Clips February 10, 2004

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips February 10,
2004

ARTICLES

How Web Support Failed Dean in Crunch: Ex-Manager
Trippi: Net Politics Here to Stay  
Bush Report Offers Positive Outlook on Jobs 

*******************************
Associated Press
How Web Support Failed Dean in Crunch: Ex-Manager
Mon Feb 9, 7:53 PM ET
By Eric Auchard 

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - Internet activism that thrust up the Howard Dean
(news - web sites) U.S. election campaign later hobbled the
organization's ability to respond to criticism in the weeks before the
primaries, Dean's former campaign manager said on Monday. 


Joe Trippi, who resigned after defeats in Iowa caucuses and the New
Hampshire Democratic presidential primary, said the direct involvement of
so many Internet supporters deprived the campaign of the traditional
weapon of political surprise. 


"We were having a real problem with how to say, 'We could be in real
trouble here,"' Trippi told a technology conference of the tactical
trouble the Dean campaign had in balancing the need to keep supporters
informed. 


The transparency of the anti-establishment Dean campaign made it hard to
respond to political attacks from his eight other Democratic opponents
and media criticism of the candidate's missteps, he said. 


"We couldn't figure out how to tell people we had a problem without
raising the wrong impression. Part of the problem is that the press are
reading our blogs (Internet journals)," he said. 


Trippi, a veteran Democratic Party consultant, is credited with tapping
the latest grass-roots Internet recruitment and fund-raising techniques
to draw 600,000 volunteers and raise a record $45 million in financing
for Dean in less than a year. 


In his critique of the Internet's role in contemporary politics, Trippi
hinted that Dean's candidacy may be coming to an end, even if he was
unwilling to write its obituary yet. 


"I still believe that Governor Dean has an excellent chance in
Wisconsin," he said of next week's primary that Dean recently called
a must-win for his candidacy to continue. 


"(But) if Kerry wins in Wisconsin, it is over guys," he told an
audience of 200 at the annual O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference
here. 


Trippi said the open online discussions that connected the Dean campaign
with its broad base of supporters helped opponents by signaling in
advance where Dean planned to spend money on costly local television
advertising. 


He said the decentralized nature of online involvement made it hard for a
campaign manager to marshal a unified response. 


The Dean campaign in effect created its own spam, with volunteers
receiving e-mail from local Dean groups, state organizations and the
national campaign, fragmenting its key messages, he said. 


Meanwhile, other candidates took advantage of Dean's online
organizational lists. 


Early support for Dean evaporated as reporters picked up on policy
misstatements by the candidate, leading up to Dean's much publicized
scream when rallying supporters after his Iowa loss. 


Despite the participation of hundreds of thousands of Internet
supporters, that was no match for the mass media's rebroadcasting of
Dean's primary night antics, Trippi said. 


He criticized the media for emphasizing an event that was a form of
entertainment, not news. 


"It was the heat-seeking missile hitting its target that they run
over and over again," Trippi said of the repeated airing of Dean's
famous yell. 

   



Nonetheless, Trippi said Internet activism was the best chance for
Democrats to raise money and inspire voter participation in the November
election. 

The Democratic Party could still dislodge President Bush (news - web
sites) if it tapped the Internet to raise $100 each from two million
supporters, or $200 million in total, he said. 

Bush has raised $131 million for his re-election bid.
*******************************
Wired News
Trippi: Net Politics Here to Stay  
By Noah Shachtman
02:00 AM Feb. 10, 2004 PT

SAN DIEGO -- Forgive the hundreds of thousands of people who gave Howard
Dean more than $40 million in contributions last year. They might have
thought they were trying to elect a president, but they were wrong,
according to Dean's former campaign manager, Joe Trippi. 

Instead, he said, all that money was used to beta test a new, online
revolution in American politics.

Speaking at the Digital Democracy Teach-In -- part of this week's
O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in downtown San Diego -- Trippi
issued a spirited defense of the former Vermont governor's campaign, and
his role in Dean for America's mercurial rise and fall. 

"This wasn't about one guy," he said. "This is the
beginning of the tools, and a platform, to take the country back."

Talking largely about Dean's presidential quest in the past tense, Trippi
blamed rival campaigns and an irresponsible, hopelessly conventional news
media for knocking the one-time front-runner from his perch. And he
warned that those same forces are now trying to discredit the
Internet-fueled brand of activism that was the hallmark of the Dean
candidacy. 

"Why do they want this movement to fail?" he asked.
"What's so scary about millions of people becoming involved in
democracy?" 

