Back in February I made this claim while most Obama supporters were chewing their fingernails over the showdown with Hillary Clinton. Results from the field are backing me up: a 50 state+ primary benefited both Obama and the Democrats tremendously, pushing up the Dems’ voter rolls and helping Obama build a veteran ground team that [...]
A fresh pair of articles is shining light back on to the Obama ground operations, which — presuming victory on November 4 — will be remembered as one of the deepest and most robust political startups in modern history. Zack Exley’s in-depth piece on “The New Organizers” in the Huffington Post goes into (excruciating) detail [...]
The New York Times’ “The Measure of a President” provides visual proof that shorter candidates suffer a remarkable handicap in winning the Presidency. Part of the blame surely lies with the media, which regularly taints their coverage with heightist phrases like “Despite his diminutive stature…” And don’t get started with the term “scrappy.”
It is little [...]
Ed Cone of CIO Insight has published a series, “How the Obama Campaign is Using Technology to Change Elections on the Ground.” (Big ups to Baratunde for the tip). There’s a few tidbits here and there worth repeating:
“It’s the difference between open and closed source.” — Cyrus Krohn, director of the eCampain division of the [...]
Compare the YouTube pages of the McCain and Obama campaigns, and you’ll also get a glimpse of how very different their strategies are. Both feature 30- and 60-second advertisements, but Obama also offers a wide range of other pieces that include speeches and rallies, calls to action, and, increasingly, videos that support local grassroots efforts.
In [...]
I don’t live in the Second Suffolk District, where a heated battle is underway between incumbent State Senator Diane Wilkerson and challenger Sonia Chang-Diaz, the challenger who won the Democratic nomination last week. I have no standing to evaluate whether Wilkerson or Chang-Diaz is more capable of representing that District’s needs.
However, as a Chinese-American, I [...]
New survey out from the Wall Street Journal / NBC / MySpace. Full report. The WSJ’s read on this was that new voters were less likely than the poll of all voters to vote this November (”very interested” = 49% vs. 70%). However, what I find interesting is that this question is on a 10-pt [...]
A few days ago I discussed how Treasury Secretary Paulson came to the negotiation with an extreme, highly “anchored” opening move, and how negotiations research shows that anchoring works. Why, then, don’t we always use absurd opening moves when engaging in a negotiation over used cars or other purchases? The answer is that the party [...]
The Obama campaign has a unique opportunity to show us what leadership in his Internet-savvy administration might look like. Americans are panicking now over the crisis on Wall Street, panicking but completely at a loss as to what we should do. This is Obama’s chance to show us real leadership through running a serious of [...]
The crisis on Wall Street and subsequent negotiation between the Bush Administration and Congress over solutions expose a dangerous weakness of the people’s branch in the modern era: legislators lack unity and the power that unity affords. They will lose almost every time they get into a showdown with the President, especially without an O’Neill [...]
