View Micah Sifry
Rapporteur: Laura Stein
Micah Sifry, “The Useful Myths of the Obama Campaign”
Sifry is the founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, a conference on how technology is changing politics. He’s also a founder of the Technology President forum, which produced data on how Presidential candidate use the Internet. He’s on the Board of the Sunlight Foundation, which uses the social web to give people access to Washington DC and broader US politics.
MS said people have misunderstood what Obama did with the Web during his presidential campaign. It was not a model of bottom up, voter-centric action. It was the first 21st century top down political campaign. American politics require a supporter base, media attention, volunteers and ultimately votes. By 2007, Obama had inspired voter-generated activism. An everyday citizen spontaneously started a web page a www.myspace.com/barackobama, and built a network of 30,000 friends. When Obama announced his presidential run, this site had no official connection to the Obama campaign. After initially collaborating with the super-volunteer who created the page and treating it as their de facto web page, in 2007 the campaign asked Myspace to take back the page. Myspace did so, violating it’s own terms of service. This incident is indicative of how the Obama campaign related to their base. The myth is that the people were the organization, and that web 2.0 met politics in this campaign. But MS suggests this may just be an example of 21st century marketing. Who was really empowered, the people or the campaign managers? Citing Yochai Benkler, MS noted that decentralized, non-market social sharing and exchange are expanding. In a networked public sphere, we can shift more toward an era of mass participation. User generated content during the election (90%) was bigger than content created by the campaign (10%). Most of the campaign’s budget was spent on traditional media, primarily television ($420 million), rather than on the Internet ($43 million). The Obama campaign created the myth that the campaign was all about the people, but the reality of the campaign was the traditional power brokers in suits. His campaign didn’t have as many small donors as the John Edwards campaign, but raised most of their money from Wall Street. The Obama administration supports government transparency, openness, and collaboration, but pursues traditional media opportunities and is afraid to let participation get out of control. His campaign didn’t want the disruption that open participation could bring. The central question going forward is, how do we collaborate, make government open, and become full participants in politics, rather than parts of a marketing campaign?
Discussion- Questions to Sifry included whether we could expect the Internet to enable an upwards transfer of power from people to politicians, whether the Obama campaign actively promoted the myth that his supporter base would have decision-making power, whether we could expect political campaigns to embrace any tactics other than marketing, to what degree does participation actually empower, and whether the mainstream media contributed to the myth of Internet empowerment. Sifry said that the Internet harbors the potential for political participation but not yet the reality. The message of the Obama campaign was good in that it set up an ideal of political participation, but it didn’t fully follow it, and allowed the political momentum built during the campaign to dissipate once the campaign was won. Nevertheless, the Internet holds the potential for real and increased public power. A qualitative change is taking place in people’s power, since they are now able to set the agenda in some respects, such as asking questions of the president in Internet forums. Technology can further enable people’s participation.
Rapporteur: Ben Moskowitz
Sifry is a writer, strategist, and co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum. He’s also an advisor to the Sunlight Foundation. His work explores the intersection of new technologies and participatory democracy.
Perhaps eager to rouse the jet-lagged assembly at Porto, Sifry kicked off his talk with a short screening of a clever mash-up called “Barack Obollywood.” In it, construction-paper cutouts of the 44th president trip, jerk, and pirouette with technicolor Bollywood dancers, crudely lip-synced to catchy Hindi lyrics. This is an example of what Sifry calls voter-generated content: the product of new modes of political participation and by now commonplace.
Sifry’s talk dismantled the “useful myths” of the Obama campaign: chiefly, that it was a campaign owned by the people. The truth, Sifry explained, is that the Obama machine was a sophisticated 21st century marketing machine.
An interesting story: in 2004, a 28-year-old paralegal named Joe Anthony was inspired by Obama’s keynote speech to the Democratic convention. Hoping to promote the rising politician, Joe created a profile MySpace.com/BarackObama and started building a friend network. Soon, people were asking Joe questions about Obama’s positions, for information on how to vote, and other substantive requests. Joe began to field these questions on a volunteer basis, and gradually began to dedicate more of his spare time toward maintaining and growing the Obama online presence.
In January 2007, Obama finally announced his bid for president. At the time, the Barack Obama MySpace profile had over 30,000 friends in its network—far more than any other candidate, Democrat or Republican. The press took notice, declaring that Obama was winning the “internet primary.” As Obama’s star rose, so too did Joe’s responsibility. Soon he was dedicating 5-6 hours a day toward building the Obama profile, still on a volunteer basis.
When the official Obama team initially learned of the profile, they began to cooperate with Joe, giving him advice on how to manage the page. Joe was a super-volunteer: with him in control, the friend network peaked at 160,000. The Obama team directed MySpace to treat the account as the de facto, official page of the campaign.
As the campaign heated up, the Obama team made an offer for Joe to quit his job and move to Chicago to work on the online strategy full-time. Joe declined. The Obama team said they’d compensate him for his work and take over, and asked him to draft a proposal. Joe came back with $39k and was instantly rejected. Shortly thereafter, the Obama campaign directed MySpace to close the account. MySpace accommodated this request, violating its own terms of service in the process.
“This was an X-ray into how Obama campaign was interacting with its base,” said Sifry. The common perception of the campaign was web 2.0 meets politics. In reality, he argues, the campaign was engaged in highly sophisticated, 21st century marketing. The Obama numbers were impressive: 200k local events held, 2 million profiles created on Obama’s official site, 35k volunteer groups. But who was in power?
To illustrate, Sifry cited Yochai Benkler’s four transactional frameworks:
decentralized | market-based: price-system
decentralized | non-market: social sharing and exchange
centralized | market-based: firms
centralized | non-market: government; non-profits
The kind of activity taking place in the Obama campaign—decentralized/non-market production—is generally expanding because of declining transactional costs. “I do think we are entering into an age of mass participation in the political process,” Sifry said. But instead of giving these volunteers seats at the table, he argues, the Obama campaign simply assigned them tasks (recalling Schuler’s barb this morning: “how does it feel to be harnessed?”).
Was the Obama campaign really as organically bottom-up as it was portrayed in the political press? A few refutations were in order: first, despite reports to the contrary, Obama’s percentage of small donors was similar to George W. Bush’s numbers in 2004. Second, the vast expenditure of all Obama campaign funds was on traditional tactics like TV advertising. Did the Obama campaign’s superb internet machine tilt the balance? No doubt. But the campaign was not as people-powered or Internet-native as Howard Dean’s 2004 bid.
The Obama campaign provides a prototype for how campaigns will be run in the future. But the model needs improvement. Web 2.0 provides unprecedented opportunities for political participation. Can campaigns sustain real participation? Can we make e-governance work?