I first posted this video last Christmas but I think today's a much more appropriate spot for it.
The underlying truth about Father's Day that I realised this year is that it isn't so much about celebrating fathers as it's a chance for fathers to celebrate their kids. (With that said, there's no reason a son can't celebrate his father as well.)
I'll still
thinking about a post with my thoughts on some of the things the Meili
campaign could've done differently to perhaps put themselves over the
top. But until that comes clearer, I thought I'd do a post looking at
things in the bigger picture.
I never get a
good response when I call for audience participation but I'll try it
again. I'd love to challenge anyone reading this post to add a comment with their own
lists/thoughts on this subject – anonymously or otherwise. If you have
a blog and are desperate for content ideas, feel free to steal this idea as well! Or respond to it.
(My only suggestion if you plan to do your own list – don't read mine
first. I'm curious whether people would come up with the same things
as me or not.)
FIVE THINGS THAT HAD THE BIGGEST IMPACT IN THE 2009 SASK NDP LEADERSHIP RACE
1. Advance Voting
Did I read
somewhere that Ryan Meili got something like 75% of the votes of people
who chose to wait until the convention day, hear all the presentations
and endorsements, see the buzz for each candidate before making their
own choice? If so, it's tempting to re-imagine the results had
everyone been required to wait until the day of the convention to
vote. A couple real life examples – we had one woman at our table who
said she was torn between Ryan and Yens based on everything she'd seen
so far. After the floor shows were over, I asked, “So?” and she just
smiled and asked if she could have one of the Ryan buttons I'd offered
her earlier. I also heard from a couple people who said they would've
changed the order of their vote based on the floor shows. I'm sure
many others felt the same way. I still love the idea of every
individual member being able to vote by a variety of methods (by mail,
phone, online or in person) but perhaps limiting the vote only to the
day of the convention would reduce the chances of people re-thinking (or regretting!)
their choices? (Can you imagine if the news of the membership scandal
had broken on June 3, only a couple days before the convention and
after most early votes were already in?)
2. Baby Boomers
I made this point on my blog before when discussing some of Ryan's biggest challenges
and I suspect that ultimately, there was a huge portion of the NDP's
membership who are baby boomers (roughly everyone between 45-64 years
of age) that identified most closely with Dwain Lingenfelter as a
contemporary whereas the idea of Ryan as party leader was about as
palatable as the idea of putting their own Gen X kid in charge of the
family business no matter how accomplished or successful that young whippersnapper was otherwise.
3. Yens Pedersen Conceding
Yens Pedersen
withdrawing when he did after the first ballot right after Deb Higgins
was eliminated, meant that nearly all of his support went to Ryan. Had
he waited for a third ballot, Link would've likely gone over the top
with enough support from Deb supporters who picked him second, leaving
both Yens and Ryan in a more marginalized position rather than the
final result which made for a much closer result in the end and stronger showing for the progressive wing of the party. Again,
you can't re-write history but I can't help but wonder what might
have transpired if Yens had been eliminated first and Deb was still in
the field as most people expected. Would she have withdrawn as well leading to a similar finish or would
she have hung on to send things to a third ballot which may have
diminished Ryan's strong finish?
4. The Money Bomb
Even more than the cash
infusion it gave to Ryan's campaign at a critical time, even more than confirming Ryan as the most innovative user of new technology, the biggest impact of the money bomb may turn out to be that doubled Ryan's
total number of donors which, if I can make one last Obama parallel 
, gives Ryan a much bigger mailing list for any future endeavours he may
undertake – whether it's his own political future or directing support
towards other candidates he's backing.
5. The YouTube & Floor Show Videos
Ryan released a series of campaign policy videos
that I found stunning in how professional and engaging they
were. For a candidate without the resources to visit every
constituency like Link was doing, this put them on a more level playing
field – anyone who wanted to learn more about Ryan and where he stood
would get a very good idea after viewing even one or two of these
videos. The floor show video was
even better and I'm glad when offered the chance to see a preview
in the days leading up to the convention, I said no. I decided that I
wanted to see
this video the way everyone else would – like going to the opening
night of a big summer blockbuster for the shared experience. I'm glad
I made that choice – seeing it for the first time was one of the
highlights of this entire campaign for me. The
impact of the floor show video also ties into my first point that if
everybody who voted was required to vote on the day of the convention,
we may just have had a different result than we ended up with!
