As I anticipated, Zach responds that Orlowski gets it all wrong:
Don’t you know that journalists get it ALL wrong sometimes? You just spent two days hurling criticisms at me based on what a UK reporter wrote about me in The Register. He carelessly and radically misrepresented what I said while speaking on a recent panel at Harvard’s Berkman Center. He took things I said about the Bush Internet team and had me saying them about my own team; criticisms of the DNC program were reported as criticisms of the Kerry program or of ACT; criticisms of the Kerry/DNC field program were reported as criticisms of the Kerry Internet program; he flat out misquoted me inside of quotation marks and implied worse outside of quotation marks such as the “blog blather” and “goateed chinned web designers” comments.
Read Zach’s entire post at DailyKos. It’s a good read, and sheds a ton of light on the thinking behind his comments (both reported and inferred from The Register).
I don't see Exley as being “repentant” here by any means. The rest of the article was one series of lobbing grenades after another at the “Internet Revoluntion” crowd. I especially like the business-like context, he put it into:
ReplyDelete“constantly evaluating every online endeavor that consumes resources INSIDE the campaign on the basis of measurable positive results for the campaign.”
He then poceeds to takes issue with two common myths in the blogosphere.
1) He says the Internet's MOST IMPORTANT contribution is to Democracy, not campaigns.
2) The Internet's contributions has important limitations in campaigns (they are not the be-all and end-all of online campaigns).
He is right. While the contribution the Internet has made to Democracy is tremendous and the new on-line communities and exchange of ideas is exciting, we have not evolved effective enough tools that are able to replace traditional tried and true campaign tactics.