The heart of the last panel of the day, which was focused on how the Internet affected the outcome of Election 2004, was in the divergent presentations from Zack Exley and Chuck Defeo, who had parallel jobs running the Kerry and Bush Internet campaigns.

Exley was a tad defensive, given the complaints from the left that Kerry's online effort was too top-down and fundraising-obsessed and didn't do enough fostering of grassroots conversation or power. He parried those critiques by pointing out that they used the net to get thousands of people on the ground talking to voters, and given the Bush campaign's expected fundraising advantage, they felt it important to raise the money needed to keep pace in the ad wars. "We did listen to our base," he noted, describing how the campaign solicited stories from its supporters on how they had been affected by the Bush economy. "We got 100,000 responses which were put into a database. So when you saw people standing at a Kerry rally telling their life stories, those were real people telling real stories," he said.

Chuck Defeo sounded like he had come straight from a N-TEN seminar. "Our Internet strategy was all people-to-people, viral marketing, getting voters to go to their neighbors and co-workers, building a bond between the president and them." He talked about their "Parties for the President" house-party tool, and their "Walk the Vote" tool that enabled people to sign up and get a list of 20 voters in their immediate neighborhood to talk to. Instead of being bussed on a Saturday morning to a neighborhood they might not know, people could get this information whenever was convenient to them and walk their own block.

"There's no more powerful statement than 'I'm your neighbor and I share your values and here's why I'm supporting the President.'"

At one point Exley mentioned that he thought the Republicans actually enacted a Democratic online strategy (i.e. loosely distributed and grassroots centered) while the Democrats's strategy was more Republican (i.e. command and control, highly planned).

But there was something about Defeo's use of the word "bond" in describing the relationship between the President and his supporters that bugged me. I heard echoes of "USA!! USA!!" in my ears as I considered what to ask, since I felt we weren't addressing the emotional context of this election, coming during wartime and after 9-11. So I stood on the questioners' line shlepping my Powerbook so I could read two quotes to Defeo:

"He's the most powerful man in the world and all he wants to do is make sure that I'm safe, that I'm OK," Ashley Faulkner, the 16-year-old girl who lost her mother in 9-11 and whose father took a powerful picture of Bush hugging her at a campaign rally, in Progress for America’s TV ads for Bush.

"The sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, sends one’s desire back to the father and mother, with whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection. It is not for nothing that one’s State is still thought of as Father or Motherland, that one’s relation toward it is conceived in terms of family affection. The war has shown that nowhere under the shock of danger have these primitive childlike attitudes failed to assert themselves again, … A people at war have become in the most literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naïve faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who takes care of them, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties." [Randolph Bourne, "War is the Health of the State," 1918]

Then I asked "What was the nature of the bond between President Bush and his supporters, democratic/two-way, or strong-father/dependent-subordinate/one-way?" My purpose was to get away from the unspoken assumption pervading the panel, and some of the earlier ones, that net-empowered communication is inherently democraticizing, when, under the certain circumstances, it may also be used to herd people into powerful masses happy NOT to be thinking skeptically. (And this is a concern I have about the left as much as the right, by the way.)

Defeo, who in fairness probably never expected this kind of question, essentially punted, saying he didn't have the sociological or psychological background to comment. Gillmor jumped in to say that the Internet could be used to spread propaganda as easily as anything else.

And then we went onto other subjects...