Jason A. Cohen - Political Communication Literature Review and Analysis Paper

THE INTERNET’SEXPANDINGROLEAS POLITICALCOMMUNICATION STRATEGY ANDTHE ROLE IT PLAYED
IN BARACKOBAMA’SELECTION TO THE PRESIDENCY
Jason A. Cohen
Monmouth University
Political Communication
Literature Review & Analysis
December 10, 2015

Abstract
In the discipline of political communication, candidates employ numerous strategies
during their campaigns to get their message to their targeted audiences. As society continues to
move forward in the technological age, it has become increasingly more imperative for
candidates to leverage this medium or risk losing ground to their opponents who are reaping the
benefits of technology to send targeted messages to their constituents that will keep them
informed of the campaign. With the development of the internet, e-campaigns, social media
platforms, and smart phone technology playing a larger role, the question of how have these
technologies impacted campaigns in the 21st century?
Literature Review
To address this question, several resources provide valuable insight on the role the
internet has played in the political landscape over the years. There have been numerous research
studies and surveys conducted about the importance of the internet in the elections. Some of the
key themes that emerged during the review of these studies and articles lead to the following
takeaways. The articles highlight a precipitous increase in the role the internet has played in the
lives of citizens by providing them with valuable information about campaigns. Another theme is
the ability for citizens to gain greater transparency from politicians on the way their taxes are
being used and how much government is spending. Furthermore, the internet has provided
additional opportunities and platforms for coalitions of active voters to become more active in
politics by sharing their opinions whether they are Democrat, Independent or Republication.
Through an unprecedented amount of access to the candidates, citizens can write posts on
Facebook, tweet at the candidates, write articles on their blogs about candidates and have their
feedback reach the candidates directly. In many cases, the additional access to at your finger tip

information has been both a blessing and a curse for campaigns because any misstep they make
is magnified and made available to voters as part of the twenty four hour news cycle.
One such article, “Study shows internet’s role in modern politics,” by Hillary Jackson,
uses figures from a Center for the Digital Future at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication
and Journalism survey. Jackson quotes, “Nearly three-quarters of all respondents agreed that the
Internet has become important for political campaigns, up from 71 percent in the previous study
and a new high for the Digital Future studies that began in 1999” (Jackson, December 9, 2015).
In the article, Jackson cites the director of the Center for the Digital Future and creator of the
World Internet Project, Jeffrey I. Cole. He speaks to the changes of how citizens access
campaign information when he says, “Fifty years ago television surpassed newspapers as the
primary communication medium for people seeking information for political campaigns.” Cole
continues, “Now the Internet is assuming a much more prominent role in political
communication — for learning more about candidates, for sharing political views, for mobilizing
constituents, and especially for fundraising.” One of the most telling statistics from the survey
came when Jackson cited, “67 percent agreed or strongly agreed that going online can help
people better understand politics, up from 63 percent in 2013 (Jackson, December 9, 2015).
Echoing the revolutionary nature of the internet in politics, an article in Fair Observer written by
Boban Markovic titled “Will the Internet Remake Politics” claims, “The Internet’s impact on
society in our contemporary world can be compared to the effect of radio and television in the
1930s and 1960s” (Markovic, March 18, 2013). These insights point toward a continued
movement to digital and mobile platforms as we move into the future. Having highlighted these
studies and articles, it is readily apparent the internet has revolutionized the way voters obtain
and process political information.

