After 26 months, more than 10 candidates and over 12 debates, the campaign of 2008 came to end.  For once, this was a campaign, an election, that lived up to our expectations.  It will likely be seen as the most important election of our lifetime…until the next most important election of our lifetime, of course.  Nonetheless, this election set the precedent, changed the rules and invigorated the electorate.  A few highlights:

Surprising?

America did it.  There was no Bradley effect.  Forty-five years after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech,” more than 200,000 people gathered in Grant Park to see Barack Obama address the nation as President-elect:

Groundbreaking?

Fundraising

• The 2008 campaign was the most expensive ever, with more than $5.3 billion spent
• McCain stuck with public financing, and may well have been the last presidential candidate to make that mistake
• Obama raised over $500 million, attracting more than 3 million donors who gave little but gave often

Diversity

• Yes, the campaign had the usual majority of white, old men but it stood out for its diversity, from an Hispanic governor, to two Italians, to a former First Lady, a female vice presidential candidate and, finally, an African American who outlasted and out survived them all.

Significant?

Technology

• YouTube, Twitter, IPhone – all were non-existent, Jetsens-like technology in 2004 that became the centerpieces of the 2008 campaign.  From voter-generated content to campaign videos to the media and, of course, SNL, technology pushed the candidates into campaigning 3.0, and, many would argue, propelled Obama to victory.

Participation

• The 24/7 news cycle and the accessibility of everything from polling sites to The Note and First Read had everyone feeling they were James Carville and George Stephanopoulos.   Americans were engaged like never before and the democracy is better for it.

Media

• The mainstream media felt the effects of the first 21^st century campaign as well.  They struggled to contend with blogs and citizen journalists, while the campaigns and candidates could use the Internet and old-fashioned ignoring to bypass them completely.  

“This is the most important legacy of Howard Dean’s campaign for president.  From this point on, there will be a new special interest group to reckon with – the American people.  And this special interest group has a tool – the Internet..Now politics are no longer the domain of that one-quarter of 1 percent of the wealthiest Americans who give 80 percent of individual political donations….Now the power is back in our hands.”  - Joe Trippi

Trippi sees the Internet as the “empowerment age,” shifting power from top-down institutions to a “power that is democratically distributed and shared by all of us.”

Such a populist approach to the power of the Internet comes from a man who saw his insurgent candidate fly with the Internet and then, ultimately, fall to the traditional media and political power structure when they had a presence in 2004. I think Trippi would argue the Internet is a tool for insurgent candidates – a tool that, because of its open and chaotic nature, does not adapt to frontrunner, top-down campaigns.

I agree that through the 2008 election, the Internet was largely a tool of insurgent candidates.  I disagree, however, that the Internet intrinsically favors dark horse insurgents. That might have been true in 1996, 2000 and into 2004 when the Internet was still largely being explored by the masses for social connections and adapted by campaigns for political use.  Since then, the Internet has gone mainstream and Moore’s Law tells us it is advancing at such a pace that the candidate who can’t master it won’t even be a candidate.

Ironically, it was two insurgent candidacies, the Dean campaign in 2004 and Obama’s campaign in 2008 that, I believe, opened the Internet to frontrunners.  Dean’s campaign, led by Trippi, rocked the political world and the young minds involved spread like ripples throughout the 2008 campaign.  In that election, Obama was the insurgent candidate and he won, using tools largely built on from Dean’s campaign.  Whoever did not see the power of the Internet in 2004 (ahem, Mark Penn, see Trippi p. 249) awoke to it in 2008.  Obama succeeded to such a degree that no candidate will make the mistake of Hillary Clinton in surrounding themselves with “old minds.”

Insurgent candidates use the Internet effectively out of necessity.   The Internet gives such candidates a voice and means to compete, but it is not something limited to their use.  Every candidate can use the Internet to reach folks like Lou Stark, the 89-year old who was motivated to join the Dean campaign.  And every candidate can use tools like blogs, MeetUp and Get Local that were created in 2004 and enhanced in 2008 to reach voters.

