How Obama did it

Written By: - Date published: 11:00 am, June 6th, 2008 - 6 comments
Categories: International, uncategorized - Tags:

Time has a special report on how Obama “become the first Democratic insurgent in a generation… to knock off the party’s establishment front-runner”.

Obama’s Chicago headquarters made technology its running mate from the start. That wasn’t just for fund-raising: in state after state, the campaign turned over its voter lists — normally a closely guarded crown jewel — to volunteers, who used their own laptops and the unlimited night and weekend minutes of their cell-phone plans to contact every name and populate a political organization from the ground up. “The tools were there, and they built it,” says Joe Trippi, who ran Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign. “In a lot of ways, the Dean campaign was like the Wright brothers. Four years later, we’re watching the Apollo project.”

Even Obama admits he did not expect the Internet to be such a good friend. “What I didn’t anticipate was how effectively we could use the Internet to harness that grass-roots base, both on the financial side and the organizing side,” Obama says. “That, I think, was probably one of the biggest surprises of the campaign, just how powerfully our message merged with the social networking and the power of the Internet.”

Read the full article here.

6 comments on “How Obama did it ”

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  1. Pascal's bookie 1
    6 June 2008 at 11:52 am

    This is good as well. Electoral geeky though.

    He is very well organised.

  2. jafapete 2
    6 June 2008 at 1:22 pm

    There are some real lessons for political campaigners here from Obama’s campaign, even if it was heavily constrained by the bizzare nature of the primary process. As thw Washington Post put it, “message, money and organising”. Of course, it took a superior strategy to tie them all together.

  3. PhilBest 3
    6 June 2008 at 6:45 pm

    Hey, the Socialists of NZ could learn a lesson about raising money, instead of throwing the toys out of the cot and passing Electoral Finance Acts…….

    By the way, read “Intellectual Class Wars”, by David Horowitz. Leftwing causes in the USA get around TEN TIMES as much funding as “conservative” ones. Why? Joseph Schumpeter predicted decades ago, that as wealth built up, the political beliefs of those that INITIATED the wealth creation process would fade into insignificance compared to the eagerness of later INHERITORS of that wealth to ingratiate themselves with “the elites” and the media. It is all happening.

    The irony is that in a “soft socialist” nation like NZ, there has never been the long term wealth creation necessary to drive this phenomenon, hence the Left crying poor all the time and claiming that all the “rich pricks” support the other side…….instead of passing the EFA you should have just looked up George Soros and Ted Turner and a few other American Socialist “bag men”……even one of their minions could probably have flicked you something out of their petty cash that they wouldn’t even notice missing, but enough to buy the NZ election several times over for the next few terms……..

  4. Ari 4
    6 June 2008 at 11:01 pm

    Phil, the EFA does more than just even the financial playing field between some of the parties. It also minimises the effect of wealthy interests and their lobby groups, prevents paralell campaigning, makes large anonymous donations much more difficult, and requires verifiable registration for election advertising.

    I don’t really follow how the left are “elitist”, (what, we believe in facts and research? Analysis and debate? Because those are the only things even vaguely elitist about leftist movements in general) or even how the media are leftist. Most political stories about the government are basically shallow National Party talking points right now, and the situation is similar over the pacific in the USA, where the media paints a misleadingly positive image of McCain as a straight-talking maverick despite the fact that he’s just as much of a politician as anyone else, and he has bought into practically every Bush policy.

    If you want to be convincing with your weird political theories, I suggest you explain them a bit more clearly.

  5. Lew 5
    6 June 2008 at 11:58 pm

    PhilBest: Just for the record, can you confirm you aren’t the same person as our regular Phil?

    Also: David Horowitz is a wingnut – if you aim to persuade people I recommend you choose sources who aren’t quite so marginal. Quoting Horowitz, you have a little less credibility than someone from the left waltzing over to KiwiBlog and quoting Chomsky. (Saying so is at worst as absurd as calling George Soros an American Socialist bag man, so don’t bother to bleat about double standards.)

    As it happens, I agree that calling in foreign financial aid would have been a legitimate political strategy for Labour, but your recommendation is revealing in that it implies that you accept and are happy with the same degree of input from foreign neocon backers to National. While I consider it a legitimate strategy I don’t really consider it a wise strategy, since it would inevitably result in an arms race which would require legislative measures to halt.

    L

    [lprent: it is very unlikely looking at the access records]

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