Kerry net chief: software doesn't win elections

Zack Exley, the online communications chief for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, offered a brutally frank assessment of his team's elections tactics today. It probably didn't win him many friends at the Berkman Law School's Internet and Society 2004 conference here at Harvard, many of whom have come to hear their faith in the goodness of the internet affirmed - but it's the most accurate account we've heard.

Exley was on a panel with his counterpart Chuck DeFeo, eCampaign manager of Bush-Cheney '04, discussing how the net had influenced politics this year.

The Democrats had no shortage of goatee-chinned web designers, but they were trounced by the Republicans' superior top-down organization.

"The difference between our approach and the Republicans is that we were more interested in just putting cool software up. The idea was to put up the tools and let people use them."

He derided net evangelists who believed that the answer was 'let's come up with new ways of talking!'

"The belief was 'let's get 5,000 people out there and they'll talk to each other. but to put a president in office we need to get people organized and trained." In the end, he said, a field organization was far more valuable than blog blather.

"The left's now saying we didn't have people on discussion forums," Exley said. "But we did. It didn't move votes."

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