In the article “How the Internet Has Changed the State of Political Debate,” which
appeared on the Huffington Post, the author Rand Strauss, President and CEO of
PeopleCount.org claims, “In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of adult
Internet users go online for data about government spending and activities. Think back 15 years
ago -- that would have seemed otherworldly!” (Strauss, November 20, 2012). Citizens are
looking for a greater level of accountability and transparency in their government officials and it
is not surprising that a trend towards more citizens using the new technological advances they
have to track how their tax dollars are being spent. To highlight the practice of citizens using the
internet to build an informed opinion and check whether candidates are being transparent the
Pew study “The State of the 2012 Election — Mobile Politics” reports, “45% have used their
Smartphone to read other people’s comments on a social networking site about a candidate or
the campaign in general and 35% have used their Smartphone during this election campaign to
look up whether something they just heard about a candidate or the campaign in general was
true”(Smith & Duggan, October 9, 2012). With regards to campaigns and political
communication, it is imperative for a candidate to keep abreast of this information so they can
stay ahead of their opponents or use any negative information they can gather about wasteful
spending that was done under their opponents watch. Strauss goes on to highlight the new ways
that the internet has allowed political campaigns to encourage activism amongst constituents
including rallies, fundraising, the use of Facebook and Twitter, videos on YouTube and the
scheduling of meetings.
Another theme that emerges when considering existing scholarship is the idea that certain
political affiliations will make someone more or less likely to share their opinions on political
issues in social media. Similarly, there is the idea that being more active on social networking

will make someone more politically active in general based on their political affiliation. In a Pew
study Politics on Social Network Sites, authored by Lee Rainie and Aaron Smith the results
claim, “Democrats and liberals who use social networking sites are more likely than others to say
their activities on the sites have led them to become more active. Some 33% of SNS-using
Democrats say so, compared with 24% of both Republicans and Independents. The same is true
of 39% of SNS-using liberals compared with 24% of conservatives and 21% of moderates”
(Smith & Rainie, September 4, 2012). This increased involvement can be due to an enhanced
feeling of engagement in the political process and in an enhanced feeling of community with
their fellow constituents who share similar political beliefs.
In summation, through a review of existing literature and studies about the ever evolving
and expanding role of the internet in the political process it is apparent the traditional campaign
will never be the same. Voters have tapped into the internet in ways that make avoiding digital
communication strategies for candidates to be the equivalent of political suicide. The research
shows that not only are citizens leveraging the internet to gather information about candidates,
but there are several other key themes that candidates must take into consideration when
developing their campaign strategies. As highlighted some of the main themes include voters
using social media platforms to become more active in the political process, joining social
groups and directly following a candidates Facebook or Twitter account to have more of a
personal connection with the candidate, leveraging the internet to share their political views with
their peers, and to obtain and verify information about candidates based on claims they make
during debates, speeches, and other public appearances. One this is for certain, the way
candidates run an election will never be the same again.

References:
Duggan M. and Smith A. (October 9, 2012). “The State of the 2012 Election — Mobile Politics”
Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/10/09/the-state-of-the-2012-election-mobile-
politics/
Duggan M. and Smith A. (November 2, 2012). “Online Political Videos and Campaign 2012.”
Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/11/02/online-political-videos-and-campaign-
2012/
Jackson H. (December 9, 2015). “Study Shows Internet’s Role in Modern Politics” Retrieved
from http://mynewsla.com/life/2015/12/09/study-shows-internets-role-in-modern-politics/
Markovic B. (March 13, 2013). “Will the Internet Remake Politics?” Retrieved from
http://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/will-internet-remake-politics/
Strauss R. (November 20, 2012). “How the Internet Has Changed the State of Political Debate”
Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rand-strauss/how-the-internet-has-
chan_b_2161805.html

