One of the reasons why we heart Barack Obama is the way he embraced web technology and social networking. Hillary Clinton’s web presence is sorta like the way you kiss your Great Aunt Sally — more for show than out of affection — and John McCain may actually be poking his web servers with a stick down in Texas somewhere. Then Obama landed Chris Hughes, one of the Facebook co-founders, to run his online campaign:
Sitting amid a cluster of cubicles, Mr. Hughes, whose title is “online organizing guru,” handles the My.BarackObama.com site [...] Other staff members maintain Mr. Obama’s presence on Facebook (where he has one million supporters), purchase online advertising, respond to text messages from curious voters, produce videos and e-mail millions of supporters.
Somewhere in Chicago, someone is watching Barack’s web presence and making it happen. This is the kind of real, serious, down to brass-tacks intelligence I’m talking about: I may not know the answer, but I can damn well find a smart, dedicated motherfucker who does know it. Chris Hughes came in with some insanely sensible strategy: Keep it local, and make sure you can organize the people that you sign up.
In contrast:
[John McCain's] social network, called McCainSpace and part of JohnMcCain.com, is “virtually impossible to use and appears largely abandoned.”
See? It’s cause he poked it with a stick.
Chris Hughes offered himself up to Obama, and quit the Facebook to work the campaign after being reassured that Obama was serious about his social media presence. Here’s the question: Is it that no other candidate would have thought to take social media seriously enough to hire someone like Chris Hughes, or that somone like Chris Hughes would never have taken the job for anyone but Barack Obama?
And at the end of the day, does it matter? You want the guy who can get it done.
You know Reggie Love is a mean scrabulous player.
Reggie Love plays “BALLER” on a triple word score every fucking game and nobody can stop him.
And you know Obama’s totally playing BrickBreaker in that photo.
Could have sworn he was playing Pork Invaders.