Campaigning gets a new Web version

WASHINGTON -- Seven candidates for the 2008 Democratic Party nomination will take part tonight in a live "virtual town hall" forum about the Iraq war, in what is being billed as the largest and most ambitious experiment yet in harnessing the power of Internet technology to reshape participatory democracy.

Calling in by telephone, candidates Joseph Biden , Hillary Clinton , Christopher Dodd , John Edwards , Dennis Kucinich , Barack Obama , and Bill Richardson will each answer several questions about Iraq. The liberal activist group MoveOn.org , which is hosting the event, asked members to vote on which questions to ask from among 6,800 queries proposed by members for the forum.

About 10,000 MoveOn members are expected to gather in about 950 living rooms around the country to listen to the event, which begins at 7 p.m. and will be streamed live on the group's website and broadcast on the liberal talk radio network Air America. The group will conduct a straw poll afterward among its 3.2 million members about which candidate gave the strongest answers.

"It's politics 2.0," said Adam Ruben , the political director of MoveOn. "I think it shows how the Internet is changing the way campaigns are run. It's a way of democratizing the subjects of political debate, rather than the terms of the debate being set only by the campaigns and the media."

There have been online debates for statewide elections before, but specialists in technology and politics said they know of no previous event of such a national scope. In addition, most previous online debates have allowed candidates to answer questions via e-mail over a longer period of time, rather than allowing candidates to answer in real-time.

Each candidate will give a brief opening statement and then answer several questions prerecorded from MoveOn members. After the candidate answers the initial questions, the event moderator, MoveOn executive director Eli Pariser, will ask one or two follow-up questions.

The candidates will take turns doing all their talking in one shot, and then hang up. They will not debate one another in the sense of a back-and-forth interaction, event organizers said.

Julie Germany , deputy director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet, said tonight's forum is the latest stride toward diffusing control of the political process.

Instead of a small number of journalists and campaign consultants shaping the agenda, she said, 21st century-style campaigning will increasingly focus on using new technology to let larger numbers of people connect more directly with the process.

"It's the big trend -- 'crowd-sourcing,' " Germany said. "The idea is that you get your supporters or the audience to help you figure something out -- in this case, what the questions to be asked are. It's the marketplace of ideas concept, and what it's good for in politics is engaging people. It gives them the sense that they are actually doing something -- that you [the candidate] are buying into them because you are allowing them to have a voice in the discussion."

Online campaigning traces back to the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web first began to bring larger numbers of people online. The first generation of campaign websites basically used the Internet as a platform for online pamphlets, with pictures and text about a candidate but little opportunity for feedback.

But then campaign webmasters, picking up credit card technology from online merchants, began to allow visitors to donate money online. As Howard Dean showed in the 2004 Democratic primary, the new methods could generate many small donations from a larger pool of people.

Germany said that research has shown that many people who contributed to a candidate online in recent election cycles were making the first campaign donation of their lives.

Similarly, when broadband Internet technology first made streaming video widely accessible, politicians initially echoed the television broadcast model: sending out information from a central source to be passively absorbed by its audience.

In a landmark 2005 event, for example, a group of evangelical churches led by the Family Research Council used online streaming to help get their "Justice Sunday" rallies, pressuring Senate Democrats to stop blocking votes on some of Bush's judicial nominees, to a wider audience.

In the past two years, changing technology has made political Internet videos more interactive. The rise of sites such as YouTube.com , which gave anyone the ability to upload short video clips, loosened controls over attack ad-style videos. Anyone can now make one, and it costs nothing to disseminate.

YouTube-style video clips have played a role in the early jostling in the 2008 presidential race. A formerly anonymous supporter of Obama caused a stir with a widely viewed "mash-up" combining an old Apple Macintosh ad invoking Big Brother with footage of Clinton, offering a commentary on Clinton's status as the front-runner establishment pick.

Alan Rosenblatt , an online campaign consultant who also teaches at American University, said that the Internet, if used with innovation, has the potential to bring into the political process people who feel alienated because they don't live in Iowa or New Hampshire and interact with candidates only through intermediaries, such as pollsters and journalists.

"The big idea is reengaging voters," he said. "For all the people who don't vote because they simply don't care, there are a lot of other people who don't vote because the candidates seem insulated from them."

And Ruben said the impact of such technologies is to widen the number of people who can participate in politics without being in the same location or investing a lot of time in the effort.

MoveOn was founded in 1998 during the battle over President Clinton's impeachment, and was reenergized during the lead-up to the Iraq war. Its first plunge into electoral politics was during the 2004 presidential campaign, and it has since been a pioneer of online grass-roots activism.

During the 2006 election, for example, MoveOn posted lists of the telephone numbers of registered voters in swing districts on its website. Visitors to the website were asked to call a few of the numbers and urge people to vote. MoveOn members made about 7 million such calls, Ruben said.

"Presidential politics has often required a really high level of commitment," he said. "We've tried to make it something you don't have to be a full-time activist to get involved. In our [phone bank] program, for example, you could do 15 minutes of calling after dinner and before you gave your kids a bath."