Christine Pelosi: I met Michelle Obama at an event, and I said, “I’m neutral, but my boyfriend’s up for grabs, and he’s from Chicago,” so they did a little Chicago back and forth. Then I said to her, “What are you going to do with these young people? How are you going to measure what they’re doing? Because they’re not even on laptops anymore—they’re just texting on their phones.” She said, “Don’t worry about it. We know how to reach them. We’re South Side Chicago, we’re organizers, we’re going to stay in touch. And by the way, Christine, no one’s neutral.”
Joe Trippi: James Carville used to say, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Well, in this election it was the network, stupid. The fact is, Barack Obama won nearly every caucus state, including Iowa. And he did it because of the tools.
Peter Leyden: If you had to boil it down to the one reason why Obama is president, it’s Web 2.0.
Joe Trippi: At the end of the Dean campaign, Facebook was limited to Harvard and a couple other college campuses. YouTube wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye. Twitter didn’t exist until 2006. So in four years, the technology and know-how skipped Mercury and Gemini and went straight from the Wright brothers to the Apollo program.
Wes Boyd: In the ’60s or ’70s, when people came out and marched—maybe even did a million-man march—there was no way to reach them the next day, no follow-through. That’s all changed. In the Obama campaign, the synergy between online and offline was immense.
Peter Leyden: Television had shifted people from being active participants in the electoral process to being consumers. You just looked at the commercials and got manipulated, and then, on Election Day, you went to the polls and pulled a lever. The result of all this was complete alienation from politics. Barely 50 percent of the voters turned out.
Wes Boyd: Even among the Democrats,
participation had become almost a dirty word. The campaigns were very wary of volunteers, because they would screw things up.
Peter Leyden: These new tools radically dropped the threshold of getting involved. It was just
click, click, click…boom: You’d given money, and now they had your name and email. So you were constantly getting pulled into politics. People were like, “How many emails can you get from Barack?” It was this freewheeling, interconnected social-network/web-connectivity thing.
Nick Thompson: The smartest idea I ever saw was the way the Obama campaign used Facebook. Before the Iowa caucuses, he set up that app that would troll through people’s friends lists, identify friends who were in Iowa, then automate an email to them that said, “Hey, here’s how the caucus system works. Go vote.” It was totally brilliant.
Meena Harris, Silicon Valley grassroots fundraising manager: I did a lot of work with Stanford students: getting volunteers, translating the online stuff into a field operation, lower-level fundraising. It was standard procedure to put all our events on MyBO, but I barely used it. I used Facebook.
Lawrence Lessig: People could become soldiers, not just supporters. They could volunteer late at night in their pajamas. They could volunteer 20 minutes a week. They didn’t have to go outside and march; they could stay inside and make a difference.
Raven Brooks, executive director, Netroots Nation: People are on Facebook daily, checking out what their friends are doing, posting on their walls, fooling around with applications. So if you posted an invitation to an Obama event on Facebook, they were more likely to read it.
Meena Harris: The first thing I did when organizing youth-vote directors—in New Mexico, say—was to figure out how many Facebook groups they wanted to have: UNM students for Obama, Santa Fe for Obama, Albuquerque for Obama. Then we created this group called Street Team to hand out flyers at bars and make contact on the ground.
Cheryl Contee, founder, JackandJillPolitics.com: On Facebook and other sites, people created their own groups to express what they think about global warming, the economy, housing, to connect on those issues. It’s going beyond “Hey, I’m going to a party tonight—want to come?”
Steve Spinner: Eventually, the campaign had relationships with at least 15 to 20 social networks, maybe more.
Wes Boyd: The sense of openness in general was extraordinary.
Tim Dickinson: Before the primaries, I went to Obama’s headquarters in Oakland for an organizational meeting. One of the people there said, “OK, you can just download the voter lists and go make calls.” And I went, “Wait a minute. You’re not worried about people hacking into the lists?” And they went, “Well, you know, it’s out there. Who cares?”
Sarah Lai Stirland, contributing writer, Wired.com: The whole open-source model that came from the Bay Area poured over to Obama. It wasn’t a specific piece of software; it was the whole radical idea of open sourcing a campaign.
Tim Dickinson: The lack of central control and the ability of anyone to jump onboard and start doing their own thing were amazing. It was a spirit of empowerment that no longer required anyone to give you permission to do something—and it came out of the mindset that built things like Craigslist and Wikipedia.
Chris Lehane: If you want to give out fishing poles to a million people so they can go fishing on your behalf, you have to let them choose the poles they want and pick the ponds and lakes they want to fish in. That’s something that political campaigns generally have been reluctant to allow.
Tim Dickinson: It was nuts! On MyBO, people could organize themselves by “I like ice cream and Barack Obama” or “Georgia women for Barack Obama” or “Texans for Barack Obama.” In Texas, this sort of “just add water” operation was what allowed Obama to win the caucus there, even though Hillary won the primary itself. Anyone with the drive to do something for Obama could. I could have started “Journalists secretly for Obama,” you know?
Joan Walsh: I was in Henderson, Nevada, and you would go to HillaryClinton.com and type in the zip code, and you’d get three to six speeches, or an announcement that Teachers for Hillary was doing some event in the state that day. Then you did the same thing on MyBO, and you got dozens of results. In L.A., on the weekend before Super Tuesday, it was hundreds. If you wanted to, you could build your whole social life around events you found on the site, all mapped on Google.
Angela Petrella: Ridiculously large events were mixed in with small ones. When I was looking on MyBO in Ohio because I was going there to volunteer, Jay-Z and LeBron James were having a free concert to support Obama. And that was next to “Meet here to learn how to canvass at so-and-so’s house at 2:00.”
