Aviva Total Politics 2010 Election Map

Total Politics - because knowledge is power

 

Obama's 13 million buddies

 

Tim Shipman

 

Can the new President turn the vast online movement that secured his election into a voluenteer force that will remake America? Tim Shipman reports.

 

A week before his inauguration, I received an email from Barack Obama. An exciting prospect you would think, particularly since the new President is such an emailsavvy figure, who echoed Charlton Heston's affection for his gun in telling the Secret Service that they would have to prise his BlackBerry from his cold, dead hands.

 

But as anyone who has spent the last year on Obama's email list knows, electronic communication from the big man is hardly rare and certainly not the basis of an exclusive relationship. By the time he was elected, in part by a new generation of similarly tech-savvy voters, Obama's email list contained 13 million names. The Obama email was the last in a succession of electronic begging letters, urging his grassroots supporters to send more cash. The pleas, from a man who had raised three quarters of a billion dollars to get elected, rubbed some of his hard-up supporters the wrong way, as Obama raised money to pay for his inauguration. It highlighted the dilemma the new President (and every politician since parliaments were a glint in Magna Carta's eye) has faced in trying to keep voters interested in politics in the years between elections.

 

Obama's fate in this regard is an object of fascination for politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, since here is a man who finally delivered on the promise of using technology to bring in young people and transform politics.

 

When he visited the US last year, Gordon Brown grumbled his way around a reception at the British Embassy. But when asked what Labour was doing to emulate Obama's internet operations, his face positively lit up. The holy grail for British politicians is to see if it is possible to win people over with web savvy, even where there is no fresh-faced leader to inspire them. This is Obama 1.0.

 

The holy grail for the new President is to somehow hang on to this army of young allies.

 

More than a million people asked for campaign text messages, two million joined MyBO, a website which combined elements of Facebook-style social networking with volunteer work for the campaign. More than five million made friends with Obama on Facebook, MySpace and other web networks. On election day, one in four of Obama's voters were directly linked to him through these networks, an astonishing and unprecedented figure.

 

In that context, the most significant event of inauguration week was not the two million strong crowd, the fluffed oath or Michelle Obama's taste in clothes, it was a web video (what else?!) that Obama released as his train chugged from Philadelphia to Washington announcing the creation of Organising for America. Welcome to what those in the know are calling "OFA 2.0". To the rest of us, that's Obama For America two point oh. 

 

Organising for America is President Obama's answer to the question: what are you going to do with your email list? It's a group that will try to enlist his young supporters in volunteering, develop community organisers like himself who can go on to hold local and national office. In short, the BlackBerry generation is being told to put down its laptops and hit the streets.

 

In his video message, Mr Obama said: "As President, I will need the help of all Americans to meet the challenges that lie ahead. That's why I'm asking people like you who fought for change during the campaign to continue fighting for change."

 

Volunteering and organising is in Mr Obama's blood. It's an issue he cares about. The day before he was sworn in, his fans ran 10,000 volunteering events around the country to mark Martin Luther King Day. But even if he was not passionate about grassroots organising, this is a way of channelling the public spirit that his campaign unleashed into something productive. "Government can only do so much," he said that day as he helped decorate a Washington high school. "If we're waiting for someone else to do something, it never gets done."

 

But, politically at least, the most important point is not that his people will be doing anything useful, it is that they will remain selfconsciously part of Obama's team, engaged in the political process and ready to anchor his re-election bid in four years time. Daniel Parker, Indiana's state party chairman, was franker than most when he said: "It's  important that the structure is staying in place because 2012 will be here before we know it."

 

Most intriguingly, after a summer in which she spent more time as a daytime talk show guest and glossy magazine cover girl than a political player, Michelle Obama's office has announced that the new First Lady will make volunteering one of her core areas of interest. Her spokeswoman, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, revealed in a timely fashion that Mrs Obama's favourite former job was as founding chief executive of the Chicago branch of Public Allies, an organisation that trains young adults to become community organisers and project managers for charitable  groups. 

 

Expect Mrs O to keep the troops sweet for 2012 while her husband makes decisions that risk alienating some of them.

US law prevents the White House from accessing a campaign email list, so Organising for America will be run by the Democratic National Committee, which Obama's ally Tim Kaine has taken over.

 

But Obama isn't stopping there. Take a look at whitehouse.gov (and make sure you type it accurately or you will swiftly find yourself on a pornographic website) and you will see it looks pretty much the same as Obama's campaign website. Indeed, the web builders came under fire within 48 hours for putting partisan denunciations of George W Bush on the White House site, which is traditionally seen as an outlet of the office rather than the man.

 

Those who want to follow the progress of the Obama administration can sign up to that email list too. Millions probably will, giving Obama two hotlines back to the people who put him where he is. Half a million of his supporters made suggestions about the new organisation and others were connected at random on conference calls to discuss what worked and what didn't in recruiting Obama voters last November. In a new spirit of openness, the public will be able to scrutinise all bills online for a week before they are signed.

 

Much of this is already being done in the UK. Online consultations on legislation are commonplace. Petitions on the Downing Street website have achieved a cult following as people seek to censure the government or, (encouraged by my old colleague Dave Wooding of The Sun) ennoble yet more legends of Liverpool Football Club. But what is novel here is that Obama is seeking to turn things around and instead of just listening to voters, he is trying to mobilise them.

 

Downing Street official Derek Draper seems to be trying something similar at the UK blog site LabourList ("Where Labourminded people come together" - which only sounds like a pornographic website). But there seems little immediate prospect that his ruminations will reach anything other than a narrow band of Labour supporters - hardly a growth area at present. To get the 2.0 you first have to build the 1.0. Obama has it and may be about to prove that while web 2.0 is an excellent weapon for executive power, it might be rather less liberating for elected parliamentary and congressional politicians.

 

The sting in the tale for the legislature is that Obama wants Organising for America to lobby on behalf of his  programme for government. In practise that will mean bombarding senators and representatives with emails, letters and phone calls urging them to vote for his plans.

 

It may not be long before the overwhelming numbers and unprecedented organisation of these Obama armies are a distinct pain in the proverbial for elected officials, which could create greater friction with the White House rather than acquiescence to it. Congressmen will have to be more sophisticated at taking soundings to see what their constituents really think because critics of Mr Obama are likely to be swamped in numbers in their inboxes and in-trays by his young web-savvy friends.

 

Obama's ambition is nothing less than to maintain a movement that will force legislators into his slipstream as he remakes America. It could allow him to speak over the heads of the bitterly divided Washington world, and without the not-always-friendly translation services of the mainstream media. It won't be easy. Making laws is often compared to making sausages. It is an unseemly business best not observed by the consumer, in this case the Obamaphile voter.

 

And the dangers are there for Obama too. Stray too far from the left wing orthodoxy of his supporters and he will find himself on the receiving end of an avalanche of complaints. But the prize is a large one. Peter Levine, director of a civics research group at Tufts University said: "Barack Obama won an unprecedented 66 percent of the under-30 vote. Ronald Reagan set the previous record with 59 per cent in 1984. The Reagan cohort has remained conservative ever since. Obama now has an opportunity to achieve a lasting realignment. There will be Obama Democrats in 2060 the way there are New Deal Democrats today."

 

 

Tim Shipman is Washington correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph