David Talbot: In the past, the Fox echo chamber would just drown everything else out. That’s what I expected again. But online media finally fought the right wing to a draw. That was because the Karl Rove game plan—freak people out, divide and conquer, run a campaign based on fear and bogus issues—kept getting derailed by counterstories, counternarratives.
Marc Cooper: The ability of millions of people to generate their own content and go around the channels of the mainstream media make it more difficult for political strategists of any stripe, including Karl Rove, to manipulate the entire population by man­ipulating a couple of TV networks. All it takes to get around them is a simple YouTube video that you post on a site or send to your friends.
Steve Grove, news and political director, YouTube: We knew after the 2006 midterm election that YouTube would be big in 2008. I trace it to George Allen’s infamous “macaca” moment [when he was caught on video calling an Indian American man a racial slur]. Allen ended up losing to Jim Webb by just over 7,000 votes out of some 2.3 million cast—and the “macaca” moment is, arguably, what allowed the blue team to win back the Senate.
Joe Trippi: What happened was that this medium demands authenticity, whereas television demands fakeness, for the most part. You can fool anybody for 30 seconds. George Allen could run millions of dollars’ worth of 30-second ads and seem like a decent guy; then the “macaca” stuff turns out to be who he really is. I don’t believe there’s anybody who can fake it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Steve Grove: Knowing YouTube would be important, we coached the campaigns on how to use the site and were in contact with their new-media teams on an almost daily basis. From day one, Obama’s team was the most sophisticated and active of all the campaigns. They even hired an Emmy-winning CNN producer to be on their video team.
Peter Greenberger: The campaign uploaded more than 1,800 videos, at least 16 of which got over a million views.
Christine Pelosi: The videos and the rest let Obama bypass the filters and talk right to the American people. I think that’s why he was very effective in combating all the lies.
Chris Lehane: From early on, there was a very, very aggressive email campaign trying to raise questions about Obama’s religion: where he was born, who his forbears were, what churches he may or may not have gone to.
Lawrence Lessig: One of the biggest issues for the campaign was, how should Obama respond to those questions? In 2004, Kerry’s response was to not dignify the Swift Boat attacks—and look what happened to him.
Christine Pelosi: Obama understood that to counter all the things being said about him, he needed to do two things. First, he was going to have to Google himself, which is terrifying the first time you do it. Second, he was going to have to commun­icate with people in ways that wouldn’t allow him to be cari­caturized.
Peter Greenberger: The campaign invested heavily in keyword advertising, which allows you to rebut accusations. For example, if someone did a search about Obama’s being a Muslim, because Obama had invested in that keyword, an ad with a headline like “Barack Obama is a Christian. Learn more…” would appear on the side of the screen. He couldn’t have done that with TV or print.
Christine Pelosi: He understood that you have to be your own messenger. The right-wing blogs are smearing you? Set up your own website to stop the smears. Also, Obama wouldn’t depend on what else we were seeing in other places. He would email the speech directly to us and say, “Watch the whole thing.”
Arianna Huffington, cofounder, HuffingtonPost.com: One of the most fascinating things to me was the number of people who watched Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race in March from beginning to end. It was 37 minutes, and over six million people watched it on YouTube. That made a huge difference when his opponents tried to present him as some kind of radical black man, like Reverend Wright.
Peter Leyden: Who would have thought that in the 21st century—when the average sound bite is down to eight seconds and everything is quick, quick, quick—oration would even matter? That a brilliant orator like Obama, a speaker on the level of only a handful of folks in American history, could break through?
Joan Blades: The race speech was just an amazing turning point. It had real substance, communicated by a leader, from the heart, and it wasn’t being chopped into little nuggets.
Peter Leyden: With YouTube, you don’t have to hook somebody in just eight seconds. You can take 10 minutes, or 37 minutes, or an hour. And you’re not just reaching 500 people in one room—you can have millions of people watching for as long as you can keep them hooked. So the actual language Obama used to get the audience to hang on as he made his case was really, really important.
Steve Grove: Another beauty of YouTube is that the Obama campaign didn’t have to fight the battle on its own. Even if the campaign didn’t respond to an attack right away, someone else would. For example, Obama did an interview with George Stephanopoulos in which he uttered the phrase “my Muslim faith” in saying that he wasn’t Muslim. But somebody uploaded just those few words, taken out of context, so it sounded as if he were saying that he was Muslim. But then an Obama supporter uploaded the entire interview, so people could hear what he was really saying, and that video actually outpaced the other one in view counts.
Chris Lehane: The empowering of people happened in all kinds of ways. Look at the advertising side.
Rich Silverstein, cochairman, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners: The qual­ity of political adver­tising by the campaigns is so low. They focus-group everything—everything—and they run it through pollsters. What you get is the advertising equivalent of USA Today, aimed at the lowest common denominator. And the process is so slow—you do an ad on some­thing like Joe the Plumber and by the time it comes out, it’s irrelevant.
Chris Lehane: Now anyone—everyday people, as well as the campaigns—can do their own ads and get enormous play without having to spend anywhere near the amount of money that you used to have to spend. And the impact can be huge, because when you click on one of those YouTube videos, chances are that you’re actually going to watch it—versus what happens when an ad comes on TV and you just change the channel.
