By the close of the campaign, Obama’s e-mail list had swelled to thirteen million addresses (Plouffe, 2010: 364). Around 24 percent of all voters were contacted via e-mail during the campaign, though e-mail came a poor second to a much older medium for direct contact—the phone, which was used to reach 53 percent of voters. CNN’s national exit poll found that 26 percent of voters had been “personally” contacted by the Obama campaign, while 18 percent had been reached by the McCain campaign (Sabato, 2010: 71). By election day, Obama had 2.4 million friends on Facebook; McCain had 623,000. Across the top 200 online video platforms, 104,000 videos mentioned Obama; 64,000 mentioned McCain. The Obama campaign itself uploaded 1,822 videos to YouTube; McCain’s campaign managed just 330. Twenty of Obama’s videos received more than one million views by the campaign’s close. McCain’s performance on YouTube was less spectacular, with only three videos topping the one million mark (Alexander, 2010: 60; Rasiej & Sifry, 2008). The Annenberg Election Study (Kenski, et al., 2010: 306) found that those who self-reported acquiring political information online were more likely to vote for Obama, though the margin was very small—a clue to how the internet must be set in the context of the wider media system, particularly the deluge of television advertising I discussed earlier in this chapter. Overall, 68 percent of voters cited television as their main source of campaign news, compared with 26 percent who cited “the internet” (Pew Research Center, 2008a). This seldom-reported statistic should not come as a surprise if we consider the amount of television advertising generated during the campaign—funded, of course, by all of those internet donations.
Conclusion
The Obama campaign of 2008 was important in constructing a new model for the successful prosecution of the American presidential campaign. This novelty did not arise from the use of newer media but from an approach that simultaneously constructed and rigorously exploited the hybrid media system for the purposes of campaign communication. The campaign went beyond simple reactions to a preexisting context: it actively shaped the media system in which it could then play such a decisive role. This was a genuine breakthrough, but the breakthrough was not the sole result of the adoption of digital media.
The campaign clearly saw the internet as a tool for mobilization and the coordination of face-to-face contact activity such as canvassing and voter registration and mobilization. But the internet was not understood as a means of displacing television and newspapers. And despite the importance of the new media staff and their direct line of communication with the war room, it was clear from an early stage that the internet campaign would be tightly managed to ensure that it was fully integrated with the other divisions. Online interactivity, while encouraged, would, as much as possible, be on the campaign’s own terms and harnessed in a way that fitted with this hybrid media campaigning model.
Obama’s campaign was a calibrated and controlled response to long-term trends in the fragmentation of mediated politics. But the response was not quite as expected. Yes, the campaign sliced and diced the demographics and used targeted communication on a scale that had never before been witnessed. And yet 2008 also revealed the continuing importance of physical gatherings and big television events. The theatrical, the grandiose, and the televisual endure in importance. This is the wider context in which Obama’s digital media campaign must be set. Televised debates, ads, newspaper interviews, web videos, and high-profile television appearances increasingly meshed together to create new campaign dynamics. In an important sense, then, as time passes it is becoming clearer that there is never likely to be such a thing as an “internet election.” While the internet was undoubtedly of major significance, its position in a broader media system matters just as much. It is to analysis of that broader media system beyond the campaign that I now turn.
7
Systemic Hybridity in the Mediation of the American Presidential Campaign
Amy Rice and Alicia Sams’s behind-the-scenes documentary By the People: The Election of Barack Obama (2009) vividly exposes what it now takes to run an American presidential campaign. Much of this revealing film is devoted to capturing the backstage maneuvers of Obama’s senior staff: David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and Jon Favreau. Consider some typical scenes. As Axelrod and Plouffe enter elevators, they descend into silence and stare intently at their BlackBerry smartphones. They leave elevators and walk into campaign rooms where staff sit huddled around computer screens and multiple television screens. With BlackBerrys still in hand, Axelrod and Plouffe often half look up at these televisions, which usually feature news bulletins from around six or seven different channels, before directing their gaze to multiple computer monitors. These monitors usually feature data—incoming results and projections of the night ahead—based on polling and digitally stored voter contact reports that are updated hourly (Plouffe, 2010: 170). Axelrod and Plouffe often appear to cross-reference this information against what they are reading in their BlackBerry text messages and e-mails. Meanwhile, at another computer sits Jon Favreau, usually willing into submission the final draft of a speech he is writing for the candidate.
Vast amounts of time in the contemporary campaign is spent interacting with one screen or another, or several screens at the same time. This is campaigning in the hybrid media system.
