Barack Obama's superiority in his campaign's use of the internet as a political tool in the 2008 presidential election was underlined at a new media conference in New York today in which senior Republican advisers admitted that the party had become complacent in the last four years and lost the initiative.
Mindy Finn, who led internet strategy for Mitt Romney during the primary elections, said the Republicans had lost their edge over the past four years. "The right was very big on the web in 2000, 2002 and 2004, and Bush was effective at getting his message out through videos and the blogosphere. But now we've got complacent."
The conference, organised by the Personal Democracy Forum, brought together chief internet strategists for several of the 2008 candidates. In addition to Romney they included the internet gurus of Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain and Ron Paul.
The vast gulf in internet-driven campaign energy between Obama and his Republican opponent McCain was underlined by the fact that Obama has just past the magical figure of one million supporters on Facebook.
McCain by contrast has about 150,000.
McCain's web strategist Mark Soohoo insisted that this was not a measure of Obama's political support. "Just because we don't have a million Facebook friends doesn't mean we don't have supporters - if it did the polls would be showing an Obama lead by nine to one."
Tracy Russo, part of John Edwards's internet team, said McCain's grasp of social networking tools was "like trying to teach your grandmother about Twitter and then applying it to government".
Soohoo, put on the defensive, countered that it was a mistake to assume McCain had no knowledge of new media. "You don't have to use a computer to know how it shapes the country. John McCain is aware of the
internet. This is a man who has a long history of understanding a range of issues," he said.
Despite the note of discord, the one area of agreement between all panel members - Soohoo included - was that Obama campaign had led the field in applying internet social networking tools to a presidential run, with massive results. His success in primaries and caucuses across the country, as well as in raising unprecedented amounts of money
through small donations, can both be traced back to the internet.
Joe Rospars, Obama's top web strategist, said the inspiration all flowed directly from the candidate himself. "[Obama's] been the driving force of the ethos and the use of the web. It has all flowed from his background as a community organiser and his knowledge of working on the
ground."
Rospars denied that Obama had been more stand-offish towards bloggers than other candidates, saying the campaign's approach of spreading itself locally in all 50 states was intimately tied into the blogosphere. He added that if Obama reached the White House he would introduce open communications into government, with meetings streamed live.
Peter Daou, Clinton's internet chief, said 2008 was the first presidential election where the internet "really did arrive". Though he said it would be too complicated to merge Clinton's enormous database of supporters' emails with Obama's, Daou said that everything would be done to use the database in the coming election to persuade her supporters to back him.
