Archive: Category: TechPresident

What next for the millions of people, tens of thousands of volunteers and several thousand staff who came together to propel Barack Obama to re-election? While public attention in Washington has turned to the so-called "fiscal cliff" negotiations and the cable news shows are now fixated on the violence in the Middle East, how this question is answered may be the most consequential of Obama's second term. Will there be a real "outside" Washington strategy to put pressure on recalcitrant Members of Congress? Will they use the massive lists and online presence that were built around the campaign? Will the extraordinary machinery of tracking, targeting and mobilization that the campaign built be used to maximize such efforts? Will Obama supporters...

Ever since Election Day, the White House's "We the People" page has experienced a surge in e-petitions from people who, to put it kindly, don't especially like the Obama Administration. Petitions calling for individual states to be allowed to secede from the USA and form their own governments have received more than 900,000 signatures so far. Considering that as of mid-September, "We the People," which was launched a year earlier, had just hit a total of 3.4 million signatures, this is a big surge in public engagement with the platform. The secession boomlet has drawn a wide range of media attention, from gushing coverage in the rightwing Daily Caller to bemusement and derision from all over the liberal left. Signers...

DailyKos.com, the Grand Central Station of the online Democratic left, had a record-breaking year, the site's founder Markos Moulitsas announced last Friday. For the last thirty days before Election Day, the site garnered more than 4 million unique visitors, according to its Quantcast stats. That's up from 1.8 million uniques for the month of January, or 2.3 million that it garnered during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement in October 2011. While some progressive political blogs are struggling to survive, thanks to a the decline in political online advertising spent on their sites, DKos is thriving. Reports of the progressive blogosphere's overall demise are therefore premature. Not only do mainstream advertisers continue to purchase space on its pages, its...

Now that the election is over, all kinds of inside stories are starting to work their way out of the tightly controlled Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago. Here, in a video taken last August during a visit President Obama paid to his staff, but just uploaded Saturday, two young staffers, Sara El-Amine (the campaign's national training director) and Matthew Saniie, tell the President how they had gotten engaged during the campaign. It's impossible not to enjoy. We especially liked Obama's instant familiarity with Beyonce, and thought we'd commemorate it for all time with a few .gifs. Here's a version of that .gif optimized for Tumblr: Bonus: If you watch the video until the end, you'll be rewarded with a fleeting glimpse of...

There's a new video of President Obama talking to his campaign staff in Chicago yesterday that has just been posted to the Obama 2012 YouTube channel, in tandem with a thank-you email to supporters from campaign manager Jim Messina sent out tonight. It's already generating a powerful emotional response on Twitter, with people like Obama 2008 blogger Sam Graham-Felsen, who later turned into a sometime critic of Obama's presidency, gushing about its authenticity. And that is inarguable. As I watched the video, I was struck by two things. First, how Obama still feels connected to his days as a community organizer, and draws sustenance from seeing young people dedicated to the same path of service. More than that; he believes in...

Now what? Four years ago, when Barack Obama first won election, his staff had prepared a detailed transition plan that covered all the conventional bases for taking the reins of government and starting to flesh out who would staff what agencies and departments. But it left out one element that no transition planner, Democrat or Republican, had ever faced before: what to do with the gigantic grass-roots army of paid organizers and volunteer supporters that had been summoned (and in some places, summoned itself) into existence to power his campaign to victory. The lack of a plan was just a symptom of a deeper value choice by his leadership team. Whether that mass movement continued mattered much less to them...

Four years ago for us here techPresident, Election Day was a moment to reflect on the Internet's impact on the campaign, and in particular how so many voters had ventured onto the playing field of politics by using new interactive media, self-publishing tools like blogs and YouTube, and nascent social networks like Facebook. We tallied those metrics with excitement, and by November 4, 2008, we thought they were astounding. Barack Obama had 2,397,253 friends on Facebook to John McCain's 622,860. He had 125,639 Twitter followers to McCain's 5,319. There were 79,613 blog posts using the phrase "voting for Obama" compared to 42,093 saying "voting for McCain." And these benchmarks were signifiers of a mass movement that involved millions of people...

Nate Silver is a math nerd. And due to his skill in analyzing poll numbers and developing sophisticated models for predicting elections, he's become something of a household name among anyone who cares about American politics. Of late, he's even become the center of a controversy over whether a great deal of political reporting and punditry on the ups and downs of the horse race is actually much ado about nothing, since the data shows that the polls actually don't change all that much in response to specific events or debate performances or gaffes. It's a bit disconcerting to many people to consider the possibility that the real story of the presidential campaign isn't in the daily news and chatter...

Has New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has steered his city in all kinds of admirable ways since Hurricane Sandy first appeared on the horizon a week ago, seriously misread the mood of his fellow Gothamites with his decision to let the annual New York City Marathon proceed as scheduled this Sunday? The race, which draws between 40,000 and 60,000 runners each year, is the largest in the world--and many people are wondering if the usually uplifting event may put too heavy a burden on already strained and breaking city services. Two hours ago, a petition on Change.org calling for the race to be postponed until next spring had about 5,000 signatures. That has already quadrupled to 20,000 as of this...

With millions of residents of the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut tri-state area without power since Superstorm Sandy swept through the region Monday, a complete picture of the devastation and loss remains out of reach. Yesterday, I visited Oceanside, on the south shore of Long Island, where I grew up and where my mother still lives in our family home. Situated four miles north of Long Beach, Oceanside is filled with split-level suburban ranches on low-lying land touching the Middle and Hewlett bays. Sunday afternoon, I had driven out to evacuate her before the storm came in, and we rode it out at my home in Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester, where tree-downings were rife and thousands, including us, lost power Monday. But that...