Hope 2.0: Inside Obama's Campaign

from Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/hope-2-0-inside-obamas-campaign-20120329?page=3


Frank Polich/Getty Images

PASS through security into the headquarters of Obama 2012, and the effect is like stepping into the world's most high-tech dorm room. Spanning the entire floor of a Chicago skyscraper, the campaign's nerve center boasts a ping-pong table, a staff of 300 and a life-size cardboard cutout of the president dressed in a University of Montana jersey. They don't use phones up here; most of the digital team weren't even issued any. Instead, campaign workers communicate mostly by e-mail, G-chat and Twitter. Rows of young staffers, some perched on yoga balls, are quietly coding new online tools to engage supporters, tweaking a video of Sarah Palin attacking Obama, and tracking metrics of volunteers recruited and new voters registered. An energetic hum fills the room, punctuated only by mouse clicks.

Given Barack Obama's transformation from insurgent politician to establishment president, you might expect his re-election campaign to emphasize the benefits of incumbency, leaning on big-dollar donors and party insiders. But the campaign staff assembled in Chicago has a different plan to return Obama to the White House: They're building the mother of all field campaigns – one that is even more dependent on face-to-face organizing than it was four years ago. Obama 2.0 has been quietly re-engineered from the bottom up, powered by new high-tech organizing tools designed to mobilize volunteers and target new voters more quickly and efficiently. By the start of early voting in October, the campaign expects to transform college dorms and coffeehouses across the country into 20,000 all-volunteer, fully functioning field offices.

"To be honest, I'm amazed at what they're doing," says Temo Figueroa, who directed Obama's field operation against Hillary Clinton in 2008 but is not a part of the campaign this year. "It makes what we were doing look like a startup."

Obama and his team know that come fall, they will face an epic ad war backed by the nearly limitless funds being poured into Republican Super PACs. So the campaign is returning to the potent combination of cutting-edge technology and timeworn field techniques it deployed in 2008 – the president's one advantage that the GOP can't match. "The other side has decided this is a race about Super PAC ads," says Jim Messina, the campaign manager of Obama 2012. "We have a different theory about the whole deal. Both sides are going to have beautiful TV ads, and everyone is going to spend millions of dollars. But we're going to win this on the ground, person-to-person, volunteers talking to voters about the issues."


full article: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/hope-2-0-inside-obamas-campaign-20120329


Volunteers signing up at the Obama for America Arkansas office grand opening.