Autobiographies and Premediation
Election campaigning now begins many years before the campaign itself and this is driven by a bastion of older media logic that has assumed even greater significance in the last decade: the candidate book. Almost all candidates in recent election cycles have used autobiographies to premediate their campaign, as far as possible on their own terms. Richard Grusin has written of the spread of premediation as “the cultural desire to make sure that the future has already been pre-mediated before it turns into the present (or the past)—in large part to try to prevent the media, and hence the American public, from being caught unawares.… ” “Premediation,” he suggests, “is not about getting the future right, but about proliferating multiple remediations of the future … ” (2010: 4). This concept can be transposed to the campaign environment. Obama’s two bestselling autobiographies, Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006), together with John McCain’s bestselling Faith of My Fathers (1999), played important roles in the run-up to the 2008 contest. These books provided professional journalists with an extended set of narratives about the candidates, ready-made well in advance of when the reporters’ gaze would inevitably focus on personal character and past judgment. Given their importance for establishing early campaign momentum, it is no surprise that the visual lexicon of candidates’ websites also heavily reinforced these narratives. This was particularly evident, for example, in the skillful use of what David Gliem and James Janack have termed “historiated” still photography. Such photography served to tie Obama visually to transformational moments in America’s past, such as the Lincoln presidency, the Kennedy era, and the great speeches of Martin Luther King (Gliem & Janack, 2008). These historical themes were also reinforced by graphic designers and visual artists such as Shepard Fairey and Ron English, whose retro-style posters were important in augmenting the campaign’s official visual style (Seidman, 2010).
As Jeffrey Alexander has argued, the autobiographies of potential future presidents usually conform with the classic tropes of heroic fiction. A candidate will present himself as having overcome past hardships during unusual formative experiences that have come to shape his present character (Alexander, 2010: 64) These themes were dominant for each candidate in 2008. On the McCain side, it was how a military record in Vietnam equipped him to become a “fighter” and how an earlier career flouting party discipline in Congress made him a “maverick.” As for Obama, it was how experience of community organizing in Chicago and an unusual mixed-heritage background had both made him particularly proud to be American. To force these narratives home, giant video screens featuring grainy archive images depicting a candidate’s past life often formed the backdrop to rallie
s and speeches, but also websites.
During the early stages of the campaign, journalists working for elite media such as the Washington Post and the New York Times latched onto these books and presented readers with summary accounts of the candidates’ histories. The 2006 book tour for Obama’s The Audacity of Hope sparked off an independent grassroots campaign that urged him to announce a presidential bid. More importantly, it stoked television journalists’ incessant desire to speculate on likely entrants in the race. The success of the book tour led to an appearance in October 2006 on Meet the Press, during which Obama was questioned by Tim Russert. Although he would not formally announce his decision to run until January 2007, this was the first public signal that Obama was seriously considering his candidacy.
Autobiographical narratives provide journalists with particularly important resources during times of surprise and crisis. As the U.S. financial meltdown closed in on the campaign in October 2008, several essays in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal refracted the candidates’ likely reactions through the prism of the autobiographies they had earlier established through their books (Alexander, 2010: 85). Books are therefore an effective means of influencing the long-term framing of the campaign. But they also carry risks. Should the context shift and public opinion swing dramatically away from support for a candidate’s formative values and character, a candidate’s personalized narrative may become anchorless. McCain’s experience of military valor struck many chords, but in the context of his advancing years, the growing unpopularity of America’s involvement in Iraq, and the emergence of the economy as the most salient issue for voters in the campaign, his story was less resonant than Obama’s. Yet even Obama had problems with the story of his books, as his rapid rise and limited experience in national politics fueled McCain campaign’s attacks on him during the summer of 2008.
The Real-Space–Internet–Television Nexus
In line with the online announcements of rivals John Edwards and Hillary Clinton that they had decided to run, Obama launched his Democratic primary campaign with a video uploaded to YouTube on January 18, 2007. As David Plouffe said of this: “the fact that it feels more casual, not like an Oval Office address, is dead-on. It looks less contrived” (Plouffe, 2010: 32). The point, of course, is that it was contrived. Not only was it contrived, it was also deemed insufficient: the video launch was followed by an “announcement tour” that began with a carefully managed outside rally in Springfield, Illinois, complete with a crowd of fifty thousand supporters and a carefully designed stage in front of the Old State Capitol that had been lit up in anticipation the night before.
These first major events of the campaign presaged what was to become a recurrent theme: the physicality and theatricality of journeying around the country to participate in carefully orchestrated real-space spectacles was a crucial aspect of projecting Obama to the public and of garnering professional journalists’ interest. But the significance of these real-space campaign events must also be set in a wider context. Real-space spectacles integrated with the online effort. Tickets to attend rallies and speeches were issued via online sign-up forms. Attendees were asked to sign in to rallies and hand over their e-mail addresses. This is now essential in the early primary states, such as Iowa and New Hampshire, where relatively small electorates and progressively refined voter information files make it possible for campaigns to know a great deal about the entire voting body. In Iowa, for instance, the Obama team was able to compare its attendance data with the voter data it had purchased, and it could then target its campaign efforts accordingly. Iowa meetings revealed that large numbers of young voters, non-activist Democrats, and even Republicans and independents were attracted to participate in these real-space rallies (Plouffe, 2010: 42). And the individuals who attended could be tracked throughout the entire duration of the campaign. Donations, volunteering activity, and primary voting patterns were logged, enabling the campaign to adapt reflexively and calibrate the stimuli with which they attempted to mobilize support.
