Barack Online

Some months previously, very impulsively, I bought an official Barack Obama campaign t-shirt from his online store. It was not a straightforward transaction since I live in Barcelona and the products for sale in the store are only sold in the United States, although they can be seen in any part of the world. In order not to go without this historic t-shirt, given that in recent months it was not clear whether Obama would win the Democratic nomination, I requested that they send the t-shirt to a friend who lives in California, with the idea that he would then send it on to me afterwards.

The purchase of the t-shirt, which is a simple anecdote, had an interesting secondary effect. From the very moment I completed the commercial transaction I was converted, in a somewhat involuntary way, into an outlandish donor who lives in Spain and who has no voting rights in the United States, but who has a credit card number and an email address. These two elements, multiplied by the one and a half million donors on the Internet, were crucial to Obama ultimately managing to become the Democratic candidate.

The term nomad, according to Jacques Attali’s reasoning in his book Millennium (1990) ‘is the key word which defines the way of life, cultural style and consumption of the new millennium. So everyone will carry with him/her these characteristics and nomadism will be the superior form of the economic order’. In this nomadic, and essentially economic, world which Attali predicted 18 years ago, the address of a house, the number and the street, have little significance, what is fundamental is being reachable through the Internet, in this virtual territory where Barack Obama’s team have attacked systematically and tenaciously in recent months.

Every day, the persistent team sent an email, sometimes two or three, which informed us of all of the candidate’s activities, of the main points in his declarations, along with a link to a YouTube clip showing Obama delivering the speech which had taken place just a matter of hours previously. The email also contained a balance sheet of the campaign up to the present day and, when necessary, asked for another donation or support in a specific area, such as, for example, that which they asked for on the 24th of January this year when suspicion grew that behind this charismatic politician was a Muslim in disguise (there were even photographs in circulation). In that email Obama said ‘I am not Muslim; send this message to everyone that you know’.

So, day after day, Obama’s team provided its donors, hundreds of thousands of us, his point of view on the race to the White House. Certainly, sometimes, such insistence becomes tiring, there are mornings when one does not wake up with the urge to delve into what Obama did in the last 12 hours, but should this fatigue become excessive, there is always the option to unsubscribe as a donor.

On the eve of his victorious night, some minutes before his speech, the candidate sent a message which said ‘I am about to go on stage in St Paul to announce that we have won the Democratic nomination’. This message, as in other outstanding moments, was personalized with my name and signed with an over familiar ‘Barack’, without a title or surname.

Beyond what happens from now on, regardless of whether he beats McCain and reaches the White House, Obama has already managed to permanently change the way in which politics is practiced. It’s true that this is an extremely charismatic man, an exceptional speaker who has transcended the social and political boundaries which his color imposed, but it is also certain that these qualities have been strengthened and amplified by the way in which he conducts his campaign. Obama and his advisors have invested in the Internet, making this form of communication their battle ground. Through emails and a very well-designed web page, they managed to obtain, in addition to a considerable amount of fans worldwide, three quarters of the 265 million dollars that they collected, through thousands of modest donations which were no greater than 200 dollars.

Clearly, in recent years, the Internet has become an important tool for political campaigns in any country – in Spain there are prominent examples – but Obama’s great contribution is the central role that the Internet has played in his campaign. His web page functions like a headquarters; volunteers make agreements, share ideas and develop projects through the page itself, that is to say, the leader of a campaign of a group of people, say in Montana, organizes his team, allocates tasks and offers recommendations, by using wiki technology and without leaving his home. And then, when the time comes, this army of stationery nomads (Attali again), who are positioned allover without moving from their seats, leave their homes to physically carry out what they have been planning in their virtual headquarters.

This radical gamble on the future by Barack Obama, with its impressive results, should pay off when the time comes for people to vote. It was an innovative gamble which turned out well for him but which had its risks during a time when many people, especially older voters, still do not trust transactions, not to mention donations, over the Internet.

‘It is impossible to imagine the rise of Barack Obama without the modern methods which he used to organize his campaign, particularly through the Internet’, Simon Rosenburg, president of the New Democratic Network, a prestigious think tank, declared some days ago. In addition to his gamble on the future, which is reflected by the amount of young people who believe in him, and beyond his original way of obtaining financial support, which is a stark contrast to the monolithic donation system used by John McCain, Obama has made his candidacy a joint project which every one of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers and donors feel they belong to. And at this level, he has already provided firm proof that he is very capable of achieving the unity that he advocates and that around the attractive manner in which he speaks, he can orchestrate the change urgently needed in the most powerful country in the world.