Tall? Wide? Spherical?

My friend over at St. Scobie's pointed me to an essay on the Harvard Business Review site that unpacks Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators. She's left scratching her head at the article's use of biz-speak. I agree. "Explode your sense of purpose?" Why does anyone write that way?

The thing St. Scobie didn't mention: the essay just seems to be wrong in many, many ways. The essay's author, Umair Haque, calls McCain's campaign a traditional "command-and-control" organization. That's wrong. It was a freakin' mess. With people coming and going, exiled and rehabilitated, swerving off-message, speaking at cross-purposes, hell, in Sarah Palin's case, speaking in tongues. McCain's campaign had neither anyone in command nor any capacity to exert control over events. It collapsed into a blur of near-daily tactical and strategic shifts and ended in infighting and finger-pointing. Obama, on the other hand, Haque claims, succeeded because his organization was "spherical - a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers." True, but why wouldn't an organization of the type Haque describes derail due to an inability to discipline volunteers and control the organization's message? His suggestion is that Obama's organization was all about passion, and discipline and coordination were tossed aside. That is obviously wrong. Obama won because he (or at least key actors within his organization) understood that they could trust volunteers if the campaign engineered the tools and the messages volunteers employed. Campaign supporters shared postings, YouTube videos, and talking-points manufactured by the Obama campaign. Volunteers broadcasted what the Obama campaign wanted them to broadcast. If we want to use Haque's image - of Obama's organization as a sphere - the orb the campaign most resembles is the sun, where everything is generated in the core, and the remaining structure (the radiative zone, the convective zone, the photosphere, the chromosphere and the corona, for you sun worshippers) merely functions to transmit the energy manufactured within the astral core.

Another thing Haque seems utterly wrong about: he claims that Obama succeeded because he "dispensed almost entirely with strategy in its most naïve sense: strategy as gamesmanship or positioning." Huh? The more I watched the Obama campaign, the more I was convinced they were masters of gamesmanship and positioning and shaping the news cycle. The thing that really brought this into focus for me happened back during the closing days of the primaries. On May 13th, Hillary won West Virginia by 30 points - taking 67% of the vote to Obama's 26%. For a day, the media commentators were talking about Hillary's win as proof that Obama couldn't succeed with working-class white voters. Then, on May 15th, Obama appeared with John Edwards in Michigan to claim Edwards' endorsement. Which, of course, in retrospect, with Edwards wandering in the political wilderness, now seems meaningless. However, at the time, it was a perfectly played card. The Obama campaign most certainly had that endorsement in their pocket for some time, but they waited until the West Virginia primary - which they clearly knew they would lose - to publicize the endorsement, and in the process took the headlines away from Hillary.

Joe Lieberman is Peter Pettigrew

To start with, as a note of clarification to my mother-in-law: I don't think Barack Obama is the Chosen One. She thinks we have all bought into some idea that Obama is the Messiah. But I am as secular as anyone can be. I don't believe anyone will be delivered from the heavens to save us from immorality and violence and despair. And I certainly would never believe that Harvard Law School, of all places, could produce a savior. Oberlin maybe. But then there's Michelle Malkin to account for. I guess there is no place unsullied by evil. No citadel where decency and tolerance are preserved.

Anyway, my goal here is to offer a basic primer for understanding why Barack Obama wants to save Joe Lieberman from the wrath of the Democratic party. I want to make this so simple anyone can get it.

We know that Obama is a Harry Potter fan, and has read all seven books with his daughters. He has to be aware of the fate of Peter Pettigrew, otherwise known as Wormtail, the shape-shifting wizard who possesses the ability to transform into a rat. The resemblence to Lieberman is hard to miss.

We learn in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that Peter Pettigrew betrayed the Order of the Phoenix, the forces of tolerance and decency, to side with the evil Lord Voldemort and his followers, the Death Eaters. When Voldemort was unable to eliminate Harry, and in the process was instead transformed into a mere shadow, Pettigrew slinked away and concealed himself for years, disguised as a rat. When Harry and Wormtail's paths crossed again, Harry's friends, angered by Wormtail's betrayal, sought revenge. Just to be clear, Sirius Black wanted to do more than relieve Wormtail of a few Committee Chairmanships and kick him out of the caucus. He wanted to kill Wormtail. By comparison, the Democratic leadership in the Senate is exercising restraint.

But, to get to the point, Harry intervened and saved Wormtail, earning, in the process, a life debt, forging an obligation on Wormtail's part. It wasn't clear at the time what the result would be. But, years later, in the book that wraps up Harry's story, we learn that Wormtail's magical debt is paid when he hesitates to deliver Harry back into the clutches of Voldemort. At precisely the moment when Harry was trapped and it looked like the forces of evil would triumph, Pettigrew delays, allowing Harry to escape.

Obama knows the dark forces have merely been driven into the shadows. They will do all they can to destroy him and regain power. But at some point, perhaps in the closing days of his first term, when he needs a legislative victory to survive, Lieberman will be obligated to step in and help. When he does, I suspect Lieberman will learn, as Wormtail did, that the dark forces are far less forgiving.

