I just finished Garrett Graff's The First Campaign. The first chunk of the book is sort of The World is Flat meets Crashing the Gate, and I was quite looking forward to Garrett laying out the argument for why in our brave new world electoral and governing success is going to require a firm understanding of technology and the forces it's unleashed. But Garrett morphs from reporter to pundit in the second part of the book, and I think loses that thread somewhat.

I'd still really like to read a book that really nails how and why getting the Internet and other new tech is the critical issue facing political campaigns and what gets done once you get in office. It's a tough nut to crack, no doubt. Why, I myself had a go at it in a talk called "Geek Politics" that I gave at SXSW in 2007, which Garrett kindly mentions:

Nancy Scola is another Democratic technology expert and five-year veteran of Capitol Hill, who at the 2007 South by Southwest technology conference in Austin, Texas, pleaded to a room of lap-top wielding geeks for more experts in the new world to become politically active. "You can't really overstate how poorly understood technology is in Washington," she told them. She pointed to the example of the 2006 Deleting Online Predators Act, whereby 410 House members voted to prohibit social-networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster from being used in libraries and schools so as to hinder the ability of child sex predators to gain access to them. It was a remarkably boneheaded bill that could have passed only in a body with no understanding of where the internet and online communities were headed.

But it's easy enough to poke fun when we have "boneheaded" bills like DOPA, senators who confuse email with the Internet, and a President who professes that he uses "the Google." It's tougher, I think, to figure out what technology means for governing once we've crossed the threshold of total ignorance.

Oh, one last thing. If you're a Mark Warner fan, The First Campaign reads like porn. The work he did to bring broadband access to rural Virginia forms the spine of the book, and his ability to articulate why bits and bytes matter to every Virginian is held up as a fluency that modern politicos should strive to attain. A moment of silence for what could have been...

(UPDATE: I should mention that all and all, the book is actually quite good, and a heck of a first book. I had forgotten for a moment my motto, stolen from a talk I heard Arjun Appadurai give: "Don't be so hard on those who try.")