The Political Web

Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, which is the company at the center of Obama's Internet operations, told Christopher Dickey over the phone a couple of weeks ago that he and his colleagues at Blue State Digital pick and choose their mostly left-wing causes and clients very carefully. "Our progressive idealism will always be intact," he said. Thus among the many accounts they signed up after working on the Howard Dean presidential bid in 2004 have been Save Darfur, George Soros's Americans Coming Together and Al Gore's We Can Solve It. "The key is not about technology, not about design," Gensemer said. "It's about having a message."

But the more Gensemer described the mechanics of the operations, the more obvious it became just how widely available the basic tools are to anyone with any cause or message, and they're not just about spreading information but inciting action. "You are building fundamentally, at first, a mailing list," Gensemer said. There should be a very low barrier for entry, and once someone has joined "you build on that relationship by building a campaign narrative": we are going to change things, yes we can. E-mails go out asking people to do more than sympathize. "Virtual" and "viral," those overused words that suggest passive viewing, are not part of the Blue State program. "Those e-mails that go out are asking people to perform action after action after action," said Gensemer. One of the founders of Facebook was on the Obama team, and there are many similarities with the major networking sites. But this is about much more than "create your profile and post your picture," as Gensemer put it. Those running MyBO saw very quickly who was responding to what message and when, and unlike Obama's Facebook and MySpace pages, on each of which he had about a million "friends," at MyBO "we own the data," said Gensemer.

The incitement to organize and act is combined with the existence of infrastructure already on the ground. During the Democratic Party caucuses early this year, for instance, "the goal was if somebody signed up with a post code in Iowa, it was expected that a paid organizer would contact them by e-mail or phone," said Gensemer. Eventually, MyBO was giving its partisans the wherewithal to create their own teams. You can see this process, which raked in hundreds of millions of dollars, presented quite matter of factly on the "MyBO tour" on YouTube. "Next I am going to show you how to set up your own personal fundraising page where you can set a goal, track your progress with a thermometer, and write a personal message to your friends and family about why they should donate," explains a young woman at MyBO. "So, I am going to go ahead and set my goal for $1,000, which might seem like a lot, but you'd really be surprised by how much you'll be able to raise if you are able to convey why this is so important to you."

With everyone from Bibi to Zawahiri watching and learning from such techniques, it's fair to say the surprises have only just begun, said Dickey.