THE FORUM ON TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

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DIGITAL DEMOCRACY:

POLITICS GOES ONLINE

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THURSDAY,

FEBRUARY 24, 2000

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This transcript was produced from a tape provided by the Council on Competitiveness.

I-N-D-E-X

PRESENTERS PAGE

Mr. Bailey 5

Mr. Kohut 14

Ms. Ireland 23

P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S

MR. ROONEY: Lunchtime policy briefings that we host are made possible by generous grants from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. We are very, very grateful for their support.

I think we have a terrific program for you today, very topical on the issue of politics online, using the web to deliver political messages, energize voters, and garner campaign contributions. The Senators have invited a terrific group of people to talk to about that.

We are going to follow our usual format. Each speaker gets ten minutes to deliver their view of the world of online politics. Then the Senators will throw the floor open to your questions, and moderate the ensuing roundtable discussion.

In your briefing packets, there are some items. During the Q&A, we have four mikes. We really encourage you to come to the mike and ask your questions. It's a lot more interesting and dynamic that way.

We do give priority at the microphones to our congressional staff audience. We are here, and the Senators are here primarily for them. We are delighted to have our other guests, but we ask that you allow the congressional staff to ask questions first.

For those of you who are hopelessly shy, we have green question cards in your packets. If you could fill these cards out and hold them up, our staff will collect them from you, bring them up to the Senators, and they will ask questions on your behalf, National Press Club style.

We also have blue evaluation forms. I hope before the end of the afternoon, that you fill these out. We take your feedback very seriously. They influence what we do here. We want to make this as useful to you as possible.

Finally, at the very back of your packet, is information on our next event on Internet taxation, which is just two weeks away. So take a look at that.

It is my pleasure to introduce our speakers here today. One of them has not arrived yet, but I think she will be here in time to speak.

Our first speaker is Doug Bailey, who is founder, President and CEO of FreedomChannel.com, a non-profit web venture that makes on-demand video available on the web to the public, to politicians, and to the press. It's a very interesting venture. Doug actually has a long history as a political consultant. Most of you probably know him as founder and executive publisher of National Journal's Hotline, which all of us use every day as a critical tool.

Our second speaker is Andrew Kohut, one of the foremost pollsters in America. He is director of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. He served as president of the Gallup Organization, and founded the Princeton Survey Research Associates. He is an expert on demographics and trends in Internet usage.

Our third speaker, who will be arriving shortly, is Emi Ireland. She is president and CEO of Campaign Advantage, a leading provider of web-based tools for communicating with voters, contributors, and constituents. She also has experience as a political consultant, but in addition is an experienced Internet technology consultant, an unusual background.

So I think we have a terrific panel. We are going to get going with Doug Bailey here. Doug?

MR. BAILEY: Thank you.

You know that the Internet has arrived, not so much from the success of Amazon.com or all of the startups and the virtual billionaires that are cropping up, but when the Nielsen rating came out, the first Nielsen rating that studied people using the Internet came out the other day.

Just as this was the same organization that found that most Americans who watched television watched an average of seven hours a day, they found that users on the Internet watched an average of 20 hours a week. They found also that most of those hours were spent in the office, which was predictably going to be a problem.

I think until this year a campaign website was something that the candidate wanted in order to be certain that he or she was seen as technologically with it. They didn't know what a URL was, and probably forgot their own, and didn't visit the site very often. But if they had young volunteers, the volunteers would create the website, and that was that.

That doesn't mean that there weren't some decent political websites, but I don't think they were a central part of any campaign that I know of until perhaps the Ventura campaign, and that maybe as an afterthought. But this year, it really is different.

It's not just the McCain use. You can look at George Bush's site that reports every dollar every day for an entirely new form of campaign finance disclosure. You can look at Al Gore challenging Bill Bradley via video e-mail. But it is the McCain campaign which is putting e-politics on the map, if you will.

Just three or four thoughts. Yes, they have raised $3 million. Most of that is matchable, so they have really raised since New Hampshire, $6 million in effect, through their Internet site with no direct mail, no nothing, no costs.

Although in McCain's case, they knew what they were doing because they ran some McCain ads for the site in other places so that on-line users who were excited about McCain saw an opportunity to go to the McCain site, went there, made their contribution. Very interesting use of the medium.

They have also used it aggressively. This is less well known or written about. They have used it aggressively to recruit volunteers whom they then use via e-mail to do a variety of things. In New Hampshire, in one hour's time, they took their e-mail list and recruited 7,000 people across the country, who volunteered each to make ten phone calls off the McCain list into New Hampshire.

They used it to turn out thousands of young people in New Hampshire to both vote and to register before they voted for the first time on primary day. They used it in California to solicit Democrats and Independents to re-register as Republicans before the registration closed so that they could vote in the Republican part of the California primary. So they have aggressively used the technology.

I want to introduce you to something that we are doing at FreedomChannel. FreedomChannel.com is intended to introduce the technology of video-on-demand into our politics. Let me just explain what video-on-demand is and the reason that it is important.

In four or five years time, it really will be true when you are watching television, which may come through your computer, just as your computer information and databases and the Internet may come through your television set, it may be one electronic vehicle.

But when you are watching television, you are watching the ballgame, and you want to see it from the third base camera angle instead of from behind home plate, you will be able to push a button and be your own TV producer in that sense. If you are watching the Leno monologue, and you didn't get the joke, there will be a little replay button where you become your own producer, and you can hear it again, and not get it again probably in most cases.

You will be able, when you arrive late and your boss has kept you at the office long past the nightly news, you will be able to arrive home and dial up your own nightly news. That is, and go and see Rather's 30 minutes again if you want, or you will also be able to pick and choose those stories off the nightly news that you want.

You will be able to order them in the order that you want to hear them. You will be able to pick the six minute version of the Elian Gonzalez story of the night rather than the 30-second version. You will be able to eliminate certain stories all together. That is video-on-demand. You become the producers.

It is significant in the world of politics for the following reason. It may be obvious, but let's review it. The world of television that we have known, unless it's Super Bowl Sunday or you are an ad producer, nobody watches television to watch the ads. You go to watch the ballgame. You go to watch the concert. You go to watch Friends. You go to watch the news. The ads just come on.

The challenge to the ad-maker, and believe me, I used to be one so I know this, the challenge to the ad-maker is to figure out how I can keep that audience when the audience has the clicker.