Analysis of Barack Obama’s Internet Strategy in 2008 Election
No time more than in the 2008 election was the impact of the internet going to play a
larger role in the results of who would become President of the United States. As noted in the
literature review, the internet has become a powerful tool for citizens and candidates alike.
Through social media, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MeetUp, mobile applications, and
text messaging a candidate has unlimited opportunities and potential to communicate, in a two
way manner, with their constituents. Whether it is to solidify the support and mobilize known
voters or to attempt to sway those who are normally inactive politically, this medium has
changed the way elections are run permanently. In this paper, Barack Obama’s utilization of the
internet to win the 2008 election will be illuminated through an analysis of how his campaign
leveraged the internet to employ masterful strategies to deliver political communication, mass
communication, and rhetorical messages that would change the course of election history. In
conducting a search of other scholarly sources that focus on Obama’s utilization of the internet,
these sources will be incorporated to underscore the point that a main reason Obama won the
election was his campaign’s masterful use of the internet.
During the 2008 election, Barack Obama used the internet as part of a political
communication, mass communication, and rhetoric strategy that catapulted him to the Presidency
against overwhelming odds. Recognizing a trend from previous elections, his strategy was to
embrace a shifting culture towards citizens becoming more and more reliant on technological
advances to obtain news and information about politics and elections. According to an article by
Aaron Smith of the Pew Research Center,
“Six in ten internet users went online for news or information about politics in 2008. This
represents 44% of all American adults. Nearly one-fifth of the online population got
political news on a daily basis during the campaign, as 12% of internet users said they got

political news every day and 7% said they did so multiple times over the course of typical
day” (Smith, 2009).
With these statistics in mind, the reason Barack Obama was able to go from a relative unknown
challenger in the Democratic Primary to defeating John McCain in the election was because of
his campaigns commitment to developing a digital campaign strategy that took advantage of the
trends highlighted in this Pew Study. This was accomplished because Obama was able to tap into
social media, more so than any of his predecessors, to get out his message. To further drive this
point home, an article that ran in the New York Times, “How Obama Tapped into Social
Networks’ Power,” by David Carr, points to how critical it was for Obama to challenge the status
quo in order to overcome the tremendous odds he faced heading into the election. Carr says,
“Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely
new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a
movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear
campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then
John McCain and the Republicans” (Carr, November 9, 2008).
This quote effectively highlights why Obama saw the importance of thinking outside the box to
employ a very aggressive political communication strategy that would bridge the gap between
him and his political opponents. Not only was Obama less recognized than Clinton and McCain,
but he also had to make up for a perceived lack in political experience. Therefore, the
campaign’s choice to build his brand from the ground up went a long way in helping to educate
the public about what Obama stands for and why he deserves to be President.
Entering the election, Obama had significantly less fundraising support and political
backing than the Clinton campaign and his internet strategy was a key way for him to catch up in
the amount of fundraising dollars that it would take. Through the efforts to appeal to internet
savvy consumers, Obama’s bet was that he could catch up to the political powerhouses of

Clinton and McCain by getting a large volume of smaller donations from his followed through
engaging with them electronically. In fact, research from the USC Annenberg School of
Communication’s Digital Future Report confirms that Obama’s strategy to leverage the internet
to garner donations was an overwhelming success. The Report notes,
“The Obama campaign reported that more than three million people contributed money to
the campaign -- and a large percentage of those donations came through the Internet. In
little more than two weeks between October 15 and Election Day, the Obama campaign
raised $104 million -- most of it through online donations. Of the record $750 million
raised by the campaign, more than $500 million came from the Internet” (USC, 2009, pp.
186).
These figures support the idea that not only is the internet a powerful tool for distributing
campaign messages, but if it is effectively leveraged it can also be a dynamic tool for building
financial support for a candidate’s political campaign. In the case of Obama, mobilizing his
supporters to provide him with funding at a record level was a byproduct of his commitment to
engage with his supporters in such a personal manner.
Once Obama was able to build his brand and cultivate his following that was just the first
phase of his multifaceted digital engagement strategy with the American people. His campaign
leveraged many tools to stay in front of those individuals throughout the election process by
employing several effective political communication and mass communication examples.
Prior to getting into the various strategies, it is helpful to bring in insights about how internet
politics and campaigns are typically regarded. In the report, “Technology is a Commodity: The
Internet in the 2008 United States Presidential Election, by Cristian Vaccari, he notes, “Research
on Internet campaigning has been conditioned by the clash of two paradigms: technological
determinism, which claims that technologies are an autonomous force that shapes society, and
social determinism, which sees technologies as fundamentally neutral tools that are molded by

