Pacific Views

Go MB!

Mary Beth Williams of Wampum has gotten some nice press on her campaign for the Maine legislature.

Williams's campaign is an interesting case of a larger phenomenon just beginning to manifest itself in American politics: the influence of the Internet, and more specifically of blogs, online journals devoted to everything from high-tech geek rapture to personal thoughts to political activism of every stripe. Blogs, depending on who you talk to, are either proof that the Internet is basically narcissistic or a bold new method of democratizing American media and politics.

A number of the most popular blogs on the Web are political, and most of those are conservative, a fact that Williams attributes to simple demographics. "Fifty percent of Americans still do not have internet access," she says. "There are two times as many Republican blogs as there are Democratic blogs, and in part that's because there are more Republicans online than Democrats because Republicans have more money. There are Indian reservations in the West that don't even have phone lines, let alone access to the Internet."

Part of her reason for starting Wampum was to get new voices into the discourse of the Web, and now that same impulse has provoked her to run for the state legislature. [...]

It's a delicious irony that the campaign that has brought Internet fund-raising to Maine — and with it the accompanying issues of national vs. local control, so potent in a state where the most vulgar epithet in the language is "from away" — will be conducted by Williams, an Abenaki Indian whose family, she likes to say, "has been in Maine for 12,000 years."

It's also interesting that Mary Beth Williams herself is skeptical of the power of Internet/blog fund-raising. In an email follow-up to her Phoenix interview, she wrote that online solicitation is "uncharted territory, and I think only time will tell if it's a flash in the pan or a true revolution for campaign fund-raising. I'm fairly convinced that my modest success in the past week fund-raising in the blogosphere probably has a little to do with the novelty of a blogger's campaign, but mostly arises from the relationship we've developed with Wampum's readership over the past eighteen months."

You can find out lots more about MB, her campaign, and the role of blogs and the Internet in politics if you go read the rest of the article. (There's also a really nice picture of MB — this magpie is glad to finally know what she looks like.)

Via Portland Phoenix.