What sets candidates apart is their message.  Trippi writes, “Every other candidate has started by saying – Look at me.  Aren’t I amazing?  But every time Howard Dean got up to speak, every time his campaign staff got on the web to blog, the message was Look at you.  Aren’t you amazing?”  Obama followed the same model in 2008 and that is what fueled his campaign and drove his success.  Online and off, it was “you” and “us,” not “I.”  This is the tool that matters.

As Trippi says, the Internet is able to give voice to the silent, influence to the average and power to the powerless.  It will always be a tool for insurgents, but by 2012 and beyond it will be mainstream to the degree it must, and will, be the tool of the frontrunner.

Obama revolutionized political campaigning and now he has the opportunity to revolutionize the White House and bring government into a Web 2.0 world.

His transition Web site, change.gov, gives us a hint of what is to come, taking us behind-the-scenes of the transition process, providing information and resources.  As a reminder of the high expectations Obama faces, the site has come under criticism for being too one-way and undergoing some clever revisions.

The opportunities for Obama are limitless, but I think he’d be wise to focus his revolution on two areas:

1)      Video

2)      Transparency

He’s off to a good start with video, breaking new ground by delivering the weekly Democratic address not just on radio but also on video.   The address already has more than 1,000,000 views on YouTube.  And how many people gathered by the radio to listen to President Bush? 

Obama’s White House transition team has also indicated they’ll conduct online Q&As and video interviews, including with choices for the Cabinet and policy experts.  I like Dan Manatt’s idea to weave YouTube through all of government, creating a GovTube that would put video in a searchable and friendly format.  This would also enable Kevin Thurman’s smart vision to bring a two-way dialogue to every agency and every Cabinet secretary, getting the “federal government behind having a conversation with citizens online.”

Obama has also indicated he’ll take the lead on transparency.

Obama would be smart to closely follow the 21^st Century Right to Know Project to build a White House 2.0.

Let’s see “wikis, comment sections, collaborative projects, public review of pending policies and online dialogues” to bring democracy to the people.  Make G-Webs as familiar a term as YouTube and Facebook to the general public.

The best sign we have of Obama’s commitment is the man he’s place at his side:  Google CEO Eric Schmidt.  He may not become CTO, but hopefully his presence will bring the Google mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” straight to Washington, DC.

What Alex Gage and the Republican Party revolutionized in 2000 is now standard practice in politics:   using personal data collected by “powerful and expensive databases” (see the GOP’s Voter Vault and the progressive Catalist) to “target voters with pinpoint precision.”  Now that the Democrats have finally caught up with the Republicans in their store of data knowledge, Alex Gage said it best, “…once you  have the information, what do you do with it?  That’s the real question.”

Republicans, as usual, took the early advantage, launching their vaunted “72-Hour Project” in the 2002 election to get base voters to the polls.  The Obama campaign took it to the next level in 2008, compiling all information into one massive database and using that data to contact voters when they wanted it, how they wanted it and with the information they wanted to hear.

Which raises the bigger question of what the future of microtargeting will mean to politics and the electorate?  The debate over invasion of privacy issues that always arises with microtargeting is a non-issue to me as that information already exists in the public space and is used every day to persuade me to choose Target over K-Mart, Coke over Pepsi and Nike over Reebok.  The real question, for me, is the harm microtargeting does to the electorate.  Just as the Internet can make politics a one-way conversation, will the growth of microtargeting in politics mean the electorate is pandered to, with voters only hear the messaging they want, when they want it, framed in the way they want it?  Reporters are already covering the prospect of Obama unleashing his online army in the White House.  Microtargeting as governance?

In the end though, no matter how high we try to exult it, politics is business, and microtargeting makes good business sense.  Political database firms have goals of building a “living record of nearly every political action undertaken by an American,” the Republican Party will rebuild and Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 could cost $1 billion.  Microtargeting is here to stay.

