* * *

This is a story about politics in America.

Some say it’s a story about Matthew Smoot; about the start of his political career.

Some say it’s a story about technology; about the internet.

They’re wrong.

It’s a story about loneliness.

It’s about the lonely job of being a Congressman, and the lonely job of being a citizen.

It’s about how, in Michigan’s 12th district, it’s a little less lonely now.

But it begins in darkness.

* * *

Matthew Smoot was a local kid, Royal Oak born and raised. Graduated from University of Michigan, then two years with Teach for America, then back to Michigan for business school. Before long, a VP at Ford. Matt was smooth and successful. He was devoted to his family.
He was one of Michigan’s best.

So, we recruited him — and suddenly, he was a Congressman.

It’s important that you know Matt was not naive when he came to Washington. He’d taught school and he’d worked at Ford; he knew patience and persistence. He knew disappointment.

What he didn’t know was loneliness.

In Washington, he was far from his family, and the House was no substitute for home. People didn’t make friends here. In fact, they barely knew each other. Matt was spending half his time on planes and the other half in conference rooms listening to other people talk. Lobbyist lunches were the highlight of his week — but freshman representatives in the minority party don’t get many of those invitations.

So he answered his mail, voted like he was supposed to, and sank into a mire.

It was the waning weeks of his second Congress and Matt was stuck in Washington, going through TV shows on DVD. After “Arrested Development” he turned to “Lost,” and that’s what I found him watching, with the shades drawn, one Sunday afternoon. His hair was tangled, his wiry body all drawn up onto the couch. There was an empty pizza box on the floor.

It seemed to me then that he had found the nadir of his misadventure in government.

But “Lost” is what saved Matt — and what started all of this.

Seized by some new suspicion, a shadow he spotted in the DVD freeze-frame, Matt opened his laptop. Google delivered him to a giant “Lost” fan forum; he hunted and pecked his crackpot theory into the matrix.

I let myself out.

* * *

Monday morning, I organized a conference call with Matt’s small campaign committee. I expected him to announce that he would not be running again.

We were all dialed in, making small talk about the heat in Michigan and the hotter heat in Washington, when the line chirped. It was Matt. And something was different.

He said wanted to start a forum just like the “Lost” site — for the campaign.

He’d been on it all weekend and he was in awe. There was so much conversation there, he told us. So much thinking.

Joe Blust, the calm operator who managed our Michigan office, cleared his throat and said, well, that sounds interesting, Matt.

Matt said he’d decided: We were going to call it Forum 12.

* * *

By the end of that week it was online, thanks entirely to Joe’s son, Jackson Blust, a high school junior. It was a hack, but it worked. We sent an email to Matt’s list of 1,207 people.

Over the weekend, a few posts appeared, attached to names we recognized. Bland words of encouragement.

Then Ann Jaworski, one of our best volunteers, asked a question. It was about net neutrality. She’d heard about it on the Daily Show.

On the forum, Matt answered. At length.

I was sitting in our office in the basement of the Cannon Building next to Susan Kaluzny, Matt’s press secretary, when she saw it. She made a little sound like she was being strangled and ran straight to Matt’s office.

Through the door, I heard him take her through his new theory: Now, he said, we have our own pipe. It’s crude, but it runs straight to the people who matter. We no longer have to pare our message down to fit the time or space allotted to us in someone else’s pipe. In radical opposition to the ever-narrowing confines of the 21st-century sound-bite, we are going to engage in the politics of verbosity. We are going to answer Ann Jaworski’s damn question.

Susan quit the next day.

* * *

The campaign began. Forum 12 grew.

Turns out all the best stuff came from two groups: the young and the old.

Sixteen-year-olds can’t vote. But they can drive. And the teenagers became Matt’s new machine: They plastered the district with signs of their own design. They produced videos and recorded songs. They emailed like demons. (And we converted our unspent materials budget into an epic pizza party to reward them.)

The other great faction was retirees. Matt had a head for policy and an ear for the right questions — he’d done Teach for America, remember, so he knew how to run a classroom. He linked to Brookings reports and Census narratives and ended all his sentences with question marks. The people who contributed the most were… old: retired lawyers, doctors, even one of Matt’s old teachers. They submitted arguments and briefs that, honestly, put our staff to shame. These people were smart and experienced. And, crucially, they had a lot of free time.

