Why I Googled Mayhill Fowler and Nash McCabe

    New media are conveying “new voters” into public life in two senses of the term.  There has been a surge in first-time voters during the primaries, most notably among young people, and online organizing and communicating has ushered some of these newcomers through the process from motivation to registration to casting a ballot.  But voters are also behaving in new ways.   One of them altered the course of the presidential campaign discourse two weeks ago.

    Mayhill Fowler describes herself on her bio page at the Huffington Post’s citizen-journalism site Off The Bus as an “over-educated sixty year-old woman with politics in my blood.”  Fowler supports Barack Obama.  She has given him money, although she has also given money to Hillary Clinton and Fred Thompson (out of loyalty to her home state).  She has also spent money to follow the Obama campaign and file dispatches for Off The Bus.  On April 7, she wormed her way into an exclusive reception for Obama donors in San Francisco.  She tape-recorded the candidate’s remarks, with the campaign’s tacit consent. Reporters were not admitted.

    As a de facto campaign correspondent, Fowler recognized when Obama veered away from his stump speech.  As a campaign supporter, she didn’t like some of what she heard.   After four days of reflection and then some quick negotiations among her editors, Off The Bus posted the recording online under the headline “Obama: No Surprise That Hard-Pressed Pennsylvanians Turn Bitter.”  Immediately below appeared a link and invitation to listen to the entire speech.  Beneath the documentation ran Fowler’s story. 

    Its opening paragraphs, like many of Fowler’s posts, read like a travel essay.  Fowler describes the pride Pennsylvanians take in their heritage and land.  It seems digressive at first, but she is admirably focused on the candidate and the voters he encounters; there is nary a reference to the media and campaign entourages who were certainly within her gaze, and no mention of strategies, polls, or policies.   Fowler segues to a home in the Pacific Heights district, filled with her sort of people (she lives in nearby Oakland).  The candidate now speaks to Bay Area denizens.  Following the now famous quote from his characterization of those same Pennsylvanians, Fowler delivers her analysis:

Obama made a problematic judgment call in trying to explain working class culture to a much wealthier audience. He described blue collar Pennsylvanians with a series of what in the eyes of Californians might be considered pure negatives: guns, clinging to religion, antipathy, xenophobia.

Fowler thinks it is Obama’s challenge, and the job of a president, to build bridges of understanding between different segments of the populace.  By that yardstick, he fell short on this occasion.

    Among the multitude of reactions to Fowler’s post –more than 5,000 on the originating site alone-- and the controversy it wrought was an ABC News mini-production featuring another previously unknown woman, Nash McCabe.  The old media stalwart deployed McCabe to pose a videotaped question to Senator Obama during the April 16 debate.  The identifying graphic stated her name and home town (Latrobe); it might as well have labeled her a bitter Pennsylvanian.   She asked Obama about his not wearing an American flag pin.

    After the debate, Margaret Talev of McClatchy newspapers supplied McCabe’s back story and some of her reasoning:

In Obama, she sees someone who rose like a rocket, always has a smooth explanation for everything — whether it's about his former preacher or the flag pin — and who makes it all look too easy.

"That's what upsets me about Barack Obama," she says. "He takes everything so nonchalantly."

    These voter cameos stirred animus toward their producers.  ABC heard it for launching a cheap shot at Obama.  Huffington Post, Off The Bus, and Fowler have been criticized for violating standards of practice regarding what can go on the record, how much loyalty supporters owe candidates, and what properly demarcates news from opinion.

    The offenses seem negligible.  For starters, in both instances Obama was neither in private life nor in the middle of sensitive negotiations, and has had ample forums to revise and extend his remarks.  More generally, while the circumstances of these incidents were unusual, they were not anarchic:  New media rules applied.  The news outlets encouraged and acknowledged reactions from the public.  Others filled out important details.  And Google put it all within easy reach.

    In their book Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government professors Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May advised political analysts to “place” key players under study.  K-Schoolers and other readers were instructed to examine biographies and writings in order to discern a political actor’s world view, tendencies, priorities, allies, and enemies.  Those edified by placement memos would make better decisions with respect to these actors.

    Mayhill Fowler is a new kind of actor in the campaign arena, combining aspects of reporting, donating, and analysis under the sponsorship of an innovative experiment in civic empowerment.  My placing of her as a sympathetic critic of Obama, rather than a campaign mole or publicity hound (two equally attainable roles), rests on evidence I found and perused in a couple of hours.  I wish Nash McCabe would let us know what she thought of Obama’s answer to her question.  I was glad to see that another Off The Bus correspondent, Celeste Fremon, posted a tape recording of Hillary Clinton’s remarks at another fund-raiser, revealing hostility toward MoveOn.org.

   

What disposes me kindly toward this model of new voter activity is my capacity to perform the act of placement, which is something else new voters can now do.