James Poniewozik has a great article in Time on the media and this presidential election that hits on a few points I’d been thinking about as well.  The first is the insatiable appetite the public has had for this election.  From polling sites to The Note and First Read, the Internet has allowed the average voter to track this election like they’re James Carville or George Stephanopoulos.   (See too Eugene Robinson’s humorous take on this.)  Poniewozik attributes this to the very high stakes the electorate sees in this election.  Poniewozik makes the obvious point that this rapid feed of news has moved us from a 24-hour news cycle to a 24-minute news cycle, but makes what I think is an interesting argument that this “souped-up cycle” has not made the election more trivial but, in fact, raised the level by keeping voters engaged.  The McCain campaign clearly fell into the media’s bait of 24-minute news while the Obama campaign  stuck with their message from the primary on, and won.

The “media formerly known as mainstream,” as Poniewozik so aptly calls them, had to adapt in this election to anything becoming news at any time.  Candidates utilizing nontraditional media like The View and The Late Show to reach voters made names like Elisabeth Hasselbeck and David Letterman somehow political, and traditional news outlets like CNN responded by adding names like D.L. Hughley to its roster of David Gergen-talking heads.  He points out the power of nontraditional media to drive the debate was enhanced by the blogosphere, but voters still rely on the mainstream media to validate their political news.  This, on a broader scale, was a thought I’ve had many times this week as we saw what the public sought in the days after Obama’s win.  Print and mainstream may never go too far.

I was fascinated this weekend by David Broder’s declaration in his Washington Post column that the 2008 presidential election was the “best campaign” he’s ever covered.  This coming from the “dean of the press corps” and a man who has covered presidential politics for more than four decades speaks to the enthusiasm and interest generated by the candidacies of John McCain and Barack Obama.  It speaks to the promises, tools and bargains the campaigns have offered to the electorate, and how those have sparked an energy that many predict will result in unprecedented turnout on Tuesday. 

Broder cited what is essentially the Obama campaign’s superior use of the promise, tool and bargain as the “precise moment” he realized this would be the best presidential campaign he’d ever covered.  He knew it when he watched more than 18,000 people come to watch Obama in Iowa last January, and then saw the Obama campaign follow up with the legwork of volunteers, phone calls and precincts.  On the Republican side, Broder saw it when the voters rejected the mainstream media, pundits and party leaders alike to elect the older, established John McCain over “younger, more attractive” alternatives.

What struck me in Broder’s column was the back-to-the-basics nature of both the campaigns and his reporting.  As in his old days on the bus, Broder got his sense of the 2008 election not through blogs or YouTube but with on-the-ground reporting.  And his column makes no mention of text messages, emails or websites.  It’s about town halls, phone calls, canvassing and rallies, the campaigns meeting the voters 1:1.  When we think we’ve come so far, how much has really changed? 

And, if this is the “best campaign ever,” what can we expect next? 

They asked the question, “How much is YouTube worth to a Presidential campaign”?  The numbers, and the stark difference between Obama and McCain, are startling.   

The total in absolute time (views * video length):
Obama 14,548,809.05 hours; McCain 488,093.01 hours

14+ million hours of free video for Obama.  14 million!  They then put that number to Joe Trippi who calculated that would cost about $46 million for Obama in paid advertising.  For McCain, the cost would be about $1.5 million.  Trippi also makes the point that those 14 million hours are hours spent by people who chose to be there, not the same as paid ads that often seemed shoved down voters’ throats.

What is amazing to me is that the guy who has no money, McCain, is the candidate who did not take advantage of YouTube, aka free media.  The campaign knew they would be reined in by public financing and up against the financial juggernaut that is Obama, yet they did not take advantage of online videos as a new, cheap and innovative way to reach voters.  Of course, a large number of the Obama videos are voter-generated, in addition to those released by the campaign.  This demonstrates once again what I’ll call the “Shirky rule” of the 2008 election – McCain had no promise, no bargain and no tools.  And, perhaps most consequently, no YouTube!