Tim Dickinson: I went to this big rally in Oakland, and to be admitted, the only thing they asked for was your email address. That was 12,000 addresses, and he was doing the same thing around the country.
Peter Leyden: At his acceptance speech in Denver, the campaign asked the audience to send text messages to Obama, which they randomly selected and streamed up on the stadium scoreboard. It was cool to see your message up there in front of 80,000 people. And the campaign was getting 80,000 cell phone numbers, which are like gold, because something like 20 percent of Americans don’t have landlines.
Randy Shandobil, political editor, KTVU: There were people signing up for Obama’s text messages who didn’t even support him, just because they thought it was so cool.
Matt Buchanan: The Obama iPhone app—even though it’s a small little app—is when it clicked for me how hyperlocal and constantly connected the campaign would be.
Biz Stone, cofounder, Twitter: When we first saw Obama Twitter, we were like, “Wow, if he wins, we’ll have a president with a Twitter account.”
Angela Petrella: I signed up for the McCain emails, but I couldn’t stomach them. They were just attacks, whereas Barack’s always said things like “Did you see Michelle speak last night? I’m so proud of her. I’m the most positive human ever.”
Jim Klar, musician turned Obama fundraiser: The whole style of his emails reeked of Web 2.0: open graphics, a simple, single message, a big “Donate” button. And you would think, “OK, I can afford $10.”
Christine Pelosi: The fact that you could email someone and ask them for just $10 made things so easy. You’re gonna send in that 10 bucks because you have this vivid picture of it: It’s half a pizza. You can visualize the volunteers eating it while they make campaign calls, and ringing a little bell when they get a yes vote. It paints the whole picture for you in a way that telemarketing just can’t.
Peter Leyden: When you raise money the old way—all those people in a room, paid an hourly wage, calling constantly—literally half of what you bring in goes toward overhead. But if you do it online, the costs just go whomp—they drop through the floor. So you essentially double your money because you haven’t spent the money to make the money.
Chris Lehane: There’s this concept in Silicon Valley called the cascade effect: the idea that you can use online organizing to break through old ceilings that used to exist. Obama’s campaign did that with fundraising—it raised $150 million in one month!
Angela Petrella: I watched the acceptance speech, and I was like, “What am I doing? I need to become more involved.” So I sent out an email, and it turned out that everyone I wrote to felt the same way. So then I sent out another email that said, “Why don’t we raise money by having some kind of fun event?” Everyone I sent it to had some kind of incredible skill in event planning, so it became sort of a supergroup of females.
Sarah Lai Stirland: The idea of sending out emails to your address book is really key; it’s peer influence in its highest form. People see what you’re doing and get interested because you’re an actual friend of theirs.
Peter Leyden: My email list has 3,000 people. It would have taken me half a year to call all those people up.
Christine Pelosi: These days, you don’t know who the most valuable person on a campaign is going to be. It could be a kid with 50,000 friends on Facebook. Or it could be a young entrepreneur who gets all his friends to give $50 a month over time.
Wes Boyd: Social networking was the open door that brought people in. But it’s much more nuanced than what the Dean campaign thought, which was: “Invite people in, they’ll self-organize, amazing things will happen.” The Obama campaign knew that mobilizing, say, 7 million phone calls or 20 million voter contacts is a significant managerial challenge. They were extremely innovative in training volunteers to play middle management, and they had a great program for having people share their stories about why they’re committed.
Brian Lesh: I got an email about Camp Obama. It was a three-day training session for people in the Bay Area who wanted to be volunteers. It was pretty intensive—from early in the morning until late at night. That’s where I met Marshall Ganz.
Marshall Ganz, public policy lecturer, Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government: We felt that Obama’s organizing had to be values based. The heart of social change in America has always been rooted in values and communicated through narrative. Where do we find hope? How do we fight fear?
Brian Lesh: Marshall emphasized what he called the “story of us”: When you call and say, “Hi, my name is Brian, I’m a student, this is why I care, this is why you should care, and this is what Barack offers,” you build a connection between the person you’re trying to convince, the candidate’s ideas, and you. At one point, we would tell our stories to the group. One woman stood up and said, “I have to get this off my chest: I’m a Republican.” And everyone started clapping. It was really quite powerful.
Molly Kawahata: At Camp Obama, I met a lot of people from Silicon Valley who went back and ended up creating one of the strongest volunteer bases. A lot were adults who’d never voted before and were inspired to campaign. The predominantly online organization really resonated with people in Silicon Valley. It was consistent with how they organize their lives.
Wes Boyd: I can’t remember another campaign that was so well put together. And we got into it as one big, happy family, throwing all of MoveOn’s weight behind it and helping almost a million volunteers connect with it—more than 600,000 people in battleground states. I don’t think anything like that had ever happened before on that scale.
Tony West: Suddenly, people who had never given money to a candidate before were flying to New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Florida, or Ohio to do grassroots, “get out the vote” stuff.
Steve Spinner: The secret sauce was that people felt like they owned a piece of the campaign. That encouraged them to play an even larger role. I started out at 20 hours a week, then went up to 30, then 50. And I’m just one of hundreds of thousands of stories.
Andy Rappaport: My daughter is a criminology major in college, and she had to go to Houston to research death-penalty cases. She called me: “Hey, Dad, how ’bout a road trip?” So, looking for some offbeat places to drive through, we found out that there’s something called the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville, where there are five prisons. We visited the museum, where we saw, among other things, Old Sparky the electric chair. It was very disturbing. Then, as we were heading to downtown Huntsville to see one of the prisons, we saw an Obama campaign office a block away. And we said, “Shit, if there’s an Obama campaign office in Huntsville, Texas, where the number-one industry is killing people, there must be one
everywhere.”
(
Photo credit: Steve Rhodes)
Next: Chapter 5
2008: Taking control of the story line