After Dean's worse-than-expected showing in Iowa, it became an instant
media cliché to equate his campaign to the high-flying, fast-falling
Internet bubble companies of the late 1990s. But Trippi said such
comparisons were all wrong. 

"This wasn't a dot-com crash," he said. "The Howard Dean
campaign was a dot-com miracle." 

For months, everything was going along just miraculously in Dean-land,
according to Trippi: the most money ever raised by a Democratic
presidential candidate, hundreds of thousands of supporters, an
increasing willingness on the part of Democrats to speak out against the
Bush administration. 

Then Al Gore endorsed the ex-governor. Instantly, "alarm bells went
off in every newsroom in the country, in every other campaign in the
country," Trippi asserted. And those bells said, "Kill him.
Kill Howard Dean right this second or else he's going to be the
nominee." 

According to Trippi, the media -- "who, frankly, could never figure
out what the Dean campaign was" -- teamed up with the former
governor's competitors to "wreck the Dean campaign with their
attacks." 

After three or four weeks of this white-hot assault, Trippi asserted,
Dean's popularity melted. 

But Trippi's argument was called into question only moments after the
long-time political operative left the stage. 

Speaking immediately after Trippi, Jonah Seiger -- with George Washington
University's Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet -- said
the media didn't off Dean's campaign. Dean did it to himself. 

The candidate simply "failed to close the deal" in Iowa, Seiger
said. A string of "controversies long before the Al Gore
announcement" was the problem, including the former governor
allegedly offering the vice presidential slot to retired Gen. Wesley
Clark. 

Story continued on Problems after the Gore endorsement -- Dean getting
kicked out of a Martin Luther King celebration, for example -- only made
matters worse. And word of these missteps spread quickly, sowing doubts
about the then-front-runner in an enormously influential group: the
Internet-goers who supposedly formed the core of Dean's campaign.

"Just as Dean's successes cascaded through the network he created,
so did his failures," Seiger said.

In the New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucuses, a series of surveys
showed, Sen. John Kerry actually beat Howard Dean among those who used
the Internet to find out about the presidential candidates. 

Dean's Internet organizing may have gotten people to vote, Seiger said,
"but they voted for someone else." 

Trippi, who stepped down from the campaign after Dean replaced him as
campaign manager with Roy Neel, a former lobbyist and adviser to Gore,
was unwilling to admit anything more than minor, tactical gaffes in his
stewardship of Dean's operation. A million-dollar advertising push last
summer may not have worked, he said, but it helped raise an equal amount
of money, so it was all a wash. 

And Trippi was adamant that he and his firm did not take windfall profits
from the Dean campaign, as some have alleged. He claimed to have made
only $165,000 from the more than $7 million of advertisements bought
through his company, Trippi, McMahon & Squier. 

"How do you stop this movement in its tracks? By making people think
it's a Trippi get-rich-quick scheme," he said. 

Trippi predicted that such efforts would fail, and that this was the
beginning of a sea change in American politics. 

"Revolution 1.0 was the 1700s," Trippi said. "We're in the
middle of the beta stage of 2.0, where people have the tools to say,
'enough.'" 

Many in the audience -- who gave Trippi a standing ovation after his talk
-- seemed to agree. 

"I was always a firm believer that there was always a future, a
movement, a something, that happened afterward," said Robert
Walikis, who writes the One Father for Dean weblog.

"The cat is out of the bag," said Scott Heiferman, CEO of
Meetup.com. "People have it in their brain that they can organize
themselves."
*******************************
Washington Post
Bush Report Offers Positive Outlook on Jobs 
By Jonathan Weisman
Tuesday, February 10, 2004; Page E01 

Wading into an election-year debate, President Bush's top economist
yesterday said the outsourcing of U.S. service jobs to workers overseas
is good for the nation's economy.

Shipping jobs to low-cost countries is the "latest manifestation of
the gains from trade that economists have talked about" for
centuries, said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of
Economic Advisers. Just as U.S. consumers have enjoyed lower prices from
foreign manufacturers, so too should they benefit from services being
offered by overseas companies that have lower labor costs, he
said.

Mankiw's comments come as the president struggles to shore up support in
manufacturing states that have lost millions of jobs and Democratic
rivals make economic nationalism a centerpiece of their attacks on the
administration.

