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In Portcullis house last night David Lammy MP spoke about the lessons Labour could learn from Barack Obama’s campaign for the US Presidency. Aside from the obvious rejoinder that this campaign may yet fail it’s worth looking in particular at Obama’s use of the internet and what lesson politicians in general could take from that.
Until recently the internet was seen more as an obstacle to be negotiated and something campaign teams had to ‘manage’ rather than an opportunity to exploit – a difficult view to shake when the most notable impacts on US politics to date had been essentially negative - the ‘Dean Scream’ in 2004 or George Allen’s 'macaca' remark in 2006.
But the Obama campaign managed to turn these technologies to their advantage in a number of important ways.
• Fundraising - breaking (or at least weakening) the dependency on big corporate or union donations is an important part of Barack’s ‘change’ narrative and the internet allowed him to raise huge amounts of money from a large number of very small donors.
• Profile – smart use of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter etc.) allowed Barack to overcome the distinct disadvantage he had over his nomination rivals in terms of name recognition. It’s hard to believe now that only 9 months ago none but political geeks would’ve been able to name Obama.
• Participation – to some extent an amalgamation of the previous two but the sheer numbers of those donating to his campaign and interacting via his various online ‘homes’ meant Obama was able to create a ‘buzz’ around his candidacy in a way that his rivals couldn’t. In substantive policy terms there was no tremendous distance between him and his Democratic rivals so it’s hard to justify this buzz on those grounds. His use of technology is one possible explanation.
• Tone - Obama’s embrace of new technology was a perfect fit for his pitch as a ‘new type of candidate’ and was bound to have particular resonance among the young. As it became clear he was likely to face a 72 year old opponent this advantage became all the more stark.
The lessons for UK campaigning are clear and both main parties are starting to explore the possibilities – witness ‘Cameron Direct’ & Gordon Brown’s You Tube sessions. The danger (and one that Obama and others in the US seem to be avoiding) is making sure that you’re using the internet to genuinely broaden involvement in politics rather than just extending it to bloggers and a small army of political obsessives willing to engage anyway. To date in the UK it’s this latter group who have dominated the interaction between politics and the internet but if either party is to come close to aping Obama’s successes they’ll need to broaden their audience considerably.
3 comments
Youtube has good potential for more targeted discussion on the internet about campaigns and issues, since bloggers can embed the videos into webpages or e-mails about a particular subject.
This makes viewers more likely to be susceptible to the message than through blanket, expensive TV advertising.
The political Youtube videos posted by the Aussie leaders seemed to be generally well received by the public although its always important not to appear contrived.
Homespun videos are a definite no-no - Cameron's efforts have certainly been binned into the "Not Cool" category. Professional videos, on a par with music videos, fair much better on Youtube.
I think the challenge with the internet is how exploit the benefits but avoid the dangers. Youtube is a great medium provided you're never caught off-guard. In those circumstances it can kill a political campaign stone dead in a matter or hours...
"it is all about engaging the people in the political process".
That has policy implications. I think the most important one is probably smaller local authorities allowed to make bigger mistakes.
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