Just saw Clay chat at the NY Tech Meetup... was great.

Yeah, it is REALLY effective.

In fact, the Obama girl videos are so effective, that they effected Obama Girl so much she didn't even vote in her Primary.

It is all fluff and puff and no substance or thought. They can make nifty videos with warm emotional platitudes that pluck the heart stings, chant, and show up at rallies to worship together, but they don't vote in their primary nor can they explain his platform beyond empty memes like Hope and Change. But realloy, that is the whole point of politics, to make people passionate over worthless fluff puff propaganda.

Cult of Personality, indeed.

So Gore was sick of the Clintons and distanced himself from them and ran a more populist campaign. Clinton had a 65% approaval rating and Gore allowed the press to force him to distance himself from something that nobody was overly concerned about at that point anyway. And lost to a dumbass from TX.

Ok, perhaps if Clinton hadn't poisoned the press' attitude towards Gore by association, things would have been different. Still, though, despite the inside the Beltway conventional wisdom Bill was, and is, popular in polls with the hoi polloi. So maybe running against him as a Democrat isn't the best approach.

Just something to think about.

'Uh, it's not an "Obama presentation." He had nothing to do with it other than someone gloaming onto his persona.'

If he indeed "had nothing to do with it," I hereby withdraw any criticism directly specifically at him.

[And maybe I should re-read the article, huh?]

I believe Obamaniacs will be the first group in mainstream American political history to commit mass suicide a-la Jim Jones style cults. You can only smoke so much Jesus before you flip out.

Frankly is is stupid and so it the "YES We Can" and other videos. Please stop. Your making Obama look like a cult figure, and just giving the right more meat.

"The people who were excited about Dean were really, really excited, but their excitement turned off the people whom they needed to be just barely excited enough to go out and vote."

What does it tell you about America's liberal voters that when offered the option of a candidate who actually got people excited for once, they turned yellow and chose a "business as usual" candidate instead? They talked about nothing but "electability" at the time, yet because they couldn't see beyond "risk," they ended up choosing the LEAST electable of the three leading candidates! I must say that their November failure was richly deserved. (And I don't care if you call me a Nader-lover.)

Maybe they'll get it right this time (though the Ohio voters didn't).

I loved Clay's book, but I should probably say that the summary of my views is misleading here (and it's certainly not a direct quote, as Salon's punctuation would imply). As someone who uses email campaigns as a tool of activism, and in the UK built the tools that allowed citizens to contact their MPs in this way, I would never say that the value of email campaigns was zero.

When I spoke to Clay's class last year, I did stress that the traditional comparison of email campaigns with old-fashioned letter-writing campaigns is inaccurate in describing their results. But that's not to say they don't have a positive effect. Congress no longer maps single communications to a certain number of votes, it's true -- but email campaigns have a different kind of effect. They draw attention to issues that might not have been considered (to give an example, EFF members emailing about the WIPO Broadcast Treaty took it from a non-issue in D.C. to a hot topic: and MoveOn has many successes in pushing issues to the forefront of the national debate in this way); they highlight sentiment en masse (a million emails isn't a million man march, but it says something); and they also provide a simple action that leads many people to other, more involved activism.

To borrow Clay's language, co-ordinated email actions like this are below the "Coasian floor": actions that would have impossible to co-ordinate before the Internet. They're not the *same* as pre-Internet gestures, but that doesn't mean they're ignorable or don't count, as so many of the examples in Here Comes Everybody amply demonstrate. The answer to the question "How many votes in an election does an email count for?" isn't "zero", it's "that question generally doesn't apply any more".