The selling of Brand Obama

Barack Obama's campaign should be used as a case study in classrooms across the country. The Obama campaign made unprecedented use of social network sites and used existing web tools in exceptionally saavy ways to understand his supporters and shape and position messages to influence them. They employed some of the best talent in the field - including Joe Rospars, who managed Howard Dean's internet presence in 2004, and Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook - and gave them the support and latitude to accomplish what they were brought in to do. There was an impressive degree of integration across the different dimensions of the campaign. When television ads were launched in battleground states, they were also posted on YouTube and displayed on the campaign's Facebook page, where they were picked up by Obama's 2.8 million Facebook friends and shared with others. Any gaffe by John McCain was similarly broadcast across the wide internet landscape, which the campaign understood better than their rival did.


The Obama campaign understood that "people influence people." Every time a new supporter signed up to be one of Obama's Facebook friends, that supporter's new affiliation was automatically broadcast to all of his or her Facebook friends. On average, each Facebook user has 150 "friends" plugged into his or her network, some have as many as 600, a few have many more. Of course, many of these "friends" already share political leanings, and many may also be part of Obama's Facebook community. Still, doing the math, we're talking about a potential social network of 367 million people - greater than the entire population of the U.S.* I wish I had better tools to estimate the likely number of distinct individuals pulled in as friends of the 2.8 million Obama supporters on Facebook. It's big. Let's leave it at that.


Many of these supporters also set up their own accounts on My.BarackObama.com, where they could blog about their own campaigning and canvassing efforts, post photos, and set up their own fundraising pages with their own messages. As people registered on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign gathered information about them. Some of this information was volunteered - name, address, email, cell number - but the campaign also deposited a cookie on each vistor's web browser, allowing the campaign to track where that supporter went after he or she left the site. This allowed the campaign to know where the supporter was getting his or her news and entertainment, helping to craft advertising plans.


Ultimately, every registered supporter was recruited, by carefully targeted emails, to donate, or volunteer at phone banks, or contribute to canvassing and get out the vote efforts. When volunteers showed up at campaign headquarters, they were given lists that were made more precise by the campaign's capability to gather information from its web-based resources. All of these campaign offices, set up across the country, even in states Democrats often skipped, were financed by the unrivalled web-based fund-raising accomplished by the campaign. Some estimates suggest the campaign raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 million dollars.


In the end, of course, Obama won the race and in the process captured 7.7 million of the 11.7 million voters under 29 who cast a ballot. The number of voters under 29 was greater than the number of senior citizens who voted. It will take some time to fully understand the numbers, and grasp what motivated voters and which messages caught their attention. But there seems broad consenus that Obama's bet on younger voters paid off, and his use of the web and the power of social networking sites generated armies of volunteers and helped generate unimagined financial support.


Obama's campaign had the insight to see the web as a campaign tool with impressive reach, and, more so than any political campaign before, they grasped the utility of social networking sites to connect with people (and connect people to people). They brought in the talent to give shape and form to their ambitions. Furthermore - and this is a powerful lesson for future campaigns and social movements - they trusted millions of supporters to do a great deal of the work, downloading videos and passing them around, creating their own content and sharing it. This might seem like a risky move for a campaign so focused on communicating a carefully scripted message - emphasizing the candidate's commitment to change, while backgrounding discussions of race - but the campaign was counting on a preexisting set of practices it understood very well. Or rather, that Chris Hughes knew well. From his work on Facebook, Hughes knew that most supporters would share videos and other content crafted by the campaign. What the campaign counted on was that their message would be passed hand-to-hand, shared among "friends."


The Obama campaign was confronted with a workplace extending across the full landscape of the United States, and had to deploy "workers" who were unpaid and had no formal position within the organization. Yet, for their model to work, they needed to trust these supporters to broadcast their message and carry out the groundwork necessary to get out the vote. This, it seems to me, is a quintessentially progressive impulse - Obama trusted us to help him do the work that was necessary to seize the White House. But he's also no fool, he wasn't going to put all his money on us going out there and building buzz on blogs and capturing the look and feel of his campaign with our clumsy photos. He gave the professionals some work to do, and then asked us to pitch in. Seems like a model for government too, doesn't it?

* My own imperfect research shows that 2 Facebook friends probably have 37 other friends in common, assuming they have 150 friends each.

