Almost exactly a year before his electoral triumph this November 4, Barack Obama told a room full of Google employees at the company?s headquarters that ?the internet is perhaps the most open network in history.? For economic historians, no more than for those of other creeds, expanding networks have provided key cornerstones for commercial and social transformations throughout history. Take the global silk routes that Ptolemy documented in the second century or the transcontinental railroad that opened up the American West to big commerce in the 19th century. In comparison to most such meta-exchange forums, the web does indeed offer a more democratic structure, albeit one with a pecking order of its own.
With a high 72.5% internet penetration as compared to the world?s 21.9%, the US was of course ripe for a web-driven election. One in three Americans have posted a comment or rating, one in five have posted something they created themselves and 90% of those younger than 29 use the internet. But without a candidate committed to re-envisioning democracy for a new technological era (when his opponent didn?t even use e-mail), this election?s e-connection may have been nothing to write home about.
As a measure of this commitment, consider a bill that Obama pushed through along with Republicans John McCain and Tom Coburn) in 2006, a bill that seeks to create a Google-like search engine and database to help Americans track $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks and loans. Coburn said at the time that the group that deserved credit for passing the bill was not Congress, but the army of bloggers and concerned citizens who told Congress that transparency is a just demand for all citizens, not a special privilege for political insiders.
As his critics have cried, Obama has a thin legislative history. But what this, arguably his most compelling Senate vote after the one he cast against the Iraq war, reveals is a steady oneness with the principles that made his campaign such a runaway success: commitment to both bipartisan coalition-building and the idea that America?s system of government does go forward when its people take on the reins. It?s evidence that the online chapter of Obama?s change story had been on the burner for some time, gathering momentum with each new sous chef, sponsor, patron and punter that stepped on board.
The financial tsunami thus churned up reached a crescendo in September, when Obama collected a stunning $150m, almost 75% of it via the web. Putting to shame the less than $18m that George W Bush totaled in two election cycles, the Obama campaign has rewritten the playbook for political moneymen of the future. But whether the masses that dropped in the e-bucks this time around will do the same for less inspiring or connected candidates is anybody?s guess. After all, the Obama team did not just amass 13m email addresses and 3.2m friends on Facebook, it also attracted a tidal flurry of user-generated content. Some 280,000 personal pages on mybarackobama.com, a deluge of photos, videos, blogs and social networking posts. And this web mania was not disconnected from a larger story, where the Obamans never ran short of old-fashioned, big money either, where they pulled in more votes on election night than anyone had ever won before. The larger story in short: the most money and most votes raised from the most people in American history.
This campaign didn?t just use its army of volounteers to raise money or identify and register voters, it put open-source principles to work on the ground too. As campaign manager David Plouffe has noted, it didn?t have to wait for a state to report in on how they did on a given night because it trusted the volunteers: ?We gave them the voter file, we said here are the people on your block, you go talk to ?em, you record the result of the conversation. We in Chicago could look at that… It makes you enormously agile. You?ve got real-time data, and that makes you make scheduling decisions and resource-allocation decisions and where to send surrogates and you?re adjusting those by the end multiple times a day.? But such a grassroots network, like the online one, wouldn?t have got to the goalpost without great directions. Just as Facebook messages were regularly answered, just as negative segments were rebutted with rapid blogging or Youtube posting, just as mass emails were modified to reflect age, gender and even neighbourhood specific targets, so serious resources were put into training the ground volunteers who pulled in the field data to which campaign strategy would regularly readjust.
Back in 2006, Time justified its unusual decision to give the person of the year title to a generic You: ?It?s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes. The tool that makes this possible is the world wide web.? Specifically web 2.0, which brings together the small contributions of millions and makes them matter. The magazine?s choice this year was much more predictable: Obama. But the two choices are part of one whole, with the groundswell of one sending a booming echo through the other.
Some fear that in tapping into an upsurge of voter activism, Obama has taken a tiger by the tail. Such is the passion and variety of his constituency, how is he going to live up to its hopes? He is after all expected to get the US out of Iraq and embark on a love affair with the rest of the world while simultaneously rebuilding the economy, making sure that people get to keep their houses and healthcare, not to mention delivering cleaner and cheaper fuels. However he prioritises and tackles these issues in 2009, Obama has pledged a five-day period on the White House website where the public can comment on any legislation before he signs it into law. During the transition period, the subjects of different meetings and the documents shared therein are being posted on change.gov. What will all this interactivity mean for governance?
First, this quest for transparency is in sharp contrast to the Bush years that have seen the Freedom of Information Act exemptions cited to withhold information increase 83%. Second, appearances apart, it does not set the stage for direct democracy or a digital mob of some kind. Instead, we will likely see more of that ability to channel assorted interactions into practical directions, so ably demonstrated during the campaign period. Finally, many of Obama?s appointments have already annoyed one or the other set of hyper-activists, without any significant number announcing a divorce so far. That the tryst with Obamaspeak has survived two months of bad news piled on top of more bad news, bodes well for its future, for his ability to make tough calls, perhaps even frontloading his first term with these.
As for the elephant in the room, Obama appears to bear the burden of American racism lightly, but that doesn?t mitigate the burden itself. His victory, on the other hand, does. As The Australian asked: ?Which other big, rich, predominantly white society has elected a member of a racial minority to be its head of government?? France?s Liberation wrote: ?It seems like America could teach us a thing or two about democracy.? A compelling sense of new possibilities for politics is Obamerica?s greatest gift to the world so far. We will keep our fingers crossed for further presents in the New Year.
