May 9th, 2008
The Obama Party and the Googlization of politics
Barack Obama is the Google of modern American politics.
MyBarackObama and Google share strengths and, perhaps, weaknesses.
I just described Google’s problem with the ASP loophole. By supporting the loophole Google maintains its proprietary advantage but risks losing friends in the open source community. This is a loss it can bear.
It can bear the loss because its immense infrastructure allows it independence from this kind of community pressure. It can act autonomously, in its own interest, when that interest conflicts with others’ ideology.
Barack Obama is doing essentially the same thing, as Marc Ambinder wrote on The Atlantic’s blog recently.
Over at Hullaballoo, liberal blogger dday calls the result
“The Obama Party“:
He’s building a new Democratic infrastructure, regimenting it under his brand, and enlisting new technologies and more sophisticated voter contacting techniques to turn it from a normal Get Out The Vote (GOTV) effort into a lasting movement.
The long-term goal is to subvert the traditional structures of the Democratic Party since the early 1990s, subvert the nascent structures that the progressive movement has been building since the late 1990s, and build a parallel structure, under his brand, that will become the new power center in American politics.
Just as with Google and open source, Obama’s is not a bottom-up strategy, as Matt Stoller notes at OpenLeft. Stoller says Obama is deliberately isolating long-standing progressive groups like VoteVets (left, from one of their 2004 ads) and Progressive Media.
Unlike John McCain and Hillary Clinton, in other words, Barack Obama has not been doing calls with bloggers, or working hand-in-glove with groups like Moveon.org. He is building a first-class technical infrastructure that replaces everyone else’s and owes its loyalty strictly to him.
His sites are becoming Google-like in their power, and Google-like in their autonomy from the movements which spawned them.
Stoller worries this may prove to be a mistake:
When the Swift Boaters come back, and they will, it’s all on Obama and his movement to hit back. He’s betting that he can strip power from their base just as he stripped power from the old Washington way of doing politics within the Democratic Party.
In other words just as Google’s infrastructure allows it to act independently of the open source movement which it claims to champion, so Barack Obama’s infrastructure enables the same with regards the progressive movement he claims to champion.
What that portends I cannot say. What do you think it portends, in both cases?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
| 05/10/08
