Earlier, I mentioned an analysis of Obama’s fundraising machine, the new bottom-up model beating Hillary’s practiced top-down methods. The piece also says:

The Clinton campaign belatedly sought to mimic Obama’s Internet success, and has raised what in any other context would be considered significant money online—but nothing like Obama’s totals, in dollars or donors. John McCain’s online fund-raising has been abysmal.

As I said earlier in the year, the web will continue to gain influence and in the 2012 US Presidential Election, a robust web strategy will become the crux of all the campaigns. However, part of Obama’s success resulted from mining entirely new set of donors, in an entirely new way. His model and his demographic are now common knowledge, and I wonder whether future candidates will reap quite such a harvest from future fundraising drives.
I remember watching a version of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now on TV a few years ago. Melmotte (played by David Suchet) declares that his grand plans for a trans-continental railway in the USA were a business opportunity that could only be exploited “once per continent”. I’m afraid I can’t find the appropriate reference in the book text.
Could it be that Obama’s fundraising exploits represent a one-off? A ‘once-per-continent’ – or perhaps, in this case, ‘once-per-medium’ – moment. He is often referred to as the Google of the Presidential race, and one thing that characterizes successful dot.com “killer-apps” is that they tend to pull up the ladder behind them. The innovations, once invented and exploited by the vanguard, have a very obvious key to success, which is easy to reverse-engineer and copy. However, none of the copies really achieve the stratospheric success of the trail-blazer.
I think Obama’s next challenge, aside from winning the Presidency and then saving the world, is to expand his fundraising network in such a way that it benefits more people. Perhaps an online project which could be an equivalent of Emily’s List for young, grassroots activists from areas that do not normally produce political candidates? This would certainly be a logical and interesting next step for a movement that, while supposedly about many-to-many networks and bottom-up organising, nevertheless has a single, strong personality at its centre.

Brown’s Woes

Note the recent collapse of the Labour vote, the hemorrhaging of councillors and the plummeting ratings in the opinion polls. Ministers and Labour supporters lament the withering of grassroots support. Remember Gordon Brown’s coronation as party leader. One wonders that, if he (or a challenger) had been forced into a grinding leadership campaign, he might have built up more of a base of support within the party.
The activists and donors to Obama’s campaign became effective advocates for the candidate, inoculating him from the full force of smears, and putting out a positive message after gaffes. Who’s doing that for Gordon? Let us never have a coronation again.

There’s a glut of post-primary analysis in all the papers, on both sides of the Atlantic, but I somehow feel as if I’ve read it already. This is the blogger’s curse. By the time Gerard Baker in the Times, say, or Rupert Cornwell in the Independent opine on the challenges Obama now faces, I’m already twelve hours ahead.
I’ll readily admit that another kind of Atlantic, the magazine, is increasingly becoming my one-stop-shop for American news. British ex-pat Andrew Sullivan is a prolific and influential hub, and I’ve heard more than one person declare that his prescient December essay on Obama’s candidacy is what persuaded them in favour of the jug-eared Senator from Illinois.
Granted, that piece of writing was not a blog, but it came from a blogger, and regular readers of Sullivan’s blog will recognise nuggets of information and thoughts that were posted weeks or months earlier on Sullivan’s Daily Dish. The feeling of having read it before is nowhere stronger than in his Sunday Times column, which often summarizes the ongoing conversation he has led on his blog over the past seven days.
At other times, the feeling of having read something before is because I literally have. Halfway through a piece on Obama’s Web 2.0 fundraisers in the Independent, a noteworthy phrase jumped out at me:

“What’s Amazing” says Peter Leyden, “is that Hillary built the best campaign that has ever been done in Democratic politics on the old model. And yet, she’s getting beaten by this political start-up that is essntially a a totally different model of the new politics”.

Only then did I notice that the piece was reprinted from an earlier issue of The Atlantic Monthly, snippets of which I had already seen online. Another thing that blogging reveals is how much journalism is reprinted and recycled from elsewhere. And I include Baker and Cornwell’s most recent offerings in that statement, too.
The danger of all this is of course that the new media becomes much like the old media. The top sites still take the lion’s share of the traffic, aided and abetted by amateurs like me who link to them (people like Clay Shirky have been worrying about this for years). Sullivan already employs an assistant and interns to wade through other blogs and show him interesting stories, so the Daily Dish is already mediated by gatekeepers who decide what is interesting. However, the difference is first one of speed and scale – blogging allows more responses and fact-checking to appear, and quicker too. The second difference is that although sites like the Dish, or in the UK places like Iain Dale’s Diary or (we hope) Liberal Conspiracy are the hub, the content and arguments I am actually reading come from smaller sites, and you do get wider, more diverse range of voices.