Barack Obama's Political (data) Base

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n an article written for technologyreview.com, David Talbot traces how the Obama campaign used new media to help secure the 2008 Democratic nomination. In particular, Talbot highlights the efficiency and effectiveness of Obama’s social networking site www.my.barackobama.com, or MyBO. Developed by Blue State Digital, MyBO powered the Obama political machine, helping Obama rake in donations and allowing supporters to organize locally and get out the vote. As Talbot writes: “The MyBO databases could slice and dice lists of volunteers by geographic microregion and pair people with appropriate tasks, including prepping nearby voters on caucus procedures.” Further, using MyBO, the Obama campaign managed phone banks, dividing massive call lists into scores of small “chunks” that local enthusiasts could access online. Probably most importantly, MyBO’s user-friendly and interactive fund-raising tools bankrolled the campaign, setting records along the way. As Talbot details: “By July 2008, the campaign had raised more than $200 million from more than a million online donors.” Finally, the Obama campaign leveraged established social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and viral Internet sites like YouTube to distribute media, including Obama’s speeches and the candidate’s overarching message.

To be clear, the Obama campaign did not “invent” online political networking. Indeed, the brains behind MyBO first developed a similar site for Howard Dean’s failed but nonetheless groundbreaking (in terms of its use of the web to raise money) 2004 presidential campaign. Moreover, Obama’s competition—first Hillary Clinton and then Republican John McCain—all developed web strategies. What Obama did do was recognize social networks’ true power and then make well-managed networks of supporters the core of his campaign (by contrast, Clinton, who sat atop the party establishment, relied more heavily on traditional campaigning methods like big-ticket fund-raising).

Obama’s 2008 online march to the presidency (and later his 2012 campaign for re-election) not only transformed campaigning but also presented profound implications for his presidency. In an article written for nytimes.com, David Carr points out that Obama’s “open-source campaign” created so much online popular support (and transformed that support into offline initiatives) that special-interest groups, lobbyists and even, at least to some extent, the Democratic Party now face an administration that “owes them nothing…and can take its case directly to its base [via the Internet].” Talbot, writing before Obama entered the Oval Office, also hints at the effects of using social networking sites to build a political (data) base. He writes: “If Obama wins but doesn’t govern according to the principles of openness and change, as promised, supporters may not be so interested in serving as MyBO foot soldiers [in the future].” Or as David Carr puts it: “There is sense of ownership, a kind of possessive entitlement, on the part of the people who worked to elect him. The shorthand for his organizing Web site, ‘MyBO,’ says it all.”

The effects of social networking on Obama’s campaign and presidency—and on American politics in general—brings me to a related topic that I discuss in my next entry: the danger to democracy associated with the so-called “Online Filter Bubble.”