Deerdorf (phonetic) and I got out of the advertising business about the time the clicker came around, because prior to that, a captive audience meant that you were in the sofa and you had to get out of the sofa and go all the way across the room and turn the television station to another channel in order to change. That was our captive audience. Give him the clicker, and we were out of there. We were gone in a second.

That's of course what happens. So the advertising agency or the people who create the ads, both commercial and political, have to figure out how can I make my ad entertaining enough or different enough, or combustible enough, or confrontational enough, or negative enough to keep the audience watching, to keep them from clicking or getting a beer. That is one reason why you get so much negative advertising. People do watch it. They may not like it, but they watch it.

The second thing about television as we know it is that no matter whether the audience is large or small for any program, it's demographically very broad. So that if I could figure out what this first gentleman on the center aisle in the second row, the issue that's going to decide that person's vote, I can give him enough information in 30 seconds to win his vote. But by contacting with him, the chances are I have lost contact with everybody else. So I don't do that. That's again, another reason why the ads are so general now.

Think about video-on-demand. If you could go to your television set and say listen, tonight, right now I want to push the buttons, and give me Al Gore on education. I want him to talk to me about education. I have got more than 30 seconds. I have got 90 seconds. I am going to push the button. The chances are very good that now the campaign realizes when they provide that video, they have got to provide some substance because people have ordered that up. This isn't an ad coming out of nowhere. It is you as your own television producer have decided.

But we have decided with FreedomChannel to start introducing that process. So you can go to the FreedomChannel at FreedomChannel.com. You will hear that from me for the next couple minutes a lot. You can seek out the presidential candidate that you want. Let's say, Al Gore. See what videos he has in the system. Let's choose education. Push the button, and hear what he has to say.

(Video shown.)

MR. BAILEY: Now we're not going to get into any paid commercials here so I am going to cut some of these people short in order to make my points. In other words, you can come in and find the candidate and find out what issues they have tapes on the system on. Or you can come over here and pick an issue that you care about, let's say Social Security, and see which candidates have tapes on it. So we'll play Gore again. I thought Bradley had one in there, but he didn't.

Now let me stress one thing. Everything that's here in video form is also here in audio form, and is also here in transcript form. So that while all of you in your Senate offices have the kind of connections that you can get this easily, some of you at home may not have the same kind of either broad band connections or a computer purchased in the last three or four years.

Increasingly of course, broad band capability is becoming ubiquitous. In four or five years, it will be. Right now, it's somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of home computers can receive competent video messages. That will increase dramatically.

Now on this site, what we have done is to give the same open invitation to every candidate for President, regardless of party, every candidate for the U.S. Senate, every candidate for the U.S. House, every candidate for Governor. We started with the Presidential candidates.

There are tapes on the system from all of those remaining in the race, plus a bunch of other folks who some of whom you have heard before, but aren't as visible in the race, like Linden LaRouche is running in fact again this year. The FreedomChannel is both non-partisan and open to all on an equal basis. It costs the candidates nothing to participate. This is not only a non-partisan site, it is a not-for-profit site supported by the foundations. We give the videos away, in effect. We are doing this as a demonstration of the future of video-on-demand.

Let me also stress that we have made the same offer to every interest group, be it party or 501(c)3, 501(c)4, for spokesperson to camera on their issue. Let's pick an issue. I'm doing this for a purpose here, if I can find the right one. The Republican National Committee gave us this tape on Medicare, for example.

(Video shown.)

Since Senator Frist isn't here yet, I will cut him off, but don't tell him when he arrives.

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: I am going to have to cut you off. Your ten minutes is used up.

MR. BAILEY: Then let me simply say this is intended as an introduction to the future of video-on-demand, which is very exciting, and will change our politics, just as the Internet will revolutionize it all together. Thank you very much.

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Doug, I didn't mean to be rude, obviously I was, but we have to stick by the ten minutes.

Andrew Kohut is director of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. He is leading independent opinion research, which is that kind of an independent research group. He is also one of America's leading pollsters. He has served as president of the Gallup Organization, founded the Princeton Survey Research Associates. He is an expert on demographics and trends.

MR. KOHUT: Thank you very much. I am happy to be here. This is an interesting juxtaposition of presentations. Doug has provided the sizzle, and I'm the angry little accountant from down the hall who is going to give you the numbers, which are less dramatic than the sizzle.

We have been studying the use of the Internet as a news source since 1994, when my center was part of the Los Angeles Times company, the Times Mirror Company. So we go way back on this. We did surveys in 1996 and 1998. Let me try to just give you some basic numbers.

First of all, half, 52 percent of the voting age population has access to the Internet either at home or at work. Now two years ago, January of 1998, the beginning of that election cycle, it was 40 percent. Four years ago, it was 23 percent. So one-fourth of all households four years ago, one-half of all households -- individuals, not households, had access. So that is a pretty dramatic improvement.

About one in four people tell us they go on the Internet at least once a week or more for news currently. That was only seven percent four years ago. This is a very dramatic and important increase. The Internet is now a real player in news consumption generally.

I am going to focus on the election, obviously, but with regard to the general subject of news use, the Internet is growing by topsy. At the beginning of 1999, three percent told us that the Internet was their principle news site for international and national news. By the end of the year, it was close to 10 percent.

Now when we asked, as we did recently, what is your principle resource, news source for election news, six percent said it was the Internet. That's six percent of all registered voters. That was two percent four years ago.

Now six percent doesn't sound like a very big number, but it is a completely different world today than it was four years ago or eight years ago. There is so much audience fragmentation, that six percent is a pretty respectable number.

Only three percent said they basically turn to magazines for news about the election principally. The largest news sources, cable news and newspapers, are only attended by about a third or 31 percent of the public of the voting age population. One in four say local television. Twenty four percent say network television.

Newspapers and network television, the old principle media for election news, are now no longer dominant. What we have is a kaleidoscopic array of news sources. The Internet is right in there with as many as six percent of Americans today. This is basically where I'm going for my news about the election.

Six percent is not the top of that number. As many as 24 percent of all voters say they go at least some of the time. That number was only about 10 percent four years ago. So there is a lot of dramatic growth. The Internet is an important element in the news mix for this campaign, but it is obviously not the dominant medium.

But there are no dominant mediums at this point. If we begin to think about the way the Internet has grown over the past four years, four years from now it could clearly rival local news or network news, given the fragmentation and the disbursal of audiences.