The election came, and Matt won again. No surprise: The district leaned Democrat, he was the incumbent, and the forum had charged up his base.

That’s when the trouble began.

* * *

There was an article about Matt’s re-election in the Free Press, and the reporter, a kid named Terry O’Neill, keyed the entire story to the forum’s success. Overnight, Forum 12 wasn’t just Matt’s people anymore.

It was everybody.

It was refugees from the rival campaign, full of spite. It was the local bloggers, pimping their posts. It was all the one-issue wonders and parking-lot polymaths with their crackpot rants.

Overnight, it went from a campaign slumber party to an electronic knife-fight. Forty-eight hours after the article, I told Matt we had to shut the forum down. I knew Terry O’Neill would check back, see the site engulfed in a flame war, and write another story — this one very different.

* * *

It was the nerd that saved us.

Back during the first campaign, Matt’s sister had introduced me to a friend of hers named Tad Clawson. Tad had a computer science degree from Carnegie Mellon and was just starting law school at Michigan. He had popular blog about copyright and DRM; he’d interned at Brookings; and he contributed to the Firefox codebase. In short, he was one of the new wired wonks.

Importantly, he was the one wired wonk we knew.

So, two days into the new term, Matt called him up for advice. The next day Tad sent over a four-page memo detailing exactly what we needed to do, and it all hinged on improving the forum, not closing it down.

I could tell he wanted to do more than just write the memo; that day, I hired Tad as Matt’s tech policy advisor and, more importantly at the moment, his staff software developer.

It was touch and go for a while. But we kept a lid on the craziness while Tad dove headfirst into the code, and we made it out on the other side with collaborative filtering, better user profiles and pictures, blocking and banning, and geo-verification to figure out who actually lived in the district. Crucially, we also hired the United States House of Representatives’ first online community manager, a plugged-in kid from Georgetown named Natalie Gomez.

* * *

Now the forum was humming.

Congress was in session and Matt was operating more like an embedded reporter than an elected official. He was documenting everything he did. He was twittering from a BlackBerry and streaming live video from an iPhone.

We put Matt’s entire schedule online and opened it up for comments.

All day now, he was writing, recording, responding. He was lonely no more.

Thanks to Tad, you could tell when users were logged in, and I’d see Matt on the forum at midnight, or 2 a.m., or later. I’d open an IM window and play my part in our little routine:

rsloan: Congressman, please go to bed.
matt: don’t bother me robin. i’m representing.

Matt became scornful of media invitations. We had to cajole him into going on TV — not for the sake of the TV audience, of course, but for our audience. They loved it when we captured clips and posted them in the forum. Matt would never miss an opportunity to plug his constituents, to cite their questions and arguments. It was like he was the press secretary, and Michigan’s 12th district was the Member of Congress.

We never did get a new press secretary.

* * *

The forum was a genuine phenomenon now — we’d just crossed 50,000 registrations, almost 10% of all the souls in the 12th district.

Hundreds of people emailed us every day, mostly at the prodding of activist organizations or single-issue interest groups. We replied to their form letters with personal invitations. Natalie would write: Hey, would you like to come talk about this issue on Forum 12? It’s not just between you and your Congressman; it’s between you and your neighbors.

She was busting apart a pyramid to build a village.

But now we had a problem.

* * *

For all these new users, the site was completely overwhelming. We had too much content.

It was Joe Blust’s idea that we should do what anybody does when they have too much content: Hire an editor.

So we called that Free Press reporter, Terry O’Neill. We knew Gannett had the Freep’s belt jerked way too tight for Terry’s taste… but working for a politician was not an option. When I made the offer he barked a laugh into the phone and hung up on me.

He hung up on me!

I called back. He said, I can’t do good journalism working for a Congressman. I said, you can’t do good journalism working for a newspaper.

Another month of that, and he was curating Forum 12’s new home page. He pulled good posts out of the guts of the site and put them into context. He roved the district, interviewing home-grown experts and constituents directly affected by policy changes.

Hey: If the press wasn’t going to explain the challenges that faced us, well, we’d just have to pick up the slack.

It was around that time that Tad Clawson emerged from the codebase to write a signature post that articulated what we’d all been thinking:

Direct democracy or representative republic? It’s a false dichotomy. With these new tools, we can harness the best of both: Matt is as much a communicator as he is a legislator. Maybe that’s what representatives should become: Nodes where the collective intelligence of their district comes together, coalesces, and finds expression.

