Strategy and Organising – Lessons from the Obama Campaign
In line with this, a new book, The Change We Need: What Britain Can Learn From Obama’s Victory, published in Britain by the Fabian Society argues that, ‘the facilitation of a new movement politics by the Labour Party should go deeper: it should change more fundamentally not just how the Party competes for election but also how it is organised and how it mobilises support. Thus, while Obama’s election provides opportunities for Labour, it also poses a huge challenge to which the party must respond.’5 The book sets out five principles that the Labour Party must adopt including removing all barriers to participation and enabling channels for debate and dissent.
Although the historical, cultural and institutional issues facing other progressive parties around the world will be different, and each unique organisation will have to think carefully about how it adapts, many of the necessary reforms will be similar. But letting go so that supporters can self-organise or opening up policy discussions to the public is anathema to many progressive parties who have struggled to keep their structures from being over run by left wing extremists. Permanent party structures will therefore resist some of these changes.
But the risk of inaction is greater still. Obama opened a Pandora’s Box of political participation. As an Economist poll showed, people around the world cheered on Obama by a factor of more than five to one.6 The world watched when he stood on the east steps of the Capitol to make his inaugural address. But this vicarious excitement will now be hard to suppress as the global citizenry demands similar electoral campaigns in their own countries. In a world where people have the ability to comment at any time anywhere on anything from the news to their latest book purchase, political parties will be ignored if they do not develop this kind of environment for their supporters.
National elections are not warfare but Sun Tzu’s maxim is still relevant. Political parties around the world cannot decouple Obama’s strategy from his tactics. While modern technology cannot and should not be ignored, if the message and organisation do not complement the network potential of the internet, political parties will fail to follow Obama’s success. And in changing the way we run our campaigns, we can learn from a pacifist too. As Ghandi said, ‘we need to be the change we wish to see in the world.’
