So this Obama MySpace profile screw-up is interesting. I have a few calls in to the campaign to get their side, since most of what we know is coming from Micah Sifrey's excellent article at Techpresident. I expect it'll probably generate some TV coverage, just because it's such a fresh angle on campaigns.
The narrative is as follows. A volunteer named Joe Anthony started an unofficial MySpace page for Obama in 2004. When the Presidential campaign started up, Chris Hughes (who co-founded Facebook) and Scott Goodstein, both of whom worked for the Obama campaign, reached out to Anthony and began working with him. Anthony was fine at first, but it became more and more work to manage the page. On the flip side, the Obama people became more concerned about control. Eventually, the Obama people asked to purchase the page, Anthony gave them a price of $39,000. Instead of negotiating a price, the Obama campaign claimed they did not have the money, accused Anthony of seeking a 'big pay day' and went to MySpace management and seized the page directly, losing 160,000 MySpace friends in the process. Anthony is now embittered and speaking out about the campaign's treatment of him.
I don't know what happened on the campaign side. It sounds like wires were crossed. It's possible that the internet department actually didn't have the money in its budget, which is sad in terms of the campaign priorities. It's possible that Chris or Scott was promising something without authority, or that someone is just lying. Or maybe Joe Rospars or David Axelrod got involved and just demanded that the campaign control the page and acted as if the campaign was being blackmailed. Regardless, it seems like there is a tone at work here, a tone that comes from the top.
There is nothing unusual about such a conflict between the open world of Joe Anthony and the gatekeeping world of David Axelrod. The open world is fairly relaxed and encourages sharing control and power with all stakeholders. The gatekeeper world is all about control and turning everyone into a signholder. The likely scenario here is that the Obama internet team promoted the unofficial page because it was cool and relaxed, and then adult supervision scared them into believing they needed control. They put pressure on Anthony, who valued his own work. The Obama campaign couldn't both stomach the need for control and the real moral need to value the work done by Anthony, and so it appears the campaign just lied and threatened him. This is standard Democratic politics, only when you put it on the internet, it looks really bad.
I don't really know that this episode is particularly important in the context of who will win in 2008, but it is interesting. This is the exact definition of a campaign treating people like an ATM. And this brings me back to the movement that's being created, because while this seems like a small episode, it's actually events like this that in some ways help form our movement. Joe Anthony will never forget this, and it's pretty obvious he's good at leading large groups of people. Anthony will never trust campaign operatives again, and hopefully, he'll plug into the Democratic Party somewhere else.
Jonathan Chait yesterday wrote about how the blogosphere was formed in the crucible of 2000. That's not quite right. The open left was formed in the wake of a series of events, starting with the impeachment (Moveon) and continuing probably until 2008. The blogosphere is one of the manifestations of the open left, and it's a response to the institutional failure of the Democratic and media leadership to lead. For some of us, like for Anthony in 2008, the way the 2004 campaigns operated were one of these shocks.
The Kerry campaign was a significant personal experience for many of us coming into politics for the first time from other professions. It was there that we learned how unprofessional, arrogant, top-down, and dishonest most parts of the Democratic Party really were. That experience was deeply embittering, especially because the Dean campaign had a much freer model of politics in terms of allowing citizens space to grow and wield power and the Kerry campaign did not.
Obama is a symbol of what politics could be, which is why he's bringing in huge crowds, because the public wants a different type of politics and is willing to pay for it and support it with time, effort, and sweat. We were a vanguard, and we had this moment too, in 1998, 2000, 2002, or 2004. But like our experience of being rebuffed by a hostile Democratic Party, this new generation of Obama supporters is smashing smack dab into the old structures of power. It's a bit ironic that the people they are smashing into are professionals from the Dean campaign, those who ran the DNC from 2005 onward. But really, this is about architecture, not personality, and the person who bears responsibility for sitting atop a throne and hating on the activists who want to do things for him is Barack Obama, and to a lesser extent, David Axelrod.
I've been criticizing Obama for several years, and the reason is because of I sense he surrounds himself with people who have this hostility to participation in politics. I remember being screwed over by Democrats, consistently, from 2003 until I came to MyDD as an independent blogger. I remember what it's like to be taken for granted, to be insulted, to be ripped off, to be lied to. Its not a good thing, not just on a personal level, but on a structural level. It's not a sustainable model of politics because it drives leaders like Joe Anthony away. And fundamentally, we cannot win as a progressive movement until we stop this nonsense and actually buy into progressive structures that treat people well and act professionally. I feel bad for the people in the Obama campaign who went through this. They are under untenable pressure from higher-ups who don't respect them, and they don't have the leverage to really wield power. I feel bad for Anthony, who went through what a lot of us went through over the last few years. Eating shit is never fun.
My sense though is that 2008 is going to see a lot more of this kind of shoddy treatment of stakeholders. A huge wave of new people are going to come into politics over the next few years, and they are going to smash into the same barriers we smashed into in 2002 and 2004. Some of the leaders are going to feel betrayed, like we felt betrayed, and hopefully, they will join us in building a more people-powered movement that doesn't rely on media-driven cults of personality and top-down operators who lie, smear, and cheat.
Democratic campaigns cannot and should not be run based on lies and threats. This is the old system. I hope Obama takes some time to reassess his campaign and the way he interacts with supporters. This should be a warning flag.
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