Peter Leyden: "I went down to South Carolina for the first YouTube debate in July 2007. Everybody in the traditional press was saying Hillary was anointed, she was a steamroller, there was no way you could beat her. Obama was flatlining in the polls. But I told the Washington Post guy, Jose Antonio Vargas, “No way this is over. No one has any idea how powerful this fundraising and other stuff’s going to be.” Then I made a rash prediction: Obama would probably beat her and then win the presidency...."
Peter Leyden: "How do you use these next-generation tools not just for winning in politics or inspiring volunteerism, but also for government policymaking? As an example, Al Gore has put out this challenge to get the entire electrical grid off of oil and on to renewable resources within 10 years. We haven’t figured out how to do it yet, but there’s an understanding emerging about how to use collaborative tools, wikis, and video to open up the policymaking process. I see a huge opportunity here."
"Blame Us: An Instant History. Without Bay Area Technology, Ingenuity, Righteous Indignation and Cash, Barack Obama would not be President." Two of 25 extended quotes by Leyden in San Francisco Magazine, February issue, 2009, an exceptional oral history overview of the whole story of how Democrats and Obama took back the country after the election of 2004.
"If I had to boil down what has really happened in the election cycle, it is [that] you are finally seeing the real fruition of the full power of … the Internet on politics,” says Peter Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, a Democratic group that studies campaign tactics and technology.
"The First 21st-Century Campaign," National Journal, April 19, 2008
“What’s amazing,” says Peter Leyden of the New Politics Institute, “is that Hillary built the best campaign that has ever been done in Democratic politics on the old model—she raised more money than anyone before her, she locked down all the party stalwarts, she assembled an all-star team of consultants, and she really mastered this top-down, command-and-control type of outfit. And yet, she’s getting beaten by this political start-up that is essentially a totally different model of the new politics.”
"The Amazing Money Machine," The Atlantic Monthly, June 1, 2008
Washington is top-down, centralized, "a series of fiefdoms," Kralik
says. "Washington operates on the Peter Principle. You get promoted to
the highest level of your own incompetence."
Silicon Valley is a
bottom-up, "somewhat chaotic," decentralized network that thrives "on
meritocracy," he continues. Twenty-somethings with an idea -- say,
Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- think their way to the top.
But
in reality, the two worlds can't operate separately. In response to a
spate of lawsuits against tech firms in the mid-1990s, Valley CEOs
formed TechNet, a bipartisan network that lobbies in Washington. And by
the time the Microsoft antitrust case made headlines in the late '90s,
it was clear that the Valley needed to beef up its presence in
Washington.
Says Peter Leyden, the former editor of Wired
magazine who heads the New Politics Institute, a think tank focusing on
technology's impact on Washington: "There's an emerging sense that both
worlds need each other. Think of it this way: The scale of the problems
that the world faces -- globalization, global warming, global terrorism
-- can't be solved without these two hubs cooperating with each other."
Journey of a Capital Insider From Hill To Valley," The Washington Post, June 3, 2008
Click on the image below to watch the video.
"The Uncharted Political Terrain of Campaign '08," C-Span, February 20th, 2008
"The Web called it early," declared Peter Leyden, head of the New Politics Institute, a liberal think-tank analyzing the Internet's impact on politics.
It was nearing 12:30 a.m. at the Google-sponsored party in Charleston, S.C., just hours after the CNN/YouTube debate. This was in late July, during those dog days of summer when Sen. Hillary Clinton was branded by pundits as the favorite for the Democratic nomination. A "flawless campaign," they said of her "tightly disciplined" machine. To Leyden, however, Sen. Barack Obama had the edge -- the Web was saying so. Go on MySpace and Facebook, type "Obama" on YouTube, look at the money he's raising on the Internet, check out the traffic on the increasing traffic on his site, Leyden instructed. There was not much of a contest on the Web. Voters flocked to Obama.
But what about Howard Dean? Dean, the darling of the Web, eventually lost the nomination to Sen. John Kerry.
"Obama is not Dean," Leyden said, "and 2004 is not 2008."
"How the Web Predicted the Real Thing," Washington Post, May 8, 2008
"Politics is always thinking about how, when you do something, affects everybody else," Leyden says. "In the world I'm coming from, the tech world, you tend to just create a new tool or a new idea or a new company, and you want it to be disruptive and want everyone to have to adapt to it."
"Inside, Outside," National Journal, May 24, 2008
“The need for money is probably going to reach some diminishing return, and it’s probably going to be a pretty low ceiling, compared to past campaigns,” predicts Peter Leyden, president of the left-leaning New Politics Institute. In other words, the emerging high-tech marketplace may yet bring us closer to what decades of federal campaign regulations have failed to achieve: a day when candidates can afford to spend less time obsessing over the constant need for cash and more time concerned with the currency of their ideas.
"The Post-Money Era," New York Times, April 29, 2007
Wired Magazine's founding editor looks back at the publication's
15-year history and singles out what they got right and what they got
wrong. Listed as number one on the list "Good Thing We Got Some Stuff
Right" is a cover story Peter Leyden co-authored before becoming NPI's
Director.
"In 1997, we published "The Long Boom." Some pundits
snarked that it was dotcom-stock boosterism. Instead, it pinpointed
what was behind the unprecedented increase in material well-being for
most of humanity: the spread of liberal democracy, globalization, and
technological revolutions."
"In a Letter to His Kids, Wired's Founding Editor Recalls the Dawn of the Digital Revolution," Wired Magazine, May 19, 2008
