Kate--
Wow, he opined in all of 328 words. 195 if you don't count where he quotes Estrich. Your post was longer than that.

Thanks for citing Brian Reich's piece, it's still good, and a lot of people are curious whether any of the problems have been followed up on.

Back in November, I put in a 1600-word analysis of the the two approaches, seeing them as the corporate/top-down approach associated with the GOP and the social/bottom-up approach. And I simply backed up statements Zephyr Teachout here and Zack Exley (elsewhere) that there was no point for progressives to be religious about shunning technology that appears to be "top-down".

That's not to say that the Amazon-like voter targeting is healthy for Democracy. Here's a quote I still admire from Jon Gertner's 2/15/04 NYT Mag article: "The candidate knows everything about the voter, but the media and the public know nothing about what the candidate really believes. It is, in effect, a nearly perfect perversion of the political process."

btw, the opening from Lewis's piece was rather telling:
"Recently, I attended a conference on the use of technology in politics. Or, in short, bloggers talking to bloggers about how great blogging is..."

A Republican I know once said, "Republican candidates are more familiar with working in corporations, so love things like polling, because they have used it in business and understand the benefits; Democratic candidates are always more keen to spend time with the Media team, because they think it seems more interesting."

I think that is true about their use of technology. Look at how the two parties used it in 04 - the GOP were using it for micro-targeting and organising their volunteers; ACT were going round Ohio showing people videos on their PDAs. Which do we think was the more effective approach?

Technology, the Internet included, can make the basic campaign functions like volunteer coordination, fundraising, GOTV etc. more effective and more efficient - but it must enhance these functions, not replace them.

The Republicans seem to get that for 04, I am not sure the Democrats have even now.