The Machinery of Hope : Rolling Stone - The Diigo Meta page

• 29 Apr 08
  

  Justin Massa
• 19 Mar 08
  

  Levy Rivers

  campaign marketing networking obama organizier politics social

  • The meeting in San Marcos wasn't advertised in any traditional
    sense. Instead, the campaign posted the event on my.barackobama.com
    — its social-networking site affectionately known as "MyBo"
    — and e-mailed local residents who had donated to the
    campaign or surrendered their addresses as the price of admission
    to an Obama rally. And the volunteers who showed up won't be
    micromanaged by Ukman or anyone else from the campaign. They'll be
    able to call their own shots, from organizing local rallies to
    recruiting and training a crew of fellow Obama supporters to man
    their precincts on election day.
  • This scene in the rec center is being repeated in neighborhood
    coffee shops, high school cafeterias and public libraries across
    Texas. Over the course of the three-day weekend, the Obama campaign
    trained 4,000 precinct captains in more than twenty communities,
    from El Paso to Corpus Christi. This is the same grass-roots effort
    that has trounced the Clinton campaign — a classic top-down
    operation run by high-paid consultants — in ten straight
    contests by an average of more than thirty points. It has evolved
    into the mother of all get-out-the-vote campaigns, one that has
    enabled Obama to collect more votes in Virginia and Wisconsin than
    all of the GOP candidates combined.
  • 6 more annotations...
  • • The Obama campaign has actually worked to
      tamp down media coverage of its technological advances in
      organizing, avoiding anything that would cast the candidate as "the
      next Howard Dean." In Democratic political circles, Dean's
      short-lived campaign still carries heavy baggage: Howard Dean
      was the Internet. Howard Dean lost.
    • "They've been guarded," says Peter Leyden, director of the New
      Politics Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank that promotes
      technology in politics. "It's been beautiful to watch them blending
      these new tools into the old-fashioned shoe-leather, door-knocking
      politics. But they don't talk about it. People like myself have to
      piece it together from its outer effects."
    • According to David Axelrod, the campaign's chief strategist, the
      bottom-up ethos of the campaign comes straight from the top. "When
      we started this race, Barack told us that he wanted the campaign to
      be a vehicle for involving people and giving them a stake in the
      kind of organizing he believed in," Axelrod says. "He is still the
      same guy who came to Chicago as a community organizer twenty-three
      years ago. The idea that we can organize together and improve our
      country — I mean, he really believes that."
    • Steve Hildebrand, a folksy veteran of South Dakota politics
      regarded as one of the top field strategists in the game. "We
      wanted to make sure we learned from Howard Dean's campaign,"
      Hildebrand says. The most valuable lesson? "We didn't make the
      assumption that people signing up on our Web site meant that they
      were going to help the candidate or even vote for him. From the
      beginning, we had an initiative to take our online force
      offline."
    • In February and March of 2007, just after Obama
      announced his candidacy, the campaign set up huge rallies in cities
      from Los Angeles to Austin to Cleveland. In return for a ticket,
      supporters were asked only to provide their e-mail, zip code and
      telephone number — a practice that continues at every Obama
      megarally, where it has become routine for him to draw crowds in
      excess of 20,000.
    • "Events are not just an opportunity for us to put Barack in
      front of voters," says Hildebrand. "It's a chance for voters to be
      in a captive environment where we ask them to sign up and do more
      for Barack — to make phone calls, canvas, get out the vote.
      We don't want people to just come to an event — we want them
      to become part of this movement."

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