Left Over GREY MATTER

Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” Barack Obama told a crowd of 250,000 on Tuesday night in Chicago who gathered to hear his historcial speech.

But how did Mr. Obama — the 47-year-old, first-term senator from Illinois — do it?

Times are quoted in saying Obama fought an almost flawless campaign run by the Obama Team.

“Taking the tightly run Bush 2004 campaign as a model, Mr. Obama’s campaign did not waver from its core theme of change. It tolerated no drama and did not endure a single staff shakeup, in contrast to the turmoil that marked the Clinton and McCain campaigns. Mr. Obama kept himself, and his team, on an even keel — a character trait that paid immense dividends in the closing stages, when his understated approach to the economic crisis came off to many voters as steady leadership.”

Mr. Obama and his aides believed from the outset that it would have to be nothing less than flawless if he was to overcome obstacle that this was a black man with an unusual name and exotic past, someone dogged by a stubborn and inaccurate belief among some voters that he is a Muslim, who began plotting his presidential run less than two years after moving from the Illinois Legislature to the United States Senate.

But what is very interesting to us at EO Creative is the use of the newest technology and old-fashioned organizing skills to harness the grass-roots enthusiasm his candidacy generated to help raise record sums of money and build a volunteer army to turn out the vote. They carefully researched how to handle the issue of race, and worked at making voters comfortable with the idea of putting a black family in the White House.

Maybe, just maybe, something new has arrived: a post-partisan approach to governing, founded on the Obama Coalition, fuelled by young and minority voters, powered by the 21st century technologies that helped turn a first-term senator from Illinois into a historic lodestone.

Did Obama really receive a mandate, or was he the beneficiary of the nation’s disgust with President George W. Bush, and its unease with America’s course?

These are the questions that will be answered over the next four years. But for the moment, some astounding things are certain:

The next president is a man who identifies himself as black, but was raised by his white mother — a man who reflects the multiracial society America has become.

He was born in the 1960s, and was too young to experience the Vietnam era that left scars on the nation’s psyche for decades. And his lack of experience, central to his opponents’ campaigns against him in the primaries and general election, means that he is not necessarily invested in the way things have always been done.

Exit polls indicated that Obama’s triumph was built on his overwhelming success with blacks, Hispanics, 18-to-34-year-olds and new voters.

This is the future of the U.S. electorate.

History shows that once a young voter casts ballots twice for a given party, he or she is unlikely to ever turn away.

Hispanics are the nation’s fastest-growing voting bloc. Indeed, the government recently reported that white people will no longer make up a majority of Americans by 2042, eight years sooner than previous estimates.

About one in 10 voters said this was the first year they had cast ballots, and 70 per cent of them backed Obama. To cap it off, Obama won the female vote.

“From this day forward,” says historian John Baick of Western New England College in Springfield, Mass., “politics, politicians and the people they serve will never be the same.”

Obama takes over after 16 years of leadership by presidents born in the thick of the baby boom. In this fast-moving society, the worlds in which George W. Bush and Bill Clinton governed are so out of date they seem almost quaint.

Consider this: There were just a few hundred websites when Clinton took office and virtually no blogs when Bush entered the White House in January 2001.

Barack Obama turned to the iPhone into a political recruiting tool with a free application that was aimed at getting all the information to the voter.

The software had a “Call Friends” option to help organise contacts in swing states.

A note about the software on Mr Obama’s blog said: “This tool is designed to help you become more directly involved in our campaign to change the country.”

The free application was developed by volunteers in less than three weeks.

“This really has the potential to help the campaign,” said Jason Grigsby, one of the project leaders.

“The use of mobile technology to get out the vote and get people involved was a way for the grass roots to really make an impact.”

In a recent blog entry the campaign wrote: “During the last days of the election it was more important than ever to call your friends and family to make sure they were registered and voting for Barack.”

The blog also said that it hoped the “Call Friends” feature would “generate thousands of additional personal contacts” – that would then be then turned into votes.

Other features include making notes on which friends have been called, who they are supporting, and if they need a reminder on election day.

The website said the total amount of calls the application made were tallied but no information left the phone, so the privacy of friends and users were protected.

The application also passed on up-to-date news from the campaign, plus video, photos and talking points to help convince friends to vote for the candidate.

Raven Zachary, another co-developer, is quoted telling the BBC: “The iPhone is one mobile platform and there are millions of voters who don’t have the iPhone.

“But we are at the beginning of a new wave of mobile technology and we are seeing with the Obama campaign how he uses technology. This will become the norm moving forward.”

“Having your friends sorted by battleground states is something I haven’t seen any other politician come up with before. This is a glimpse of the future of high-tech politicking.”

Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent at news site CNET also told the BBC: “It’s a pretty slick iPhone application.

Jonathan Wight, another developer who worked on the project, said he did not believe John McCain’s camp would have time to better their efforts. “It took us less than three weeks and McCain simply could not catch up.”

Senator Obama has proved a fan of technology in his campaign and made headlines when he announced his choice of Joe Biden for vice-president via a text message.

Both Mr Obama and Mr McCain have turned to the web to raise money, to YouTube to air adverts and to Facebook to raise their profiles among the social networking set.

Obama, of course, raised millions of dollars via the Internet. One of his favourite platforms, YouTube, did not exist when Bush began his second term.

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- “President-elect Barack Obama is a fan of technology, but the attention his administration gives telecommunications and high- technology issues will be overshadowed by his head-on confrontation of the global financial crisis and the war in Iraq.”

Obama is a firm believer in high-speed Internet as a tool of change, which could drive early action in his administration toward blanketing the country with broadband networks.

For example, he favors giving government subsidies to Internet service providers who build networks in hard-to-reach areas. The government currently only subsidizes phone service in rural areas. The idea of expanding eligibility for that money to Internet providers has garnered bipartisan support in recent months, which may make it easier for the administration and Congress to take steps in that direction.

So it would appear a big part of his victory and the making of history was the Obama Team’s use of technology that has never been seen before and will shape our future and future elections to come.

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