Taegan Goddard's Political Wire

December 19, 2004

Cool Software Doesn't Win Elections

Zach Exley, head of online communications for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, "offered a brutally frank assessment of his team's elections tactics" at Harvard last week, the Register reports.

Exley "derided net evangelists who believed that the answer was 'let's come up with new ways of talking!'"

"The take away was pretty stark: after a year of Panglossian happy-talk from media outlets like NPR, the tools proved not to be magic: and the much-lauded 'conversation' proved to be an irrelevant distraction from building a real world field organization."

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Taegan D. Goddard is the creator of Political Wire, a political column updated around the clock with the most interesting news, buzz and commentary.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Christian Science Monitor.

This is a personal site and does not necessarily reflect the views of any company, political campaign or advocacy group.

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