Grass-roots politics goes high-tech

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 5, 1998 | by Tiffany Danitz

When Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the U.S. government to be one "of the people, by the people," he could not have known that 130 years later the Internet would empower ordinary citizens to retrieve me reins of runaway government for the people at the state and federal levels.

For instance, the signature of Democratic former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld on an extraordinary foreign-policy bill that slapped state sanctions on a despotic junta in Burma was the direct result of the burgeonin "cyberocracy." Before scribbling his John Hancock, Weld received swarms of E-mails, faxes, letters and phone calls, some from as far away as Australia and Thailand. All were part of a grass-roots effort organized on the Internet. This huge outpouring of concern affected Weld's decision, according to his press secretary, and suggested to Massachusetts politicians that town meetings had gone international.

Sanctions advocates say they used the Internet because it was easy to access, fast and cheap -- three qualities that endear it to activists. A new, more sophisticated and organized program designed to support conservative activism is available as a software package called In House Lobbying, or IHL. The $39.99 CD-ROM or disk provides contact numbers and voting information about key conservative issues, unlocking the doors of political Washington to the world outside of the Washington Beltway. It also provides contact information for 250 conservative organizations, many of the federal agencies and a number of Cabinet departments. A fifth edition will be released in 1998 and will include contacts for state legislators. IHL is updated every six months and the upgrades are available for $10.95.

"I wanted to help grass-roots citizens lobby their government more effectively and compete with the professionals who have taken over the city," says Mathew Higbee, a senior partner at Starboard Response, a conservative political-consulting company in San Luis Obispo, Calif Near the end of the 104th Congress, Higbee resigned as a legislative assistant in the office of conservative California Republican Rep. Andrea Seastrand to pursue IHL and work on campaigns.

Higbee's creation premiered in November 1995 and was reintroduced last August. Originally, he was trying to make an electronic congressional directory for Capitol Hill staffers and Beltway organizations, but then he thought of adding features that would transform the software into a political tool that could be used by grass-roots advocates.

"We have literally millions of conservatives active out there and they are all members of different organizations concerned about a wide variety of topics. We want to give them a weapon," Higbee tells Insight.

A survey of 1,444 randomly selected Americans, published in September and conducted by Frank Luntz for Merrill Lynch and Wired magazine, finds that Higbee is tapping into the right audience. A majority of "digital citizens," when asked to choose a party identification, labeled themselves Republicans. Nine percent described themselves as "strong" Republicans, while 21 percent used the word "weak." This compares with 18 percent identifying themselves as weak Democrats and 20 percent as independents.

"Digital citizens appear startlingly close to the Jeffersonian ideal -- they are informed, outspoken, participatory, passionate about freedom, proud of their culture and committed to the free nation in which it has evolved," writes Jon Katz in his analysis in Wired.

Howard Marlowe, a lobbyist and adjunct professor at the American University School of Public Affairs in Washington, agrees that the use of the Internet as a cyberalternative to lobby Congress has increased during the last year. "Four years ago [the Internet] was largely the academic community, which means both students and teachers," he says. "We are now really reaching across the segments of the population and getting a large percentage of people in their 20s and 50s, largely middle-income translation: These are voters."

The digital-citizen survey provides statistical support for Marlowe's assertion. It discovered that more users are in their 40s than their 20s and only a small percentage are older than 55; they are mostly white suburbanites; and both sexes participate at nearly the same rate. Katz writes: "The connected are also more inclined to translate their views into political action. Nearly 60 percent say they `always' vote in national, state and local elections." Such a high percentage may knock the famously targeted soccer moms off the field as the star audience in election year 2000.

But the methodology the researchers used to categorize respondents may be suspect. With the amount of time respondents spent using E-mail, laptop computers, cellular telephones, beepers and home computers as the key measurement, they defined respondents as: superconnected, connected, semiconnected or unconnected. This may exclude many lower-income people who don't have access to expensive, high-tech equipment and thereby skew the results of the report. In fact, among the unconnected, only 8 percent earn more than $50,000 annually.