What Obama’s success really means for online politics 5. November 2008 – 14:19 by Dan Jellinek

So, it’s happened: the first major US ‘internet candidate’ has actually been elected.

There have been contenders in the past: the colourful governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, set the template for grassroots campaigning online. But so far, no US Presidential candidate has ever been able to make the internet work so well for them that it has made the difference between winning and losing.

According to a piece in the New York Times, the Obama result has “rewritten the rules on how to reach voters, raise money, organize supporters, manage the news media, track and mold public opinion, and wage — and withstand — political attacks, including many carried by blogs that did not exist four years ago.”

For the full piece, see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/us/politics/04memo.html
(thanks to Steve Clift of e-democracy.org for posting this link on his essential DO-WIRE email list)

And it is certainly true that Obama used the internet, including for the first time web 2.0 tools such as Facebook and iPhone applications, to devastating effect, building on the techniques developed by Ventura, Joe Trippi for Howard Dean, and quite a few Republicans as well to communicate directly with citizens, raise huge amounts of relatively clean money, and mobilise supporters and voters on a vast scale.

On the other hand, a little perspective is needed.

Obama won for many reasons, of which the internet is just one. Others include the desire of the US people to change political direction; Obama’s charisma (and that of his family); and his spending of the money on more ‘traditional’ campaigning media such as TV and telephones. This was a superbly-run campaign, across the board – after being out-thought last time around by the maestro Karl Christian Rove, aka The Architect, the Democrats were obsessive in their attention to detail in all aspects of the campaign, and it showed. They probably also benefited from the combination of an aged opponent and a, shall we say, divisive deputy.

So it’s hard to say precisely what affect the internet had on Obama’s campaign.

Ultimately, as well, the internet is simply a technology, a tool. It is a new tool, one among many, to help people communicate with each other: but you still need a message, and credibility.

And yet – it really does feel like a breakthrough for those of us who have watched internet campaigning since it began. Because the amount of money raised online, combined with the huge volume of genuine discussion, campaigning and messaging that took place using new technologies, was on a scale so much larger than anything we have seen before that it seems undeniable that the era of internet campaigning has now definitely – and permanently arrived. This is what the New York Times means when it senses a Sea Change. Techie toys might not win you elections on their own, but from now on, all candidates are surely going to have to win the online election as well as the offline election, to give themselves the best change of being elected at all.

NB: I look forward to continuing this debate next week at our conference!
www.headstar-events.com/edemocracy08

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