Bonus: Name Recognition
It's unfortunate but it was quite clear as I was doing my calling for Ryan that a lot of people didn't appear to even realise that there was a leadership race on or weren't really paying attention if they did know. So this vital decision that will have major implications for the future of our province was partly in the hands of people who were going to receive a ballot, see one name they recognized and send it off. I had more than one older member who told me some variation of “I always vote NDP!” clearly not realising that all of the choices *were* NDP. So if they see a ballot on it with one recognizable NDP name, that's a pretty big hurdle to overcome.
FIVE THINGS THAT HAD LESS IMPACT IN THE 2009 SASK NDP LEADERSHIP RACE THAN YOU'D EXPECT
1. The Membership Scandal
This was the
elephant in the room at the convention and I was surprised how little
attention it got except in subtle allusions and whispered side
conversations. Yes, the party did a report that cleared Dwain
Lingenfelter of any wrongdoing but the day after the convention ended
(nice timing there!), the RCMP announced they were investigating the
matter then a couple days later, announced that it had become a criminal
investigation. Some people are able to let bygones by bygones and
chalk it up to “just politics” or “that's behind us now” but I think there are also a number of
people who saw “Waterhengate” as going beyond the usual attacks and
back and forth you might see in a political campaign. (Since I keep
rewriting history in this post, I should also note that the flip side
is that Ryan might not have had as strong of showing as he did had this
scandal not happened.)
2. Deb Higgins
As I said above,
not too many people expected Yens Pedersen to come in ahead of Deb
Higgins. If you paired off the candidates that were most similar, Ryan
and Yens were an obvious match – both the “renewal” candidates, both
very progressive, both courting the youth vote. For a variety of
reasons, Ryan pulled ahead in all of these areas and it appeared that
Yens was being left in the dust. Dwain and Deb were also very similar
– experienced with long histories in the party and actual time in the
Legislature on their resumes. But their differences were also more
striking and I might've thought that alone would've been enough to gain
Deb more votes over Dwain than Yens took from Ryan (if that makes sense
– re-reading it, I'm not sure that it does! 
)
But as just one example, Deb didn't really play the “first female
leader of the party”
card very much from what I saw but that might've been one way to gain a
lot more support than she ended up with. Anyhow, I can't be too hard
on her – she's ended up as
Deputy Party leader after all!
3. Traditional Media
I'm so
completely biased here as I already think traditional media are a dying breed that I'll admit that I'm probably wrong about
the type of impact traditional media had on this race. I mean, simply
on the basis of the audience that a Leader Post columnist or a NewsTalk
radio host has, obviously, their having an impact is inevitable to some
degree. And whether it was Stefani Langenneger's line about Ryan being
“a social democratic doctor living the social democratic life” being
seized by the Meili campaign as an unofficial slogan to John Gormley's warming to Ryan, just
because he didn't refuse to appear on his radio show, they were
definitely part of the narrative of this entire campaign. But I guess
my point here is two-fold – the first is that there seemed to be very
little attention given to the race – at least until the membership
scandal happened and then, the coverage often tended towards the
sensational and confrontational rather than in-depth analysis.
4. Lorne Calvert (and Roy Romanow and Allan Blakeney)
I did a tongue-in-cheek post where I begged
kindly asked Lorne Calvert to endorse Ryan. I didn't expect a response
and it was one of the few times in this race that I was right about
something!
As I said at the time, I understand all the reasons why senior party
figures have to seen to be neutral. But at the same time, where is the
democracy if they're not allowed to share their opinions just like any
other member of the party? Those who are in roles that may impact the outcome (President, etc.) with their decisions should stay neutral of course. But how does it
strengthen the party when the men who arguably know best what it needs
have to sit on their hands while the race runs its course without their
valuable perspective? Which leads directly to my next point…
5. “New” Politics
The idea that politics can be done in a new way – that you don't
necessarily start from the position that the Sask Party are The Enemy but
that they're good, decent Saskatchewan people who just
happen to have different views than you. (Note: I said you *start*
from that point!) Or that you can talk about things
rather than shouting about things. Or that you don't go on a talk
radio
show just because the host is a conservative and you're the leader of a
social democratic party. All of those ideas about new ways to do
things didn't seem to have a major impact in this race. I guess even
the new political idea that's been proven in so many places and
political races in the last few years
– that Web 2.0 has the ability to
overcome
otherwise insurmountable odds – wasn't proven here. At least not yet.
But whether Ryan's running for leader in 2012 should the Sask Party
happens to win again and Link decide to step aside or if the NDP pulls
out a victory in 2011 and Ryan has to wait for his chance to come
around again in 2015 or 2019, as I've said a million times before the
impact of the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies will only continue to
grow. The Internet has changed how we think, how we see the world and
how we interact. And I firmly believe that this influence extends to
the way that we will do politics in the future as well.