Many “low-dollar” real-space fundraising events were held, not only as a means of generating money and sign-ups, but also to spark interest among local newspapers. Such events were perceived as having a discrete function that was especially important during the early stages of the primaries, when there was a struggle to get the media to take Obama’s candidacy seriously and to convey the impression of growing and enthusiastic grassroots support. The campaign learned that the opportunity costs of devoting the candidate’s time to internet-coordinated physical events that might produce comparatively small donation returns would be offset by the increased likelihood that local media reports “would also include footage of Obama delivering his message speech and excited supporters at what looked like a rally” (Plouffe, 2010: 49). And the campaign leadership created a broader sense of affiliation when it live-streamed some of these events to supporters across the country, and when it granted successful low-dollar fundraisers occasional meetings and conference calls with Obama and other members of the senior team. This was a case of using the coordinative affordances of online media to organize physical gatherings. But those gatherings, in turn, produced beneficially credible website, television, radio, and newspaper coverage, and they also boosted the volunteer infrastructure of the campaign.
Physical campaign events therefore continue to shape the mediation of American presidential campaigns in powerful ways. They are a test of an organization’s capacity to turn out committed supporters willing to invest time and effort in demonstrating support for a candidate, often in freezing weather during the most important early primaries. Bodies and money are the symbolic resources upon which performative success rests in the eyes of professional journalists. In-person attendance at rallies and reports of donation figures are relatively “hard” proxies for popular enthusiasm. A show of strength at a rally signals to reporters that the candidate should be taken seriously, even if they know all too well that the party has to varying extents manufactured the show. The location of rallies is more carefully chosen than ever. One in Delaware on Super Bowl Sunday turned out to be the largest in the state’s history and it did much to secure the state’s primary delegates for Obama on Super Tuesday. But Delaware was selected primarily for the coverage the meeting would inevitably receive in the Philadelphia television region (Plouffe, 2010: 169).
The physicality of an enthusiastic crowd can often be powerfully conveyed on television, but it can be difficult to convey in textual online mediation. However, the self-produced video footage that now plays such an important role in campaigns makes for good online content to e-mail to volunteers, post on the official campaign blog, and upload to YouTube. These real-space events are also useful for more concrete tasks, though these tasks are also made more achievable by digital media. At many rallies, including most spectacularly Obama’s seventy-five thousand-strong convention speech at Denver, Colorado, impromptu phone banks were set up to spur a captive audience of activists to make calls for support. Attendees were invited to call names from specially prepared flyers handed out on entry (Cornfield, 2010: 225). If journalists use turnouts at rallies as a proxy for the broader commitment of supporters, events like the Denver speech phone banks add an extra layer of authenticity, physically demonstrating the existence of the wider networked campaign. Text-to-screen technology was also used on several occasions as a means of fusing real-space with digitally mediated space. The Obama Minute campaign organized by New York photographer Scott Cohen asked supporters to donate money and send text messages that were then displayed on a giant billboard in Times Square. Web users could also embed Cohen’s widget on their websites displaying the constantly updated billboard (An Obama Minute, 2008).
Ironically, however, as the campaign progressed it became increasingly obvious that Obama was having fewer and fewer opportunities to be depicted interacting in smaller, calmer settings with voters (Plouffe, 2010: 142). This approach is regarded as essential for displaying humility, interperso
nal skills, and a willingness to connect with the public on their own terms. These are quintessentially televisual moments: candidates are usually wearing a microphone and there is space for journalists to operate a camera and use close-up shots. This is a different kind of physicality from the rally, but one that has become an increasingly essential part of televised electoral campaigning since the 1960s. Even as early as the New Hampshire primary, the fear was that Obama would be depicted as a crowd-pleasing “rock-star” with a large devoted following of young people. Conveying too much grassroots enthusiasm might turn off potential voters whose evaluative criteria does not involve inspirational stump-speech performances. This fear generated a series of responses by the Obama campaign and these reveal television’s unique advantages and its place in the assemblage of media, technologies, and human labor that make up the contemporary campaign.
An excellent example of the enduring power of the genres of television-centric campaigning came during the primaries. Behind in the opinion polls and about to go down to an unthinkable second defeat to Obama, Hillary Clinton gathered with a small group of sixteen voters, fourteen of whom were women, in a coffee shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. About one hundred journalists were crammed into the shop, out of view of the cameras (Breslau, 2008). ABC and many other television channels were there to film the occasion. Clinton was asked how she juggled the demands of running a campaign with her personal life and identity as a woman. She began her response and, suddenly, her eyes welled up with tears. With the tears held back, a few seconds later she continued, but her voice quavered as she struggled to control her emotions. The response was simultaneously fragile and defiant. To spontaneous applause of sympathy, she outlined her commitment to the nation and hinted at how difficult it was for a woman to campaign for president.
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