When we asked in 1998 where did most people who go on the Internet for campaign news go, what they told us was not too surprising. They told us they mostly go to commercial news sites, CNN, Time, the CNN/Time all politics site, the broadcast sites were the dominant sites. Very few, about 17 percent said they went to a candidate's site. The candidate sites and the campaign sites, and the party sites got very low ratings in terms of their utility and usefulness, at least in 1996. It was the commercial news sites that people like and use.

What did they go for? Mostly they said they went for information about candidates. Thirty percent said that was their principle motivation for going on the Internet to learn about elections. Very few went to find out where to vote, how to vote, or information about participation.

There was a small, but encouraging number who were involved in some interactive capacity of the Internet. One in five said they sent or received e-mail about the election. Twenty six percent said they registered their opinions on certain sites, election-related sites.

These numbers are small, but I think they are encouraging because by 1998, the percentage of people who were newbies, that is to say they had been on the Internet for only a year, represented 40 to 50 percent of the Internet population. Those people did very little. These numbers about expressing your opinions or sharing information or e-mailing one another about election-related topics were much higher among people who had been on the Internet for some period of time.

One of the things that is very difficult in generalizing about the Internet is that if you look at today's patterns just in gross terms, it can be very deceptive because there are so many people coming into this population and they are learning so quickly, that you just can't look at the top line numbers. You have to look at what experienced users are doing. The experienced users did use the Internet to a fair degree in an interactive mode.

But what we did find in 1998, that there was less relative use of the Internet for the election because 1998 was an off-year election, not a presidential election as compared to 1996. But also, because of this newbie factor. With so many more people coming on the Internet, while there were more people in absolute terms using the Internet for campaign purposes, the percentage of Internet users using it for campaign purposes actually declined.

Now who goes on the Internet? It is a pretty familiar profile. Men are twice as likely to use the Internet for election purposes than women. Young people under 30 are three times as likely as people 50 years of age and older. The education and income profiles are just about what you would expect.

Now the question I'm asked most often, and the question that we devoted a lot of time to is will this lead to greater civic engagement, greater voter participation. I would say that the early answer is both yes and no.

On the no side, one of the most important uses of the Internet is not for general enlightment or broadening one's horizons, but for going out for more information on the things that interest you. So that just by virtue of the fact that all this information is there does not mean that people will be drawn to it. In fact, they are drawn even more narrowly to the things that they are interested in.

We did a pretty interesting analysis based upon a survey of 4,000 people that we conducted in the fall. What we found was that use of the Internet was not associated with knowing more about what's going on in the world of politics when we asked people quiz questions, holding constant educational, age differences, and the gender differences between users and non-users. In fact, reading a newspaper or even watching the news on cable television makes more of a contribution in a statistical sense to what people know about politics than using the Internet.

Again, I think it relates to this fact that the Internet is not a broadening, necessarily a broadening mechanism. What it is is it allows you to get greater depth into what you are really interested in.

So I think some of the positives about participation is that the Internet will make it easier for those who are engaged to get much more information about the things that they are interested in. I think if you want to know about Lyndon LaRouche's position on education versus Al Gore's, there it is. But I don't think that this will represent a major draw to the average citizen, and particularly to the marginal voter.

One of the things that our survey showed in January, which focused on how to communicate with voters, if you want to reach voters who are on the cusp of voting, don't use the Internet. Go to news magazines, because that's what differentiates them rather than Internet usage, because the Internet right now attracts people who are basically there already in terms of participation.

The Internet, as Doug mentioned, is great for contributors and great for party activists. They are anywhere from 50 to 75 percent more likely than non-activists and non-contributors to use the Internet as an election news source. But again, this isn't the average citizen.

I think the most encouraging potential for the Internet is its ability to help voters at the local level. People tell us they go on the Internet for news to find out about things that are not easily found out elsewhere. Finding out about the presidential race, finding out about even important state races is pretty easy to do through conventional medium. But if it's two days before the election or a week before the election and you don't understand what's going on in your district, or who the candidates are, that is where I think the potential really rested.

When we conducted a major survey in 1996, asking people to rate the utility of various sites, these campaign sites and the party sites got pretty low ratings compared to the big news sites. But the local community sites got very good usefulness ratings. So I think that there is an important -- a potentially important way in which the Internet can help people. It fits very much with what we know about the ways in which the Internet serves people's needs with regard to news more generally.

I think I will just wrap it up there.

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Thank you, Andrew. I'm not sure Doug Bailey was pleased with everything you had to say, but nevertheless that's what these are for.

Emi Ireland actually has been here all this time, sitting in the back plotting an even more spectacular presentation. She is president and CEO of Campaign Advantage, which is a leading provider of web-based tools for communication with voters and something called contributors.

She has over 14 years of experience as an information systems analyst and Internet technology consultant. She has written a lot on political issues, served as a political strategist, which I assume means that she has worked with campaigns, speech writer, and fundraiser.

So Emi, you are on.

MS. IRELAND: I am going to start my remarks on fundraising. There are three points I would like to make today. The two initial points are related. First of all, make sure if you are going to have a campaign website, that it's set up to systematically and efficiently collect data and feed it directly to your campaign database in a secure fashion.

Too many people are still putting up websites that don't feed into a database. The beauty of the Internet is that it can reduce the amount of expensive labor if you set it up properly. There are too many vendors selling databases with no website, and websites with no database. Insist on getting both parts of the solution.

By the same token, make sure that your database is connected to an effective and well-maintained website or you have got a deadend.

The third thing that I would like to say is when it comes to the Internet, just use common sense. Yes, there's HTML and JavaScript and cgi and ASP and so on. Use common sense. If you ask yourself if something makes sense regarding the Internet, substitute another word, another technology, another time-tested campaign tool. If it doesn't make sense all of a sudden, rethink it.

Would you have a TV campaign with one ad that you ran 1,000 times over and over and over and over again, never changing it? Of course not. Yet a lot of campaign managers put up websites and never change them.

Another campaign manager told me "Well what do I need to do to get people to contribute funds once we put up the website?" I said "You need to publicize it." That was a rather novel idea to this campaign manager. I said, "What if you gave a fundraiser and you had great food and everything was great, but you didn't tell anybody it was going to happen? You wouldn't raise a lot of money at that fundraiser."

