How the "flattening of the world" has transformed politics--and what it means for the 2008 election
The 2008 presidential campaign will be like none in recent memory: the first campaign in fifty years in which both the Democrats and the Republicans must nominate a new candidate, and the first ever in which the issues of globalization and technology will decide the outcome.
Garrett M. Graff represents the people that all the candidates want to engage: young, technologically savvy, concerned about the future. In this far-reaching book, he asks: Will the two major parties seize the moment and run the first campaign of the new era, or will they run the last campaign all over again?
Globalization, Graff argues, has made technology both the medium and the message of 2008. The usual domestic issues (the economy, health care, job safety) are now global issues. Meanwhile, the emergence of the Web as a political tool has shaken up the campaign process, leaving front-runners vulnerable right up until Election Day.
Which candidate will dare to run a new kind of race? Combining vivid campaign-trail reporting with a provocative argument about the state of American politics, Graff makes clear that whichever party best meets the challenges of globalization will win the election--and put America back on course.
The First Campaign is required reading for the presidential candidates--and for the rest of us, too.
"In his lively new book, The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web and the Race for the White House, Garrett M. Graff... raises a lot of provocative questions about how candidates are grappling with 'the new campaign paradigm,' (which, he says, emphasizes a dialogue between candidates and voters, instead of a one-way conversation); how they are planning to chart America's course in a new, globalized world that is increasingly reliant on broadband communication and technological innovation; and how his own generation (born in the 1980s and 'more technologically savvy and more civic-minded than the one before it') regards the current state of politics.... [T]he astonishingly young Mr. Graff (who was born in 1981) proves in these pages that he is a cogent writer, willing to tackle large-scale issues and problems." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“’The First Campaign’ is a graceful book, and an important one. It's a success born of perspective: Graff gets enough distance to sketch the landscape – with all its moving parts – while remaining firmly embroiled in the fight.” -- Christian Science Monitor
"In this ambitious book about technology's impact on politics, the author argues that the key issues of the 2008 election—business investment, education, health care, and global warming—all are tech issues at their core. But Graff, who ran Howard Dean's first Web site in 1997 (while still in high school!), is at his best when he maps the ways in which the internet is rewriting the rules of presidential campaigning." —Wired Magazine
"Graff offers an up-to-date synthesis of the multiple challenges facing Americas as we adjust to living in a flattening world, and a valuable critique of how our policy debates on everything from health care to education haven't yet caught up with reality." —Tech President
"Having invented most modern technology, including the Internet, the United States is walking blind and backwards into the future, argues a former Howard Dean webmaster and current Washingtonian editor. Ardent tech-evangelist Graff offers an incisive and fairly persuasive text laying out the reasons why the 2008 presidential campaign will not only be extraordinarily important, but unlike any ever seen before. New technologies have reshaped not only the electoral scene but the fabric of everyday life, and 2008 is the first time in a half-century that neither party has a sitting executive to nominate. Therefore, writes the author, 'the first campaign of a new era is upon us.' Graff is realistic enough in his acknowledgement that no matter how web-savvy a candidate may be, if there's no message to deliver, voters won't care: 'The candidate who best understands that the internet isn't an end to itself but merely a means to an end—a chance to pull people in and get them involved in the political process—will triumph.' [Graff]... lay[s] out the tough issues the country faces (everything from globalization to climate change), making the case that 2008 and the following decade may well be the last chance 'to make changes and address those looming challenges before they begin to become truly painful.' Graff is mostly hopeful, though he paints a bleak picture of lagging educational standards and politicians so woefully out of step with the times that as recently as 2001, Sen. Dianne Feinstein was quoted saying, 'I don't believe the Senate should be on the internet until we get rid of pedophilia and pornography." —Kirkus Reviews
"Graff... knows a great deal about the contemporary political issues he discusses... which bring a thoughtful clarity to his wide-ranging analysis, from the need for sweeping healthcare reform to the political issues of Twitter.com." —Publishers Weekly
Garrett M. Graff is the editor of The Washingtonian magazine; he's widely recognized both as one of the nation's leading experts on technology and politics as well as a rising star in the media industry. Of his first book, "The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House" (FSG, 2007), which examined the role of technology in the 2008 presidential race, The New York Times' literary critic Michiko Kakutani wrote, "The astonishingly young Mr. Graff (who was born in 1981) proves in these pages that he is a cogent writer, willing to tackle large-scale issues and problems."
After four years with The Washingtonian covering politics and Washington life, Graff became in September 2009 only the third editor in the magazine's 44-year history. The National Magazine Award-winning Washingtonian, which calls itself "the magazine Washington lives by," has a monthly readership of about 400,000. He's been named by PR Week as one of four "new media" journalists to watch and one of ten "rising stars" by the magazine industry trade magazine, Folio. His second book, "The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror," was published in Spring 2011 by Little, Brown. It traced the history of the FBI's counterterrorism program since the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972, its rise as a global police force, and profiled Robert Mueller, the current and longest-serving FBI Director since Hoover himself.
Graff also teaches internet and social media at Georgetown University in the school's master's in journalism and communications program. Previously, he was the founding editor of mediaBistro.com's Fishbowl D.C. (www.FishbowlDC.com), a popular blog that covers the media and journalism in Washington, and co-founder of EchoDitto, Inc., a multi-million-dollar Washington, D.C.-based internet strategy consulting firm. A Vermont native and graduate of Harvard, he served as deputy national press secretary on Howard Dean's presidential campaign and, beginning in 1997, was then-Governor Dean's first webmaster.
As the first blogger admitted to cover a White House press briefing in 2005, he is a frequent speaker on blogging and the intersection of politics and technology, and his reporter's notebook from that first day in the White House hangs in the Newseum in Washington, DC.
His writing and commentary has appeared in publications like the Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired magazine, the Politico, and the Huffington Post, and he has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, Fox News, CNN, CNN Headline News, CNN International, CNBC, MSNBC, CBC, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, and various NPR programs, as well as local and regional television and radio channels, and been quoted in publications ranging from US Weekly to the Miami Herald. He has spoken on the internet, new media, and politics at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the National Press Club, Harvard Business School, the Defense Department, and the Google headquarters, as well as universities from Duke and Princeton to the University of Florida and Rice University, as well as to companies, trade groups, and to many international audiences.
This book is well worth reading. It shows a revolution that is taking place in political communications and can give any political person some ideas. You can gain more information on the book beyond Amazon by going to the book's web site, which has the same domain name as the title. As we watch the current political campaigns for the Presidency, you can see what Graff is talking about by going to You Tube and looking at the various different presidential campaigns on You Tube. You should also check out the main campaign sites on the web and see how they are linking to places like Myspace and You Tube. This would help you make the book come alive. I have a list of respected books relating to future watch studies on my Amazon profile for those who might want to get a larger picture of future trends.
This is a book that really has not been written before - while it is very high density, it is extremely readable. I enjoyed it!! All young (and older) people should read this and think about it.
