Taking your netroots with you; Obama in Power and Fianna Fails lessons (?)

Barack Obama’s victory might not have been certain until late on, however his online victory was secured long before this. Anyone who attended the conference last month where Damian O Broin and Zack Exley gave an incredible breakdown of the online campaign would know that Obama’s superiority was borne of simplicity, ruthless organising and intelligent design. The net-roots really turned out for Obama and they got out the vote aswell.

Zack’s presentation (skip to 10mins in):

Anyway, the manner in which you translate that support into a movement that can sustain you in power is one of the key second order questions, once you have solved the dilemma of fundraising, contact and voting.

Joe Trippi’s thoughts on this problem of transferring all that support to a movement for President Obama - now by definition an establishment figure - are interesting;

Joe Trippi, the Internet politics guru whose computer geeks made Howard Dean a contender in 2004 and who went on to design Obama’s socially networked campaign machine, offers a provocative and educated guess.

Trippi predicted that Obama would use his forces, first and foremost, to intimidate congressional foes of his agenda, rally his allies and forge “one of the most powerful presidencies in American history”…

“Obama will be able to say these are the 10 members of Congress standing in our way on health care. Basically, it’ll be the president and the people united, with some members of Congress in between, which won’t be a very comfortable place to be.”

Anyone with half an eye can see that Fianna Fail have shown no interest in this momentum and its tapping up and I have been told they probably won’t for a while as those at the top who would decide on such things have little or no regard for the web. It is an interesting problem - Ireland has always had a culture of door-to-door campaigning and ‘people on the ground’ or ward bosses like Ahern’s. So the need  for FF to look at the new fangled approach is less pressing, for now. These circumstances change and that makes Martin’s comments one of either a sop or a genuine willingness.

Anyway Michael Martin’s brief quotes after the election look like a promising sop in that direction;

“The phenomenal organisation behind his campaign was breathtaking, not just in the presidential race, but in the primaries as well… He created a very strong organisational movement that propelled him to victory…He raised extraordinary funds and he was very good on the communications front, in terms of the web and new technologies.”

Mr Obama also used business networking site LinkedIn to target company executives and older voters.

Campaign aides also utilised online questionnaires and computer software programs to canvass floating voters to support the Democrats.

Mr Martin added: “Political parties around the world will be acutely studying the Obama phenomenon in terms of political and electoral organisation and will hope to draw lessons from it for future campaigns.”

Money, money, money. It really is the only thing to turn their heads in the internet’s direction and from what I learned from Keith on the conference day, the implementation of a similar scheme here in Ireland will be very difficult until Standard Im Public Office rules are adjusted.

It would be really interesting if we did get some insight or a report into how rules might be adjusted with online donations in mind - who do you give money to? How do you arrange it? How do you police it? Can you stop double donations? The rules allow for donations to parties and to candidates at the same time - because we don’t have a culture of personality leadership - and a parliamentary system that doesn’t encourage it the rules will need to be much different to those allowing people to donate to Obama.

In actual fact, Noel Dempsey’s old post-code scheme might have made a serious help in regard of policing it. All of these are fascinating questions but I am  not sure FF have the patience to worry about answering them, at least not until they are broke as there is not such thing as a practice elecction. So internet remains on the shelf for the biggest party of the lot.