Just one more example. I remember reading in the paper recently, The Post, that allegedly Bush's senior strategist, because he comes from a direct mail background, allegedly was "suspicious" of the Internet. Well, poor guy. I don't know if he was misquoted or not, but imagine if somebody were said to be suspicious of telephones or suspicious of direct mail. You would wonder if maybe they hadn't taken their medication that morning or something like that. But it doesn't make sense to be suspicious of a tool. That is all it is. It's a tool.

So I would say plug in common sense, just like any other part of your campaign. It needs to be fresh. It needs to be updated. You need to have your senior strategists looking at it.

One of the presidential campaign sites months after the FEC decision, that qualified online contributions for presidential matching funds, said that the credit card contributions do not qualify for matching funds. Obviously no one in the senior strategy team was looking at that website.

So the same way you would never have a TV ad that wasn't looked at by your senior strategist, it wouldn't be just done by volunteers and never looked at, you should do the same thing with your website.

So now we're going to look at the good, the bad, and the ugly regarding fundraising, and just touching on a few issues with the websites themselves. Tell me if you can hear me if I stand away and point at some of these things.

So let's go to the Forbes donation page. Now I know that he is not running right now, but it's a very interesting page from a usability standpoint. The best people to test your web pages are not young people, but your grandparents. If they look at it and they squint, you know it's not good.

Now this is a contribution page. If you have three seconds to do something on this page to make that contribution happen or else you're not going to have another chance, would you know where to click? It is not obvious.

Let's go to the next page. This is a big problem. Now Forbes spent more allegedly, on his website than any of the other candidates. But he needed to have somebody who was a fundraiser looking at his website. It's not good enough just to have coders. You also have to have good programmers. But you need the common sense, strategic, campaign approach. Okay?

You would need to get a lawyer to make a contribution on this page. Let's keep going. These are three pages. You have to read the whole thing. It's like applying for a mortgage. Let's drag it down. Look at this. Oh my gosh. Would anyone want to make a contribution?

Okay. So let's go back. This is common sense. It's not rocket science. What's happening is that too many people are saying, "Oh, I don't understand that web stuff. I'll let my volunteers take care of it." Or "None of the senior people here understands that." You have got to understand it. It's not rocket science. It's just like any other tool.

All right. Here is a Gore donation page. Now this is a lot better than the Forbes donation page. Now none of you can read these fields. Right? I assume that nobody can read it, right? That is what I would like. I don't want you to be able to read it. But what is the side that you need to fill in and click? Is it this side or this side? The left or the right? The left. That's good design. It is intuitive. That is very important for the web. There's nothing tricky about it. It has got to be easy. If your web designer and your web team put together a website that's not easy to use, forget it.

Okay, let's go back. What I object to about that page, it still puts a lot of extra verbiage on here that you don't have to see. A really designed website let's the user decide what they want to see and what they don't want to see.

Okay. Here is a Bradley. Make a donation. Let's scroll down. Notice how they say the rules and regulations. You can skip it unless you are interested. Now if you were half asleep or dead drunk, god forbid, would you know how to make a contribution? It's a big red button. That is the way it ought to be.

A lot of people will be able to get it without the red button, but you will lose thousands and thousands of people. The harder you make it, every time you raise the bar, make it harder to use, you lose thousands of people and lots of money. It all comes down to money if you don't design it properly.

Okay. Back up. Go to the next one. So the McCain info page. Look how nice and clean this is. You can skip over all the instructions if you don't want to read them. Look at this. So easy. Straight in a line.

Now you will see a lot of pages where you go across. They do it so you don't have to scroll down, but actually it's a lot easy just to go bam, bam, bam, and click off.

Now you might want to make it prettier, I mean that's another grading category, but it's easy to use. Guess what? He has raised a lot of money with that form. I mean there are a lot of other factors involved, but it is one of the things that has helped him.

Now McCain has an excellent site that way. I have been amused looking in the paper seeing everybody criticizing McCain and saying he didn't really raise all that money on the web, people made phone calls and people were helping, volunteers were making calls. He still got the money through his website. It doesn't matter -- you need synergy. You need the off-line campaign and the online campaign to work together. That is another very important thing.

Now can you pull that scroll bar? I am going to show you that this is a no-no on the web. Pull that scroll bar, if you would. Yes, drag it down. His navigation bar disappears. No good. Okay? You should never have that happen, but people under a lot of pressure, whatever, they are in a hurry. But let's assume that you want to make a contribution right now. He has got this information right here that you can't read. Where do you think you are supposed to click to make that contribution? Anybody have a guess? You got it. Making it easy. All right, right there.

Now let's back up and go to the actual page. Okay. Here is the donation page. This is a marvelous simplicity. Thank you for making this page. This is one of my -- this is a colleague on the GOP side. I do Democratic websites. This is Hogity Donatelli (phonetic). They do very well designed clean work. Look how easy this is. This isn't scary. You know, it makes it painless, relatively.

All right. Let's back up. Let's see if they have what Bush has. Let's go up again. No, they don't.

Now here is why it is really important for the senior staffers to get involved in the website. This is a very good contribution form, but when I saw the Bush contribution form, what I really liked about it is that they had a whole section for your spouse info. Well if somebody gives you $1,000, doesn't it make sense that their spouse would be likely to give you $1,000? Certainly they are not going to get insulted if you call them up and say, "Do you have another thousand dollars laying around that you might want to send to the campaign?" It makes perfect sense. They don't have to fill it in if they don't want to.

So the Bush campaign had that on their website. They have real good people on the fundraising side. The only problem with the Bush campaign is that they haven't integrated the website and the whole web campaign into the rest of their campaign.

Michael Cornfield (phonetic) made an interesting comment in an interview, a newspaper interview recently, that the Bush campaign mentions it's URL -- that's the www.georgewbush.com -- less than any of the other Presidential candidates in their ads and in their flyers. Guess what? They are earning less.

You need to have that synergy: the off-line has to work hand-in-hand with the online. It's just like an athletic team. Let's back up.

Okay. Now this is before the big bounce that McCain got, but it is still interesting. Let's go and look at this. So based on what we have seen, we would assume that which of the two candidates are raising the most money, based just on the forms that we have looked at? Bradley and McCain. That's where they are.

Which would you think comes in dead last for the hardest-to-use form and the least money raised on the web? Who do you think this is? Got it. Everybody gets an "A."

