I suppose it's inevitable that a new group of interesting and motivated supporters are going to come into the process every four years and make the party their own. For the first time in four years (at least), there were competitive elections for college Democrats. DNC members are openly talking about defying the next Democratic President in their vote to select the next DNC Chair, and are voting down Howard Dean's resolutions in executive committee meetings. Tavis Smiley is remaking black politics into a movement again, and pushing a book into the number one spot on the New York Times best-seller list published by a minority owned firm (and ignored by the mass media, including Oprah).
What have this people-powered politics thing done? So let me just say on behalf of the million plus young people that are about to encounter a corroded political system that will test the limits of their ability to withstand cynicism - Obama, don't screw this up.
What happened at George Mason provided physical evidence that Obama's youth following is more than a bunch of kids who clicked a button. Before the rally, Obama's campaign already knew they had a massive presence on Facebook. Students for Barack Obama (SFBO) had around 60,000 members, and even more astonishingly, a 26-year-old named Farouk Olu Aregbe had assembled more than 200,000 in his Facebook group "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)" in little more than two weeks (the group now has more than 272,000 members). According to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, the growth was "unprecedented." As a point of comparison, the Facebook group for Hillary Clinton has fewer than 4,000 students and the largest group for John Edwards has half that.Joe Trippi, the architect of Dean's web-driven grassroots campaign in 2004, marveled at the activity: "The Obama campaign had nothing to do with it, and they're already at 250,000 people. That's amazing--the Dean campaign, it took us six months to get to 139,000 people."
Meredith Segal, a junior at Bowdoin College, started the SFBO group on Facebook in the summer of 2006, in hopes that it would serve as a petition to encourage Obama to run. Thanks largely to Facebook's "news feed" technology, which sends out automatic alerts about the activities of all of one's Facebook "friends," the word spread fast. Soon, she was being inundated with messages and e-mails from students across the country who were eager to help. Segal and others began convening conference calls, and before long, a sophisticated operation with chapters across the country, a regional leadership structure, a field team, a communications department, a finance department and a website had evolved. The group even has a student at Gallaudet University in Washington, a school for the deaf, who specifically coordinates students with disabilities. "We started as a Facebook group, but as the rally demonstrates, we're a whole lot beyond Facebook at this point," says Segal. "We're in the real world."
Agrebe's "Barack Obama (One Million Strong)" group [registration required], which is collaborating with SFBO, is also leveraging its online manpower into tangible results. Within hours of launching a fundraising initiative--with the goal of collectively raising $1 million with small donations from members--students had already given $2,000 to the Obama campaign.
A monster! We've created a monster!
Go get 'em, kids. This is an open thread for college and youth organizing.
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