The analyses and explanations have gushed from the media geyser over the past week, attempting to answer the why and the how that the Obama organization beat an entrenched political regime and replaced it as the dominant force in the Democratic Party of the United States.
And yet I have yet to read an explanation by anyone that satisfactorily captures this moment in history[...].
The technological explanation offered by some colleagues does not even begin to sufficiently explain why the Obama campaign succeeded while, for example, the Howard Dean campaign of 2004 did not. If what happened in 2008 were merely a matter of Internet politics we'd be blogging President Dean's reelection campaign right now, and Ron Paul's pending Republican nomination to challenge him.
[So when journalists write that "it's about the Net"] such technological wonderment sounds no more convincing to me than, say, if someone were to write, the invention of radio explains the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. A half-century from now, technological explanations of the Obama phenomenon will sound a lot like that.
[...Journalist Micah] Sifry writes of the campaigns he's covered over the past 24 years:
"In each case, a charismatic candidate with a powerful message drew a ton of new activist energy into the process. And in each case, the movement and the man faced a moment of truth: is this about you, or the larger movement?
If Obama wins in November, the question will loom larger for one critical reason: because his supporters have the capacity to self-organize on a scale never seen before in our lifetimes."
[Giordano continues:]
While it's certain that Internet and technology in general have provided the networking and communications tools that made such massive self-organization so rapid, the difference between the Obama campaign and all others before it comes down, for me, to a more human factor: that the candidate has studied, practiced and believes in community organizing.
From Al Giordano's blog The Field, originally posted at Rural Votes on 11 July 2008. I have excerpted as indicated by ellipses and adjusted punctuation here and there.
The full text of the post, including Alinsky's thirteen Rules for Radicals, is available (as of July 2008) at The Field's new home, Narconews, here.
As Giordano describes there, this very post led to his departure from Rural Votes, a more traditional Democratic organization who apparently did not want to be identified with Alinsky's radicalism.
Last modified 7 July 2008