It's not rocket science. I guess my message is get involved and get the senior people involved. It is very important that they look at it with a critical eye. If your senior staffers say, "I don't understand the web" a lot of you are young enough that you can bring them into it. Hold their hands. It's like the first time somebody parallel parks, after a while -- but it is. It is very threatening. It's a threatening kind of technology the first time you use it, the first couple times. But they will get hooked on it soon.

So these are our forms. This is John Smith. We will be hearing more from him. He is actually just a -- that's a stock photo. But I love that idea from Bush. That is the nice thing about the web. People can look at each other's good ideas and get better. I have seen my form copied since I put it out there all over the place. People have said, "Why don't you sue these people?" and so on. That's what the web is for. They steal my code, that's one thing. But it's like a well-written sentence. I am not going to sue them for that. I will celebrate it.

So I am inviting everybody to copy this idea. Go to the other sites, and copy the things you like best. Not the code, but the idea. That is what makes for good campaigns and good websites.

These are just the FEC eligibility requirements. So let's go onto the next page. Then let's just go to the second page of the online checks. Online checks are fun because -- the second page of them. This is the first page where you fill in the info, the name, address, and so on. The FEC on January 13th approved online checks using our technology for Federal matching funds. Can you go to the second page?

MS. IRELAND: -- type it in. Get their transit number. You don't have to wait for it to arrive in the mail. You are going to be seeing more and more of that, because it makes it easy to get the money instantly. It is drawn on their bank account immediately.

Okay. Let's go to the home pages. The same ideas hold for the home pages. Now here's Bradley's site, very nice site, at high resolution, which most designers have, a lot of you people have. Notice you can get the -- they have the get involved button at the top, which is for donations.

Now let's go back and see it at low resolution. Low resolution is what a lot of people have on older machines at home. So let's go to the low resolution. Now what you just saw was the HTML. It's a snapshot. Notice the get involved contribution button is still visible. Good design. That's smart. Okay?

Now let's go back to the next one. It's not rocket science, but people should be looking at it critically and making demands of the website. Okay?

Now let's go to the Forbes because we don't have a lot of time. Let's just make it very obvious what the problem is. Okay, Forbes spent allegedly about a half a million dollars on his website. You don't need to spend that much. Here it is. Contribute over here. Fine. That's the high resolution. That is if you have a fancy, big monitor, high resolution, like probably his designers had.

Okay. Let's go back. Now for the folks at home, who don't have -- you want to contribute. Where is it? Well, it's here, but you have to scroll right and down. That's bad news.

Okay. Let's go back again. These are just basic issues, but they translate into dollars.

Okay. Here is just an ordinary site, somebody running for Congress. You notice the buttons are at the top? Now let's go back. People who are at home and don't have the latest, fanciest computers, are they going to be able to contribute? Yes. Donate and volunteer, contribute and volunteer should be visible and easy to find no matter what. It's not just because it's going across. This is a site that it goes -- let's go back.

Low resolution. Can people who don't have fancy websites still give money? Volunteer and donate. So there are a number of just basic things that you can, without knowing any HTML and JavaScript, just look at your website and say, "Is this easy to use? Am I making it easy on my contributors and my volunteers, or am I making it hard for them?" Just getting a good answer to that question will really increase your effectiveness on the web.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: Okay. Let me just start off. I came in late because we had two votes, and I apologize for that. Senator Frist isn't here. I am told that Doug, you got a little bit short changed, so I want to apologize to you on various fronts.

I don't know how you got short-changed, but I want if you did, and Peter never lies, you should -- maybe you and Andrew should get into a little squabble about something here for a second.

MR. BAILEY: I will say this. I don't disagree with much of anything that Andy said. In particular, I want to emphasize one thing in relation to the video-on-demand which the FreedomChannel does. It would be far more valuable, frankly, if it were done at the local level than it is -- you know, you don't have a real problem if you want to find out what John McCain stands for on something, you can read it in the press and find out. But if you are like me, and you go and vote for a school board, it's just a name and you have no idea who that person is.

So that to the degree that this kind of technology reaches down to the local level, it would be all the more valuable.

The only other thing I would say, and Andy, I am sure you would agree with this, that there is a group of people out there in the online world to whom online is a very large part of their life. That is young people. To the degree that the world of politics wants to reach them, online is the medium through which to do it.

MR. KOHUT: I think that is absolutely true. If you look -- when we looked at new voters in January, a very large percentage of the registered voters who are under 30 years of age use the Internet. One of the points I was trying to make at the beginning of my talk to you was that the whole media world is being reconfigured. It isn't the old world of television and newspapers. The Internet is growing so fast, it's already a player. It is going to be a bigger and bigger player, especially for this generation of people.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: Panels that agree with each other are bad for the Tech Forum. So I mean can you find something controversial that will set these other two guys off before I go into questions from the audience?

MS. IRELAND: Well, they are so learned and knowledgeable, I'm afraid I just can't rise to the occasion. But I notice that you have a question there that is actually kind of interesting.

Somebody asked a question, how much does a first-class political campaign website cost and how much budget should be allocated to the website and its design? Nowadays, people are saying you should spend two to three percent of your budget on a campaign website. But let me say this. For goodness sakes, don't get a fancy website and then never change the oil or put air in the tires or gas in the tank. You are going to have a dead engine real soon.

I have to arm-wrestle with the clients and say, "Don't give me all the money up front. Take half of the money and use it to develop the website. The other half, use it for professional maintenance." It is really important.

I can show you examples of websites that have been maintained by people who didn't understand how to maintain websites. They look awful. Then I have clients who are getting thousands of dollars on the web, and they feel uncomfortable maintaining the website, spending a couple hundred dollars a day when they are making thousands, to put fresh news, and fresh information. The website contributions start petering out.

So I say don't spend all your money up front. Take your website budget. Take half of it, and build a nice site. The other half, to maintain it properly.

Now it is perfectly appropriate for someone to, on your staff, to work hand-in-hand with your web team, your professional web team and learn how to do it. There's plenty of talented staffers who I train. They are very good, if they are careful and conscientious, and they can maintain your press page and so on.

But I would say when you are thinking about your campaign strategy, number one, make sure that you are going to take care of this part of your campaign, not neglect it. Number two, make sure the pieces work together. A website makes a lot more money if people send donors to the website.

The Bradley campaign, one of the things they did that was really good, McCain campaign also, is they put their URLs everywhere in their off-line campaign strategy. They trained all their people at the phone intake to refer people to the URL. The bottom line is in a Federal campaign, you have got one of every hundred people who comes to your site makes a donation. Bottom line is, send people to your site. There's money in it and of course votes.

