Obama & the Internet

“The times, they are a’changin.” No less true words have been spoken by singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. That song may have been released in 1964, but it continues to relate to the world. In 1964, the internet was something nobody had even had a clue about yet, but in 2009, it is something that many people in the world couldn’t live without. According to www.internetworldstats.com, there are currently 6,767,805,208 in the world and 1,668,870,408 are internet users. In the United States though, 74.1% of our population are frequent internet users. One comparison President Barack Obama received throughout his campaign was to John F. Kennedy Jr. The difference however, is when JFK Jr. used television to his advantage, Obama used the internet.

Arianna Huffington, the editor in chief of the Huffington Post, said “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee.” By using interactive web tools, Obama changed the way politicians organize supporters, advertise to voters, defend against attacks and communicate with constituents. He used the Internet to organize his supporters in a way that would have in the past required an enormous mass of volunteers and paid organizers throughout the nation. Barack Obama won every single caucus state that matters, and he did it because of those tools, because he was able to move thousands of people to organize. Obama’s campaign took advantage of YouTube for free advertising. These videos were more effective than television ads because viewers chose to watch them or received them from a friend instead of having their television shows interrupted. According to Joe Tippi, a political consultant and runner of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, the campaign’s official videos they created for YouTube were watched for 14.5 million hours. To buy 14.5 million hours on broadcast TV is $47 million. Another prominent figure that agrees with Huffington is Google CEO, Eric Schmidt. He discussed the internet and its current affect on politics at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver and how much has changed even since the 2004 election. The republicans were completely blindsided by the advancement Obama used in technology. Erik Telford, the executive director of RightOnline.com said "The left was far ahead of us. The efforts that Obama put into internet campaigning and what he accomplished were extraordinary.” He used social networking, and email recruiting, among many other techniques to outwit the Republicans. When the Republicans tried to propel their smear campaign, Obama turned around and threw it right back in their face with FightTheSmears.com, which was a website ran by Barack Obama’s campaign which faced the accusations head on and gave the real answers. That includes the rampant rumor about Obama not being born in the United States, and the website put up a picture of his official birth certificate. The website also has links on the left side of the page, such as “Donate Now!” and buttons to click on that lead to other social networking pages such as MySpace and Facebook. You can “become a fan” of Obama on Facebook and also follow him on Twitter. The connection between our generation and our political leaders are becoming closer and closer which is exactly what Obama’s goal was. Homophily should really be his middle name, but that probably would have caused as much as a stir as his real one (Hussein). Obama says at the top of website: "What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon - that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to demonize."

A common phrase connected to Barack Obama is the “Internet President” which is very true. During the campaign, I received e-mails almost daily from him (supposedly), Michelle Obama, and the campaign director to keep the followers updated to what the campaign had achieved, where Obama would be speaking, and of course to remind me to donate to the campaign. The constant e-mails made a huge impact on followers and Obama raised an incredible amount of money through this and his other internet campaigning. Some 3.2 million people donated to the Obama campaign through its Web site. The Obama campaign used Google Maps mashups to help volunteers find local campaign resources and people to contact and try to persuade. Using a custom social networking site, created with the help of a Facebook co-founder, Obama supporters were able to log in and find lists of people they could call, or whose doors they could knock on, to try to persuade others to vote for their candidate. In addition to the internet, he asked supporters to supply their cell phone numbers, and sent out regular text message chains, even announcing his vice-president selection via text. Barack Obama’s website received 5.5 million unique visitors, compared to John McCain’s, which received 3.1 million, according to Compete.com data. In social networking, Obama easily outweighed the amount of “fans” that McCain had to his own. McCain had garnered the support of 572,009 "fans" on Facebook, which is among the highest on the site. However, it doesn’t hold a candle in comparison to Obama's 2,071,473 fans. Obama's lead is even larger than this indicates because these numbers don't add in separate fan pages for Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, Students for Obama, Women for Obama, etc. Unfortunately for McCain, he didn’t have many of these support pages. For example, Michelle Obama has 127,000 fans, while Cindy McCain has 758 fans. Unfortunately for the McCain ticket, their largest supplementary group was the "I Have More Foreign Policy Experience than Sarah Palin," with 220,000 participants. The "friend" divide is just as prevalent on MySpace with Obama having 697,535 friends to McCain's 169,326. More comparisons just show that the “Internet War” was won by Obama by a landslide victory.

So the question remains: did the internet elect Barack Obama, and could he have done it without it? On a financial level, of course, the Internet really has changed everything about American politics. Certainly Obama couldn’t have challenged Hillary Clinton or radically outspent John McCain without the estimated $500 million in small donations mostly raised on the Internet. Nor could his campaign have had its remarkable success without its effective use of the most up to date viral marketing tools of digital technology such as the microblogging service Twitter and the cell phone texting technology Obama used to broadcast his selection of Joe Biden as his Vice-Presidential pick. But then again, the 2008 election proves that popularity on the Internet doesn’t guarantee success. The more than $20 million the libertarian Ron Paul raised on the Internet is now forgotten. Internet evangelists also conveniently forget the other 50% of Obama’s money which was raised conventionally, by a wealthy, politically powerful leaders calling other wealthy leaders on the telephone or meeting them at their private clubs. What Obama’s success proves is that having a strong Internet presence is only half the story; the other half is having the Chicago Senator’s charisma, his political judgment, his speaking skills, his intellect, his personal network, his advisers. And, of course, what is also conveniently forgotten by the digital crowd is that while Obama himself is a BlackBerry addict and a social network fiend with hundreds of thousands of Facebook “friends” or “fans”, his key political relationships, with advisors David Axelrod and David Plouffe and with Joe Biden, were all forged in the classically analog environments of the US Senate or on the streets of Chicago rather than in the concept of cyberspace.