social forces” (Vaccari, 2008, pp. 2). While these two ideologies are conflicting, in the case of
Obama’s campaign he is able to get the two ideologies to work in concert with each other. In the
case of Obama’s internet strategy the envelope is pushed between technological and social in the
sense that Obama was not the first politician to attempt to do online campaigning, but he was the
first candidate to leverage it in as effective of a manner as he did. Therefore, without the
campaign team driving the technological bus by interacting and engaging with citizens, the
strategy would have been unsuccessful as it had been for previous online campaigns. On the
same token, if social media and web 2.0 was not in existence, candidates would still employ the
traditional methods of campaigning, albeit far less interactive, before the surge in leveraging the
internet. An example of how Obama’s campaign challenges the notion that technology cannot in
itself shift the balance of power can be found when Vaccari says, “The success of the Obama e-
campaign raises the question whether the new media simply channel preexisting attitudes and
campaign dynamics, or, under certain circumstances, they actually drive political processes that
would not have otherwise occurred, possibly altering the strategic incentives of campaigns as a
consequence” (Vaccari, 2008, pp. 3). Thus, there will always have to be a balance between
technological determinism and social determinism because it would seem as though without the
technological means, social actors would have less influence over the messaging that voters
receive. It is clear that Obama’s campaign had the right communication strategy, to the right
audiences, at the right time, and that he was able to use the right tools. These tools and their
effectiveness will be the subject of the remainder of this paper.
One of the most effective of these strategies was the Obama campaigns creation and
utilization of a mobile application that supporters downloaded and were kept informed through
strategic messages sent right to their phones. The app also employed political communication,

mass media, and rhetoric by allowing those who downloaded it to be kept informed of updates
during his campaign, news about the election, to use the app to know about local events near
them, and to be alerted to the issues Obama was advocating for. Obama’s campaign also
leveraged Twitter, YouTube, MeetUp, Flickr, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, among others. To
support the role of social media in politics, the article “Digital Media in the Obama Campaigns
of 2008 and 2012: Adaptation to the Personalized Political Communication Environment,” by
Bruce Bimber goes over the importance of adapting to new media. Bimber drives home the point
that Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012 were both successful because they were able to
innovate and adapt to the changing political landscape and once he built his following, he was
able to mobilize his supporters in a much more effective manner than his political opponents.
Speaking to the Obama teams usage of social media Bimber says, “Together, the broad portfolio
of communication media embraced by the campaign allowed citizens to match their own
personalized interests and styles of participation to what the campaign was doing” (Bimber, pp.
5) In this statement it is important to highlight “broad portfolio” because Obama campaigns
usage of the highlighted social media platforms allowed citizens to interact with the candidate
through multiple portals and in the way that they have become accustomed too. For example if
you were not a big Facebook user, but were very active on YouTube Obama was still able to get
his message to you.
The images below that are highlighted as examples were chosen because they serve to
show a few samples of ways that Obama’s campaign employed the social media platforms that
were highlighted. In the case of Exhibit 1, it shows what the iPhone mobile application’s landing
page looked like and how it clearly spells out for the user the various ways they can stay
informed throughout the process. Exhibit 2 offers one of the more powerful of the videos that

Obama placed on YouTube, the video of his “Yes, We Can” speech. This was a signature
moment for his campaign and the rhetoric used in the video perfectly aligns with his campaign’s
message of change. The video had over 5,000,000 views and was an integral piece of his
rhetorical strategy. Exhibit 3 shows Obama’s Facebook page where he thanks his followers for
their support. Exhibit 4, courtesy of Mashable.com shows the Obama campaigns Twitter
message to supporters to thank them for helping his campaign win the election.
Exhibit 1: Barack Obama mobile application courtesy of filecluster.com
Exhibit 2: Image showing famous YouTube video “Yes, We Can” courtesy of YouTube.com
Exhibit 3: Image courtesy of US News article, “Barack Obama and the Facebook Election”

