This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 19 Mar 2008, by Levy Rivers.
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19 Mar 08
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Today, the network claims more than half a million members and more than 8,000 affinity groups. Some are organized by state (Ohioans for Obama), others by profession (Texas Business Women for Obama) and still others by groove thing (Soul Music Lovers for Obama).
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At first, Hildebrand and Temo Figueroa, the campaign's field director, wrestled with how to harness the nationwide groundswell of support without taking their eyes off Iowa, which they considered a win-or-go-home state. But then the campaign's first-quarter fund-raising numbers rolled in — $25 million. Suddenly, Hildebrand and Figueroa could afford to build the kind of fully participatory field campaign Obama had envisioned — one that set its horizons beyond Iowa and Super Tuesday. According to Hans Riemer, the campaign's youth-vote director, "The mantra was, 'If the same people show up that always show up — we're gonna lose.' We needed to build a new coalition of voters."
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Obama campaign sent out an e-mail asking its supporters to sign up for a day of old-fashioned door-knocking and precinct-walking across the entire country. The result: On a Saturday in early June — six months before anyone would cast a ballot or attend a caucus — more than 10,000 Obama supporters hit the pavement in all fifty states to persuade their neighbors to back Barack.
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At the same time, the campaign was developing a new high-tech toolbox to enable its supporters to keep the momentum going — both online and off. With the help of one of the founders of Facebook, the Obama campaign created, MyBo, its own social-networking tool, through which supporters could organize themselves however they saw fit. Today, the network claims more than half a million members and more than 8,000 affinity groups. Some are organized by state (Ohioans for Obama), others by profession (Texas Business Women for Obama) and still others by groove thing (Soul Music Lovers for Obama).
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Equally important, Obama didn't build his machine by sucking up to the online activists who had been courted by Howard Dean — he built it from scratch. "I kind of admire that he hasn't wasted a lot of time kissing ass to make a bunch of bloggers happy," says Markos Moulitsas, founder of the influential blog Daily Kos. "I can't blame the guy. He's got other ways to reach people."
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"Part of this new era of politics has been learning how to surrender command-and-control aspects of the campaign," he says. "If you really want grass-roots participation, then you have to give folks at the grass roots some autonomy to do this in their own way. We had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to do things. The challenge was: How do you marshal them in an organized fashion?"
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Figueroa still speaks in the foulmouthed vernacular of the kickass union organizer he used to be. These days, as national field director for Obama, he serves as Gen. Patton for the campaign's growing legions of activists.
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