Barack Obama’s team arguably ran the greatest presidential campaign ever — in the sense that it pulled out the rug from underneath the political establishment.

Of course the internet played a crucial role in raising money, building support for the candidate between new coalitions of people, and spreading his message. But just how important was that role, and can other political candidates replicate the Obama campaign’s success?

To examine those questions, the Center for American Progress Action Fund recently held an event to sort through how it all worked. Threat Level participated in the discussion, as did several reporters from The Washington Post, Campaigns & Elections, and the founder, the editor-in-chief, and a contributor to TechPresident, a technology and politics web site based in New York City. You can view the panel discussion online by clicking through this link. 

Andrew Rasiej, TechPresident’s co-founder, put his view out there in stark relief: Politicians’ growing awareness of the power of social networks and internet tools will transform the business of politics in the same way that the realization that the earth is round transformed the maritime industry.

He offered a simple yet illustrative example during the panel discussion: His 82-year-old father was sending around Obama YouTube videos to an e-mail list of 50 of his friends during the campaign. Rasiej noted that his father never would have previously done anything like this in the offline world. It would have taken too much time, and besides, sending physical pamphlets to friends or phoning them about his support would have been too gauche, he said.      

Rasiej’s example is just one of several such anecdotes I’ve heard during the course of this campaign. During a recent radio show hosted by Mario Armstrong, where I was a guest, several callers dialed in to share their own personal stories of how they had plugged into the Obama campaign through their gadgets or through the internet.

One man told a similar story of how his 72-year-old mother started texting for the first time. She spent the campaign forwarding all of the Obama’s text messages to her friends and relatives. The show took place just a few days after Election Day, and the callers shouted down the phone lines with excitement. Their adrenaline and euphoria was still pumping through them as they recounted their stories of participation.

What became clear to me, during the past year-and-a-half, but especially in the very last phase of the 2008 presidential campaign, is that this cycle arrived at the tipping point of several converging factors, and that several specific political professionals who had anticipated this moment for years had finally found a candidate who could fulfill their ideas of how their "ideal" campaign could be run.

One of those people, for example, is Harvard professor and grassroots organizing guru Marshall Ganz. You can read more about him here, and hear an interview that NPR’s On The Media show did with him below.   

Of course, there were plenty of external circumstances that tipped things in the Obama campaign’s favor. Nevertheless, an undeniably crucial factor is that Web 2.0 and database technologies, and cell phone penetration had reached critical mass. That enabled millions of everyday people who aren’t the latte-drinking political junkies of the 2004 Howard Dean campaign to easily get involved — though many of those "Deaniacs" lead the charge this year– four years later.

Obama’s campaign had, crucially, hired a team who knew how to wield these tech tools in a smart way, bearing out the truism that every technologist knows: The tools are only as good as the people use them.       

The discussion between the panelists at the recent CAP Action Fund event yielded several useful insights, and I thought it would be helpful to summarize a few:

• Although it can appear that social networks such as Facebook,  MiGente, BlackPlanet, MySpace etc may offer less than meets the eye, their influence shouldn’t be underestimated. They can exponentially magnify the scale of grassroots political campaigns. Nowadays, when people post a badge on their social nework, the aggregate numbers could add up to a couple of hundred thousand accounts online v. a couple of hundred cars with bumper stickers, noted TechPresident Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief Micah Sifry.   
• Social networks external to campaigns are good places to reach supporters where they already conduct a portion of their social lives. The activity there can be tapped into from external campaign sites. For example, Facebook has an interface called Facebook Connect that enabled the Obama campaign to let supporters provide their Facebook friends with updates on the campaign activities that they recorded on my.BarackObama.com.
• The idea that politicians would only reach high-schoolers through Facebook advertising is a myth. Alan Rosenblatt, CAP’s associate director for online advocacy, noted that a third of the 30 million Facebook members who hadn’t opted out of the targeted-ad system are over 30, and 3.3 million are over 40.
• The internet, mobile and Web 2.0 technologies present a fundamental paradox to political campaigns: Obama’s campaign exploited these networks in several instances to bypass the media and to connect directly to supporters (remember the vp announcement that told supporters that they could watch a Joe-Biden-Obama rally on BarackObama.com the next day?) But citizen-journalists such as Mayhill Fowler proved how that direct access is a two-way street, and can also take away message control from candidates.
• Microblogging service Twitter was most useful as a source of backchannel conversation at live events such as the speeches during the conventions. It’s also useful for crowdsourced live reporting, such as when TechPresident teamed up with numerous organizations to live report voting irregularities through the Twitter Vote Report.
• Web 2.0 revived the role that political humor plays in underscoring some of the more absurd moments of political campaigns. Twitter, for example, hosted Fake Sarah Palin. But scores of other talented citizens used tools such as YouTube and their own brilliant senses of humor to make salient political points. 

The panelists made several other interesting points, and again, you can download the discussion. Since I’ve received several requests for thoughts on the internet-enabled campaign of 2008, I thought this session would provide a useful resource.

The Obama team ran an astonishingly disciplined people-powered campaign that vanquished the doubts of many long-time Washington, DC insiders, who privately wondered whether Obama could win the general election. Reams more will be written about how, exactly, the team accomplished this.

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