HuffingtonPost’s ‘Off the Bus’ team of 10,000 citizen journalists caught candidates saying things that embarrassed them later, even Obama when he made his ‘guns and religion’ remark at a private fundraiser. When Obama disappointed his supporters with a Senate vote in July 2008 on a wiretapping and surveillance law, many supporters led a revolt on MyBarackObama.com, prompting the candidate to write a long blog post explaining his position. Obama also assigned staffers to monitor and respond to comments posted on the campaign’s website. After a sort of cyber-catharsis of complaints, the controversy died down.

With the internet, critics and citizen journalists are everywhere. Now, says Ms. Huffington, ‘there is no off-the-record fund-raiser’. Adds Mr. Trippi, ‘this medium demands authenticity, and television for the most part demanded fake. Authenticity is something politicians have not been used to.’

Internet Fundraising and Small Money Donors
Team Obama’s use of the internet also allowed him to become a fundraising juggernaut. He raised more money than any US presidential candidate in history, a mind-numbing $750 million. In a single day following vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican convention, an alarmed Democratic base donated an eye-popping $10 million to the Obama campaign. Just from mid-October to election day on November 4, he raised $104 million. Online donations totalled $500 million, twelve times as much as John Kerry raised through online fundraising in 2004. But unlike previous big fundraising candidates, most of his money came from small donors, the vast bulk of that in increments of $100 or less. Obama’s fundraising capabilities gave him a massive lead over John McCain in the money race to carry his campaign message to voters.

The use of the internet in political campaigns has grown exponentially in a short period of time. The Obama campaign was not the first to use the internet, and many of the techniques and tools it deployed, such as Web 2.0, are still relatively new. Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign was groundbreaking in its use of the internet to raise small amounts of money from hundreds of thousands of people, and Mr Dean was the first Democratic presidential candidate to use the internet to mobilise his supporters through his Blog for America. Republican strategists and operatives also have not ignored the internet. Michael Turk, the Bush-Cheney e-campaign director in 2004, says that the Republicans were able to mobilise their supporters through a combination of email lists and internet ‘data mining’. They identified potential Republican supporters in every precinct around the country, using technology which predicts voter preferences on the basis of commercial data on car ownership, magazine subscriptions, and the like. And then they sent their campaign volunteers detailed instructions on who to visit, including local maps of the area and walking routes, and issues that each potential voter was likely to be most concerned about.

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