With his Blackberry forever in tow, a sophisticated election campaign grounded in new social networking media, and the most YouTube friendly White House communications team ever to grace Pennsylvania Avenue— Barack Obama has, more than any to date, harnessed the power of Internet to advance his Presidential goals.

His predecessor was still a long way off.  When asked if he was familiar with the World Wide Web, President George W. Bush famously responded, “I’m familiar. I can click around and surf around.”  It was not exactly the answer of a net savvy politico.

Even in the months leading up to 2009, Obama brought quite a high tech contrast to the White House. From the earliest phase of his bid for the Presidency, Obama’s public persona was fused with the Internet at an almost genetic level.

A self-identifying “crackberry” junky, photos of a smiling Obama as he sent emails from his Blackberry had the effect humanized him early in the campaign, much the same way that photos of past candidates hunting or fishing might have done. 

The instantly iconic Obama campaign logo–a soft blue “O” bisected by a swath of color that was part Stars and Stripes, part rainbow–took its graphic cues from the popular Web 2.0 typographic styles familiar to users of Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and Reddit. 

At the same time, we learned that Barack Obama was a Mac user–and a geeky one at that.  A photo of Obama on ComputerWeekly.com, ran with the headline “Barack Obama – The First Truly Digital President.”  The picture showed Obama at his desk surrounded by jump drives and an open Macbook personalized with a Pacman sticker–presidential candidate as Internet nerd.

Just as Bill Clinton played saxophone on late night TV and pitched politics to a new generation of voters joined at the hip to MTV, Obama’s campaign sent a constant stream of emails to appeal for money, boots on the ground, and the perpetual battle cry of “hope.”

Far more important even than the speeches Obama gave to tens of thousands of attendees, his internet campaign used the internet to connect millions of voters to the candidate and to each other.  Fund raising appeals and calls to GOTV spread like electronic tentacles from campaign headquarters in Chicago through laptops, cell phones, and hand held devices.  And people loved it because the Internet campaign gave them the same social immediacy that they found on the most popular websites and on group blogs.

What made all this possible for Obama was not just the bare bones of the Internet, which was more an innovation of the 90s than this past year. They key for Obama was the now ubiquitous Wifi hookup points that now peppered the country.  While Wifi and broadband were present in the 2004 campaign, 2008 was the first time that the majority of the campaign volunteering public was equipped with devices capable of reading and uploading information to and from the internet from just about anywhere.

And in 2009, Obama brought it all to the White House.

>>>NEXT: The Wifi President Takes Office

If you cannot speak very intelligently about U.S. policy in Afghanistan, you are not alone. Right now the debate on Afghanistan raging in the media is dominated by hawks on the right saying President Obama is “dithering,” and anti-war protesters on the left saying President Obama is becoming “just like Bush.”  Meanwhile, the broadcast media has decided the Tiger Woods story is the big issue of the day.

To avoid getting bogged down in the quagmire of the debate on Afghanistan, I found it was helpful to turn away from television and blogs to read newspapers and listen to radio.  In particular, I found several Op-Eds by and interviews with Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) to be extremely informative.  Feingold sits on the Senate Foreign Services and Intelligence Committees, so he is as briefed as they get on what is really happening in Afghanistan.  Feingold explains the situation in clear language.  Plus, from late 2008 to mid 2009, Feingold’s position on the use of force in Afghanistan changed.  Taking a few minutes to read what Feingold has to say is a great way to get up to speed.  By the end of this article, you should have no trouble answering the question, “More Troops to Afghanistan, yes or no?”

October 2008: Military Surge May Not Achieve Our Goals

Writing in an Op-Ed for the Christian Science Monitor (Oct. 24, 2008) at the tail end of the Bush administration, Feingold introduced the topic of Afghanistan with this crucial statement:

Washington policymakers and others are increasingly recognizing that we need to return our attention to Afghanistan and the threat of Al Qaeda. While the [Bush] administration has pursued a misguided war in Iraq, the Taliban has regrouped in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda has established a stronghold across the border in Pakistan, and Al Qaeda affiliates have gained strength around the world.

But few people seem willing to ask whether the main solution that’s being talked about– sending more troops to Afghanistan – will actually work.

OK, so that was the state of the Afghanistan question at the end of 2008: (1) Bush went into Iraq when he should have finished the job in Afghanistan; (2) policy makers and others (e.g., the public, military leaders, presidential candidates) now recognize the need to refocus on Afghanistan; but (3) nobody is willing to ask if the use of greater force is the best answer.  Three basic issues, easy enough to understand.

