Old School Campaign?

Posted by Jeff Carter
on October 14th, 2012

Generally, I agree with a lot of Glenn Reynolds posts at Instapundit. He is a great resource and many of his posts really cause one to think. But, today he has a post up that says the Obama campaign is old school. Certainly, the themes behind the Obama campaign are old school. They can trace themselves right back to the same ideas Woodrow Wilson had. Obama and his team certainly don’t think out of the box when it comes to moving humanity forward.

However, the guts of his campaign isn’t old school. It’s highly digital. Run by Harper Reed here in Chicago, it’s targeting voters using digital data like no campaign has before. At a lunch I was at, Harper talked a little about what they were doing. They didn’t release any trade secrets. But, one thing they said was that after the 2008 campaign, no one saved anything. Harper had to write all new code, all new forms of data collection and analysis for this campaign. The other thing they are going to do is write it in such a way that it can be preserved and added onto for future Democratic campaigns. This might help Democrats get down the learning curve of building an organization more quickly.

The Republicans outsourced a lot of their digital efforts. It’s a different strategy, but one that might work just as well. It also fits with the Republican ethos. Democrats are central planners. Republicans are not. Having the digital strategy working in a symbiotic way with the campaign might lead to greater innovation than having a directed effort within a campaign. We will see the differences in a few weeks.

Many of the things they are doing are ho hum because companies have been doing it in the private sector for years. However, because of the stodginess of politics, they seem revolutionary there. That point alone ought to make you think about how sclerotic government organizations are. It’s why career politicians often have a hard time understanding what private people are thinking and doing. It’s also why government needs to be small, provide some basic frameworks, and let innovators and private markets lead the way.

Before working for Obama, Reed was the CTO at Threadless. I love what Threadless is doing with T-shirts. They basically crowdsource designs and sell them to the people that like them. That’s listening to your customer and being responsive. It also allows Threadless to run leaner than a lot of companies-and because they are so in touch with who their customer is changes the way the company operates.

Why can’t government transition so it performs more like Threadless? I can see why it can’t with things like the military. But, with social programs and other issues it certainly should be more responsive. In the short term, because all governments when given power act become oppressive, I’d prefer it if my government was smaller. Maybe we ought to make both the Constitution/Bill of Rights mandatory reading in history classes, and then require students also read The Lean Start Up and Do More Faster. Maybe the next generation will combine the two.

Really antique ideas that don’t work

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