The First Campaign by Garrett Graff

Before I started reading Garrett’s book, The First Campaign, I read the New York Times review of the book. The reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, highlighted the thing we’ve all been baffled by this semester: he’s “astonishingly young.”

More importantly though, Kakutani acknowledges the breadth and depth of the issues Garrett covers in his book. I expected The First Campaign to focus almost completely on how a campaign should use social media to accomplish the goal of getting a candidate into office. I had no idea the issues I would find in the pages of Garrett’s book.

Although I don’t see the world exactly as Garrett does, I was extremely interested in his perspective on how profoundly new media would change our world and how important it would be for the next president of the United States to fully understand the gravity of it.

I can’t possibly comment on all of the points addressed in the book, but I can’t NOT comment on the state of education and 21 Century workers. My grandfather grew up in River Rouge, near the Ford facility, and he was educated at the University of Michigan. Even though he lived there in Ford’s hayday, he would tell you that even then, the University of Michigan produced something far more important than the spectacular Ford complex. The university produced ideas and innovation.

This country has been struggling to bolster education, but its pace of decline just seems to gain momentum. I really liked Garrett’s point about the obsoleteness of some material we teach: “Today’s schools are still relying on teaching ‘who, what, where, and when’ when today’s environment asks students to know ‘how’ and ‘why.’ All of the other information exists at one’s fingertips with Google.”

That way of teaching to yesterday’s specifications reminds me of the old adage: “If you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” That wouldn’t be so bad if what we needed didn’t change and grow exponentially every year.

Though Garrett’s book doesn’t present answers to the myriad questions it asks, hopefully it will start a conversation around the issues and we can begin to work (or wiki) them out right after The First Campaign is decided.