WASHINGTON — On the Internet, anyone can be a star, as most
everyone has pretty much figured out by now. Paris Hilton can
credit it with her whole career. A handful or so of previously
anonymous news junkies are now wide-reaching opinion shapers. The
floodgates are open just as wide for the unnoticed talents as for
those who should have remained obscure.
Place into the latter category of Internet stardom the Princeton
University students who brought their “mock filibuster” to the
National Mall Wednesday and Thursday. Their Washington protest
culminated the talkathon against Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
(Princeton ‘74) and the nuclear option that they began April 26 in
front of the major campus building back in Princeton, New Jersey,
bearing the good senator’s name.
In front of the Frist Campus Center at Princeton, this
“Filibuster for Democracy” was a small, quirky, even mildly cute
spectacle. Falling late in the academic year, this little stab at
political escapism seemed almost quaint. And obscure. A Princeton
sophomore told TAS he barely noticed these budding
activists when he passed them. “It’s very showy and
self-glorifying, so I’m sure for them it’s both fun and
purposeful.”
In a world with some sense of proportion, the Princeton protest
would have remained a local story. A few New Jersey stations and
papers would have sent cameras and scribblers, and the school
newspaper would have covered the event. As it was, when the cameras
weren’t watching the campus protest usually consisted of one
student filling his filibuster hour. Even in its Washington
iteration, in the midst of the Capitol being evacuated, student
groups milling about, Frisbee players enjoying a glorious day, and
preparations for a Smithsonian festival on the Mall, the Princeton
affair was a blip.
Yet this almost non-event became a mid-major political
happening. The vocal stylings of a few college kids drew more media
attention than the annual march for life. The Princeton kids have
been on cable news repeatedly and written up by national AP, the
New York Times, Time magazine, and the Capitol
Hill newspaper Roll Call.
Only the Internet, along with a willing political climate, could
have lifted such a stunt out of obscurity. Pete Hill, a junior
majoring in politics and one of the technological gurus maintaining
the Filibuster Frist website, told TAS that he didn’t know his
fellow organizers before the filibuster — they met over e-mail.
Armed with a webcam and a website, and fueled by the attention of
major liberal blogs like Talking Points
Memo and DailyKos, the mock filibuster took off. A mention on
CNN’s “Inside the Blogs” segment snowballed into a few paragraphs
in the Washington Post and a full segment on
Hardball. The rest is mainstream media history.
The Princetonians can even thank the Internet for their pre-exam
bus ride to D.C. They raised all of their funds online through a
PayPal account — over $10,000 as of yesterday. People for the
American Way helped them attain the protest permit and their local
congressman, Democrat Rush Holt, helped them obtain needed sound
and other electric equipment.
Classics graduate student Peter Turner said the filibuster
wouldn’t have existed without this Internet-driven media
environment. “We do think the event has been successful to the
extent that it’s reached a level of national attention,” Turner
said. “We hope to combine articulate and persuasive arguments with
a platform on which to make them.”
Call it activism in a box. It frees activists from needing a
genuine movement to be significant. Despite all the media coverage
even before their arrival in Washington, a city chock full of
college students and interns, next to no one stopped by their spot
on the Mall. Yet it drew a press corps?
These Princeton students weren’t marginal radicals. Those who
trekked down — and the third-year Georgetown law student we met —
struck us as genuine, kind, clean-cut, intelligent, and articulate.
Thanks in part as well to their elite status, they engineered an
impressive coup. It helped immensely that they were politically
useful cogs in a much bigger Democratic operation in defense of the
judicial filibuster. New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg spoke
Wednesday and his counterpart Jon Corzine joined them yesterday
morning, along with bandwagoneer Chuck Schumer. The usually obscure
Rep. Holt enjoyed a spike in publicity after addressing the
students in Princeton and in Washington Wednesday. “When people
say, ‘Well, the filibuster is not in the constitution,’ I counter
that the filibuster is very much constitutional,” was one of his
more inspiring morsels.
That the students and Holt could stick to such bland talking
points is a testimony to their media savvy. But apparently
desperate for any supporter with a title, they dug up Noam Chomsky
imitator and erstwhile Georgetown law professor, Michael Seidman.
Seidman strayed off message to the real stakes of the filibuster
debate.
“By the standard conception, constitutional law amounts to
decisions made two hundred years ago in Philadelphia by a bunch of
elderly, wealthy, white men. Although none of us here had anything
to do with those decisions, somehow we are now obligated to accept
them. I think that version of constitutional law is deeply
authoritarian.”
Maybe he thought no one was listening.
