The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House

How the "flattening of the world" has transformed politics--and what it means for the 2008 election


The 2008 presidential campaign will be like none in recent memory: the first campaign in fifty years in which both the Democrats and the Republicans must nominate a new candidate, and the first ever in which the issues of globalization and technology will decide the outcome.
Garrett M. Graff represents the people that all the candidates want to engage: young, technologically savvy, concerned about the future. In this far-reaching book, he asks: Will the two major parties seize the moment and run the first campaign of the new era, or will they run the last campaign all over again?

Globalization, Graff argues, has made technology both the medium and the message of 2008. The usual domestic issues (the economy, health care, job safety) are now global issues. Meanwhile, the emergence of the Web as a political tool has shaken up the campaign process, leaving front-runners vulnerable right up until Election Day.

Which candidate will dare to run a new kind of race? Combining vivid campaign-trail reporting with a provocative argument about the state of American politics, Graff makes clear that whichever party best meets the challenges of globalization will win the election--and put America back on course.

The First Campaign is required reading for the presidential candidates--and for the rest of us, too.

A Vermonter, Garrett M. Graff was Howard Dean's first webmaster; at FishbowlDC.com, he was the first blogger to be granted credentials for a White House press conference. He is now an editor at Washingtonian magazine.