"'So you write about the Internet?'

"In the nearly two years I was on the campaign trail, a few seasoned political reporters asked me some version of that question. Usually, the question ended up being a statement, expressed in a careful, almost parental, just-hang-in-there way: "So [pause], you write about the Internet [another pause]." Sometimes, it was asked with a dismissive, get-yourself-a-real-writing-job tone: 'So you write about the Internet? What about the Internet?'

"Whatever the tone, I often replied, 'I don't write about the Internet. I write about people who are using the Internet.'"


This entire campaign was about seasoned pros of every stripe not taking seriously this young upstart of a candidate or his mastery of a medium they still stubbornly believed consisted mostly of nerds still living at home and plunking away on their keyboards in their pajamas.

You could see this reflected everywhere, particularly on the Sunday morning and other news talk shows.  I almost never saw anyone like Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo or Mark Koutsaris of Daily Kos.  It's only been fairly recently that Arianna Huffington of Huffington Post has been a regular contributor, but not as a permanent panel member. 

You still see the same old weathered faces and gray hair, many of whom don't know a blog from a google.

And none of them--none of them--were aware of what was happening until it was too late.

But I'm still waiting to see Josh or Kos regularly on these programs--or any young, hip face who rode this wave right alongside Obama.

What I'm going to do with my GROUNDSWELL pre-Inauguration series is break it up into four or five separate posts--to facilitate ease of reading--with plenty of quotes and links.  In some cases, in order to compress space and reading-time, I'll just include a list of links with maybe a quote or two.  You can peruse them as you see fit.

I'm going to post them one at a time, and I'll be working on the series all day.  As each one is finished, up it will go.  I hope to be finished by the end of the day.

Some of my links are old enough that they no longer work or, as in the case of one article, is simply quoted on another source, but the original is no longer available online.

What I want to prove with this series is that the Obama Groundswell was about waaaay more than fund-raising--another point that has almost completely escaped the punditry.

It's about revolutionizing democracy.

People who have either worked in or observed Washington for many years steadfastly refuse to admit this.  They don't think that anything is going to change in Washington, but what I am saying is that IT ALREADY HAS.

The change is underway.  We are in a new century, and this moment in history is every bit as monumental as the Industrial Revolution was at the cusp of the last century.  Technology is changing everything, from the way wars are fought to the way long-distance grandparents communicate with their grandbabies.

It's not just generational, although that seems to be the only descriptive term that applies.  It's more than that, because many of us who caught on to what is happening are in our 50's and 60's.  It's about how we look at and perceive the world.

What I'm going to detail is how Obama is taking his campaign Internet strategy and applying it to a whole new way of governing.

It's brand-new, taking place daily--almost in a blur--and nobody knows what the result is going to be.  What we do know is that we are witnessing history, right before our eyes, and for those of us with, er, prophet-like tendencies, well, we're taking part in it too.

It's a very exciting time to be alive.

This first part of my GROUNDSWELL series deals with the campaign, which has been hashed and rehashed enough that I'm only going to mention a handful of quotes and their links:


From "Lessons Learned as Obama Shepherds a Following," by Michael Cooper, New York Times, June 23, 2007:


It was just an organizational meeting for Senator Barack Obama's New York volunteers, but the gathering this month jammed every pew of a church in the East Village, and the crowd spilled over into not one but two overflow rooms.

All told, 710 people showed up, even though the closest they would get to Mr. Obama, the Illinois Democrat and presidential candidate, that night would be to view a campaign screening of a biographical DVD. They cheered wildly anyway. Many had already formed their own volunteer groups in New York: Brooklyn for Barack, NYC4Obama, the Audacity of Park Slope. Quite a few already had Web sites, neatly designed logos, newsletters and regular meetings.

...

All the campaigns are trying to marshal volunteer supporters this year. The Clinton campaign, for example, arranges discussion meetings in the homes of supporters; holds large, inexpensive fund-raisers; and is organizing groups to go to New Hampshire.