After laying the groundwork for a discussion, Feingold then posed a series of questions that summed up the policy dilemma we faced as a nation in Afghanistan at the end of the Bush administration:

For far too long, we have been fighting in Afghanistan with too few troops. It has been an “economy of force” campaign, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff put it. But we can’t just assume that additional troops will undo the damage caused by years of neglect.

Sending more US troops made sense in, say, 2006, and it may still make sense today. The situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated badly over the past year, however, despite a larger US and coalition military presence.

We need to ask: After seven years of war, will more troops help us achieve our strategic goals in Afghanistan? How many troops would be needed and for how long? Is there a danger that a heavier military footprint will further alienate the population, and, if so, what are the alternatives? And – with the lessons of Iraq in mind – will this approach advance our top national security priority, namely defeating Al Qaeda?

In other words, we should have had more troops in Afghanistan to achieve our goals from the beginning, but by late 2008, we could no longer just increase troop levels and expect to defeat Al Qaeda.  We do not get a “do over” in Afghanistan, Feingold was telling us. The low troop numbers created problems, including but not limited to the population turning against the U.S. military.  We could, Feingold warned, increase troop levels to what they should have been all along only to find that the higher levels resulted in more antagonism by the Afghan public against the U.S. Or maybe not.  In late 2008, the jury was still largely out about how to achieve our goals.

For the rest of the Op-Ed, Feingold then explains that even if we increased military levels, that greater force would not achieve our goals if we did not also solve several other problems, each of which is daunting and complex by itself:

Regardless of whether we send more troops, we need to understand that, as in Iraq, there is ultimately no military solution to Afghanistan’s problems. Unless we push for diplomacy and a regional approach, work to root out corruption, stamp out the country’s narcotics trade, and step up development and reconstruction efforts, Afghanistan will probably continue its downward trajectory.

Here again, Feingold gives us three basic points to consider.  Success in Afghanistan will depend on:  (1) a regional approach to diplomacy; (2) rooting out corruption in Afghanistan governance; and (3) replacing the opium trade with viable and legal rural development.  The U.S. military could blast Al Qaeda back to the Jurassic period, but unless we address diplomacy, corruption, and drugs the situation could spiral down just the same.

Feingold then concludes with this statement:

The decision to go to war in Afghanistan was the right one, but after years of misplaced priorities and muddling through, we have to do some hard thinking before asking our military to create the stability and security that are badly needed there.

Shortly after Feingold’s Op-Ed appeared, Barack Obama won the Presidential election.
August 2009:  Military Surge Likely to Push Al Qaeda into Pakistan

Less than a year into the Obama administration, as it became clearer that the new President might seek a troop surge in Afghanistan, Feingold clarified his position. Writing in an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal (Aug 28, 2009), Feingold explained that the Bush administration’s poor handling of the situation in Afghanistan had created a dangerous link between our policy there and our policy in Pakistan:

President Barack Obama is rightly focusing on this critical part of the world. But I cannot support an open-ended commitment to an escalating war in Afghanistan when the al Qaeda operatives we sought have largely been captured or killed or crossed the border to Pakistan.

Ending al Qaeda’s safe haven in Pakistan is a top national security priority. Yet our operations in Afghanistan will not do so, and they could actually contribute to further destabilization of Pakistan. Meanwhile, we’ve become embroiled in a nation-building experiment that may distract us from combating al Qaeda and its affiliates, not just in Pakistan, but in Yemen, the Horn of Africa and other terrorist sanctuaries.

These two short paragraphs sum up the reasons Feingold could not support additional troops being sent to Afghanistan.  The key problem is that the “open-ended commitment to an escalating war in Afghanistan” had strengthened al Qaeda’s presence in Pakistan.  At the same time, the attempt by the U.S. to launch a viable nation state in Afghanistan had soaked up so much attention and resources that al Qaeda was now flourishing in new places.

Feingold then explains exactly what the new policy should be:

We need to start discussing a flexible timetable to bring our brave troops out of Afghanistan. Proposing a timetable doesn’t mean giving up our ability to go after al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Far from it: We should continue a more focused military mission that includes targeted strikes on Taliban and al Qaeda leaders, and we should step up our long-term civilian efforts to deal with the corruption in the Afghan government that has helped the Taliban to thrive. But we must recognize that our troop presence contributes to resentment in some quarters and hinders our ability to achieve our broader national security goals.

Again, Feingold gives us three key points to consider: (1) putting in place a timetable for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan (a “flexible” timetable); (2) continuing a more focused military mission aimed at Taliban and al Qaeda leaders; and (3) stepping up the effort to root out corruption in the Afghan government.

