I, Obot: What will Obama's tech gurus Shift+Control next? By Tim Dickinson

[Demeter]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2009/01/outfront-shift-plus-control.html

In late October—the day after General Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama put to rest any doubts of the Democrat's standing to become commander in chief—Obama received a second, perhaps more telling, endorsement from Eric Schmidt, the moonfaced, bespectacled ceo of Google. Schmidt not only vouched for Obama as a candidate for the Oval Office, he deadpanned that the Democrat might be qualified to take the reins at the Googleplex. "These guys managed to hire 3,000 people, create a billion dollars in revenue, and recruit a million volunteers in two years," he told me in a postelection interview. "Those numbers are faster than Google's—and Google was the fastest thing I've ever seen."

The praise offered validation—if any were still needed—that Obama had created the most technologically innovative, entrepreneurially driven campaign in American political history. Now, more than a decade after Bill Clinton promised it, Obama is about to march the federal government across the bridge to the 21st century. He has vowed to bring every federal agency up to current tech standards, appoint the nation's first chief technology officer (see "Hail to the Geek"), and "use technology to open up our government...and invite all Americans in." In short, to end Dick Cheney's reign of darkness with Internet-powered sunshine.

For those who immersed themselves in the campaign text by text and tweet by tweet, it's easy to lose perspective of just how radical a challenge Obama presented to the traditional model of politics. From Richard Nixon through George W. Bush, the essence of presidential campaigning had been "a tarmac hit, a 30-second spot, and 200 kids in the campaign headquarters," says Simon Rosenberg, founder of the New Politics Institute, a think tank that focuses on the intersection between politics and the Internet. Obama, by contrast, leveraged Web 2.0 technologies to create a bottom-up campaign that got millions of people to pitch in, not just as donors but as partners.

Necessity was the mother of this invention. "It was brilliant—and they had no choice," says Schmidt. Facing in Hillary Clinton a primary opponent who'd mastered the top-down techniques and had locked up the backing (and dollars) of the party elite, Obama was forced to trust his fate to small-time donors and community activists. Early on, he snatched up key talent, including Chris Hughes, his "online organizing guru" and one of the wunderkind founders of Facebook, as well as Joe Rospars, a droll 27-year-old who looks like he might be John "I'm a PC" Hodgman's younger brother (and who was a key player in Howard Dean's failed bid for the White House) as his new media director.

The results were impressive. Obama—who never took much interest in courting the existing netroots establishment—didn't merely build his own MoveOn, he trebled it, with an email list that is now estimated to top 10 million. The campaign's wildly successful text-message stunt—breaking the news of its VP selection exclusively to those who'd signed up for a text alert—allowed Rospars & Co. to amass nearly 3 million cell phone numbers, and then to target text messages to the pockets, purses, and belt clips of Obama's most motivated supporters...



Tim Dickinson writes Rolling Stone's National Affairs blog.