“It’s the difference between a horse and buggy and a NASA space ship”
The Politico has an interesting article on the difference between Obama’s online operations and McCain’s:
“It’s the difference between a horse and buggy and a NASA space ship,” said Phil Noble, a veteran of Democratic campaigns and the founder of the nonpartisan political news site PoliticsOnline, comparing the campaigns’ respective approaches to technology. “Obama has given people the tools to create and run their own campaigns,” Noble continued. “McCain is still a command-and-control, top-down candidate. Part of it is the difference in age.”
[....]
Obama has also built a formidable network of online supporters and activists. As of Tuesday, his my.barackobama.com social networking site had 926,000 members, and he had 946,568 Facebook supporters.
McCain, by contrast, had 141,183 Facebook supporters, and his McCain Space online sign-up contains the dispiriting sentence fragment: “Benefits of joining Team McCain include:” — with nothing following.
The Obama campaign’s fundraising prowess has been well-documented and the campaign’s online presence has been credited for some of this. But having a strong online presence has other benefits as well:
Political consultant and pollster Joseph Mercurio, who worked on Sen. Joe Biden’s campaign media team, points to “Obama’s vast online reach and networking apparatus, which is set up so when he gets into trouble like with the Wright thing, his [37-minute-long] race speech was viewed in full on YouTube over 5 million times. It means he effectively has a tremendous number of people working on his behalf, telling other people that, ‘You’ve got to see this.’”
One of the right-wing’s great innovations was to create its own media that allowed for a way of bypassing the traditional media in situations where the traditional media storyline was not one that helped their candidate. The big question is: have YouTube, the blogs, and other online begun to create such an infrastructure for progressives? And can we expect other campaigns to help build — and take advantage of such an infrastructure?
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One interesting piece of speculation I’ve read about Obama’s network is that it will be used post-election (if he’s elected) to mobilize supporters in support of Obama Administration programs. How that would shake out is not clear to me, but it’s an fascinating prospect.