All around the world, as political parties study the campaign that fuelled Barack Obama’s rapid and remarkable rise from the Illinois state legislature to the White House, they analyse the reasons and try to learn the lessons for their own campaigns.
Some credit his progressive policies, the weakness of the Republicans, a flawed Clinton campaign, the ailing economy, Iraq, eight years of George W Bush, and that Obama was, as the hapless John McCain called him, “that one”, a once-in-a-generation politician able to captivate and galvanise an America crying out for change.
On the lessons, many point to his online strategy, now lauded and mythologised.
The online campaign was of undeniable importance, set new standards and showed the extent to which politicians had hitherto failed to grasp the possibilities of the internet. The use of email, online video and social networking (including MyBO, short for “My.BarackObama. com”) was superbly executed. Obama’s ability to raise vast sums from a 13 million-strong base of supporters online – the “a few dollars more” approach – left his opponents in the dust. His database gave him access to millions of receptive voters, and still does. His team is now using it to inspire the supporters of last year to become the community organisers of future years, and the activists for his second-term campaign in 2012.
But internet brilliance alone will not put votes in ballot boxes. From all of the above, something else is missing. What really won it was the ground game.
Even on that February day two years ago when Obama declared his intentions in Springfield, Illinois, he and his advisers, online and on-ground, knew instinctively what Abraham Lincoln had known, standing in the same place 150 years earlier. As one of his strategists told me: “The secret of success in politics is knowing what to do with your hands.” Knowing that the hands that sign off decisions in grand offices should also be hands that knock on doors in humble streets. Hands which then firmly shake the hands that open the doors, and persuade those people this is their fight, too.
Barack Obama and his team saw that the biggest obstacle to winning their party’s nomination, and then the presidency, was not going to be a hostile media or a Republican Party clinging to power. The challenge was getting enough volunteers knocking on doors, making phone calls, distributing campaign literature, drawing in friends and family and enthusing voters face-to-face.
Without a well-cultivated ground operation, Obama would never have clinched Iowa in January last year. It was his ability to win caucus states, with a huge activist effort, that won the nomination. Without this shoe-leather strategy, challenging the media-savvy but seemingly doorstep-averse Clinton campaign, he would not have become the Democratic candidate.
Obama’s online strategy supported the ground campaign, not the other way round. It allowed the activist and donor base to be built and organised, connected with him yet also interconnected. Idealistic teenagers in Iowa received as much information from Obama as the disabled veterans in Idaho or black high-school teachers in Illinois. But, crucially, they became aware of and committed to each other, and allowed the freedom to form their own campaigning groups under the Obama banner – Latinos for Obama, Mothers for Obama, Obama Pride, even Republicans for Obama. Throughout the campaign, supporters received and absorbed the big messages, as well as the detailed arguments and differences between Obama and McCain, to use on the phone and, most crucially, the doorstep. Volunteers were empowered to become leaders of their own campaigns. That is the lesson Labour should heed because, in the end, it was a triumph for sheer hands-on hard work by selfless, determined and passionate activists.
I was based for the campaign in the swing state of Virginia, in buzzing campaign offices in places such as Falls Church (in a former beauty parlour) and Richmond (a former warehouse). There I saw the Obama campaign in all its diversity – the African-American aspiring actor, the 12-year-old Muslim girl, the elderly widow of a respected economist, the burly trucker, the union organiser, the retired admiral discussing health care with the 16-year-old Latino student, the pinstriped corporate lawyer from DC volunteering time for voter protection – preventing Republican dirty tricks. Hundreds of diverse people, drawn together for a single purpose.
On one single Saturday, we had enough Democratic activists out across Virginia to fill a football stadium, tens of thousands knocking on doors, giving out campaign buttons and yard signs, reminding voters about absentee ballots and offering rides to the polling stations. This was the magic that made possible the first win for the party in Virginia since 1964. In neighbouring North Carolina, Democrats contacted half a million people in one day. This is the spirit, and the approach, that Labour has to generate here.
Of course it is harder than in 1997. But just as we may have lost some supporters from back then, there are others we have gained. We also have a record to defend, policies to promote, feeble opponents to attack. Some of it can be done online. But there is never any substitute for the face-to-face campaigning that under Obama’s leadership has made America more politically engaged, more committed to progressive aims, than it has been in decades.
His experience as a community organiser on the South Side of Chicago shaped the man, his politics and the instinct towards activism. Indeed, he fought a brilliant modern campaign; but he fought a brilliant old-fashioned campaign, too, with a clear message communicated relentlessly by a disciplined team, and brilliant organisation on the ground which turned apathy into interest, interest into support, and support into activism. That is the real lesson for Labour out of the Obama campaign. Provided we learn it, we can win again.
Mark Bennett is a Labour councillor in Lambeth and an organiser for Go Fourth: the Campaign for a Labour Fourth Term
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