Exhibit 4: Obama’s campaign thanks supporters with tweet obtained from
http://mashable.com/2012/11/06/obama-wins-twitter/#BDcGpFIIdEqj
The Obama campaign strategy was able to take advantage of the lack of presence in
digital marketing by the Republican Party to overcome his lack in experience. This allowed
Obama to show that his campaign message of change was more than just lip service. He really
was turning the typical campaign on its head by dedicating a lot of his campaign funds to his
online presence. In the article “Study shows internet’s role in modern politics,” by Hillary
Jackson, which was highlighted earlier, Jackson quotes Cole who claims, “In 2008, the
Republicans did not pay attention to social media, but Barack Obama used digital
communication in his first presidential campaign as a primary tool in developing his power base.
Now social media is integral to all campaign strategies — Democratic or Republican” (Jackson,
December 9, 2015). The study that Jackson cites is the USC Annenberg School of

Communication’s Digital Future Report, which has been conducted annually since 1999. To
bring in additional insights from this scholarly source, in the Eighth edition of the Digital Future
Report, the report supports the notion that citizens view the internet as an important tool to
gather information during campaigns. According to the report, “The percentage of Internet users
who went online to gather information during the most recent significant election in their area
increased to 37 percent of adult users in the current study” (USC, 2009, pp. 24). Furthermore, the
finding of the report show that American’s use the internet to learn more about the candidates
and issues. “Among Internet users who go online for information-gathering during an election,
91 percent said they sought information about issues or candidates they supported -- a finding
generally consistent across the three years this question has been asked” (USC, 2009, pp. 178).
These statistics show the inevitable shift that was occurring that if a campaign fails to include a
major online presence, that candidate is destined to fail because of the perception they cannot
adapt to the changing technological environment and embrace a new medium that citizens are
embracing.
In addition to his political communication strategy, he also was able to effectively target
specific groups to garner support in a way that John McCain could not. Part of this strategy was
to target the younger vote. His political opponent, McCain, could not appeal to this segment of
voters because it would come across as disingenuous since the issues the Republican Party was
running their campaign on typically are at odds with what younger voters believe in or support.
In the US News article, “Barack Obama and the Facebook Election”, by Soumitra Dutta and
Matthew Fraser, the authors highlight this strategy by saying, “Early in his campaign, political
pollsters were observing that Obama was "rocking the youth vote." This proved true: Exit polls
revealed that Obama had won nearly 70 percent of the vote among Americans under age 25—the

highest percentage since U.S. exit polling began in 1976” (Dutta & Fraser, November 19, 2008).
This strategy incorporated a political communication perspective as well as a mass
communication perspective as appealing to the younger generation is something that has been
attempted by previous politicians, but typically with little success. The fear of politicians has
always been that by relying on youth voters to actually follow through on voting, or to share the
message with their friends is a potentially risky endeavor. In the article, “Youth Vote May Have
Been Key in Obama’s Win”, by Melissa Dahl, she stresses this fear when she notes, “Political
analysts have long been forecasting a high number of young voters in this presidential election
— but there’s always that niggling fear that young people will do what young people are known
for: flaking out, slacking off and failing to show up when it counts” (Dahl, November 5, 2008).
Therefore, Obama’s dedication to using social media to consistently engage with younger voters
was crucial to avoid losing their attention. Professor Michael Nelson, of the University of
Virginia’s Miller Center sheds further light on the Obama campaign strategy by saying,
“Relying heavily on the Internet, the Obama campaign mobilized a massive grassroots
organization of volunteers and donors. With Axelrod again at the helm, the campaign
developed a strategy for winning the Democratic nomination that relied on assembling
the same coalition of blacks and white liberals that had enabled him to succeed in Illinois,
with an additional focus on young voters” (Nelson, Millercenter.org).
Professor Nelson goes on to cite a fact that shows why Obama’s strategy to engage the youth
vote was a difference maker. “Exit polls revealed that the two candidates broke even among
voters who had participated in the 2004 election. But Obama built his majority among first-time
voters who surged to the polls in 2008, many of them young or African American” (Nelson,
Millercenter.org). This unprecedented success with new voters and his ability to drive the
African American vote clearly was one of the difference makers that swung the election in his
favor. To gain a mass communication perspective, the article “Intermedia Agenda-Setting and

