Indistinguishable From Magic
There is a saying about technology that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The idea is that if you don’t understand (at least in a general sense) all of the technologies that lead up to the iPod, an iPod seems like a magical device. I have been thinking about this quote for close to a week, due to a conversation that I had with a “connected” politician.
He told me that some of his friends that had worked on Bill Clinton’s campaigns had been frustrated by their involvement in the Obama campaign. They had never seen such a disorganized campaign in their lives.
I was floored. Here was a campaign that from all outward appearances was the most disciplined, best organized and best funded in history. It took me a little while to process what he was saying. Then I thought of the magic quote.
I think what we saw here was an evolution of campaigning from the old way of doing things (a top-down organization model run with military precision) to the new model (a grassroots organization with thousands of moving parts and no central control). I think it is analogous to the “encyclopedia” model to the “wikipedia” model.
I think that these old hands showed up ready to write an encyclopedia and found thousands of people putting the damn thing together one random fact at a time. As Donald Rumsfeld said, “Democracy is messy” and I love the messiness that we created this time around in the world of politics.
open source…
One of the things that the Obama campaign did that improved on the Dean model was in providing central control of key campaign levers — especially messaging. They were quite adept at getting folks to volunteer and did get them into an acceptable “zone” for reaching out, gathering data and speaking to others. They gave folks alot of freedom and information for campaigning, but they were pretty specific about goals and objectives — specifically asking for votes (which Dean neglected).
Great article on the organizing effort in Wired.
Whether you liked her or no, HRC would never have gotten to this or been able to leverage what she could muster to expand the map.
What I loved about working at the Obama office was the freedom to do what needed to be done. In calling un-decideds we were told to tell them why we (personally) were voting for Obama. Not only did I make calls, but I helped train new volunteers, made coffee and copies, dropped volunteers off in neighborhoods and hunted down and found a large map of New Castle County.
All around me people were taking the initiative. It was extremely high energy and productive.