The “New Organizers” have succeeded in building what many netroots-oriented campaigners have been dreaming about for a decade. Other recent attempts have failed because they were either so “top-down” and/or poorly-managed that they choked volunteer leadership and enthusiasm; or because they were so dogmatically fixated on pure peer-to-peer or “bottom-up” organizing that they rejected basic management, accountability and planning. The architects and builders of the Obama field campaign, on the other hand, have undogmatically mixed timeless traditions and discipline of good organizing with new technologies of decentralization and self-organization.
The world of organizational science has changed dramatically. Witness the decentralized / centralized Obama campaign as it changes the rules of political campaigns across a battleground state near you.
The real change is the lowered cost of participation. Not in the dollars and cents sense of cost but in the effort involved in getting up off of the couch. We don’t have to find our checkbook, an envelope and a stamp anymore to make a contribution to our favorite candidate. We can do it with two clicks of a mouse.
The Obama campaign is at the forefront of this right now. If I want to call voters in swing states, I have an iPhone app that will do the work for me. But pretty soon the rest of the political spectrum will catch up and then watch out.
But I’ve been thinking about the role of traditional marketing vs social media in the current campaign for the Democratic Nomination. And trying to make some over-arching metaphor to explain it all.
On the one hand you have Senator Clinton’s campaign and its (supposed) genius, Mark Penn of Burson Marsteller. The buzz-word at BM’s (please don’t giggle) C suite is microtrends. Here’s the low down from Amazon:
From “Soccer Moms,” the legendary swing voters of the mid-1990s, to “Late-Breaking Gays” such as former Gov. Games McGreevey (out at age 47), Burson-Marsteller CEO (and campaign adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton) Penn delves into the ever-splintering societal subsets with which Americans are increasingly identifying, and what they mean.
I can almost (almost) see the worker bees at BM (stop it!!) preparing their strategic plans with whole pages dedicated to ‘affluant at home moms’ and ‘NASCAR liberal dads’ not to mention ‘gays with minivans’ and ‘opera loving teens.’
As the Rude Pundit put it:
And so it’s even sadder that Hillary Clinton invested so much of her presidential ambitions in this wannabe intellectual, this bloated boob, who says smart sounding things like calling groups of people shit like “Impressionable Elites” and “Permissive Parents,” spouting vaguely coherent pop sociology like, “Numbers help you land on something that is incontrovertibly true.” Well, that is until they don’t.
On the other hand, Senator Obama raises millions every day from small donors who span the demographic classes we’ve been stuck with since the dawn of the Soccer Mom era. The most significant viral video of the entire campaign cost the campaign itself absolutely nothing and gets millions of downloads and views. And who is winning in the overall battle for momentum as we approach the grand finale of the primary season?
Penn’s thesis of microtrends might strike one at first glance to be an affirmation of the social media approach. After all, small things or communities eventually make up the whole of us. We’re all just dashes on the Long Tail. But as practiced by the Clinton campaign it’s more like the focus-group approach of traditional marketing. Get me a room full of teenagers and they will tell us what every skateboarder thinks. Or in the case of Clinton, get me a room full of boomer women and they will tell us what we want to hear.
The Clinton campaign’s attempts to portray their candidate as ‘just like you,’ whomever the ‘you’ who’s votes they need happens to be, has been laughable. Like the ‘I worked the night shift’ commercials currently playing in Ohio and Texas.
Does this strike you as the way traditional PR and marketing is done? And how traditional agencies and practitioners approach social media? Pick a ‘community’ you think exists, and pretend to be a part of it while always maintaining the illusion of transparency.
While the Obama campaign is doing it the way it should be done. Appeal to us as people, as individuals and at the same time as part of something bigger than all of us. Stop breaking down populations into ever smaller segments the same way the Nations of Europe split up the map of Africa and Asia in the 19th century. And let your audience tell you the truth, not what you want to hear. And don’t rely on statistical models and pop socialogy. People are not robots and are likely to do just the opposite of what your model is telling you.
So here we are. The candidate for a major party will either be a woman or a black man and let’s not gloss over that point. We are at a turning point.
But what about the individual candidates themselves? It took me a lot longer to get here than I thought. My candidate all along in this was John Edwards but even before he dropped out, I was certain I would have to chose between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama.
To be honest, and you can count this as one of the Eight Things You Didn’t Know About Me – despite being a raving left wing lunatic (and living down the road from her), I’ve never pulled the lever for Hillary. There’s something calculating there that I can’t quite get over. Something very narcissistic that screams out “I am Hillary, I am owed this.” Plus having worked on and off in the Party for most of my life, she represents to me the old school Party I saw in New York City – the Party that puts a woman on a ticket and expects women to vote for her, or a Jew or Latino. That sort of identity politics has marginalized the Democratic Party as badly as pandering to the worst elements of the Taliban Christian Right has hurt the Republicans.
Sure she’s got “35 years of experience” but what exactly has she done? I’m a New Yorker and I cannot point to one thing she has done as my Senator, apart from introducing a bill to regulate violence in video games and voting for the War in Iraq.
On the other side, all the knocks against Obama really don’t hold any water with me. Sure he’s inexperienced but so was Reagan, Bush, Carter and Clinton on the national stage. The only President we’ve had in recent years with any significant national government experience upon election was Bush 41 and look how well he did.
My beef with Obama is exactly what seems to be attracting all of the attention. Tossing around words like ‘hope’ and ‘change’ is all very well and good but let’s not forget that the same folks who have denied us national heath care, a living wage, a strong middle class and our standing in the world are still going to be fighting tooth and nail against any hope of change. It’s no accident Obama makes me think of Oprah tossing around bon mots like ‘the law of attraction.’ It’s entertaining in a train wreck sort of way, watching all of those suckers buy “The Secret” but would you want to elect a Leader of the Free World on that basis?
So what changed in my mind?
Sunday night I had the privlidge of hearing Ted Sorensen speak at my Town Democratic Committee’s annual fundraiser. He’s already endorsed and spoken on behalf of Senator Obama but on Sunday he said something that struck a chord with me. He said that we’ve lived with small men too long. That we need some big men (and women) to get things working again. And if someone who actually worked with (as opposed once read about or saw a speech by) John Kennedy thought Senator Obama is that ‘big man’ well there might be something there.
And then on the way home I realized that I hadn’t lost my idealism. My objections to Senator Clinton – that baby-boomer narcissism that was bothering me all along was clouding my thoughts. It was about idealism. It’s about restoring a sense of positive possibilities to this country after the last seven years of cynicism and war and the rest of it (and by extension the previous eight years of policy triangulation and personal psychodramas).
Finally it hit me that Obama is a man only two years older than I am. Someone who grew up like me with Reagan and Bush and the Me years and gradual erosion of our economic and civil liberties.
Voting for Barack Obama is as much about hope and change as it is about taking power away from the baby boomer generation – the generation that gave us not only the anti-war movement in the 60s but the Me-Generation of the 70s, the Reagan revolution of the 80s and two of the most flawed Presidents of the 20th Century. It’s about drawing a line in the sand and starting anew. It’s about taking power from the corporate power structure that’s run this country into the ground.
So it was with great hope and trepidation that I dragged my children out of bed and down to the Town Firehouse this morning to vote for Barack Obama.
David Parmet is a New York based PR and social media marketing guru who helps businesses and agencies navigate the seas of social media.
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