The Obama bio running in today's NYT is almost too positive to read. But you need to read it, if only so that you can take in how it ends. Here's Obama's take on the meaning of his campaign:
"It's like I'm just the excuse."
Go read the full thing to put it into context, because this at bottom what this whole thing is about.
There are plenty of people out there who still don't understand what is happening. Obama has taken the ethic of web 2.0 and carried it into politics. Its not about him, but about us, and not in some cheezy, new agey way, but in a deep, meaningful way that has the potential to thoroughly transform our system.
This has happened three times before in our history, and it is happening again.
In the 1820s, rapid technological innovation led to an explosion of cheap paper and cheap print that gave rise to a new system called Jacksonian Democracy - mass participation, national political parties that thoroughly remade a system before its founders had even passed from the scene.
In the early 1900s, the Industrial Revolution drove a series of technological shifts that gave rise to pluralist politics, pushing parties out of the way in favor of vast array of newly created interest groups.
In the 1950s, radio and TV joined forces to create candidate centered campaigns, further weakening parties and moving individual political elites into the center of the system.
And today, in the early 2000s, the rise of social network technologies has opened the door for yet another transformation, bringing citizens back into the center of the system in a way we haven't seen for almost 200 years.
Obama's campaign would have been impossible without this shift, and he and his most senior advisors know it. They beat Clinton because they understood this new world in ways that she simply could not. She built a 20th century political machine, and they used 21st century technology to destroy it. Now they will take their new network and use it to dismantle the system that has dominated our politics for more than half a century.
Our system runs in cycles. They aren't perfectly predictable, but they are there, and if you are willing to do the historical research you can learn how to spot them. I don't know how it is that Obama's team saw the shift before so many others, but they did. And that made all the difference.
UPDATE: Funny, that. The first thing I read after posting this was from Juan Cole. Reacting to another NYT article, he channels Wired and writes:
I think it is more significant that Obama is the first major party candidate for president who got where he is through the current iteration of the World Wide Web, which includes the blogging world, distributed information networks, social networking, and video sites such as YouTube (i.e. Web 2.0). That is, the Iowa breakthrough was iconic of Obama's success, because youth, progressivism, metro-racialism and independent politics are all tightly interwoven with Web 2.0.
Ironically, Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992 was the first to use email extensively to shape the news cycle and contact supporters, but Hillary Clinton's people did not seem as good (or maybe as interested) in being on the vanguard of communications technology.Among the more important capabilities bestowed by the Web 2.0 has been a new model of grassroots fundraising. American politics had been dominated by rich old cranky white people, because they had the money and they voted. They gave us all those Republican administrations and they shaped the Clinton administration as essentially neo-Eisenhowerism. Obama really does have an opportunity to accomplish some new things in American politics, and to avoid slavish adherence to Lobby politics, precisely because he has a different economic base. People younger than 65, and people for whom certain racial categories are not the most important thing in the world, might finally have a voice. In the past, the promise of the youth vote has always faltered when it comes to the November elections. If people in their 20s, 30s and 40s really want change (and with Iraq, the economy, etc., why would they not?) they have to go on organizing, canvassing, giving and above all voting. It is in your hands, O Generation of Web 2.0.
Here's the key difference with the 1968 generation: the "kids" today live and breathe distributed information networks and social networking. Using these systems is both as normal and as necessary for them as breathing air. They are on the other side of a dividing line that those of us born before the invention of these technologies cannot truly understand. We imagine a world without these technologies by remembering our own very recent past. They imagine a world without them by imagining a world without them. For those of us born in the world after the TV, imagine what life would be like if someone suddenly took away all of the TVs in the world - and imagine it with everything that implies - and you have some sense of just how big this transformation is. But only some sense, because whereas TV is a passive medium, social networks are active. They are participatory.
And that is the key fact that so many people don't seem to understand. These "kids" live and breathe participatory networks. It isn't a question of "if" they want change. They are change.
The question is not if, but when. Do we embrace this moment now, or do we hold on to our past for four more years and elect a man older than the automatic transmission and Snow White. Those are the alternatives. Is the future now, or will it have to wait 4 years? That's it.
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