Fundraising in the First Campaign

Even though we are in the middle of the First Campaign, Barack Obama has already written one chapter of the lesson learned book from this election cycle. It is the cahpater about fundraising.

 

It may not be surprising that the story of Obama is a story of money. He needed a lot of money to compete with Hillary Clinton in the primaries and for building a remarkable campaign operation. How did he do it? Joshua Green asked the question in an article in the Atlantic Monthly in June and answered:

 

“…He (Obama) built a fund-raising machine quite unlike anything seen before in national politics. Obama’s machine attracts large and small donors alike, those who want to give money and those who want to raise it, veteran activists and first-time contributors, and—especially—anyone who is wired to anything: computer, cell phone, PDA.”

 

Obama has done what insurgents like John McCain in 2000 and Howard Dean in 2004 were not able to do because the social networking tools and culture were not as advanced then as they are now. Joe Trippi explains in his book why McCain did not have more success with his digital campaign in 2000; “Not enough snow had been plowed by Amazon.com, eBay, and all the travel agencies for a political candidacy to make much headway” (Trippi, 2005, p.82). In this term, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn have plowed a path for Obama that did not exist during the Dean for America campaign in 2004 or for McCain in 2000.  

 

Trippi talked about the Perfect Storm (Trippi, 2005, p. 119) in 2004, and it is even more perfect and stormy today; Obama has raised $265 million from more than 1.5 million donors in the end of June 2008. Obama is relying so much on small donors that he opted out of public funding.

 

The online force behind Obama’s success is MyBarackObama.com. It is based on the idea of social networking; besides connecting friends and share information the assumption is that people are more comfortable receiving information from friends they trust than from a newspaper or an expert. Furthermore, the campaign has been lowering the barriers to entry and raised the expectations for supporters who have to do more than just have a bumper sticker on the car. According to Joe Rospars, Obama’s new-media director and a Dean veteran, the campaign wants supporters to donate money, make calls, or host an event. “If you look at the messages we send to people over time, there’s an assumption that they will organize,” Rospar said to Green from the Atlantic Monthly.

 

On MyBarackObama.com, you can create a personal site with our own fundraising goals and thermometer, friends, and groups.  You can blog and write emails – just like on Facebook. And you can’t miss the donation bottom. I noticed when Hillary was in the race that Obama’s fundraising attempts were much more “in your face all the time you were on the website.” It does not matter what you do in this network, and you will see the pledge for donations. You are also encouraged to leave an email address, and the campaign will come back to your inbox with a very-well crafted email )check this link for the anatomy of a perfect email) mentioning the pledge for donations several times. Besides the social-networking website, the social media strategy also includes cell phones and ring tones generating money and votes.

 

I can’t wait till the election is over, and Obama staffers begin to tell the stories and anecdotes from this campaign. I have just finished Joe Trippi’s book “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and I was just as thrilled reading the book as Trippi was in 2003 seeing the rise of the merger of politics and technology.

Conversations in Concentric Circles

Last night, Michael Silberman, Deans’s National Meetup Director visited our class and lectured us about his experiences at the Dean Campaign in 2003 and 2004. Blogging It In sums up the wisdom of crowds behind the Dean Campaign or you can read Silberman’s detailed account in the anthology; Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope (chapter nine). Here’re a few of my thoughts after class.

 

I might be repeating my blogging from the spring semester but it is getting more and more obvious to me that Dean’s use of the internet was not just a purely strategic choice. Well, there were no other choices because of the lack of money, resources, and staffers according to Garrett Graff. But it was also a strategic choice aimed at cultivating a more transparent and collaborative process. I am fascinated by Joe Trippi’s understanding or idea of trusting the base and let the campaign come out from their efforts. Instead of perceiving a campaign as a traditional command-demand hierarchy he approached the campaign as concentric circles. Collaboration and conversations spread through these concentric circles. The base owned the campaign was the message as well as the fact.

 

However, Garrett Graff pointed out that Dean could only do this because he was behind. Frontrunners will never give up control like this  -  because they cannot afford it. As much as I admire Trippi´s approach, I agree (not just because Graff is my professor). Sey and Castells explain in the reflections part of Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope (chapter eightteen) that politicians are afraid of opening up the process because it will be time consuming and “erode representative democracy” (p.227). Furthermore, Sey and Castells note that controlling the message is an obsession just like money for any campaign. Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter (part of the Dean Campaign) are also uncertain that politics will become more open (see p. 240). They make the distinction between distributed work and decentralized power. For instance, if I send a suggestion to Starbucks it is not “transforming my lack of power in the organization into a fact of power” (p.241). Though, there is a tension between using the internet as a strategic tool to win the next election by any means and using the internet to cultivate a democratic society (p. 234).

 

Where do Obama’s and McCain’s campaigns fit into the appraoch of concentric conversations?