To wrap up for the week: Thanks to all for participating. We had some healthy disagreements and I recommend that readers look at the posts below and also scan some of the good comments.

I thought I'd close on a lighter note, while also posing a question: How big a role did "comedy" play in the 2008 and is this a role that will only grow in campaigns ahead? Let's hear from you.

I ask this now as wide attention continues to focus on Jon Stewart's CNBC takedown from Wednesday night. Thanks to Web links, millions more have seen it beyond watchers of "The Daily Show" and I suspect that it made vivid for the first time, for many, the true culpability of TV pundits in the economic meltdown.

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Greg and I will just have to disagree about whether the economic collapse did more to doom McCain's candidacy than the nomination of Sarah Palin. (Though while we are on the subject of V for Viral I have to personally plead guilty to sending everyone I know of voting age a link to this video which I'm also saving till 2012 just in case....)

And I'm glad to see the shout out to Tina Fey. My decidedly unscientific sense is that SNL's skewering of Palin probably cost the GOP 3 states. And though for those of us outside the range of NBC's transmitters the internet made it possible to savor the skit again (and again and again), I'm not sure SNL really counts as new media.

So instead I want to pick up on the question of whether, by sweeping past the MSM gatekeepers, the new media really does push not just political coverage but politics itself in a more democratic direction.

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Let me first thank Kyle and Lila for asking me to participate in this week's book chat and of course thanks to Greg Mitchell for writing such a thought-provoking book.

Greg is really on to something about the importance of new media in political campaigns. It's not simply a question of using digital technology to get your message out, but it is also about how technology transforms the way candidates raise money and organize their supporters. The former in particular was not only hugely beneficial to the Obama campaign but by giving more Americans the opportunity to support their candidate it really helped democratize the political process and empowered millions of citizens.

The benefits to our democracy of the trends that Greg notes are really vast. I remember when I was a kid and I wanted to follow the presidential campaigns I had to rely on the 2-3 minute snippet from the evening news. Today, anyone can go online and read and watch the candidate's speeches, check out their positions, meet like-minded folks, find a place to volunteer etc. The extent to which new media is opening up American democracy so that more people can participate is perhaps the most important takeaway from the 2008 campaign. And I think we can all agree that this is a uniformly good thing!

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Thanks for all the postings so far, which are all interesting, and wise, especially about some of the limits of "new media" in the post-campaign period.

Some, however, have misread my initial postings. I never wrote that Bill Clinton hitting the campaign trail was "the" turning point in the race but only "a" turning point. I never said his offensive statements alone were the reason millions of African-Americans suddenly switched from Hillary to Obama but only that they really helped promote that process.

As for the economic crisis, not the Palin pick, dooming McCain: Polls showed that McCain had tied the score with Obama very briefly during the GOP convention but when details about Palin's background and complete lack of national or international experience quickly emerged, Obama took the lead again and never looked back. Yes, the economic crisis sealed McCain's doom but, in my view, he would have lost anyway because of Palin (along with the Bush legacy and the "change" motive). The one thing McCain had going for him was "experience" and he threw that away with the Palin choice.

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I salute Greg Mitchell both for the clarity of his argument and the boldness of his claim. What were the key moments in the campaign: Bill Clinton's plunge into campaigning for Hilary and John McCain's decision to pick Sarah Palin as his running mate. Why did Obama win? Because he alone understood the new media and the new political landscape they opened up.

As it happens I don't agree with any of these propositions, but however much I may fault his logic I admire Greg for not hedging his bets. Also I think he's completely right that the new media (blogs, websites, RSS feeds) have completely changed the way campaigns are and can be covered. And like him I think that change is mostly a good thing. Indeed I once wrote that the new media "has gone a long way toward providing a level playing field for political reporters around the country. It is now possible for a reporter based in Seattle, for example, to read what the Arkansas papers have to say about Clinton's record -- in some cases even before those papers are on the newsstands." That was back in 1992, when the new media I had in mind was the American Political Network's Campaign Hotline, an e-mailed digest that is to the internet what the Stanley Steamer is to a Toyota Prius!

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I agree with the importance to Obama's election of the "new media" but it seems to me that, however it is delivered, it is the message itself that determines whether or not any media is effective in delivering it. If a candidate knows what it is he wants to do, what he believes is best for the country, then the message can be shaped to any media. But if the message itself is not attractive, the media isn't going to save it.