(Jason hands out guitars – everyone
to sing “Kumbaya”.)
John Hodgman roasts Barack Obama at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner while trying to decide if the new President is a nerd or a jock (and including a subtle message that perhaps the expectations for Obama were set too high?).
Ryan's concession speech is now up on YouTube. I don't know what to say as I'm still, even a couple weeks later, oscillating between disappointment at how close the result was only to come up short in the end and unbelievable joy when I think about how much his campaign was able to accomplish in a few short months.
As Ryan says in the speech, he started the race as “that guy from Saskatoon nobody's ever heard of” and ended it within less than a thousand votes of beating the best-known, best-funded candidate in the race.
There aren't a lot of videos on YouTube of Ryan simply speaking. So if you want to get a taste of the sense of humour, class and genuine decency that drew so many people to Dr. Ryan Meili, watch this video.
Came across this article while doing some unrelated searches. It's short so I'll quote it in its entirety. The cool thing? It's from 2003! I don't know what the Sask NDP uses these days but hopefully they've only expanded their use of open source technologies! (The link back to the original NDP newsletter with three different mentions of open source/Linux is unfortunately broken so I can't see the original context.)
“Seems like the NDP in Saskatchewan are starting to notice OSS and GNU/Linux. This newsletter
contains not one or even two but three separate articles. Looks like
progressive movements, which are natural allies, are noticing Linux and
OSS in a more significant way. We need to start cranking up the
political machine to lobby the left, disability groups, educators,
civil liberties groups, and Government to make sure the attention keeps
growing.”
Oh, and I wonder how long I'll be able to keep doing posts that manage
to combine things of interest to the political junkies out there and
the library junkies (yes, they do exist!) as well? Probably not long
to be honest.
Regina Leader-Post columnist, Will Chabun, has a different take on what Dwain Lingenfelter's role might be in the current political climate by drawing parallels to other times of upheaval for the provincial NDP.
He's also got another piece on his blog about the role that a small community branch library at RPL played in his life. As someone (I think it was keynote speaker, Joseph Janes) observed at CLA (I'm paraphrasing): “isn't it wonderful to be in a profession where literally everyone has fond memories of you from their childhood? Teachers can't say that. Dentists definitely can't say that. Even police officers and fire fighters can't always say that. But librarians can.”
No, not another political post…just the funniest story I've seen online in a LONG time.
(via Reddit which has more on this subject in the comments for this post.)
[Edit: A loyal reader has informed me that edarem, the man who made the video below, is a registered sex offender in two states and has a variety of other creepy habits and histories. That makes this video about a million times creepier if that's possible.]
Seriously, if you scare easy, don't watch this…
If you asked what role the blogosphere played in the 2009 NDP Leadership Race, the quick answer would be “not enough.”
Even though three of the four bloggers who were writing regularly about the leadership race endorsed Ryan Meili (myself, Accidental Deliberations, Louis Riel Trail) and the fourth (Buckdog) didn't endorse anyone, the reality is that Ryan lost in the end.
But that's perhaps too quick of an answer. Because Ryan has also acknowledged repeatedly, including in his concession speech, that he went from being “that other one – the doctor from Saskatoon” in a field of well-known, well-connected people within the NDP party to a strong second place finish which many would've thought impossible when he first entered the race back in February.
Blogs aren't solely responsible for this result of course – not by a long shot. Ryan's well-run campaign with its positive message and dedicated team, his amazing personal biography, the desire for renewal within the party – all of those things played a big part. But the blogs definitely had an impact too, I think.
I can only speak to my own experience but the first clue is that I saw my number of unique visitors more than double from January of this year when my blog was doing it's usual mix of library, technology, and cute kid-related posts to May when I was writing almost exclusively about the leadership race.
I was told by a variety of party insiders – from convention committee members to MLA's – that they read this blog. Others have also mentioned to me that it often seemed as if an issue would come up on the blogs then a day or three later, they'd see it worked into a story in the mainstream media – whether it was the Leader Post, CBC, NewsTalk Radio or some other outlet. (I know for sure the mainstream media was checking in because I even got a name check from well-known Saskatchewan talk radio host, John Gormley's show – fast forward to 15:40).