U.S. job growth is sluggish, though many sectors of the economy appear to
be recovering smartly. Mankiw released the White House's annual Economic
Report of the President yesterday, predicting 2.6 million new payroll
jobs by the end of the year. But such projections have proved
problematic. Last year's report projected 1.7 million new jobs would be
added in 2003. The 2002 report was even more optimistic, predicting 3
million new jobs in 2003. 

Instead, the nation lost 53,000 payroll jobs last year, the Labor
Department says.

"I know there will be jobs in the future," Mankiw told
reporters at a news conference, "because I know this is a vibrant
economy, a dynamic economy."

Those comments echoed a speech by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan
last month. Greenspan counseled that workers hurt by outsourcing
"can be confident that new jobs will displace old ones as they
always have."

Mankiw's defense of the "offshoring" of jobs has been seconded
by other economists and business leaders. A recent study by the
management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. also concluded that
business investment in service sector jobs abroad will ultimately help
the U.S. economy. But Mankiw's conclusions may prove discordant during an
election year, when many workers remain concerned about their
prospects.

"It's a kind of flip thing to say when people are losing their
jobs," said Franklin J. Vargo, vice president of international
economic affairs at the National Association of Manufacturers, a group
that has strongly supported the president.

In recent years, companies have shipped software engineering jobs, data
entry and customer service operations abroad, especially to India. Even
hospitals have joined the trend, hiring radiologists on the other side of
the world to read X-ray images shipped to them over the
Internet.

Mankiw said the trend is a new and positive chapter in world trade
liberalization. Calling a computer technician in India is economically no
different from buying a car from Japan, he said. Only the delivery system
has changed. Market forces are finding which countries can deliver labor
most efficiently, Mankiw said. And deciding that certain jobs must remain
in the United States would be the equivalent of the state economic
planning that ultimately brought down the Soviet Union.

Indeed, outsourcing health care jobs to lower-wage countries could help
control the upward spiral of health care costs, he suggested.

"We don't have a comparative advantage in producing clothing,
textiles, and that's one of the reasons we've tended to lose textile
jobs," Mankiw said. "Maybe we've learned that we don't have a
comparative advantage in radiologists."

The Economic Report of the President made the same point: "When a
good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to
import it than make or provide it domestically."

The report also analyzed another hot-button political issue, Chinese
exports to the United States, and concluded that they are not "a
primary factor in the displacement of American manufacturing
workers." The U.S. trade deficit with China reached $124 billion
last year, nearly twice as large as the U.S.-Japanese imbalance, the next
biggest bilateral trade deficit. But the report said the largest
manufacturing job losses in the United States have come in industries
without strong Chinese competition.

Such conclusions may only exacerbate Bush's problems in manufacturing
states, numerous manufacturing executives said yesterday. Vargo declared
the analysis of the China trade to be simply wrong. 

"These guys just don't get it, period," said Paul Kennedy, a
self-described Republican and president of Kennedy Die Castings Inc. in
Worcester, Mass.

On Friday, Laurie S. Moncrieff, chief executive of Schmald Tool & Die
Inc. in Burton, Mich., met with Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the
front-running Democratic candidate for president. Yesterday, the lifelong
Republican declared, "I'm starting to get on the bandwagon of,
'Whoever can beat Bush, I'm voting for him,' and I'm not the only
one."

Gary Henderson, purchasing manager of Aircraft Precision Products Inc. in
Ithaca, Mich., who has worked for Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill
and in Lansing, said, "Let's put it this way. The Bush/Cheney yard
sign that was in front of my house may just stay behind the Oldsmobile
this fall."

Such executives have different specific complaints. Kennedy said Bush's
push to slash taxes on investment dividends showed a propensity to look
out for large corporations and shareholders, not for small business and
job creation. Jack Metzemaekers, chief executive of Scott Electronics
Inc. in Salem, N.H., said he was "very upset" that Bush's
budget for 2005 would slash funding for the Manufacturing Extension
Partnership, a national consulting program, from $235 million to $39
million. Moncrieff focused on China.

Democrats have homed in on economic nationalism issues, or what Kerry has
called "Benedict Arnold" companies or executives that take
"American jobs overseas and stick the American people with the
bill." Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) has decried "policies that
make it profitable for companies to shift jobs overseas."

Kerry issued a statement yesterday saying the president's economic report
amounted to "empty promises and false hope for middle-class
families."