Rich Silverstein: The creative community has been so pent up for eight years—artists, musicians, advertising people. We all came out.
Tony West: Someone did a video remake of the Apple 1984 ad that was a definite hit on Hillary. It was completely unsanctioned by the Obama campaign, yet it was very well produced and got so much mainstream-media play that it became an issue for the next two or three days.
Peter Leyden: Obama’s response was pretty funny. Basically, he said, “My team isn’t talented enough to come up with that kind of thing. That’s much better than we could ever have done.”
Tim Dickinson: So many campaigns are obsessed with controlling the message. But [Obama’s chief campaign strategist] David Axelrod had the balls to say about this other stuff that started going on in the ecosystem, “Go ahead and do that. We’re not going to shut it down.” I’m talking about the “I got a crush...on Obama” video in mid-2007 and the Will.i.am “Yes We Can” video in early ’08. All this brilliant, creative stuff.
Jim Klar: I joined the Obama site after watching that Will.i.am video. It just struck the most emotional chord—the star power, connecting the music with his words in a speech.
David Carr, media columnist, the New York Times: The way things like YouTube now interact with the blogs and the mainstream media—in Spanish, you say los revueltos, the scrambled.
Joe Garofoli: It’s sacrilegious to say this when you work at a newspaper, but the left-wing blogosphere started to have a tremendous influence. In previous elections, there had been a mutual loathing. The blogosphere would say, “Oh, you’re old media. You’re a bunch of hacks. You’re timid and lame.” And the mainstream press would say, “You guys don’t do any reporting. You publish stuff that isn’t verified.”
Joan Walsh: But now, many bloggers pull together analysis that’s credible, and they’ve earned respect from some mainstream journalists. There’s this new river of influence.
David Carr: There’s now a networked reflex of testing everything being said against what that person said before. Everything can be fact-checked because this database now exists.
Joe Trippi: The day the Dean campaign ended in 2004, there were 1.4 million blogs in the world. By 2008, there were 80 million. We’re not talking about something that grew by three times. We’re talking 57 times.
Matt Buchanan: The thing about blogs is that they give you intensely granular, really niche things—scattered, very detailed, immediate, like Sarah Palin’s wardrobe—but they sort of add up to a complete picture, because all of that information spreads.
Marc Cooper: And part of this is that the people formerly known as the audience can react in immediate ways and generate their own content. This citizen journalism has made the media much more transparent and accountable.
Arianna Huffington: Let me make something very clear: I do not send anybody out to report. Citizens in general send themselves out and report back. We now have 12,000 of them working on a project we call OffTheBus, to differen­tiate them from the reporters who are on the bus.
Mayhill Fowler: I had been trying to be a writer for so long, but when I started following the campaigns in June 2007, I had no interest in politics and I never read blogs. I didn’t know where Obama fit on the spectrum, whether he was a Blue Dog Democrat or a progressive or whatever. All I knew was that here was a great story I could follow, and the Huffington Post was a great platform.
Tom Rosenstiel: The Bittergate incident during the primaries, when Mayhill Fowler taped Obama talking at a private fundraiser in San Francisco about small-town Americans clinging to their guns—a mainstream journalist would not have done that.
Mayhill Fowler: I think the “bitter” story ultimately forced Obama to run a better campaign. It forced him to seek out small-town, working-class people and learn to connect with them, like Hillary Clinton was able to do.
Tom Rosenstiel: Polling is another huge thing that has grown along with the Internet and has really come to dom­inate the narrative. Technology and automated dial­ing have made polls easier to do, and citi­zen websites and blogs that aggregate polling data are magnifying their effects. Instead of just CNN or the New York Times, there are now 15 polls you can look at at any given moment on those sites.
Craig Newmark: I became a big fan of Nate Silver’s polling blog, FiveThirtyEight.com.
Tom Rosenstiel: You saw significance of the polling sites after the first debate. Most mainstream media said it was very close, or McCain may actually have been the more effective aggressor. That pundit judgment used to be more important than polling, because the flash polls took a while, the morning papers wouldn’t necessarily catch them, and within three days, the polls would show a more decisive victory for the candidate whom the pundits had liked in the first place. This year, though, the public polls came out instantly and showed that Obama was a clear winner, by about 15 points. And that, not the media judgments, was what was magnified.
Peter Leyden: What the blogosphere really did best was attack Sarah Palin.
Nick Thompson: I think a main reason McCain lost was because of his vice-presidential pick, and that happened because of online media. Nobody really cared what the New York Times wrote about Palin, but everyone cared what Andrew Sullivan wrote on his blog [The Daily Dish, on the Atlantic’s website].
Tom Rosenstiel: Palin was named on the day after the Democratic Convention, and the entire political press corps was in transit from Denver, so the moment was very well suited to bloggers.
David Talbot: To go from Reagan to Dan Quayle to George W. to Sarah Palin would have been the ultimate deevolution of American politics—the ultimate “fuck you” from the Republican Party to the whole notion of good government.
