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ShareWASHINGTON—Barack Obama’s newly revamped Web site looks a lot like MySpace and Facebook, and that is no accident.
As a presidential candidate offering himself as a generational change agent, Obama is leveraging online social networking in a nearly unprecedented way in yet another clear measure of how the Internet is transforming politics.
The new look of the site, launched last week, invites the user to create a profile for public viewing, complete with an uploaded digital photo. Anyone can create a personal blog. Users also can create their own on-site network of friends and public groups arrayed around any common interest that moves them.
As of Friday, less than one week after Obama announced his presidential campaign and the Web site launched, more than 3,000 groups had formed on the site, ranging from the Iowa Union Members for Obama and New Hampshire Firefighters for Barack to the Hip Hop for Obama.
The campaign says that more than 4,000 people have started blogs on the site. More than 3,000 have set up personal fundraising Web pages. Thefos of Tampa gushes over her 21-year-old daughter’s $20 contribution to the Obama campaign while Andrew from mile-high Denver chronicles his efforts to raise $5,280, the number of feet in a mile.
The Obama site is an unabashed attempt to use the power of Web-based social networking to channel a surge of enthusiasm—and a flood of money—for an upstart candidate into a broad-based political movement.
“It’s about building those relationships and providing the glue that will bind people together,” said Joe Rospars, new media director for the Obama campaign. “The more solid the relationships are among our supporters, the more impact they’ll have as advocates in their own community.”
Before the campaign did it, supporters acting on their own had created groups. One started last month on Facebook by Farouk Olu Aregbe, a 26-year-old Nigerian immigrant, has drawn more than 276,000 followers and served as a vehicle for organizing one of the campaign’s first events, a rally for students held earlier this month at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., near Washington.
Other presidential campaigns also are incorporating social networking features into their campaign plans. John Edwards’ One Corps, for example, encourages detailed public profiles and blogs, and each campaign’s Web presence is a work in progress.
But social networking is just one way in which uses of the Internet are altering presidential campaigns. Advances in technology also are changing the way presidential campaigns raise money, organize their networks of volunteers and engage in public debate.
To be sure, technology-driven campaigns like Howard Dean’s star-crossed run in 2004 can offer more promise than real results. And this contest for the White House may be more volatile, as each campaign scrambles for advantage on new and unfamiliar terrain.
Candidates like Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., signaled the start of the new era by announcing their presidential exploratory committees through Web videos.
Clinton followed up with a series of highly publicized video Web chats and also has reached out to potential supporters through non-political Internet forums such as Yahoo! Answers. A question that Clinton posed on the Yahoo! site soliciting ideas to improve the health-care system, one of her signature issues, already has drawn more than 38,000 responses.
Two bloggers hired onto the Edwards campaign staff stirred the Democratic presidential candidate’s first major controversy because of past personal blog postings in which they made vulgar and incendiary comments about sex and religion. Both of them resigned.
Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who is running as a social conservative, faced his first serious negative attack when a video clip was posted on YouTube showing him declaring his support for abortion rights during a 1994 debate with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
Romney responded to the YouTube posting in kind, defending his change in view with a video that his campaign posted on the same site.
With the mass media no longer an arbiter, attacks can come from many more directions. Romney did not have to feed the controversy over the abortion comments with a broadcast interview, noted Erik Smith, a Democratic communications operative. “You don’t have to force an attack into the mainstream media in order to respond anymore,” he said.
The wide-open forum of the Internet and related technologies create the potential for a more wide-ranging political dialogue. Bloggers often operate without the standards of fairness or taste that restrain many media organizations.
An advisory opinion issued by the Federal Election Commission allows campaigns to send out text-messages to cell phones without the same disclaimers that identify their television commercials and print advertisements. Though campaigns must disclose their role in Web sites, individuals need not—including the kind of wealthy political partisans who had to reveal their role in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads against Democratic nominee John Kerry in 2004.
“I think you will see very hard-hitting messages on the Internet from across the political spectrum,” said Michael Toner, an FEC member and general counsel to the 2000 Bush campaign. “The Internet also may be the canary in the coal mine. It’s a venue where you can test out different messages, different arguments at very low cost, and if it works out, you can migrate it to the traditional media.”
At the same time, e-mail, Web video, online chats and podcasts give candidates more opportunity to bypass the mass media and forge a deeper, more personal relationship. Obama’s podcast recently was among the Top 20 on the iTunes Web site.
Many political professionals say Internet communications still have not shown much power to sway undecided voters. But the Web provides a powerful means to strengthen support once someone has taken an interest in a candidate, said Julie Barko Germany, deputy director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. “In 2008, that relationship-building is going to be very important,” Germany said.
The Web already has proven itself as a fundraising force and that capacity has only increased with the expansion of broadband access.
Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick allowed supporters to create personal fundraising pages on his Web site then tracked contributions, ranking the pages and publishing standings. Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry set up a similar system, rewarding fundraisers with Texas flags and campaign memorabilia as they reached goals.
Obama, Clinton and Romney all already have copied the technique of Web-based personal fundraising pages. “Within an online community, that reputation system can be pretty powerful,” said Trei Brundrett, a Democratic consultant who was technology director for former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner’s now abandoned presidential bid.
In his gubernatorial campaign, Patrick allowed individual supporters limited access to the campaign’s voter files over the Web, encouraging them to canvass prospective voters on their own.
“I think this is going to be big in `08,” Brundrett said. “You can allow people to self-organize.”
