The Wiki Man | 15 November 2008

The most powerful storyline of the US election, which the fawning media did nothing to challenge, was the idea that Barack Obama was an underdog who had miraculously triumphed against a hostile establishment to make a presidential bid. In this he was rather helped by the simplistic American belief that race somehow trumps all other claims to adversity. To me this seems, well, slightly racist. If asked to choose between a) being a black editor of the Harvard Law Review or b) spending five years of my life in a small bamboo cage being tortured by some really angry North Vietnamese, I wouldn’t think long before ticking box a).

But being seen as an outsider has always been electorally useful, and more so now than ever. For if you want to tap the remarkable potential of online communities, it helps to convince people that you can’t succeed without them. That’s easier to do as an outsider candidate, since an outsider’s supporters enjoy the feeling they are changing the path of history rather than just helping to pave it. The slogan ‘Yes we can’ (shamelessly lifted from Bob the Builder) showed a true grasp of mass engagement. By contrast Hillary Clinton and John McCain (who admitted he had never used the internet) both had a de haut en bas style of campaigning left over from a time when media only went one way.

Obama’s ‘against all odds’ positioning helped his campaign raise huge sums from small donors (the supposed underdog had perhaps $300 million more to spend on advertising than the Republican, the greater part derived from individual online donations of under $300). They also enjoyed other forms of voluntary support, including great advertising created by volunteers and circulated online.