbor tool, an innovative approach to field work which releases volunteers from the need to go to a campaign office in order to reach potential voters and volunteers. This tool has been kicking around Democratic circles for a while - first in the Lamont campaign's postcard tool, then in MoveOn's phonbebanking system for the 2006 general election, as well as Deval Patrick's DIY canvassing effort in the run-up to his landslide victory in Massachusetts.

The basic idea is simple. If you want to volunteer for Obama, just go to my.barackobama.com, and either sign up or register for an account. Once you're logged in, you'll see a list of "Neighbor to Neighbor" campaigns on the left hand side of your screen; click one of them, and the website will take you through the necessary next steps. At the end of the day, you get a list of people who the campaign needs to contact - either prospective volunteers who you could bring on board to increase capacity, or voters who you could convince to vote for Obama. You also get a script to use when you're making calls. When you're done with the calls, you record the results of each call (Was the person home? Will he or she volunteer / vote for Obama? etc.). The campaign has a good video explaining the process, too:

I'm very pleased to see this system come on-line. It's an excellent way to empower volunteers and to radically ramp up the campaigns potential for volunteer activity. If you're not signed up at my.barackobama.com, head on over there and register now. Then schedule some time to make Neighbor to Neighbor calls in the next week.

Despite my enthusiasm for this system, I think there are a few things the campaign could do to improve upon it, if there's time:

1. Publicize it better. I've seen almost no mention of Neighbor to Neighbor anywhere, except for a passing reference on a blog post (and I can't remember where that was.) I had some idea that this would be coming online eventually, since I remember hearing about it during Patrick's campaign, and I can't imagine that the Patrick campaign had a single tactical or strategic innovation that wasn't shared with Obama. But a Google search for "obama neighbor to neighbor" turns up a good post by Jack and Jill, an embed of the video clip I posted above - and very little from the Obama campaign itself. Despite having attended a couple of volunteer organizing meetings in my neighborhood over the last week, I've heard nothing about Neighbor to Neighbor. Why not publicize this great new system on the email list, or at a bare minimum make volunteer organizers aware of it?
2. Make it Facebook-savvy. I've installed the Obama Facebook application, I've registered on my.barackobama.com. Why did I have to do the two things separately? Much more importantly, how come the one doesn't seem to know anything about the other? Why isn't My.BarackObama.com trolling through my Facebook friend list and asking me to invite those of my friends which are also on its list to register to vote, volunteer, or otherwise get engaged? Why can't I find out which of my Facebook friends are listed as undecided, so I can chat with them about the election, or possibly clear up a gap in the campaign's records? As far as I can tell, the Facebook application is just a content delivery mechanism, which seems like a serious underestimation of Facebook's organizing capabilities.
3. Better matching capabilities. What I've heard from professional tele-fundraisers is that the best people to staff the phones on a campaign are either those who are naturally good at telemarketing, or those who are demographically similar to the target population. It seems obvious enough, but that kind of smart matching rarely happens on political campaigns. Currently, the Neighbor to Neighbor program matches me with other people in my geographic area (since I asked to speak to prospective volunteers, anyway). That's a reasonable way to approximate demographic matchup, but there are plenty of people who live near me but aren't at all like me. Potentially, a web developer in Ohio or a Jewish grandmother in Florida would be a much better person for me to talk with than a lawyer down the street. Yet the system doesn't ask me anything about my occupation, religion, racial identification, or other demographic indicators, and I can almost guarantee that on the other side, there's no cross-referencing of voter registration records to commercial databases that could reveal similar information about voters.
4. Open up the data. From what I can tell, there's no way to get this data and write a program to do something interesting with it. That's significant, as both of my last two points could be addressed by a sufficiently energetic team of developers, without the supervision of the campaign, writing data-mining or Facebook-mashing applications to make the Obama campaign's database come alive. The point is, these two ideas might be the tip of the iceberg, and there could be other, smarter applications waiting to be unleashed. This point is all the more significant because, I'd wager, data-miners and web developers are probably emphatically pro-Obama. The weight of technological innovation is squarely in Obama's camp this year, and the campaign should press that advantage to the hilt. I recognize there are important privacy concerns regarding this data, but there must be some way to properly license or protect the data while allowing outside developers to innovate on top of it.

At this point, Obama's exceptionally strong ground game could easily be the difference between victory and defeat. Neighbor to Neighbor could be a game-changing application that blows open the potential for volunteer engagement in the campaign. It's a wonderful tool, but it needs a bit of tweaking at the margins to really make it shine. I'd love to hear from others - have you used Neighbor to Neighbor? If so, what are your thoughts or critiques? Any thoughts about Obama's ground game from an in-the-trenches perspective?

This week, Chris Bowers at OpenLeft has been encouraging readers to run their own media campaign. The idea is very simple: at a fairly low budget, anyone can set up a simple Google ad campaign, targeted geographically and by keyword. Bowers has been running two ads - one against McCain, the other against Palin - in his native Pennsylvania, and thinks he can reach a lot of voters on a fairly low budget.

The commenters at OpenLeft have been ecstatic about the idea, and I think it is exceptionally clever. In addition to the first order effects - exposing anti-McCain messages to a lot of voters in swing states - the campaign could also have an indirect sway over the campaign's own messaging strategy, by demonstrating in a quantifiable way the messages that work (and receive a lot of click-throughs) and those that don't. I suppose that's a long shot with this campaign, but it's nevertheless a possibility.