The report projects strong economic and job growth for years to come. The
economy should expand by 4 percent this year and by 3.4 percent in 2005,
the report predicts. The unemployment rate, currently at 5.6 percent,
should fall to 5.4 percent in 2005 and 5.2 percent in 2006, with payrolls
expanding by 6.2 million over the next two years.
*******************************
Washington Times
Memo download called 'criminal'
By Charles Hurt
2/10/04

    Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee said
yesterday that they expect criminal charges to arise from the imbroglio
over internal memos downloaded from their computers by Republican
staffers. 

    "This is going to be a criminal matter,"
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat, said as he left a nearly
two-hour meeting behind closed doors with the Senate sergeant at arms,
who is investigating the matter. 

    Mr. Leahy and other Democrats in the meeting declined
to share the specifics provided by Sergeant at Arms William Pickle.

    Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, whose memos
wound up in the pages of The Washington Times and Wall Street Journal,
said he was startled by the briefing Mr. Pickle gave yesterday. 

    "The extent and depth of the theft far exceeded
anything I had imagined," he said. 

    The chief legal counsel for Senate Majority Leader
Bill Frist, who handled judicial nominations, resigned his position last
week amid the two-month investigation into the matter. 

    Manuel Miranda told investigators that he had viewed
the documents but was not responsible for distributing them. 

    He also said no hacking had been involved in
downloading the memos. Rather, they were easily accessed through a glitch
in the "fire wall" that separated Democratic and Republican
documents stored electronically on the Judiciary Committee's shared
computer server. 

    Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat,
attended the meeting yesterday. He also had memos from his office
downloaded. 

    He called the actions "highly improper, highly
unethical and probably criminal." 

    Mr. Miranda said yesterday that he is confident that
he broke no laws. 

    "It is perfectly normal for Democrats to misstate
the law in the pursuit of their aims," he said. 

    In a farewell letter, Mr. Miranda warned that although
14 memos have floated into the public domain, thousands more Democratic
memos had been viewed and downloaded. 

    "If thousands of documents were taken as Manny
Miranda asserts in his memo, you have to wonder what is the nature of the
other documents," said one Democratic staffer. "There's a great
deal of sensitive information pertaining to individual nominees on that
server." 

    One line of inquiry among Democrats is whether the
documents were shared with nominees before they testified. Among the
documents routinely stored on Democratic computers are those that detail
the line of questions they plan to ask nominees and other witnesses.

    Providing such information to witnesses before they
testify could lead to charges of "suborning testimony."

    "Such a prosecution would make for the most
exciting discovery process in Washington history," Mr. Miranda said.

    Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican,
called a closed members-only meeting for this morning, ostensibly to
discuss the investigation.
*******************************
Government Computer News
Spammers continue to ignore Can-Spam law 

By William Jackson 
GCN Staff

The Federal Trade Commission is still drawing up rules for compliance
with the federal anti-spam law, but a study by one e-mail security
provider found most spammers are ignoring the law. 

Less than 3 percent of 40,000 spam messages examined by MX Logic Inc. of
Denver contained the postal address and opt-out functions required by the
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of
2003. 

?Spammers should and could be further along in complying with Can-Spam,
if they all truly wanted to be,? said Scott Chassin, chief technology
officer for MX Logic. ?That is why legislation needs to be complemented
by the other three components of a comprehensive spam protection
solution: anti-spam technology, end-user education and industry
cooperation in the e-mail industry.? 

Spammers soon will have to meet a new requirement to pass federal muster.
FTC has proposed a labeling rule required under Can-Spam for all e-mail
containing sexually oriented material. All such spam would have to
contain the phrase ?Sexually-Explicit Content:? followed by a space in
the first 27 spaces of the subject line. 

The commission is seeking comment on the proposed rule until Feb. 17. The
final rule will take effect in April. 

The commissioners added the hyphen in the phrase and the colon following
it to facilitate e-mail filtering. ?The commission is concerned that a
filter set to block a simple English phrase like ?sexually explicit
content? could prevent delivery of an e-mail from an anti-pornography
group that used the phrase,? for instance. 

The phrase would also have to be included on the digital equivalent of a
brown paper wrapper when the e-mail is opened. This opening page would
also include the opt-out function for people who did not want to receive
such messages, and a valid postal address. 

The elements already are required under Can-Spam, which took effect Jan.
1, overriding existing state laws. 

It was the opt-out function and postal address that MX Logic looked for
in its survey. The company, which filters e-mail for about 900 corporate
customers, examined a random batch of 10,000 e-mail messages filtered as
spam each week for four weeks, ending Feb. 6. 

?Three percent is a negligible increase in compliance compared to the
less than 1 percent compliance rate we found during the first week in
January,? Chassin said.