Rospars: The Failure of Britain's Post-Obama "Internet Election"
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, May 4 2010
In a piece for the Guardian, Joe Rospars, the Obama campaign's web director, makes the case that the British election has fallen fall short of any standard or ideal set by the 2008 election in the U.S. on the Internet front. The diagnosis: David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and their respective political parties have used the web to simply speed up and amplify the same adversarial, tired, sound-bite politics of the past, rather than actually connect with the British people, or connecting the citizens of their country with one another. Here's Rospars:
In 2008, the Obama campaign prioritised the web because it provided a conduit to the very heart of the organisation: ordinary people. The campaign used the web to lower the barrier to entry for as many people as possible, and developed relationships that turned those people into activists, donors and leaders. Together Obama's supporters planned more than 200,000 offline campaigning events, made millions of phone calls and donated more than $500m, much of it in small donations, many as little as five dollars. But so far in this election, the bulk of the political parties' online efforts have been focused on finding new ways to play the tired insider games of accusation, response and posturing. The media has abetted them, dutifully reporting the latest quips and gaffes as fast as politicians can tweet them.
There's a decent chance that the compressed schedule of the general election in the UK this time around -- just a month, officially -- might have made it difficult to build momentum, organize, and drill-down past superficialities, which are some of the things that the web is particularly helpful for. The Obama campaign had two years to get things really right. That said, Rospars reminds us of something lost to some extent in our remembering of the Obama campaign: part of the resonance of his online organizing no doubt came from the fact that the peer-to-peer, distributed model the Obama campaign was working from sounded a lot like the sort of new politics their candidate was advocating for on the stump.