Month: July 2008

Steve Newton writes in the Beating Castle Someday thread:

First, what is the proper use of the blogosphere in statewide politics. Dean, Ron Paul, Obama, and even Hillary made successful use of the blogs, primarily to sign up supporters and raise funds on a nationwide scale. But when you shrink the scale to DE I don’t think there are actually enough people on the blogosphere for them to operate that way.
Example: there were about seventy or eighty people involved in the Ron Paul meet-ups. Once that fad passed, so did they. They weren’t converts to the blogs, they were people sucked in by a particular candidate/cause, who gave money and stuck around while it was novel. Within the state I don’t think–even on the liberal Democrat side, where the blogs arguably have the most effect anywhere in the spectrum–we’ve reached the point where bloggers can be effective fundraisers.

The thing is that while the money race gets a lot of attention and publicity, looking at on-line political activism as just blogging (or commenting) or fundraising fails to recognize there are other (sometimes more) valuable aspects of the successful political sites and that is their social networking aspects. Bringing together a large and disparate group of people, giving them a basic mission, letting them make decisions on goals and how to get there and providing tools for them to execute was what made DFA a lot of fun to be a part of and is what Obama’s campaign has made work at almost every level. (DFA was hugely inspirational too — lots of activists and candidates got really launched here.) In fact, I think that Obama has been so good at this that you do see folks discussing his campaign as a bottom-up run organization, when that is awfully far from the truth.