But the Obama campaign is making its ability to mobilize large numbers of volunteers central to its campaign ethos. On its recent nationwide canvassing day, volunteers received campaign T-shirts that read, "In the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it."

Mr. Obama, who was a grass-roots organizer in his youth, places value on door-to-door, neighborhood-by-neighborhood campaigning. In a recent conference call with 400 volunteer leaders, he gave tips for canvassing ("stay hydrated," and "don't just talk but listen").

"As tempting as it might be to think otherwise, this doesn't just have to do with me," Mr. Obama said during the call. "Change always comes from the bottom up, not the top down."

There is debate among the other campaigns and bloggers about how much of a movement the Obama campaign has created. Jerome Armstrong, a liberal blogger, wrote recently on MyDD.com that Mr. Obama had not aligned himself with the "netroots" movement that began with the Dean campaign and that helped propel Ned Lamont's Senate campaign in Connecticut last year.

Mr. Armstrong questioned whether the Obama grass-roots campaign was a movement at all. It "looks like a better-than-ordinary campaign for a candidate that's personally compelling, and not much more," he said.

But many of the volunteers who fanned out across New York City during the campaign's "Walk for Change" said they felt that they were creating a movement.

From "A Foundation Built on Small Blocks," by Jose Antonio Vargas, Washington Post, July 16, 2007:


As Julius Genachowski, Obama's chief technology adviser, put it: "The technology now has made it a lot easier for everyday people to participate. It's made it easier for campaigns, too. The technology allows us to build a platform and see if people come."

As the campaign went on and Obama began gaining ground and a bit more media attention, those who had worked on many a political campaign marveled at how different this one was, how each individual was trusted to do their own thing, find their own strengths, and act on them.  Traditionally, party bosses would move in, set up an organization, and assign tasks to volunteers.  Consequently, you might be forced to canvass when what you really wanted to do was make phone calls, or asked to answer phones when your true skills lay in Internet organizing.

Under the Obama structure, training was provided as well as support, but each volunteer was encouraged to do what they wanted to do, and some of the ideas were innovative, fresh, and endearing.  At the same time, through My.BarackObama.com, strangers established lifelong friendships as they connected and helped one another out with voting drives, phone banks, bake sales--whatever.

Newcomers--particularly curious or disgruntled Republicans--reluctantly provided the campaign their e-mail addresses, only to express surprise when they did not get badgered for donations with every campaign missive.  Some e-mails provided information on Obama's positions on the war or the economy, some set up volunteering opportunities for national disasters such as hurricanes, some were videotaped campaign updates, and some asked for money.

They were impressed.

As Laura Flanders of The Nation put it in her piece, "Grassroots Reseeded: Suites vs Streets," February 11, 2008:


Yet ideological disputes over policy points are just what today's "we"-driven campaigns dodge. The moral energy source that Obama's organizers are tapping is longing: for "change," for a new "us," for a new way of doing politics. Regular voters are so hungry for connection that they fall in love with a man who talks about "we" even if his healthcare plan leaves them out. As one campaign worker put it, "I like the message, but I love the method."

It's not necessarily vapid. A genuine commitment to a new "us" would have policy implications. "Ronald Reagan rallied a fractured nation around individual rights and competition. A campaign dedicated to a new 'us' could break from that ethic at last," says Ganz. It could translate into a new politics of equality and inclusion. But only if it's real, and only if it lasts beyond election day. In the meantime, a new generation of experienced grassroots organizers is maturing, and the question this time is, Will the party value them?


While volunteers all over the country--millions of them--were networking, organizing, setting up voter-registration drives, and setting up their own sophisticated operations, opposing campaigns were making fun of them, accusing them of belonging to some sort of cult, or of being groupies.  As if we were a bunch of swooning airheads.

From "Technology Aids Obama's Outreach Drive," by Brian C. Mooney, Boston Globe, February 24, 2008:


"People in the country are excited about change in general, and when you combine that with organizing tools that allow them to do stuff without someone looking over their shoulder, they can get a lot done," (he) said. "The thing that's important to remember is that at the end of the day, these are all grass-roots supporters. They're working directly with the campaign now, but in the past few months, they had zero or next to zero involvement with the campaign."