Of course, he was passing along my report of the altercation between Dwain Lingenfelter and an NDP member on the Sunday of the convention so I'm sure there are some – especially in the NDP – who are mad that I would even report this. But as I've said all along, we all need to wake up to the changes that technology has made in our world – not just that camera phones and Blackberries are ubiquitous – but that there's been a shift in how society operates. Today, we live in a world where it's not about control, it's about openness. Like it or not, privacy and our notion of it is shifting as well.
This might be a good place for a tangent of another kind – I know there are many who saw me as a mouthpiece for the Meili campaign and some even accused me of running a smear campaign on Ryan's behalf against Link! 
Here are the facts – at least as I see them:
I got involved in Ryan's campaign relatively early and because of the non-hierarchical nature of Ryan's operation, it's true that I was given access to information that a new volunteer to a traditionally structured campaign likely wouldn't have been. Still, I never saw myself as one of the true “insiders” of the campaign team who were making the high-level decisions and steering the ship. But on the flip side, the openness that Ryan allowed meant that it was harder for them to distance themselves from me when I wrote things that they might not have agreed with or which weren't official campaign positions. That misunderstanding is why so many people saw me as a Meili mouthpiece – a misunderstanding which I think comes from the same type of people who prefer their volunteers to be at the bottom of the pyramid so they can be more easily dis-engaged should they become “over-zealous”.
Whenever it came up, Ryan acknowledged that I was an independent blogger who chose what to write and how I would approach my topics. He only questioned me once – when I was writing about the membership scandal – and mainly in defense of the First Nations people who he felt were being needlessly embarrassed by the whole incident – not out of concern from any political implications (again, yet another testament to his character to add to the long list – whether it's choosing not to run in Riversdale or being the only campaign to take out a thank-you ad in the NDP convention program.) I explained why I felt it was important for me to write about the membership scandal and he didn't push further where some politicians would've demanded their volunteer stop or maybe even freeze them out completely.
Ryan's campaign never told me what to write either. Of course, I would pick up little things in conversations with Ryan and others in his campaign – some I would work into my posts and some I'd let slide but I never ever received a direct message from Ryan or anyone else involved in the campaign: “You have to post this!!!” (And frankly, I think if I would've posted some of the things I heard behind the scenes, we may have had a different result at the convention!)
Anyhow, that's a
bit of a tangent but it ultimately comes back to the point of what the role of the bloggers were in this race. I think both Jurist (even though he endorsed Ryan in the end) and BuckDog who set-up a separate blog just to cover the race were more like traditional journalists – for the most part, objective and fair throughout. I was more like a newspaper columnist – you knew where I stood from day one and I would always come at things from a very partisan perspective. That's fine too – as long as you acknowledge your bias and don't try to play neutral when you're not. (I also admitted things like my name, my occupation, where I live and so on – hell, my number's 306-924-1205 – call me if you want to discuss further!) So I always thought it funny when commenters on this and other blogs would accuse me of smearing Link – while using pseudonyms and hiding behind anonymous accounts to make these charges against me. 
This will sound like a pretty extreme example but I think there are parallels in the NDP leadership race to what's happening in Iran right now. Technology – in the form of blogs, social media, YouTube videos, Twitter and other methods – were a big part of why Ryan's campaign was able to do an end rush around the better-known names (at least within the party) of Deb Higgins and Yens Pedersen to reach young people, activists, new party members and others in a unique, direct way. It's similar to how those techologies are allowing Iranian protesters to get the word out directly to the rest of the world in a many-to-many approach that circumvents traditional media and communications (if they're even paying attention – which doesn't seem to be the case in either Iran or the earlier days of the NDP Leadership race until the membership scandal broke.)
From the Andrew Sullivan link (which I think I first saw on Jurist or possibly posted by someone on Facebook):
“That a new information technology could be improvised for this
purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the
Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people
any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your
established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize
as never before.
It's increasingly clear that Ahmadinejad and the
old guard mullahs were caught off-guard by this technology and how it
helped galvanize the opposition movement in the last few weeks.”
But whether it's Tehran or ToonTown, the reality of our world today is the same. Blogs and other cutting-edge technologies play a big role in politics right now and will only play a bigger role in the future. People connect with each other via many-to-many methods and no longer are thoughts and opinions solely filtered or controlled by a single campaign or a few select media outlets. I have no doubt that the political leaders who grasp this best will have the most success. Ryan didn't quite pull it off but he came close. And I, for one, can't wait to see what happens next!
Someone posted a very meta question on AskMetaFilter recently, namely, “what's the best thing you've ever seen on here?“. The person was asking the question in terms of best advice for a young person just starting out in life but the thread sort of became a place to add links to some of the best ever threads in AskMetaFilter history.
