The Barack Obama campaign has one of the worst track records in reaching out to the blogosphere for support. Not only have they snub the so-called netroots bloggers that strategize through the Townhouse mailing list, but they have actually gone out of their way to not reach out to prominent black, latino and women bloggers who are outside of said mailing.
The best example of this snub was the campaign's absence from BlogHer [1], the largest convention of women bloggers in the United States and, technically, the world. At BlogHer we had the pleasure to have Elizabeth Edwards [2] as one of our keynote speakers. The Hillary Clinton campaign made a lukewarm appearance by sending in a representative. The biggest omission was Barack Obama himself. After all, the conference was in his hometown of Chicago.
Not sending Michelle Obama to speak to the 800+ networks of vote-ready of mostly mommybloggers who were in attendance has been, in my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes of the Obama campaign. Worse than the unforgivable muscling-out of the volunteer Joe Anthony from the largest volunteer Obama network on MySpace [3].
So it does not come as a surprise that Barack's blogger outreach guy has left the building [4] :
Josh Orton, who had been doing "blog outreach" for the Obama campaign, has departed the campaign, two sources familiar with his move said.
Orton, who worked for Air America Radio before joining the campaign, filled a new job description that most presidential campaigns now embrace, a kind of press secretary and community liaison focused on the growing network of liberal political bloggers.
It's unclear whether the reasons for his departure were more related to personality or to policy, but some bloggers have been frustrated by Obama's reluctance to engage the highest-profile and most widely read branches of the Netroots.
I am still mystified as to what is the logic behind this strategy. It's true that Obama has an incredible online track record of raising vast amounts of cash from small donors. TechPresident has the numbers and it's quite impressive [5] : Obama was able to raise $20 million from 352,000 people.
Micah Sifry is quote by Ben Smith as saying that the Obama campaign has been focused on "building their own political network directly under their roof".
Isn't that completely counter-intuitive to how online networking works? Or are they rationalizing that if a fenced platform without a networking system works for MySpace and Facebook it will work for a man running for President as well?
This then begs the question : What kind of offline democratic practices can we expect from a man who has gone out of his way to not create a more open and democratic way to connect to his online democratic platform?
In other words, is Barack Obama's online strategy good for rebuilding our democracy?
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