Blue America

Republicans haven’t yet grasped the enormity of their failure or the resounding rejection of their governmental ideology. But as we sift through the data, and more importantly, assess the meaning of this election, it will become clear that Americans have rejected the idea that government should do nothing when a quarter of the country can’t afford health care, when our schools are failing, when Wall Street recklessly gambles away our retirement savings and our kids’ college money. We can’t sit by while a major American city disappears under flood waters we knew were coming. Government should facilitate scientific research, not suppress it. It should hold our soldiers back, until all efforts to avoid conflict have failed, and never throw them into a slow-motion massacre in pursuit of oil or to establish the validity of a new strategic blueprint. All of this – all of this – was rejected on Tuesday. So don’t believe conservatives who blame “this President” or “the financial crisis” or “their candidate.” This was a repudiation of conservative principles. Look at the map above. It is a graphic representation of some remarkable data. The darker the blue, the greater the shift in voters’ preferences toward the Democratic party. The paler blue hues show a less dramatic shift. The rose colored counties became even more Republican this year. Don’t misunderstand this, we are nor looking at a Democratic Idaho, but compared to 2004, more voters in Idaho voted Democratic. It – and Texas and Alabama and Mississippi - remains a Republican state, but less so than in the past. Only Oklahoma, Alaska, Arkansas, and Tennessee seem to be uninfected by the spreading blue that is transforming the map.

I can't help but think that we have witnessed the beginning of a sea-change in American politics. Voters under 24 voted for Obama, even in deeply, deeply red counties. In California, they voted against Proposition 8 in overwhelming numbers. Helping out in the Obama campaign, I saw young operatives and volunteers - many not old enough to vote - carrying the ball. Paul Krugman called this election the death of the monsters--Rove and DeLay and all the other despicable Republican Freddy Kruegers who only wanted to eviscerate their liberal opponents and savage the poor and bleed away all hope for change. I hope he's right. But as significantly, it is - or could be - the start of a new citizen corps of hands-on voters and volunteers, freed from cynicism, no longer alienated from the wider nation of which they are a part. In 2004, after George Bush won reelection, I woke up on November 3 feeling like a stranger in my own land. Surrounded by New Yorkers, I knew I was hundreds of miles away from the people who reelected our disgraceful President, but never in my life had I felt so alienated from the great majority of Americans. Now, I look at the map of the United States and I see blue spreading across even the most unlikeliest of places, and I want to mobilize these young voters and these converts to carry forward the transformation. Of course I want the Democrats to march across the country and win everywhere. That won’t happen, and maybe my hope is misguided. I dislike the proselytizing impulse in Christianity. People need to find their own path to truth and morality. And, I guess, I should feel the same way about politics. But, like religion, we should all be able to agree that we are seeking truth and morality and, in the process, put aside our politics of contempt and ugliness. I look at this map and I see people turning away from a party that promised nothing and delivered less, a party that believed we owed nothing to one another and we should expect nothing from our government. I see people who want to believe that we can collectively fashion solutions to shared problems. We might differ on how we accomplish this, but I see people who want to have that conversation, and are sick and tired of the idea that we are all alone with our problems.

Hyde Park = the sun

My neighborhood in Chicago, Hyde Park, never feels like the center of the universe. Yesterday it did. From the moment I went out to vote with my wife and our two kids at 7 a.m., until the end of the day, Hyde Park felt electric. Like our candidate was being elected President. There were news crews here, to film Obama voting. And everyone – except maybe those free-marketeer cavemen from the Econ department – seemed so happy. Jubilant. Full of eager anticipation. We waited an hour to vote because our precinct was overwhelmed by all of the University of Chicago students who had registered to vote and were. But the atmosphere was great. Our two-year-old, Jonah, loved it. And later, in the evening when he and I were alone – our one-year-old, Ellie, was sleeping and my wife was downtown at the Obama rally – he lined up all his cars in a long, long line and said: “Look daddy. These cars are lined up to vote for Barack Obama.” He wanted to wear my Obama button, but I didn’t want him to because of the sharp pin. So I put an Obama sticker on his jammies. It made him happy. Helped him feel part of everything. He fell asleep on the couch, watching election results with me and a friend, wearing his Obama sticker.

Citizen army

One of the consequences of Obama's victory, I hope and I anticipate, will be a new generation of young people who will take an active - by that I mean participatory - role in the political life of the nation. I volunteered in Hammond, Indiana today, knocking on doors and helping get the vote out. A union hall full of teenagers, in many cases too young to vote, took part. If Obama wins Indiana, and it looks like he will, teenagers and college kids and field directors not much older did it. The trick for the Democratic party is to translate this new citizen army into a force that helps guarantee Democratic wins 2 years from now, and 4 years from now. And, more importantly, the party needs to invite this segment of the population to transform our public and civic life. Draw on their enthusiasm to teach in our schools, perform public service, take part in community organizing. And fight discrimination.

One sad, sad result in tonight's otherwise happy political news: Voters in Arizona, Florida, and California voted to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry. In Arkansas, they voted to deny gays the right to adopt children. But if you dig into the numbers, discriminatory attitudes are confined to old people. In California, 67% of voters between 18 and 24 voted against the ban. Imagine combining the Obama campaign's gift for bringing young voters into the process - and giving them real responsibilities in organizing and operating the machinery of the campaign - with the attitudinal shift represented by those numbers from California. The result would be a citizen corps that would sweep away discrimination and intolerance.