21st century campaign

2008-11-09 14:13

Washington - Barack Obama's internet-savvy campaign team will revolutionise White House communications like late president Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) did with the radio, according to NDN think tank president Simon Rosenberg.

"Senator Obama just ran the first true campaign of the 21st Century using these internet tools to help organise his supporters and fight on a new battlefield of modern politics, said the veteran of former president Bill Clinton's 1992 election campaign.

"He reinvented the model of advocacy," he added of the Illinois Senator who on Tuesday won became the first US black president elect.

Obama's campaign team used the web to organise volunteers and in fundraising, dealing a decisive victory over his Republican rival John McCain, who resorted to more traditional methods of communications.

Meaningful participation

Rosenberg said the incoming US administration had significantly revamped political communications in the country and lowered the barrier to entry into politics for everyday people.

"It allows a much more meaningful participation by our citizens in their politics and democracy. We saw an enormous surge of civic participation in America this year, in terms of people giving money and voting.

"All future campaigns in America will be run on this people-based internet model Obama ran," he said.

He said the use of modern 21st-century tools will bring "an enormous reinvention" of the US presidency, as the radio did in the first half of the last century.

"FDR was using the radio in a very powerful way to establish his power in his country. In the US, now, every Saturday morning the president does a radio address.

"My assumption is that it will now be a Youtube address that will be translated in the principal languages of the world: Spanish, French, Arabic, Farsi and others.

"This way (the president) will be addressing not only his own citizens but the citizens of the world.

Rosenberg said the new technology will not only change the relationship between the US president and his own people, "it is going to change the American relationship to all the world ...

"It's going to be exciting to some governments, not so exciting to others."

As to whether the White House will be setting an example for other democracies to follow, Rosenberg predicted first there would be "a period of massive experimentation not only in the US but also in the rest of the world.

"Every elected leader in the world is going to want to try to use these tools at their own advantage there is no doubt about this.

"David Cameron, the leader of the Tories (in Britain), has done amazing YouTube videos way more creative than anything anybody in the US has done," Rosenberg said.

- AFP