Team Obama trotted out its secret weapon for the fall campaign the other day. To quote an email message sent to supporters by deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, that weapon is “you.” Put another way, Obama is depending again – as he did in 2008 – on a vast army of volunteers bound by online social networks.
Cutter was encouraging recruits to join a “Truth Team” that would promote Obama’s record and rebut the charges already being launched by his Republican rivals. As she wrote: “We’ll provide resources for you to learn everything you need to know and tools to help you share it with undecided voters in your life.” That’s three “you’s” and one “your” in one sentence.
In explaining Team Obama’s strategy, spokesman Ben LaBolt told The Washington Post: “We believe that our grass-roots supporters persuading their networks to support the president will provide us with the decisive edge in November.”
Obama won for many reasons in 2008, but one of the biggest was his mastery of social media and the new ways that voters – particularly younger voters – were receiving information about politics. He and his advisers understood that the whole media environment was rapidly shifting from a vertical, top-down model to a horizontal, peer-to-peer model. The public relations company Edelman created a “trust barometer” and asked people which sources of information they would find most “credible.” No. 1 was “a person like yourself.”
Moreover, this new system was not about one-way communication; it was interactive. Information was exchanged, conversations conducted, communities created. New technologies – smartphones, tablets, BlackBerrys – meant that anyone who got a message could also send one. Every volunteer, every voter, was potentially a broadcaster, a publisher, an organizer.
As a result, citizens saw themselves and their roles differently. They went from passive recipients of information to active players in the political process. They acquired a sense of ownership in the campaign and a greater stake in its outcome. In an important sense, the real revolution of 2008 took place inside peoples’ heads.
The president’s comparative advantage will be far less this year. Rivals such as the tea party have studied his success and duplicated his approach. His ability to tap small donors online will be balanced out by wealthy contributors giving millions to unregulated super PACs. And at least some of the young people who worked their hearts out for Obama are dispirited by the persistent unemployment rates and rancorous partisanship that have marked the president’s first term.