Political Activism: MoveOn.org and the 2008 Presidential Election” by Matthew Ragas and
Spiro Kiousis describes the various ways that new media have been involved in the agenda-
setting process by allowing activists to expand from traditional media outlets. The authors
underscore why Obama was smart to target the younger generation as a focal point of his internet
campaign messaging when they reference findings in the 2007 Pew Internet & Life Study
Project. The study notes the profile of an online activist as, “This is a population
disproportionately weighted towards the young, the relatively well educated, and the well-to-do’’
that is ‘‘dominated by those who have broadband connections’’ (Pew Study in Ragas & Kiousis,
2010, p. 7). Armed with this profile of the future political activist, Obama’s campaign strategy to
highlight the importance of younger voters shows the campaign team was paying attention to a
changing political landscape.
For an example of why Obama was so far ahead of the curve in social media looking at
Obama’s Twitter presence during the election gives us a clear picture of how wide the disparity
actually was between Obama and McCain. In an article by Frederic Lardinois called “Obama’s
Social Media Advantage,” the author references data from Trendrr, an online statistics tool,
“On Twitter, Obama gained 2865 new followers between the 3rd and 4th (for a total of 118,107),
while John McCain's Twitter account only has a paltry 4942 followers in total” (Lardinois,
November 5, 2008). This type of influence gave Obama a distinct advantage in mass
communications as having such a wide discrepancy in the number of followers almost assuredly
hurt McCain’s ability to get his message to as many users on Twitter, which has emerged as a
major platform for users to obtain and share information with peers. To continue from his
comments earlier, Carr notes the level of connection that Obama was able to foster during the
2008 election gives him substantial power as he took office. He says,

“The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial
office will have profound implications and raise significant questions. Special-interest
groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a
president who owes them nothing. The news media will now contend with an
administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the
networks” (Carr, November 9, 2008).
This is a key development as it defies the relationship that candidates typically had with the
media where they needed the news outlets to help them deliver their agenda and messages to the
voters. Now that Obama has changed the course of campaigns, he and other politicians can
continue to circumvent the media by leveraging the massive number of connections he made and
the data he collected from supporters to connect with them instantly.
Part of what made the Obama campaigns internet strategy so successful was that it was
able to resonate not just with the younger generation, but to also have a mass appeal. Obama’s
rhetoric throughout the campaign spoke a lot about how coming together and for sharing hope
for change. This theme and rhetoric undoubtedly inspired those from all generations to become
more engaged in the political process. Obama’s ability to drive digital conversations that were
spurred largely by content his team put out to the world is a shining example of this practice in
action. In the article, “The Obama Campaign, A Great Campaign, or the Greatest,” written by
Sara Lai Stirland, the author provides a great example of this strategy in action. Lai Stirland
quotes Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of TechPresidents who claimed, “His 82-year-old father was
sending around Obama YouTube videos to an e-mail list of 50 of his friends during the
campaign. Rasiej noted that his father never would have previously done anything like this in the
offline world” (Lai Stirland, November 30, 2008). This is a powerful distinction to make because
it shows that Obama’s strategy to communicate with his publics afforded his supporters with new
avenues to share their opinions and beliefs with others who are likeminded in ways that