So I think it is really important to have people on the campaign excited about working with other parts of the campaign. It is very counter-productive to have different parts of the team not working together. The campaigns that are most effective on the web and off are the ones where everybody sits down together and works together about how to get that balance, that synergy of working together.

Because the web -- you can put a TV ad on the web, and have more people see it. If you are going to spend the money to put together a TV ad, it makes sense to convert it to a streaming (phonetic) media so that many more people can see it without paying for TV time, more TV time. So you can get synergy by getting different parts of your campaign to work together.

Does that answer your question? In terms of dollar, two to three percent, roughly.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: Good question here on the digital divide and how it relates to all of this. That is, a lot of people don't have access to the Internet, and it's going to be a long time before people do in certain parts of the country, certain income groups, certain cultures, et cetera. Yet people have basic responsibilities. This person asks for, says for citizenship, like the election process, so what is this going to mean for the election process for those people who are for some period of time going to be on the wrong side of the digital divide? How does that sort of square with democracy, or is that just we do it as we can?

MR. KOHUT: I'll take a crack at that. I mean I think that the digital divide is probably less of a problem with regard to campaigning than in other areas because there are lots of other ways that people can get campaign information that don't relate to the Internet.

I think the bigger divide with regard to the campaign, at this point at least, is the coaxial divide. I mean only 70 percent or 65 percent of the population has cable. Most of the debates, for example, have been only on cable. There is much more campaign news these days on cable than on the broadcasts. I think the bigger issue is not the digital divide, but cable versus non-cable households.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: Doug?

MR. BAILEY: I do think that the digital divide represents a problem, particularly to the degree that the country starts moving toward online elections. We haven't talked about that, but that is very likely, online registration and online voting, not as the only way in which people can vote. The digital divide will mean that it will never be perhaps in our lifetime, the only way in which people can vote. But I think those elections are going to happen. Online voting is going to happen. Online registration is going to happen. You cannot repeal the technological revolution.

The question is not therefore whether to try to slow the revolution down or stop it somehow, because some people aren't participating fully in it or aren't the beneficiaries fully of it. The question is how do you make sure that you are doing everything you can for those who aren't the natural beneficiaries of it to nonetheless get some benefit from it.

MS. IRELAND: I have been pressed to make a comment we were making parenthetically. Although there is a digital divide, it is interesting to note that what's happening is you have -- it's not as though parts of the population are getting left behind and other parts of the population are getting on the Internet. All demographic segments are getting on the Internet, but at different rates of speed.

One of the fascinating statistics for me is that if I'm remembering it correctly, it was 10 percent of the households in the United States that had an annual income of $15,000 or less, had a computer. I thought my goodness, people living, a family living on $15,000 a year has really got to want to be part of the technological revolution to have a computer with that kind of an income.

So there is a tremendous desire for access to this technology. I think that it's a matter -- it's not what I think, it is a matter of some of us are running and some of us are walking, but all demographic elements are getting online.

Of course there is that wonderful study that was done by the Department of Commerce. If you don't have the link to it, it's on my website. Give me your information and I can send you more recent data as well.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: A questioner asks how much is the Internet being used by the media covering campaigns. The assumption there is that the media would be online savvy. Should, when one is designing a website, a candidate, should one keep potential media use so that they can take it to Newsweek, Time, and whatever, in mind? All of these are generically addressed.

MS. IRELAND: Mind if I take that one?

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: Sure.

MS. IRELAND: That is a wonderful question, and you are absolutely right. We didn't have time to go over all the different things. Absolutely. Your press relations is one of the things you want to have very well thought through on your website. You should post the pictures that you want used by the press. You should have them done professionally so they are not these horrible compressed jpegs that look like acid was spilled on them. You see people running at high levels have these horrible, unprofessionally done pictures. You just need to have some good pictures and the text you want.

People have been complaining for centuries that they get a bad deal in the press. With the Internet, you are the press. You can publish your side of the story. So absolutely, you need to have a press link. Some campaigns have a password-protected press area. I recommend that any Federal campaign has a sign-up area for the press so they can get regular press releases so that you can stay in direct touch with them.

The press uses the Internet more than the general population. It is a very good way to stay in touch with the press.

MR. BAILEY: Let me just add, while I agree with that totally, I think it is a fair comment that the press by and large, the political press does not pay very much attention to the Internet. Those that do, I mean the Internet sites, campaign sites ought to make material available to the media. But the fact is, for example, while there has been a lot of attention to the numbers of John McCain's fundraising off the Internet, there has been very little attention to his recruitment and his e-mail campaign, which he has run sort of under the radar. Yet it has been in New Hampshire, and in California, and in Michigan, one of the more interesting parts of his campaign, which the press hasn't figured out yet.

MR. KOHUT: I have nothing to add to that.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: Good question here. We have heard a lot about Federal elections, what about state and local elections, and the aggressiveness -- and I will come to you next, sir, I apologize. In other words, how are people using that? How much less are they using it? What is the potential for that for state and local elections?

Then the second part of the question is, are interest groups, trade associations, lobbyists, et cetera, setting up websites to influence the election process or to counter something that some candidate is saying or using it in any other way? What is the quality of what they are doing, if they are doing it, compared to what the candidates are doing?

MR. KOHUT: Let me take a crack at that. I will repeat a little of what I said earlier. In the surveying that we did in the mid-term, there was actually less use of the Internet among Internet users even though there were more Internet users compared to the Presidential election. But I will restate that I think that the potential of the Internet to be useful in local races and in races where people don't have a lot of information is very great.

In 1998, the state-wide races got more attention from the Internet news audience than local races, however. But when we asked people to evaluate sites that they visited on behalf of trying to get information about the campaign, it was the local sites that got very high ratings.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: Anybody else?

MR. BAILEY: Let me just throw out a thought that we haven't talked about much. The capacity for local campaigns to organize, to recruit, organize and keep in contact with their local troops is extraordinary on the Internet. You can do it for nothing or virtually nothing once the site is set up, and you use e-mail and you use that kind of communications.

So that it becomes an extraordinary campaign vehicle for a local campaign that wants to organize its field troops. That has not been done very much, but it will be.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: If the technological trends that Doug Bailey talks about, and the demographic trends that Andy Kohut talks about bear out over the years to come, won't the fundraising needs that Emi has devoted most of her conversation to be diminished? You won't have to buy all that time on TV if you find effective ways to use this as your communication medium, and not do all that fundraising? Will the role of money in politics diminish as the Internet's impact grows?

