Over the last few days, there's been an interesting analysis of some differences between Obama/Clinton appearing in various media outlets. Distilled to a sound-bite: Clinton is the imperial candidate, an oligarchy, with all decisions and communications coming from a small group of long-time Clinton loyalists. Obama by contrast is Web 2.0, following the Howard Dean model, and building upon Dean's Fifty State strategy.
Here are two articles that illustrate the concept more thoroughly. First, Ari Berman's article in last week's The Nation
Dean has remained fastidiously neutral and low-key in this presidential cycle. Yet a number of his top supporters believe the Clinton-Obama contest has become a referendum on the kind of grassroots party building and citizen empowerment Dean pioneered as a presidential candidate and continued as DNC chair. On that issue most Deaniacs, not surprisingly, side with Obama. "Ever since the TV era began in 1960, every single presidential campaign in America has been top-down," says Joe Trippi, Dean's '04 campaign guru and an adviser to John Edwards before he dropped out of the race. "Only two have been bottom-up. One was Dean. The other is Obama."
The race for the Democratic nomination is a window into how the candidates view the future of the party, which is being shaped in large part by Dean's efforts. Are Clinton and Obama similarly committed to Dean's fifty-state strategy? How much faith would each, as the Democratic nominee, put in the party's grassroots? In the Internet era, the party is less about elder statesmen sitting in Washington than millions of people across the country organizing locally around issues and candidates. Dean and Obama have understood how the party is changing--and have embraced it. Clinton, thus far, has not.
[snip]
Yet in a larger sense, Hillary's candidacy represents the polar opposite of what Dean built as a candidate and party chair: her campaign is dominated by an inner circle of top strategists, with little room for grassroots input; it hasn't adapted well to new Internet tools like Facebook and MySpace; it tends to raise big contributions from a small group of high rollers rather than from large numbers of small donors; and it is less inclined to expand the base of the party.
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In contrast to Clinton's campaign, Obama's--with its hundreds of thousands of small donors, Internet buzz and red-state appeal--reflects to a great extent the realization of Dean's ideals. Dean's argument for how to rebuild and expand the party base for the long term found its perfect short-term exponent in Obama, whose appeal to independents and liberal Republicans and talk of "unity" is planting Democratic roots in unfamiliar places. "The Obama for President campaign is what all of us hoped Dean for President would become," says Steve McMahon, a former top Dean strategist who's stayed neutral in '08. "Obama is Dean 2.0, dramatically updated to reflect the emergence of the grassroots."
Stylistically and rhetorically, the brash and rumpled Dean and the smooth and graceful Obama couldn't be more different. Yet the link between the two dates back to '04, when the offshoot of Dean's presidential campaign, Democracy for America, supported Obama in the Illinois Senate race. Dean's advisers admit that Obama is a more inspirational and disciplined presidential candidate than was Dean, able to excite the Democratic base while bringing in new voters, energizing a new crop of organizers and expanding the electoral map. This is borne out by Obama's remarkable performance thus far in red states like Idaho, Alaska and Alabama--places where Dean has invested heavily. "From a progressive who wants to see Democrats compete in all fifty states, you'd have to give the nod to Obama," says Trippi.
[snip]
In his sprint across the country before Super Tuesday, Obama wisely hit places where the party had barely existed years before. "They told me there weren't any Democrats in Idaho," Obama told a raucous crowd of 14,000 in Boise. "I didn't believe them." On Super Tuesday Obama won fifteen of Idaho's eighteen delegates and virtually swept the Midwest and Mountain West.
Besides a desire to push the party away from a strictly swing-state mentality, Dean and Obama share a commitment to the nuts-and-bolts of grassroots organizing. On the stump Obama is quick to stress his roots as a community organizer and always thanks his precinct captains, who routinely introduce him at campaign events. "Change doesn't happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up," he now says in his stump speech. Obama's organizing has been greatly enhanced by new technologies like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace (Friendster had just arrived when Dean was running). "We pioneered it and Obama perfected it," Trippi says. Obama embraced elements of the new politics, hiring the co-founder of Facebook, for example; but other efforts came from the grassroots--just as with the Dean campaign--as supporters organized themselves online and on the ground. The net effect is Obama's large base of small donors, who are enthusiastic supporters he can tap again and again. Ninety percent of the $28 million he raised online in January, for example, came in donations of $100 or less. Obama has fused a tightknit group of advisers with a mass of ordinary people, creating what Trippi calls "command and control at the top while empowering the bottom to make a difference."