This is a smart country.

* * *

It didn’t always go smoothly.

We had a long debate on Forum 12 about earmarks. Turns out the district didn’t want them abolished; they just wanted a say in what we requested! The Paint Creek Trail system got $3 million, tagged onto an agriculture appropriations bill, because Forum 12 scouted the project, wrote it up, and pitched it to Matt.

I’ll admit, that one made me feel weird.

We’d post each floor vote as it happened. Matt made it clear: His vote was his. He would never abdicate that responsibility — not even to Tad’s super-smart social algorithms. But because Matt was so engaged, the community was usually happy.

Usually, but not always.

After that first vote on North Korea, people were mad. Furious. Matt had voted against the forum consensus. So he explained: He went point by point through his reasoning, and he didn’t apologize.

Some people stayed mad. Some deleted their accounts. We printed those profiles out and taped them to the wall: reminders of why we were here in the first place.

* * *

Another election came and went. We won in a walk but, more importantly, we won with the highest voter turnout ever in the 12th district. It had nothing to do with national trends; turnout was actually down across the country. It was all Forum 12.

To this day, I think that turnout might be my proudest achievement in politics.

* * *

And that would turn out to be Matt’s last term in the House.

Things changed. We won back the majority; there were new opportunities now for a young, charismatic, tech-savvy legislator. Matt chaired a sub-committee and realized that he could work with his colleagues better if he wasn’t always writing them up on Forum 12.

He posted a little less. He went on Meet the Press a little more.

Two years later, we ran Matt for senator.

I give him a lot of credit for the way he approached that race: He resisted the temptation to promise more of the same. He knew it just wasn’t possible. His style was changing, and besides, an entire state was too big. Trust me, we’d learned that a single Congressional district already tests the bounds of reasonable discourse.

So Matt did what anybody does these days: He ran a solid, bottom-up campaign. All those Forum 12 kids were in college now, and they canvassed the state for him. But there was no Forum Michigan, and there would never be.

He won. We moved into the basement of the Russell building.

I worked with him there for a year, and then… I left. Turns out I’d lost my taste for the politics I’d practiced in Washington before I met Matthew Smoot.

So I went back to Forum 12.

* * *

That’s the story.

Does it matter? Or were we just a bunch of Midwestern nerds playing on the web?

You decide:

There’s the 50,000 users, and the highest turnout ever in MI-12.

There are all the floor votes that changed because Matt was on the site every night, learning from his district.

There’s Tad Clawson’s amazing social software, which grew into the open-source political platform called SmartCountry.

There are the thirty-six legislators using SmartCountry today: twenty-two of them from the other party. (Who knew?)

There’s more.

There’s Karishma Patel, the brilliant woman who ran to take Matt’s place in the House. She didn’t know a thing about politics before Forum 12. I’d never have found her without it. She was one of our best contributors: an amazing synthesizer and mediator. She lost the race — but only barely. We’re drawing up plans for her next campaign right now.

Listen: What I learned is there’s dark matter in our democracy. Tons of it. Smart people who’ve never had a good way to get into the game.

If Forum 12 matters, it’s because it lit them up.

* * *

I will tell you this: Matt always seemed sadder after leaving the House. His depression was held at bay this time by walls of responsibility. But even restrained, there was no mistaking the darkness. I could tell because I knew a different Matt once — knew him briefly.

Matt at his happiest was captured in a single photo. It’s a picture taken before Matthew Smoot the senator, before Secretary Smoot the statesman. Before all the strangeness and sadness of North Korea and everything that came after.

The photo was snapped by his wife Sophie, uploaded to Forum 12. It became an icon in that first re-election campaign after the site began.

He is in his kitchen; the house beyond is dark. He’s sitting at the table, coffee mug to one side, hunched over his laptop. He is still in his mid-30s here, rangy, with a tangle of blonde hair just beginning to thin at the top. His glasses perch on his nose. He’s wearing a blue t-shirt with the gold ‘M’ for Michigan and a pair of fraying flannel pajama pants. His arm is caught in mid-air, fingers bent in flight over the keyboard.

The clock on the microwave shines the time in red: 1:07 a.m.

There is a smile playing on his lips.

don’t bother me. i’m representing.

* * *