A Long Time Coming by Evan Thomas

Author:Evan Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: PublicAffairs

MCCAIN WAS SINCERE. He did not want to win by playing on racial anxiety. He had too vivid a memory of being smeared in South Carolina in 2000. His wife, Cindy, had an even more searing recollection. She personally blamed Karl Rove, Bush’s political guru, for unleashing the old Lee Atwater attack machine, using anonymous smear artists to spread around leaflets suggesting that her adopted daughter, Bridget, was the love child of John McCain and a black prostitute. Rove always vigorously denied any such thing, and the link was never proved. McCain, who prided himself on his sense of forgiveness, told friends that he was willing to get along with Rove and move on. But Cindy never did. At a private gathering in Aspen, Colo., in the summer of 2007, a friend asked Cindy whether she would stab Rove in the back if he walked by. “No,” she answered, “I’d stab him in the front.”

To the casual visitor, the New Media department at Obama headquarters seemed at once ultrahip and painfully earnest, a touchy-feely, emo sort of place where people talk about saving their souls and use lefty academic jargon like “agency.” One reporter described the sentiment toward the candidate as a sort of “Lincoln 2.0.” The frat brothers over in Communications liked to joke about whether the geeks in New Media were still virgins.

When it came to what they actually did, however, the nerds of New Media were cold realists. “We never do something just because it’s cool,” the campaign’s official blogger, Sam Graham-Felsen, told a Newsweek reporter. “We’re always nerdily getting something out of it.” He showed off the Obama ’08 iPhone application. With its deep Obama blues, correct fonts and glassy graphics, it looked like an electronic bauble for the well-heeled voter. Closer inspection revealed a sophisticated data-mining operation. Tap the top button, “call friends,” and the software would take a peek at your phone book and rearrange it in the order that the campaign was targeting states, so that friends who had, say, Colorado or Virginia area codes would appear at the top. With another tap, the Obama supporter could report back essential data for a voter canvass (“left message,” “not interested,” “already voted,” etc.). It all went into a giant database for Election Day.

Early that summer, the campaign made the unorthodox decision to announce its vice presidential pick via text messages sent directly to supporters. It wasn’t just a trick to do something flashy with technology and attract media attention. The point was to collect voters’ cell-phone numbers for later contact during voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts. Thanks to the promotion, the campaign’s list of cell-phone numbers increased several-fold to more than 1 million. (Among the registrees: one Beau Biden, son of Joe.)

“I don’t care about online energy and enthusiasm just for the sake of online energy and enthusiasm,” said Chris Hughes, head of New Media’s social networking. “It’s about making money, making phone calls, embedding video or having video forwarded to friends.” There was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.