Those three points are the pillars of Feingold’s Afghanistan policy recommendation for President Obama. What would this mean in real time?

>>>NEXT: Nation Building: Whose Nation Are We Building?

I am not suggesting that the biggest policy debate in recent history should have been set to song and presented by talking puppets, but — the media’s contribution to the health care discussion would have been much more useful if it emphasized effective and memorable explanation over political histrionics and diatribe. 

The problem? One year into the discussion, few Americans can speak to the basic core issues in the current health care bill, despite the fact that these details have been available for months and months. And much of the fault lies with the news shows on which we rely.

Stewart, Beck, Olbermann, O’Reilly, Maddow — they have all been great at stoking the political fire, but have any of them taken up the torch of explaining what is actually in the health care reform bill? 

I speak to many people on a daily basis about health care reform, and I cannot remember a single person telling me about a TV news show that explained the basic of the health care bill to them.  Instead, most people simply shrug their shoulders and say, “I don’t even know what’s in the bill.”  

Seriously?  One would think the health care reform bill was more complicated than Einstein’s Theory of Relativity based on our collective inability to grasp it’s core concepts.  But, in fact, it is not complicated.  The media has just walked away from the responsibility of explaining health care policy to the American public, and as a result, we could all use a little help — and maybe a catchy song or two.

The basic premise of Sesame Street was that the television could be a unique tool for childhood learning by combining entertainment and explanation.  It was a brilliant success, but can it help us now?

Here are three Sesame Street inspired explanations of the three core concepts that make up the current health care reform bill.  If you can remember these three, you should be good to go:

1. It’s Not Easy Being Sick (Insurance Regulations)

It’s not that easy bein’ sick
Denied insurance ’cause my illness pre-exists.
I think it could be nicer to be well
Or to be healthy like everyone else —
But then again we all someday get sick.

The biggest problem facing the American health care system is the widespread discrimination against sick people by the health insurance industry.   Once you get sick, the health insurance industry starts to treat you differently, resulting in widespread denial of coverage, cancellation of coverage, and denial of reimbursement.  Since everybody eventually gets sick, everybody in America (e.g., 100%) is at risk to this kind of discrimination, and to the physical and financial dangers that result from it (e.g., death and bankruptcy). The current health care bill will make it illegal for health insurers to deny coverage on the basis of so-called pre-existing conditions, to cancel policies as a result of people getting sick, or to refuse reimbursement on the basis of past or current illnesses. 

2. The Exchange, Sweepin’ the Clouds Away (The New Health Insurance Exchange)

The Exchange, helpin’ the uninsured,
On my way, to buy a plan that’s right.
Can you tell me how to get, how to get to the Exchange.

The single largest innovation of the health care reform bill will the creation of a new Health Insurance Exchange.  The Exchange, scheduled to open in 2013, would enable people who do not have health insurance to select from a range of policies.  Beyond the normal health insurance market place, the Exchange would offer consumer protections and affordability credits — subsidies for those who could not afford to pay full price for a policy.  Initially, only those with no other option would be eligible for the Exchange, but moving forward the Exchange would be opened up to a substantial percentage of the population, including private businesses.  Thus, over a relatively short period of time, the Exchange would effectively end the problem of being uninsured by offering access and affordability to those otherwise excluded from the insurance market, Medicaid, and Medicare.

3. Public Option, You’re The One (The Public Insurance Plan)

Public option, you’re the one.
You lower costs by the ton.
Public option, I’m awfully fond of you.
Public option, my joy of joys.
When I pick you, my wellness soars.
You’re not required, you’re just a choice.
Public option, you’re my very best friend, it’s true!

One of the choices available to those eligible for the new Health Insurance Exchange would be a “Public Option” — a non-profit insurance plan created by the government to compete with the private insurance industry.   The “Public Option” would be created by seed money from the Federal Government, but would become self-sustaining within a relatively short period of time.  The purpose of the Public Option is to give people an affordable choice for health insurance coverage if they are not satisfied with the private insurance offerings in the exchange.  Because other government run insurance programs have been shown to deliver the most health care per dollar, it is believed that the public option would deliver equal coverage for lower premiums and co-pays, thereby forcing private insurers to lower their prices. Over time, if the number of people enrolled in the public option reached a high enough level, it would effectively lower the overall cost of health care in America.

These are the three most important points in the health care reform bill that passed the House of Representatives last week: Pre-existing condition reform, the Health Insurance Exchange, and the Public Option.  If you can explain these three things, you can lead a discussion on the topic.  