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Greg Mitchell and David Shorr have each made interesting points about the "new media". I am at a huge disadvantage as an economist, since I don't know much about political science and even less about electoral politics. I will admit that I was not convinced that Candidate Obama had much of a chance until fairly late in the campaign. That is when I began to see Obama signs on many of the lawns in my mostly white and working class neighborhood in mostly Republican Kansas. I was finally moved even beyond the audacity of hope on a boyscouting trip to the Ozarks, where I found the number of Obama signs lagging only slightly the number of McCain signs. I don't think these are the outposts of the new media.

My reading of this was, and remains, an intense dissatisfaction with the favor-the-rich, fuel-the-fear policies of the previous administration(s). I cannot recall campaign signs in neighborhoods such as mine in previous elections. Beyond the dissatisfaction was a palpable sentiment of hope. Greg did downplay the role of the economy in the election, and to some degree I concur: most people had no idea how bad things would get, and how quickly they would get bad. Still, most Americans had already had a fairly miserable 8 years of Bushonomics--and even the Clinton rising tide had left behind tens of millions. Many of them finally found a reason to vote. I recall that local activists had predicted a surge of votes by the discontented in the previous election--but Kerry simply could not move them. Obama did, and continues to do so.

Why Obama Won author Greg Mitchell has put a strong and clear claim on the table regarding the role of new media technologies in the Obama campaign, its victory, and the rewriting of the rules for how to run for president. I think Greg is right that these technologies were a key to the victory, but because of doubts about the relative weight of this factor, I want to raise some questions.

With apologies to Marshall McLuhan, some of my questions ask whether embracing new media required some other key decisions as a logical extension, or whether those were separate choices. For instance, one trade-off for a campaign that puts a premium on empowerment of supporters and a widespread sense of ownership is diminished control. Which comes first, adoption of social networking modes of operation, or the desire to base your campaign on cultivating the maximal involvement of every supporter? When President Obama spoke to voters in terms of the challenges we all share as a nation, to what extent was that shaped by the new media environment, or vice versa? How about the "no drama" teamwork ethic that came down from the top of the organization? Perhaps these are all bound up with each other, but if so, shouldn't we be talking about them as pieces of a larger whole, rather than as technologically driven (even using the wider sense of technique)?

And then what about the "post-politics" aspect of the campaign? Maybe it's because I'm also a pointy-headed (not to mention large-eared) 47-year-old, but I place a lot of stock in the generational element. I think the do-whatever-works pragmatism and the baby-boomer-fights-over-the-60s-have-nothing-to-do-with-me rejection of stale debates were significant, and I'm not sure if they're inextricably bound with the new media.

Hello readers, and thanks to all for participating in this weeklong discussion on the 2008 race for the White House - and what it means for the future of politics and political campaigns in America.

My new book, Why Obama Won, is my third on historic campaigns. A few years ago I wrote books for Random House on Upton Sinclair's "EPIC" campaign for governor of California in 1934 (most of the modern political media/ad techniques were born during that race) and the Nixon-Douglas 1950 U.S. Senate contest. The new book chronicles the entire 2008 campaign, with all of the controversies and key characters, from Jeremiah the Preacher to Joe the Plumber.

So let's talk about why Obama won - particularly new media vs. old media -- and the lessons for the future.

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This week at book club, Greg Mitchell editor of Editor & Publisher and author of So Wrong for So Long joins us for a discussion of his latest, Why Obama Won: The Making of a President 2008.

As he remarks in his opening post (up shortly):

But more than anything the book explores the profound influence of what we'll call, in shorthand, "new media" in propelling Obama to victory. Obama, with the help of an unprecedented grassroots funding and organizing effort, battled the Clinton machine to a standstill, then knocked out McCain a few months later. This was the first national campaign profoundly shaped -- even, at times, dominated -- by the new media, from viral videos and blog rumors that went "mainstream" to startling online fundraising techniques.

You might call it Campaign 2.008.

Joining him are Randall Wray, economics professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City; David Shorr, expert in national security strategy and the US role in the world at the Stanley Foundation; Michael Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation; Nick Katzenbach, Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson; and D.D. Guttenplan, writer for The Nation. Come by and weigh in.