MS. IRELAND: Theoretically, that might be the case, but have you ever gotten a raise and then found that you were able to suddenly save a lot of money? I don't anticipate that campaigns are going to suddenly say, well we don't need to raise as much money as we used to, but they may be raising it from different venues, and it may be raised in different ways. But that is anyone's guess.

MR. BAILEY: Let me take a stab at that too. I don't mean to suggest that simply because video-on-demand, and the convergence of video and online is obviously going to happen, that the linear television scheduling which we have become used to is going to disappear. It is going to still be there. Probably most people on any given night are going to watch the program that's on one of the networks or the cable system on its regular schedule. But you will have far more capacity to pick and choose and to use the Internet for both information and for entertainment.

So unfortunately, I don't think that television costs of modern campaigns will disappear. What I think is true is that, and this to me is marvelous, the opportunity to raise a lot of money from far more people in a lot more contributions, but smaller in average size than what is ordinarily done these days in politics. That is what the Internet enables. In that sense, if it expands the number of contributors, and reduces the average dollar contribution, that I think is helpful reform.

MR. KOHUT: I think that in terms of contribution, there is little doubt that the Internet is effective and can be increasingly effective. But in terms of getting the message out, the Internet is not a very good means unless you are advertising on the Internet, to draw people to things that they are not particularly interested in. I don't see it replacing traditional advertising because it's difficult to use, to get people to focus on all of this information that has a limited appeal to them.

MR. BAILEY: Let me just say one more word that I wanted to say for the last half hour or so. I agree that Steve Forbes' website was not very good, but there are lots of reasons why people would not come quickly to the notion of giving money to Steve Forbes.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: Go ahead.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: There was some mention about the ubiquitous nature of new things, new toys, new devices, getting on the Internet is something that's moving that direction. It's interesting to hear about the denial of service problems that have been going on lately. What they are amounts to a bandwidth problem. Mr. Bailey seems to be a strong advocate of media-on-demand, yet it's going to introduce, even as that technology has been moving now, it is introducing a problem of bandwidth, where campaigns are being told, hey, you can send out wonderful e-mails with sound and lights, and video and action, and here on the Hill, we've got high speed access. You can see it and sometimes you can see bandwidth problems here.

One question would be, is it realistic to think that that's something near-term or longer term for Internet too? The other question would be basically do you see Internet as being something where you are expecting to force-feed people or is it going to stay a way of looking up information using a search engine?

MR. BAILEY: On the first question, I don't claim to be much of a technology expert, but I do think that it's sort of undeniable that when AT&T is willing to invest $120 billion to acquire essentially a bandwidth network, and infrastructure, by buying a couple cable giants, and when AOL takes the step it does, people that know a lot more than I do about the future are betting a lot of money that the bandwidth future is coming. I think it's sort of undeniable that it is.

Will it bring a lot of problems and will there be a have and have-not problem and a digital divide there too in the meantime? Of course. But is it coming? I think of course.

MR. KOHUT: As to the force feeding question, I think the best analogy is with C-SPAN, which has provided an unprecedented amount of information to the average American voter, at least American voter who has cable. Over this period of time, the absolute level of information that the American public has about what goes on up here has actually declined. Just because the information is here, is available, does not mean that it is going to be utilized. I think we are going to get some really very, very smart well-informed special segments of the public, but the impetus for the broader public to become more engaged will have to come from somewhere other than the Internet.

The Internet is a great tool to facilitate it, but it will not be what makes it happen.

MS. IRELAND: I would like to add something to that really quickly. One thing where that analogy may be -- let's say the difference between the Internet and what you see on CSPAN is the synchronicity. People don't have time to watch CSPAN -- I was trying to see a certain candidate whose site we had launched, and I wasted three hours watching television to watch a few seconds on CSPAN -- or maybe a minute or two on CSPAN. I felt very annoyed because on the Internet, I don't have to waste my time. I go to what I want.

The Internet, when you talk about force feeding, if you are going to be successful in any campaign endeavor on the Internet, it is a permission medium. You have to have people's permission. It's the opposite of the television interruption marketing methodology. Too many people are trying to take television-derived techniques and apply them to the Internet. It doesn't work.

There's a lot of people who argue with you about whether banner ads are effective or not on the web. The bottom line is, the rates have gone down in the last year. Somebody might want to say well, even though they have gone down, it's more valuable than ever. It doesn't convince me. It is a medium that has to be dealt with in a very different way from television.

In terms of the Internet having a smaller average donation, for direct mail, donation -- correct me if I'm wrong, is $30 to $40. On the Internet, it is above $100. For Democrats that I have just informally talked to, and we have done statistics for Federal races, about $120, $130. Comparable rates on the Republican side, $140 to $160. So that is very different from direct mail. That's not the same as $1,000 plate dinners, but we have to talk about what kind of donation we are averaging.

In terms of will TV always be around, people always sit down and watch their scheduled TV? I honestly don't think so. The TV, the major networks are losing money. Every study shows that people are spending less and less time watching the big major network TV. So it is not going to go away right away, but things are changing. It's not going to be the same as it has been.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: I just want to say something because we had a bad situation here this afternoon where we usually meet over in that big Senate Hart Room. The Energy Committee kicked us out. I will be suing them later in the afternoon. But I want to apologize for that, because we have never had a meeting in which you had to cross too many streets and go up five floors. I want to announce, most of you have gone, that our next -- one, leave evaluation forms before you go. I am still going to do a couple questions.

But the next even will be on March 8, which is a Wednesday, and will be back in the Senate, the big Senate Hart Room 216. That will be on a very uncontroversial subject called Internet taxation. Mike Levitt, who is the Governor of Utah, will be there. Dean Andal (phonetic), chairman of the California State Board of Equalization, if I pronounce that right, and John Sidgemar (phonetic), who is vice president of MCI WorldCom. Those will be our three panelists. That ought to be a very lively discussion.

I want to ask -- this question was handed to me, it's one I would have loved to have asked myself. I felt in a sense almost too much realism from the panel. In other words, that the Internet -- what the Internet is not doing. It's only at three percent of this or 10 percent of that, et cetera. I haven't felt what the potential is.