It is not clear why the media abandoned for the most part its public obligation to explain details to viewers. But it is clear that the U.S. voter, today, needs a show to explain the basic facts of policy debates, much like American children needed a show to help them learn the basics of reading, math, and social skills.

Elmo might not be the best fit for a gig of this sort, but I am sure there are plenty of unemployed Muppets out there who could use the work.

Introduced by CNN’s Rick Sanchez on August 25 — just a few hours before Kennedy’s death from brain cancer was announced — the video shows a middle-aged woman at a town hall meeting explaining to Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) how her husband’s insurance was canceled while in a nursing home. “Senator Coburn,” the woman cries out in anguish, “We need help!” She then tries to explain over her own tears how her husband cannot even eat or drink properly as a result of not having coverage to pay for care.

Coburn’s reaction to the pleas for help is what makes the clip so arresting.

At first, Coburn assures her that his office will get her some assistance, but then he hedges. Rather than approaching the woman to comfort her, Coburn tells the town hall attendees to remember that neighbors must help other neighbors, and concludes,”The idea that the government is the solution to our problems is an inaccurate — a very inaccurate statement.” In reply to the desperate plea for help from a constituent, Coburn serves up a cold spoonful of Republican ideology.

The clip is the most emotionally raw and devastating media moment of the entire healthcare debate so far. Here is an ordinary American, unguarded, showing the world what it feels like to be deprived of private health insurance at the very time when she needs it most. In an instant, every cry of “tyranny” and “socialism” in previous town hall footage seems insignificant, as does every circumlocution about “quality” and “affordability” by President Obama. The story captured in the CNN clip is so fundamental, so understandable, so penetrating that it will likely tip the balance of the news coverage in favor of reform from this point forward.

Were it not for the story of Kennedy’s death sweeping the headlines, millions of Americans by now would have seen the Oklahoma woman pleading to Coburn and heard the Senator’s cold response. Those tears would have changed hearts and minds in the healthcare debate.

Sanchez, to his credit, set up the short clip precisely to show the contrast between the cry for help from an American and the ideological deflection of a Senator. It is a stunning moment of political engagement.

In the long struggle to cover the healthcare debate, cable news has been caught by its own choice to consider even the most outlandish claims offered at the town halls. But up to this point, the networks have not shown what many believe is the most critical side of the healthcare reform story: the fear tens of millions of Americans experience when they are stripped of or denied health insurance at the most desperate moments of their lives. Now CNN has shown this exact dynamic.

While the death of Edward Kennedy, along time advocate for national healthcare reform, wraps the debate in a new symbolism, the CNN clip of the Oklahoma town hall hits at the emotional core of the call for reform.

The moral argument underpinning the healthcare debate should, as a result of the CNN clip, shift from one of “government threatening individual liberty” to one of “Americans in need of help to get the care they need.” But with so much media attention now focused on the implications Kennedy’s death holds for the healthcare debate, the lone pleas for “help!” from a woman in Oklahoma may wither and fade.

A cruel irony indeed.

Amidst all the talk of paying tribute to Senator Kennedy, perhaps now is the time for CNN to bring this powerful clip back into the headlines.

McLuhan: The Medium was the Message in Iran

Amidst all the journalistic gatekeeping and blogger ballyhoo over whether or not the White House seeded a question, the coverage has largely neglected to ask why we got here in the first place: because the medium was message.

What medium and what message?  The social media that gave shape to the Iran election crisis set the stage for what happened in the June 23, 2009 White House Press Conference.

If the Iran election crisis had not been so thoroughly intertwined with new social media, the White House would not have reached out (seeded, elicited, whatever) and then asked Pitney a question, Milbank would not have criticized Pitney, and nobody would have created the Twitter hash tag “#dickwhisperer.” The “medium” of the Iran election crisis really was “the message,” and that was not merely one reason the White House sought out Pitney — it was was a huge reason.

In the days prior to the his press conference, as the President watched the Iran crisis unfold, someone if not everyone in the White House must have realized that all traditional broadcast media would soon be cut off by Ahmadinejad.  The only way to get an unfiltered message from to the Mousavi supporters would be to somehow leap into the white-water rapids of the Twitter coverage — to take Obama’s enormous political cache as a global figure and use it to create a ‘push’ in the social media, a wave of momentum and hope amidst the ebb and flow of Tweeting moving in and out of the protests.  And so, the idea must have been hatched to get a message out to the Iranian people by taking aggressive steps to insert the President directly into the medium of the protests via an unorthodox press room maneuver.

It was a brilliant move by the Obama White House for several reasons.