previously would have been much less efficient. In this example, Rasiej’s father would never
have taken the time to place a phone call or write fifty letters to his friends because that would be
far less effective and far more time consuming. This further illuminates the point made earlier
about how Obama’s strategy still incorporated traditional media, but wanted to be able to control
the narrative and be seen as trustworthy, rather than merely relying on the media to filter his
message to the people.
To continue to explore from the rhetorical perspective, Obama’s 2008 campaign was able
to take the traditional speeches and public appearances that have been done for centuries and
make them much more powerful. By posting videos of speeches and rallies on YouTube,
Facebook, and the other social media outlets, Obama was able to have his voice heard by many
more people and this also allowed him to supplement the amount of money spent on television
ads by using social media video streaming. To show Obama’s dominance on YouTube, Dutta
and Fraser say, “On YouTube, Obama stole the show. His supporters uploaded more than 1,800
videos onto the BarackObama.com channel, which counted about 115,000 subscribers. The
channel attracted more than 97 million video views during some 18 million channel visits.” This
number dwarfed that of McCain and was a clear win in getting Obama’s rhetoric directly to the
citizens in a powerful way.
The importance to Obama’s campaign of having such a wide victory in the number of
views and to use video as a way to drive home his agenda and views rested in the fact that many
people in the inattentive public were only learning about him for the first time. In the case of
John McCain, he was a much more established commodity and had a lengthy history in
government. Speaking of McCain’s YouTube experience, Dutta and Fraser say, “Compare that
with McCain's YouTube presence: Only 330 videos were uploaded to the JohnMcCain.com

channel, which attracted just over 28,000 subscribers. The McCain channel attracted barely more
than 2 million visits and some 25 million video views. On YouTube, Obama beat McCain 4 to
1.” To quantify the amount of exposure that Obama achieved through his dominance on
YouTube, the article “How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics, by Claire Cain Miller,
says, “The campaign’s official stuff they created for YouTube was watched for 14.5 million
hours,” Mr. Trippi said. “To buy 14.5 million hours on broadcast TV is $47 million” (Cain
Miller, November 7, 2008). In this quote Cain Miller uses information from Joe Trippi, a
political consultant who ran Howard Dean’s failed campaign in 2004, to speak to the incredible
ability of the Obama campaign to get rhetoric out about the candidate in a new way. Typically,
rhetoric has come in the form of in person speeches that were delivered through media outlets,
but Obama once again demonstrated a keen understanding of the web 2.0 capabilities and the
desire for citizens to be able to access the content on their own terms. That is why Obama was
able to come across as being so much more genuine in his political rhetoric and why the general
public spent so much time viewing the videos of Obama speaking on YouTube.
In conclusion, Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign will go down in history as
changing the entire playbook for how a politician plans their communication strategy. From a
political communication, mass communication, and rhetorical perspective, his campaign hit on
the emergence of the new media of internet and social media in a way that was unlike any prior
campaign. The campaigns usage of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, and other
web 2.0 platforms allowed him to build his brand but also afforded him major influence to
communicate directly to his supporters. His commitment to the internet built upon a rising tide
from previous elections and was the sole reason that he won the election. Through his efforts to
run on the promise of change, he took the typical political campaign by storm and turned it on its

head. The level of commitment he achieved to his cause from supporters and the ability to
engage them in the political process to help in the spreading of his message is something that
many candidates have attempted but few have been able to achieve. No one before him was able
to mobilize the support of the youth vote in the manner that he was able to accomplish and this
tactic is certainly something that other politicians would be wise to emulate in future elections.
However, the real question is whether another candidate would be able to conduct a similar
campaign and do so with the same level of integrity and authenticity as this political upstart who
catapulted from relative obscurity to become America’s forty fourth President.

References:
Bimber B. (2014). “Digital Media in the Obama Campaigns of 2008 and 2012: Adaptation to the
Personalized Political Communication Environment.” Journal of Information Technology
& Politics, 11:130–150. DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2014.895691
Cain Miller C. (November 7, 2008). “How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics.”
Retrieved from http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-internet-
campaign-changed-politics/
Carr D. (November 7, 2008). “How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power.” Retrieved
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