[LINK] Times political op-ed

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Op-Ed Columnist
The Obama Connection  www.nytimes.com
By ROGER COHEN Published: May 26, 2008

. More than any other factor, it has been Barack Obama's grasp of the 
central place of Internet-driven social networking that has propelled his 
campaign for the Democratic nomination into a seemingly unassailable lead 
over Hillary Clinton. Her campaign has been so 20th-century. His has been 
of the century we're in.

That's not surprising. Obama spent only 10 years of his adult life in the 
split world of the cold war, double that in a post-Berlin Wall world of 
growing interconnectedness. MAC — mutually assured connectivity — has 
replaced the MAD — mutually assured destruction — of cold-war days.

For Clinton, born in 1947, that ratio is different. Her mental paradigm is 
division. When her husband last ran for president in 1996, the Internet 
was marginal. The thinking and people from that campaign have proved 
unable to fast-forward a dozen years. They’ve been left like deer blinded 
by the Webcam lights of the Obama juggernaut.

This cultural failure has been devastating for Clinton. As Joshua Green 
chronicles in an important piece in The Atlantic, Obama has used social 
networking and his user-friendly Web site to develop the money machine, 
and the youthful engagement, that has swept him forward.

Green notes, "Obama's claim of 1,276,000 donors is so large that Clinton 
doesn't bother to compete." He gives some other Obama campaign numbers: 
750,000 active volunteers and 8,000 affinity groups. In February, a month 
in which he raised $55 million ($45 million over the Internet), 94 percent 
of donations were of $200 or less, a number dwarfing small contributions 
to Clinton and John McCain.

Obama has been a classic Internet-start up, a movement spreading with 
viral intensity and propelled by some of Silicon Valley’s most creative 
minds. As with any online phenomenon, he has jumped national borders, 
stirring as much buzz in Berlin as he does back home..

The overwhelming global interest in the current U.S. election is tied in 
part to a spreading belief that America’s leader may be as important to 
French lives, for example, as the incumbent in the Élysée Palace. 

Obama's people get that. Connectivity means going it alone is a fool's 
errand: that's a basic lesson of Iraq. If Obama has promised to appoint a 
chief technology officer, to open up government via the Web, and to make 
dialogue rather than war a centerpiece of policy, it's because he knows he 
must speak to a 21st-century world..
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Cheers people
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia



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