POLITICS

Hoping to be president and web master

By Robert Braile, Globe Correspondent, March 21, 1999

Steve Forbes may not be the most electric presidential hopeful running around the state of New Hampshire these days. To some, his style is, well, almost as flat as the tax he champions. But Tuesday, Forbes did something thoroughly electric: He became the first person ever to announce his bid for the Oval Office on his Web site.

In so doing, Forbes provided a preview of what is to come, as on-line campaigning fundamentally changes the quest for votes in New Hampshire and elsewhere.

Forget the standard model of campaign announcements, one in which the candidate is surrounded by a crowd of cheering loyalists (although Forbes played it safe and held a rally just hours after his e-announcement). Instead, the pitch is to those sitting at their keyboards. "You and I are entering the Information Age, and Washington politicians are stuck in the Stone Age," Forbes told them Tuesday.

One wonders what took the virtual campaign so long. Two in five Americans now use the Internet for news, three times as many as in 1995. Few candidates had Web sites in 1996, yet two years later, 72 percent of those running for the US Senate, 35 percent for Congress, and 95 percent for governor had them.

And perhaps the most significant fact of all: Some 11 million people used the Internet for campaign news in the last election, and a third of them reported that what they found there influenced their vote, according to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.

It's no surprise then that most presidential hopefuls for 2000 -- Lamar Alexander, Patrick Buchanan, Elizabeth Dole, John Kasich, Bob Smith, Dan Quayle, and Bill Bradley -- already have sites. Others, including Al "Information Superhighway" Gore, soon will.

For the moment, New Hampshire -- with it's first-in-the-nation primary -- is the test ground for cybercampaigning. But how will these changes play in a state that is the last bastion of retail politics, where a smile-and-handshake campaign has been considered essential?

No candidate will abandon television, radio, and other traditional mediums. But look for cybercampaigning to make at least a subtle change -- and perhaps more -- in candidates' relationships to the voters, and to each other.

"The Internet will magnify politics," said Robert Arena, a Republican political consultant who devised the Internet strategies for GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1996, New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman in 1997, and New York Governor George Pataki in 1998. "It's going to make what's good about politics better, and what's bad about politics worse."

On the plus side: Voters in New Hampshire are already reasonably well informed about the candidates and their positions. But the sea of Web site information will make them experts. These super-informed voters are more likely to volunteer, show up for rallies more often, and hold candidates more accountable, the experts predict.

On-line campaigning won't make it any easier for voters to meet the candidates face-to-face, but it has the potential to offer a different kind of familiarity, as the on-line information flow between candidates and constituents bypasses the media-imposed filter and becomes as intimate as a handshake.

"The Internet may provide a way of crossing that great divide between the political world and its alienated constituency," said Andy Brack, editor of NetPulse, an on-line magazine devoted to the Internet in politics.

Cybercampaigning also has the potential to close the gap between rich and poor candidates. As Congress toys with campaign finance reform, the Internet is making it happen, allowing even challengers without a lot of money to spread their message in a way that, through traditional outlets, can cost millions.

It has not helped candidates raise money, said Michael Cornfield, research director for the Democracy Online Project at George Washington University, but, he added, "Your fax budget, your mailing budget, your gas budget, all go to zero."

All told, there are some bright prospects for the virtual campaign. "It's not yet a full-fledged medium, but it's certainly getting there, is light years from where it was in 1996, and will experience another quantum leap by 2000," said Elaine Kamarck, director of the Visions of Governance for the 21st Century Project at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

The campaigns themselves are practically giddy about going on line. Gordon MacDonald, Quayle's New Hampshire state director, who happened to be reading some e-mail from a Milford constituent when contacted for an interview, said Quayle's Web site has attracted and sustained supporters nationwide. "It can't supplant what you'd otherwise do in a campaign, but you can't have a campaign without it," he said.

Alec Koromilas, a self-described Internet buff and New Hampshire activist for Elizabeth Dole, pointed as well to the edge a site gives any candidate in "going around CNN and CBS and taking it directly to the people." Virtual campaigning, he said, "is the wave of the future."

Yet while the campaigns acknowledge the organizational benefits of virtuality, many say what they are really after is a new look that suggests their candidate is technologically savvy. As Koromilas put it, Web sites "show we're cutting edge. They say to voters that in 2000, in the new century, computers will play an increasing role in society, and that we're on the cutting edge of that."

But will the cutting edge always be the right place to be? Virtual campaigning has thus far taken the high road, but the potential of going negative is always there -- except now it can be done faster and more pervasively. Sound bites could take over the candidates' Web sites, updated hourly, rather than just on the evening news. And who knows what the effect would be of Forbes's plan to have "fireside e-chats."

There is also the danger of leaving behind those people who have no on-line access. While 11 million people turned to the Internet for election news last year, that still leaves a huge number who did not, and perhaps could not. As candidates increasingly rely on their Web sites to convey information, a "digital divide" between Internet haves and have-nots may stratify American political culture.

"This question will become as important over the next 20 or 30 years as the literacy question," Arena said. "If an effort is not made somewhere to ensure that every constituency is brought on line, we'll have a new literacy problem -- digital illiteracy."

It may especially be a problem in New Hampshire. There, candidates are more likely to be hit with tough face-to-face questions on a complex issue, and thus more tempted to respond with a flip "check my Web site" -- although, in fairness to New Hampshire, it is one of the most Internet-savvy states in the country.

Politics and technology have intersected before. As Kamarck notes, the phonograph was first used in a campaign by William Jennings Bryan in 1908. The radio was first used by Calvin Coolidge in 1924. The television was made famous as a campaign medium in the 1960 debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

Some, like Kamarck, say the potential for a digital divide is remote. Others differ. That divide, says Brack, "is more than likely."