In any case, I'd be interested to see if someone could take this idea to the next level, and make the decentralized media campaign idea a bit more social. For example, would it be possible to set up a website which allows people to set up all of the parameters for a Google Ad campaign - the keywords, the geographic target, and the message/link which appears - and then to aggregate all of those campaigns on the website in some interesting way? There are a lot of different ways to do this - e.g. breaking down ad campaigns by state, tag-clouding the chosen keywords, and showing aggregate click-through and impression statistics. This kind of aggregation could be augmented with comments (suggesting refinments and tweaks to existing campaigns) as well as team fundraising pages, allowing site visitors to support one campaign or another monetarily. It's also possible to maximize and quantify the impact of a campaign like this by targeting all of these ads at an action-oriented microsite, which takes a user through the steps of signing up for Obama's email list, giving a small donation to the campaign, signing up for My.BarackObama.com, and so on.

This sounds, to me, like a good example of a simple business idea that could be modestly profitable, since after all the main point of this project is to sell Google ads. Technologically, this should be a relatively simple mashup of a community platform like Drupal with the Google Adwords software development toolkit. With relatively low costs, it should be possible to set the transaction costs - on top of the raw costs for the campaign itself - at a sufficient level to generate relatively decent profit margins. Besides the constant problem facing any social web platform - will anyone show up? - the only difficulty, as many OpenLeft commenters have already alluded to, is whether such an endeavor would run afoul of campaign finance rules, and whether or not Google Ad purchases would be considered campaign contributions. My guess is that this kind of project would have to be organized as a 527, or under the auspices of one.

If something like this doesn't take shape between now and Election Day, it's probably a worthwhile organization to develop, even so. Beyond the immediate need to go on the offense against McCain, as Chris points out, it's important to help develop and test messaging for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, in an environment that's not controlld by the campaigns themselves. More than that, with Google beginning to sell offline media ads in newspapers, radio and television, there's no reason to restrict an ad campaign to Google Adwords (although it's much more gratifying, as real-time metrics are available.) Any takers?

Disclosure: My company worked on a small technical/design project for Open Left last year.

There have been a lot of interesting stories running across the wires in the world of progressive culture this week.  Unfortunately I don't have time to really analyze each of them in-depth, but I thought I'd point them out here:

 

• Michael Wolff profiles Roger Ailes, owner of Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal, in Vanity Fair.
• David Moberg has a great piece on Working America in The Nation.  Working America is the AFL-CIO's "community affiliate".  Essentially it's a large (2.5-million-member) list of non-union members who sympathize with the union's position on a number of bread-and-butter issues, and it gives the union the ability to extend its electoral might outside the boundaries of its membership.  What's more, Working America has also started enlisting its members in support of labor organzing drives, picket lines, and the like.
• Over at Build the Echo, Tracy van Slyke talks about digg moving to the left, and progressive new media activism inspired by The Young Turks. Progressive media creators, especially vloggers and podcasters: read this post!  Disclosure: van Slyke's organization, The Media Consortium, is a client of my company.
• Again at Build the Echo, Jessica Clark highlights this great video (another good example of progressive new media activism) about Obama's Challenge:
  
  That Amazon discount code, again, is: RGVTUIQY.  You can also buy the book at Powells.
• Global Labor Strategies has a challenging, thought-provoking post about the big-picture problems facing the labor movement, both in the US and abroad.  They argue that service sector organizing and EFCA won't cut it, given the ways corporations are reorganizing globally.  It's a fascinating piece, and well worth consideration.
• The UFT announces the opening of a labor-friendly charter school in New York City, by Green Dot Public Schools.  Given the way charter schools often pit public education advocates against teachers unions, and especially in light of all the hey made about the tiff between the DC city council and DC teachers' unions, I think this is an important development.  It's not a revolutionary one - Green Dot operates a number of schools in LA already - but something we should be keeping an eye on nonetheless.  Still, I think it is one more bit of evidence that these two progressive cultural institutions don't need to be at odds.

 

Shelby and I have some very exciting news: we're about to be published! A brief chapter we wrote on new media will be published in Dispatches from the Religious Left, due out in early October. The chapter is about how liberal religious organizations can use technologies like blogs, podcasting, and social networks to reach new audiences. The book includes a lot of leaders in the world of politics and liberal religion, including Dan Schultz ("PastorDan" at Street Prophets); Rev. Debra Haffner (Director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing, and a leading Unitarian Universalist minister); Marshall Ganz, (community organizing guru and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School); and Robert Edgar (former head of the National Council of Churches). The editor is Frederick Clarkson, who is a long-time scholar of the religious right, and the publisher is Ig Publishing, which is an up-and-coming progressive publisher that has also published Youth to Power and Framing the Debate (both written by progressive bloggers-turned-authors.) You can find the full list of authors on Frederick's blog, http://frederickclarkson.com/. It's quite humbling to be part of such esteemed company, and we feel very lucky to be included in the list! I haven't seen the other chapters, so I'm also excited to see what the other authors have to say. If you're interested, you can buy the book right now at Powells, at http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780978843182-0. There's also going to be a very brief "book tour" of sorts, including an event at Middle Collegiate Church on Oct. 14 and another event at Harvard Divinity School. More to follow on that. If you know anyone who might be interested in this topic, I'd certainly appreciate it if you let them know about the book and send this along. We're both very, very excited about the book, and we think it'll be a great read!