Blog pioneer maps political strategy for 2008

Critical of the old guard
Armstrong and “Kos” are critical of veteran consultants Bob Shrum, Tad Devine, Steve McMahon and others who they accuse of giving bad advice and producing ineffective campaign ads.

Armstrong, who is 42, hasn’t given strategic advice to a dozen Senate candidates or several presidential contenders, as Shrum, Devine and McMahon have.

But in the new world of blogs and Internet activism the barriers to entry to the consulting business have been lowered.

Armstrong says the veterans had trouble adapting in 2004. “When I worked at the Dean campaign, one of the things I handled was on-line advertising,” Armstrong recalled. “I could never convince (media consultants) McMahon and (Mark) Squier to shell out even $10,000 for web advertising in Iowa. And we spent millions and millions of dollars on television. I never got a single dime for Internet advertising in Iowa.”

Armstrong wanted to place Internet ads for Dean on the web sites of 120 small newspaper sites around Iowa.

Asked for comment on Armstrong's account, McMahon responded, "The Dean campaign used the Internet better than any campaign in the history of politics. We did everything we thought could and would be effective. I'm not aware of a single instance where the Internet team didn't get every resource it wanted or needed. At the end of the day, I didn't make the financial decisions, the manager did."

Joe Trippi was Dean's campaign manager.

The Old Politics prevails?
Even in an era of blogger-powered candidacies, some of the old ways of hierarchical, Washington-based politics seem to persist.

Many bloggers were passionately devoted to Hackett and his campaign for the Ohio Senate seat now held by Republican Sen. Mike DeWine.

According to Hackett, he was forced out of the Ohio race last month after Democratic leaders in Washington discouraged donors from giving to his campaign in his primary battle against rival Democrat Rep. Sherrod Brown.

At the end of 2005, Brown had $2.3 million in cash on hand, ten times as much as Hackett.

Asked about Hackett, Armstrong notes that he serves as a consultant to Brown’s campaign so he’s not an impartial observer.

He acknowledged that the whiff of old politics and the circumstances of Hackett’s exit from the race have caused hard feelings among some Ohio Democrats.

“Sherrod has to break through some of that personally and reach out and get across his message to those people,” he said.

But Armstrong sounded nonchalant about Hackett: “The real reason Hackett couldn’t go on is because he got squeezed on the money end. But you know what: on the Dean campaign that’s what we did in the last three months of 2003; that’s the exact same tactic we used. We squeezed all the money out of Edwards, Kerry, Lieberman, Gephardt. That’s a tactic that has nothing to do with people-powered campaigns or anything — it’s just the reality of politics.”

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