Somebody, I think, is sharing that frustration, because they are saying, the question is, will the Internet at some point in the future just because of the way American society is evolving, costs are coming down, et cetera, et cetera, will the Internet surpass traditional outlets at some point as the primary source of information about candidates and campaigns?

MR. BAILEY: I am sort of stunned that the Senator thought that I was less than optimistic about the future. The fact is I believe very strongly that convergence and broadband and the ubiquitous nature of broadband shortly will change our society. It will dramatically change our politics. We will become a people of extraordinary choices and extraordinary information available to us.

Now there are some good things about that, but there are also some bad things that we ought to recognize. The digital divide in one way or another is going to be with us for a long time because the haves and have-not problem has been with us for a long time, long before the current technological explosion. It will continue to be with us. There will always be those who have the advantage of the most recent technological advances, and there will be those who don't. So that is one problem.

A second problem, as it affects politics, is the degree to which the interactivity, the capacity for interactivity between public representatives and their constituents -- if Senator Rockefeller or Congressman Glotts (phonetic) can on Wednesday night meet on the Internet on two-way video communications with their town meeting or their constituents at home, and the elected representative can ask "How should I vote tomorrow morning on the floor on such and such a bill," that capacity is coming.

Is that good or bad? There are some ways in which it obviously is good, because it is a means of educating the public in detail to the degree that they want to be educated. It can be very bad if it is misused.

My sense is that the technology is going to dramatically change almost every aspect of our culture just as it is in the process of changing almost every aspect of our economy. Whether we like it -- I don't know whether all that's good or all that's bad. What I know is it's coming. I think in terms of our politics, we ought to be very alert to the opportunities that it provides to improve our politics. It is, just one example, a marvelous way of communicating with young people. It is their medium. If we are bright enough to figure that out, we can engage them in a politics that today they are turned off by.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: Okay. One more question, and then anybody on the panel who wants to make some final comments, I would welcome.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Picking up on what Mr. Bailey just said, I have great concern over the balance of power between the Legislative and Executive Branch. I feel that the e-commerce is coming and the private sector has put a lot of money and hired a lot of fine people and paid them a lot, continue to pay them a lot of money to develop e-commerce, but I don't see similar expenditures within both the legislative and the Executive Branch, but I know that the Executive Branch is working on a whole different pay scale.

It is hard to get a qualified technology person here on the Hill for what a Senator makes. It is just the realities of economics. To me, unless something is done about that, we are going to short change ourselves. I view that the technologies that are coming, we on the Hill need to be part of that, not just an observer.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: Let me comment on that actually, because I work on that for the Democrats. I head their Technology and Communications Committee. There has been an enormous change, even in the last four years, within the Senate. I mean you are dealing with Senators who are -- my God, I think we have one in his 30s, but everything else is 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and yes, 90s. So that means that when we started -- we didn't even have the Internet in the Senate until three years ago. Okay? Three-and-a-half years ago. I think Kennedy was the first one to have a website. Now 99 of the 100 Senators have websites.

Now I think Emi would not be pleased with some of the websites. They are pretty unsophisticated. I have been through that in my own office. We're getting better. We also have -- there's a lot of focus when the parties, both the House and the Senate meet for their caucuses on technology and improving what you're doing, getting out your message, using websites, the crossover between if you do a video that can also be turned into audio and sent to different parts. A lot of education goes on on that.

I doubt either the Democratic or Republican Party ever have retreats in which technology is not one of the main things and the use of technology is one of the main things discussed. So predicated that we're Neanderthals, we are moving faster than we were three-and-a-half years ago. The pace is picking up.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just briefly. Mr. Kohut mentioned a couple of times, I think we all know this is true, that just because you put the content out there, doesn't necessarily mean anyone is going to come and see it.

I was wondering if Ms. Ireland could comment, and all of you could comment on -- I don't know if you have seen the numbers, but once a user comes to a page, whether it's a campaign or a member's page, what are the types of files, whether it's press releases or audio or video, what are the types of the most popular files that people are going to see?

MS. IRELAND: Good question. When you are involved in a campaign website, make sure that you ask your web team to show you those statistics and talk to you about them. It's fascinating. There are pages that I was going to take off of my corporate site, and I ran the stats, and I saw those are the most popular pages. They were the pages, you know, my mom was telling me take off, you know, don't talk about your company and who everybody is. People love to read that stuff.

So the interesting thing about the Internet is that the average -- correct me if I'm wrong, TV commercial is 30 to 60 seconds, telephone message no more than 45. On a campaign website, the New York Times reported late in 1998, and I haven't seen more recent statistics on that, that the average amount of time spent was over eight minutes. That is longer than you will have to get the message out in any other medium.

Senator Rockefeller was saying, and I hate to sound school marmish, I'm sorry, about the websites. It's not that you have to bring it up to such a high level. Use the same levels, standards of excellence that you would use for a press release or any other aspect of your work or your campaign and apply them to the Internet. Just make sure it's done right. It's not that complicated. It is common sense.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: Wrap-up comments?

MR. KOHUT: I would just like to follow up on what Doug was saying about the future. I think in one or two cycles, the Internet will be as dominant a resource as newspapers or at least as dominant as broadcast television.

But to tell you the truth, I think, look forward to this interactivity potential with communicating directly with voters on issues as a nightmare, because it will make the digital divide, the engagement divide will make the digital divide look like child's play. The problems associated with the squeaky wheels who can generate lots of heat without any qualification will, I think, really give considerable problems to your being able to figure out really what the hell is going on out there with respect to public opinion and public reaction on important policy questions.

The American public has a great deal of respect for the fact that this is a representative government, not a direct democracy.

MR. BAILEY: I agree that the potential for nightmare is there. But have no doubt that the technology is coming. Therefore, need to focus now on how best to make use of the technological change as it occurs.

I am very sympathetic with the gentleman's question earlier. I assume that the Senator would agree with this. We find ourselves repeatedly doing more and more and more. We're proud that we're doing more, but are we doing enough? Are we doing enough or are we about to be engulfed one more time? Because the speed and size of technological change is just overwhelming. I don't think we have sensed yet about what's going to happen, just as the world of commerce didn't even have a clue as what was going to happen as of two years ago.

SENATOR ROCKEFELLER: With that, thank you all very, very much. Again, evaluation forms if you have them. We will see you for Internet taxation. I thank our panelists very much.

(Whereupon, the proceedings were concluded.)