Some commentators have likened aspects of the Obama campaign to a cult, which causes true believers like Valli Frausto, 50-year old mother of two, to bristle.

"It's not a cult at all," she said. "I'm a professional person with two degrees." The purpose goes beyond Obama or this campaign to a larger issue of civic engagement, she said. "There are his policies, but he has also inspired Americans to become involved."

Or, as she wrote on her MyBO page: "With the organizational tools Barack's campaign is giving us, we, the people, can change history." 

As election day neared, and especially as the relative cluelessness of the John McCain campaign grew painfully obvious (he once referred to "using the google"), the sheer magnitude of what Obama and his team had accomplished was no longer relegated to the sidebar.  On November 3rd, though, articles--and even the campaign itself--remained in the dark as to whether this unprecedented effort would result in actual votes.

But ahead of the vote-count deadline, Adam Nagourney, chief political correspondent for the New York Times, wrote a piece entitled, "A Sea-Change for the Politics We Knew":


"I think we'll be analyzing this election for years as a seminal, transformative race," said Mark McKinnon, a senior adviser to President Bush's campaigns in 2000 and 2004. "The year campaigns leveraged the Internet in ways never imagined. The year we went to warp speed. The year the paradigm got turned upside down and truly became bottom up instead of top down."

It has rewritten the rules on how to reach voters, raise money, organize supporters, manage the news media, track and mold public opinion, and wage -- and withstand -- political attacks, including many carried by blogs that did not exist four years ago. It has challenged the consensus view of the American electoral battleground, suggesting that Democrats can at a minimum be competitive in states and regions that had long been Republican strongholds.

To a considerable extent, Republicans and Democrats say, this is a result of the way that the Obama campaign sought to understand and harness the Internet (and other forms of so-called new media) to organize supporters and to reach voters who no longer rely primarily on information from newspapers and television. The platforms included YouTube, which did not exist in 2004, and the cellphone text messages that the campaign was sending out to supporters on Monday to remind them to vote.


After Obama's smashing victory, it seemed to me that the old media was still slow to let go of the old ways.  I've watched the same men and women sitting around the conference tables on Sunday mornings spout off about how Obama will never be able to change the way government functions or harness the energy of those who contributed to his election or be able to accomplish so much of what he says he will--these are the same people who were saying, just a year ago, that he would never be able to win Iowa.

What is wrong with this picture?  Why is it that the people who were wrong all along are still asked for their opinions?

What is wrong with the picture is that, in the world of technological advancement, which doubles, on the average of every 18 months, sometimes change occurs so rapidly that most of us don't realize it has happened for a while.  And some get left behind.

Obama has already changed the way governing is done because he has already harnessed the energy of his supporters to do so, and I will get into that in my next few posts.

Here are a couple of links:

"Under Obama, the Web Would be the Way," by Shalaigh Murray and Matthew Mosk, Washington Post, November 10, 2009.

"Plugged-In Volunteers Blaze New Campaign Trail," by Amy Gardner, Washington Post, November 1, 2008.


But I'd like to end GROUNDSWELL, Part I with a little jewel of a story in the Boston Globe, dated November 8, 2008, by Steve Elman and Alan Tolz, called, "The Rising Irrelevance of Talk Radio":

Tolz and Elman detail how this is the first presidential election in more than 30 years on which talk radio had no major impact, and how, more ominously--they are no longer attracting new listeners but are, instead, largely preaching to the choir:


New ears - even middle-aged or senior ears - are vital to talk radio's influence because they are attached to brains that are available for persuasion, rather than brains that have already made a choice. In other words, if Limbaugh and Michael Savage (not to mention Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, and other more recent adventurers in talk) fail to attract many new listeners, they end up talking only to those who agree with their opinions, and thus have a smaller chance to affect the ideas of the electorate in general.