Lessons from Obama (part III) – Communication

This is the third part in a three-part post seeking to esamine the lessons Irish politics can take from Obama’s campaign.  The first two parts dealt with organisation and fundraising.  Apologies for the delay in posting part three – life went a bit crazy for a while, and work has been exceptionally busy of late.

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Communication

In many ways, communications were the key battleground for the Obama victory.   From the message that was shaped by the campaign, to the innovative use of media, there are plenty of lessons there for us to learn.

Shaping a message:

Obama’s message was at all times simple and easily understood.  From the outset, Obama himself referred to himself in an interview with the New York Times as a “political Rorschach Test” – an inkblot on a page into which people could read almost anything they wanted.   From this starting point sprang the “Change” rhetoric that I was finding somewhat tiresome about three months ago, but seems to have stood him in great stead with the US electorate.

Linda Hirschman last week referred to Obama’s as a candidacy “built on opacity, ambiguity and generality”, while yesterday Tom Clark’s view was of “a campaign that was unapologetic about attacking the status quo from the centre-left”.
To a degree, both of those statements are true.  Hirschman is referring to how Obama very successfully avoided getting into a huge amount of substantive detail on most of his policies.   Perhaps he realised that he would hamstring his presidency if he over-committed himself during the election.  Or perhaps he realised that most people actually don’t want to hear about the nitty-gritty detail of public policy – they would much rather hear reassuring noises of “hope” and “change”, and feel free to fill the other blanks for themselves.

On the other hand, Clark is quite right in pointing out that the Obama campaign could accurately be described as left-of-centre.  He spoke regularly (though rarely in any considerably detail) about creating full employment, cutting taxes for lower-earners, reducing the cost of social insurance etc.   Of course, he also spoke of how he’s in favour of the death penalty, waxed lyrical in his infomercial about helping the middle classes (without once mentioning, in the present tense, the plight of working classes), and spoke of the need to escalate the war in Afghanistan.  Nevertheless, on the whole his message was an anti-establishment, left-of-centre one – he painted himself as an outsider untarnished by a lengthy political career or heavy ideology.  And boy did the electorate lap it up.

So, how could Irish political parties learn from this style of communicating.  Well, there are three lessons that I would take from the Obama message.  Firstly, the electorate don’t want to hear the finer details of your policies on welfare reform or such topics – sure have such detail available on your website or in print, but in all public appearances, stress big picture messages on how society can be altered for the better.  Secondly, when there’s an unpopular Government (and this could be particularly relevant in the run-up to the local elections next year), talk about how you would make things better – don’t go on the attack, but lead on your own proposals (which will obviously imply criticisms of the incumbent administration).  And thirdly, de-personalise debate while re-personalising politics.  People don’t want to hear squabbles about who was friends with whom years ago (see the McCain/Palin response to the Ayers issue for proof of this) – don’t get into battles over who is more qualified or experienced (again, there was little evidence in the US election that greater experience was a huge asset to McCain).  Instead, focus on how the people are demanding a shift in political thinking, and make yourself (and by extension your political movement) an embodiment of that shift – if you are successful at saying this often enough, it will become true!

Many will argue that there are limited lessons Irish politics can take from US elections due to the differences between our respective political systems.  However, while we don’t have the same style of executive government, Irish elections have become increasingly presidential in recent years.  There’s no reason to assume that will continue indefinitely, but it would seem to be safe to assume that will remain the case for the next election or two anyway.

Using the Media:

Arianna Huffington posted just before election day on how the internet was the real winner of the election.  Now, I think that’s a little shrill personally, but to be fair, she has an enormous online community behind her, so she was entitled to feel great at the end of the campaign.  However, while I do think she overstated it somewhat, I think the internet finally had some impact during the election, not least because of some exceptionally innovative campaigning.  There are a lot of lessons we can learn from Obama’s online campaign, such as:

• Obama’s website – well, the Obama website was quite simply the greatest political website I’ve ever seen.  From the exceptional splash page (no longer there) which harvested huge numbers of names, email addresses and postcodes, to the ability to create an individually personalised portal for each user, it was astonishing.  Oh, and it still managed to be amazingly pretty!
• Twitter - used by both Obama and McCain, twitter in Ireland has been somewhat limited by the inability of twitter to notify users by text of updates from their friends.  However, the fact that twitter saw their billionth post made last week shows the potential audience of the platform, and with increasing numbers of people available of data packages ont heir mobiles, I think this will continue to rise in Ireland.  For Jaiku, you could just re-read this section of the post!
• The usual suspects – bebo, facebook and myspace.  Of course, these are the grand-daddies of social networking by now, but they remain easily the best-used sites (in Ireland at least).  There’s a reason for that – they’re the best!  And millions of users can be found there.  And with such sites increasingly adopting advertising platforms that allow for targetted advertising, the usefulness in Irish politics seems likely to increase, in the medium-term at least.
• LinkedIn – while nowhere near as big as the three listed above, LinkedIn was interestingly used by the Obama campaign to target a totally different demographic.  Generally, LinkedIn users are slightly older, but considerably wealthier, than facebook or bebo users.
• Blogging – One remarkable aspect of the Obama website was how they encouraged supporters to blog their own views about Obama.  In other words, the didn’t in any way try to restrict the message online (though by all accounts this was very different when it came to printed materials), but rather openly encouraged anyone to write whatever they wanted, as long as it was supportive of Obama!  I think there are lessons to learn here – personally, I’d like to see political parties give out blog templates to anyone who wished to use one (though these templates should be enforced on representatives to provide a standardised party brand) – empowering people to make their own arguments in support of various parties.
• YouTube – this one took off from the moment the primary campaigns began.  Increasingly, each candidate used YouTube to disseminate professional infomercials, but also to begin viral marketing campaigns.  There’s potential in this idea, but I’m not convinced that any Irish parties really have the resources to exploit this potential.  I’m open to persuasion though!

I was preparing a whole other load on how Obama impacted the mainstream media, but to be honest, I’m sick of talking about him now, and I’m sure you’re all sick of reading my thoughts!

The final thing I will say, is that the Transition website is one of the most encouraging signs I have seen from Obama’s election, and opens up a world of possibilities about how the internet could alter democracy…

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