Markos Moulitsas: The mainstream reaction was “Look, isn’t she hot (wink, wink)?” Palin’s initial numbers were sky-high. We had to get in there and squash that narrative.
Tom Rosenstiel: The blogs combed documents on the Internet, particularly Alaska newspapers’ archives. They culled a bunch of stuff, like the fact that she was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it; like the proposal to ban books in Wasilla.
Peter Leyden: There’s an internal list—I won’t say what for—of 700 progressive bloggers and netroots people. The minute Palin was named, the people on the list just went nuts: “What the fuck? Who is this woman?” We entered total-coordination mode, aggregating anything we could find on her and putting it out into the blogosphere really quickly. Once again, Obama didn’t have to do it.
Raven Brooks: There were three or four days when some new fact about her past broke on Daily Kos and became part of the narrative in newspapers or asked about in interviews.
Steve Grove: Videos of her took over YouTube. For the first time in a long time, Obama’s channel went into silent mode.
Markos Moulitsas: The Democratic Party didn’t like it—they were saying, “There’s gonna be a backlash; we’ve gotta lay off her.” Unlike the Republicans, who’ve gotten where they are by running straight at our strengths—look at McCain attacking Obama’s celebrity status, trying to make the big crowds a bad thing—when Democrats see something popular, they run in the other direction. That’s something that’s frustrated me to no end.
Chris Lehane: The online communities went after her for being from a small town, for being a PTA mom, and I do think the attacks reinforced the undecided voters’ perceptions that progressives were elitist and looked down on them. Within a two-week period, the Wal-Mart voters migrated by enormous numbers to the McCain camp.
Tom Rosenstiel: After those first few days, the next step required old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting.
David Talbot: I didn’t trust the blogging culture to be able to inves­tigate her more deeply. Were they going to get their asses up to Alaska? It costs money and time. I didn’t necessarily trust the mainstream media, either. If I’d offered to do it for one of those outlets, they’d have said, “No, we have our own team,” or I’d have been considered too left. But it was important to adopt the attitude of the blogs—“Who the hell is this person? She’s kind of wack and dangerous”—while going after valid information. So I called Joan Walsh and went up there for Salon. I churned out five or six stories.
David Carr: We would’ve sent reporters up to Wasilla regardless of whether bloggers were agitated. It was our editors who were pounding on us, not the bloggers.
David Talbot: I think the best reporting on her, frankly, was Salon’s and the Times’s.
Tom Rosenstiel: Then Palin went on Katie Couric. Those interviews weren’t that big a story in the mainstream press, but people were emailing the clips to each other. Groups of them were watching Palin stumble all over the place on YouTube.
David Talbot: Ultimately, Tina Fey had the biggest single impact. It was this perfect storm: the best of American culture and media coming together to damage a person who looked like she could be a stealth candidate who’d drag McCain into the White House. Fey’s whole Palin act fed on the online churn and the solid reporting that had been done.
Peter Leyden: The economy falling was really like a nail in the cof­fin. Basically, people knew that this country was going in the wrong direction. I mean, Americans aren’t stupid. And McCain was doing politics the old way, using the old broadcast coverage. And he’s old! Obama was the new thing.
Joan Walsh: You know, I was personally wrong about many things. I wanted a fighter. But I think the nation really wanted someone who’ll be fair and judicious and not necessarily rail against George Bush and corporations and the awful people who brought us to the brink of ruin.
David Talbot: The country is traumatized by the Bush administration that created this America we don’t quite recognize anymore. We’re freaked out by the economy and the loss of livelihoods. Just to be angry and screaming doesn’t really capture the zeitgeist right now. No-Drama Obama—that’s what people want.
Christine Pelosi: An important thing about Obama is, he got stronger, and the Internet—YouTube, citizen journalism, blogs—shows you that. If you look at the record, the way he talked in February ’07, you can see the improvement. At the same time, he remained consistent in his core ideas and values, and again, the Internet proves that. If he had changed, it would have been very easy to see, and my inbox would have been flooded with the evidence.
Ross Mirkarimi, San Francisco supervisor: There was something rev­olutionary about the technological artistry of how Obama grabbed people, particularly young people, with his imagery, his silhouette, the energy of his campaign, and the way it was all promoted online. It was iconic, like the picture of Che Guevara in the beret—but instead of just being plastered on a vacant building, these images were all over the web. People everywhere were wearing their Obama T-shirts and hats.
Joan Blades: T-shirts! People really like T-shirts. MoveOn did some great ones.
Ross Mirkarimi: They’d been seduced—in a good way. And you could just see it grow and proliferate.
Sean Quinn, writer, FiveThirtyEight.com: Traveling around the country, doing our site—I lived in my car for eight weeks—I saw the discrepancy in energy every day. Toward the end, we went to one Obama office in southern Nevada, and the energy was going full blast. Then we went to the McCain office, and there were three sleepy, middle-aged to older guys, watching a game on TV and making a few calls. We walked out of that office and said, “We’re gonna win.”
Marc Cooper: This wasn’t really about new media, about information moving from dead trees to cyberspace. It was about rewriting the rules of journalism, political organizing, and community building. Now, for the first time, we’re going to see how it’ll impact the way the country is governed.