Even if Obama did not want to formally back Mousavi, by asking Pitney for a question from the Iranian people that he collected via Twitter and the blogs, Obama implicitly endorsed the medium and message of the Mousavi protests.  By bringing the key Iran coverage aggregator (Pitney) onto the White House stage, Obama gave voice to the very movement Ahmadinejad sought to silence. It was brilliant political theater and while it did not lead to a turnabout in Iran, it stuck a knife in Ahmadinejad’s side and let the world know that the White House was not a dinosaur that shuts down the presses when people are communicating via cell phone.  This was a U.S. President who “gets” the medium driving change on a global scale.  This was a U.S. President who reads what bloggers put out there.  Ahmadinejad, by contrast, came across as a petulant Grand Inquisitor: brutal in his ways and brutally out of touch with contemporary ways of doing politics.  From the grave, McLuhan applauded the White House.

Jefferson: A Free Press Must Be Independent

Having been asked to dance with the President so the White House could walk a delicate line between diplomacy and political manipulation, the Huffington Post — fairly or unfairly–was tripped up by the tangled ethical web that now constitutes the relationship between the press and government.

To understand these ethics — what is right or wrong in this situation — we are compelled to return to Jefferson’s compelling principle that a free press is one of the crucial pillars of our Democracy.

Here, we have to say that the bone of Milbank’s contention was sharp, but misguided.  The ethical question was not whether Pitney allowed the White House to seed a question, but under what circumstances does the ongoing interaction between the press and the executive branch of government diminish our ability maintain the principles of a Jeffersonian free society?

As Pitney’s defenders have pointed out, the previous administration cultivated a kind of interaction with the press that significantly undercut Jefferson’s principles.  In particular, when the time came for the American public to inform themselves about whether or not an invasion of Iraq was warranted, the White House had so co-opted the national press corp that the media coverage was unable to provide citizens with the basic information they needed to make informed decisions.

In response to that breakdown, the blogsphere emerged as a counterbalance to what was widely seen as a national media that had lost its way during the Bush administration — for good and for bad.  Rising out of the ashes of a free press was a new citizen-driven, open source media that, while only occasionally capable of generating the initial fact line of a story, was extremely nimble at ferreting out political manipulation and forcing counterpoints into the headlines.

Largely free from the institutional constraints and salaries of formal journalism, bloggers became a much needed check and balance to help re-establish a free press that could, in the Jeffersonian sense, help citizens inform themselves and make decisions.

Multiple mid-term elections and an historic presidential campaign later, bloggers are a lot more institutionalized than they once were.

The Huffington Post in particular, with readership numbers that can compete against most major media outlets, now occupies a gray zone between institutional journalism and new media. And like it or not, Huffington Post is now faced with the very same ethical questions concerning interaction with the White House that tripped up traditional journalism just a few short years ago.

Conclusion: Stepping Up to Civic Leadership

As all but a few producers at CNN have figured out by now, the solution to the spat caused by the White House pushing a blogger to the front of the press room is not to stage on-air shouting matches between supposedly “old” and “new” media. Keeping in mind that the truth is sometimes factual and sometimes philosophical, there is truth to both sides of the debate between Pitney and Milbank.

The solution is for everyone to stop hiding behind the pretense of gate keeping, on the one hand, and naivete on the other.

If formally trained reporters would stop drawing a chalk circle around the word “journalist” just so they could push bloggers outside of it, then they could finally realize that a healthy civic sphere in the year 2009 requires a few evolutionary steps forward in the idea of the quaint Jeffersonian conception of the “press.”  In an era where politicians have become nimble at manipulating the press, we need voices in the media who concern themselves with preventing the damage politics can cause to the civics. That does not mean journalism dies. It simply must grow.

Likewise, bloggers who already have a foothold in the grand-daddy of all plum assignments — the White House Press corp — and who have far-reaching and varied access to government and broadcast media at all levels, need to stop pretending that just found a way in the back door. If the Iran election protests teach us anything it is that bloggers are firmly at the core of politics and media on a global scale and now is the time for bloggers to show leadership on big civic questions.

Of course, so long as shouting matches make good ratings, both journalists and bloggers may have a hard time stepping up.  But the time is now and the talent is there to drive the public sphere forward.

Jeffrey Feldman is the author of Framing the Debate (Ig Publishing, 2007), Outright Barbarous (Ig Publishing, 2008), and founder of Frameshop, the influential blog on politics and language. He holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, which he applies to the analysis of speeches, media, and campaigns. An influential voice both on and in the media, Dr. Feldman is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, has appeared on PBS, MSNBC, and Air America, and can be seen frequently on CBC Newsworld.