Trippi's book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is required reading in a class that Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, teaches at Northwestern University. If the Obama campaign naturally understood what Dean was trying to do, even though Dean's candidacy ultimately fizzled, the Clintons did not. "They looked at '04 and said, If Howard Dean lost, those tools must not have worked," Trippi says. He cites Clinton's unwillingness to compete all-out in red-state caucuses as a main reason her campaign is in such a predicament. Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos dubbed Clinton's approach--and subsequent discounting of her losses in red America--the "insult 40 states" strategy. While the Obama campaign prepared for the long haul, Clinton poured most of her resources into a few key early states, expecting to have the nomination wrapped up by Super Tuesday. "It's not a very long run," Clinton predicted in late December. "It'll be over by February 5." [Click to read the rest The Dean Legacy]
And secondly, an IM session interview between John Heilemann and Joe Trippi covers some of the same ground
Last night, Democratic strategist Joe Trippi sat down to discuss the Democratic primary with New York's John Heilemann from his home on the eastern shore of Maryland. The architect of Howard Dean's 2000 primary insurgency, most recently a senior adviser to John Edwards's campaign and a leading advocate for the "bottom-up" style of campaigning, which eschews big donors in favor of grassroots organizing and small donations fueled by the Internet, shared his thoughts on the current Clinton-Obama deadlock. Read on to find out why this won't be resolved before the convention, a Clinton-Obama ticket is likely, and the end of the writers' strike was a key moment in the race.…JH: The Clinton strategy is premised on trying to make Obama look like just another politician. From what you've observed, how different do you think he really is?
JT: Well, the Clinton campaign is the last top-down campaign on our side — and it is the best top-down campaign of all time. The Obama campaign is only the second bottom-up campaign in history — and it is stronger than the Clinton campaign both in money and organization. It is the reason Obama destroys Clinton in caucus states. The Dean campaign, when I think of it now, it seems to me we were the Wright brothers proving you could design something no one had seen before and that you could actually fly in politics coming from the bottom up and using new ways to communicate. Four years later, win or lose, the Obama campaign is landing a man on the moon.
JH: So bottom-up campaigning, done right, wins caucuses. But top-down seems to be holding its own in big-state primaries. What lessons can we draw from that?
JT: Top-down still is king in TV dependent, massive states like California, New Jersey, etc. But bottom-up raises Obama the money to compete in that medium as well. So it's not bottom-up that is failing in those states, it is that Clinton’s message works better across those demographics. In the end your message works or it doesn't. Obama has been hit-and-miss when it comes to connecting with blue-collar Democrats. No matter what the medium, this seems to be a problem for him.
JH: If you were advising Clinton, what would you be telling her now?
JT: Clinton has to win Pennsylvania, but then she has a small chance of defeating Obama in North Carolina — and that might shock the superdelegates into rethinking Obama further. The red-phone ad worked, so they need to keep doing that to raise doubts in people's heads. But the problem she has is very real. They won't be defeating just Obama anymore; they are going to have to crush all those young people, African-Americans, and progressives in the party that have embraced Obama's candidacy. That is one of the reasons that she keeps mentioning what a great vice-president Obama would be, even as she makes the case that he isn't ready to be president. In the end, Clinton may need a self-inflicted mistake by Obama to get the nomination
[Click to read the entire interview, which also covers the superdelegate decisions yet to come John Heilemann and Joe Trippi Discuss the Democratic Primary Race Over Instant Messenger - New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer]
(H/T locussolus)
-- There was also an article a few weeks ago in AdAge and/or AdWeek about which candidate was the most effective using Facebook, twitter, blogs, and the like. Again, Obama has a clear lead.
