A sterile conference room in an anonymous Chicago skyrise, littered with empty coke cans and packets of biscuits, seemed an inauspicious place to announce plans to change the world. Yet in such a room in 2006 Barack Obama told his most trusted advisers that, yes, he was going to run for president. He was clear on one point, though: this was going to be “a different kind of campaign.”
The differentness of the campaign Obama ran—and the “movement” of millions that joined him—became political folklore long before a ballot had been cast. The trumping of team Clinton, in particular, overturned a generation of conventional wisdom about how politics worked. Previous campaigns relying on idealistic volunteers and new technology, like that of Vermont Governor Howard Dean, tended to lose. But Obama took this basic template, added professionalism and money, and won handily. His combination of clever websites and intensive training camps to help build up a volunteer army was genuinely new.
Commentators and bloggers quickly claimed this campaign model as proof for any number of pet theories, normally about the power of the internet to change politics. Obama, so they tell us, is an “open source president” in an era when “politics is viral,” who ran a campaign embodying “crowd sourcing in action.” Technology gurus, like former Wired journalist Peter Leyden, speak bafflingly of how “Obama is catalysing the paradigm shift in American politics.”
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