The Audacity of Bits

I am sick and tired of the liberal blogosphere panicking about the Obama campaign.

I am sick of their repeating tired Old Media narratives. I’m sick of the henny pennies at the HuffPo, and I’m getting frankly sick of Digby’s assumptions that "they’re going to do it again and we’re going to let them."

I’m sick and tired of the whinging.

This is not 2000. This is not 2004.

This is also about more than the country having changed. The Obama campaign is like a giant iceberg — most of it is under the water line. What is above the water line looks to be of similar size to the McCain iceberg.

But there’s nothing under McCain save water.

Obama and McCain have been making similar-size media buys, but Obama is raising more than twice as much money. What’s going on? Is anyone even asking?

No. They’re not. So I’ll tell you.

The money is going into organizing. The production of money is organizing, and the bulk of the campaign spend is organizing.

The Obama millions are going into producing the greatest
ground game American politics has ever seen, to be unleashed in October
and November. People are going to be writing about what’s happening now for generations. It’s the greatest political earthquake since TV.

Obama not only knows where his voters are, by street and
zip code, but has a granular view of his casual and fervent supporters. The Obama
campaign has registered literally millions of voters over the last
several months, new voters, new Democratic voters, in every state.

Even if this were 2004, the Obama ground game would win this coming
election. If Kerry had had Obama’s money, Obama’s databases, Obama’s
success with registering and activating new people in the process, he
would have beaten George W. Bush going away.

And let’s repeat. This isn’t 2004. This is 2008. Voters have
fundamentally changed their view of George W. Bush and the Republican
Party — not for the better. Their brand is trash. It represents
corruption, it represents oppression, it represents intolerance, it
represents incompetence. Yet John McCain had to seize that brand, and
that banner, to win his nomination — any other Republican would have
had to do the same.

It is, frankly, easy to run a Washington-based media campaign. It is
easy to look like you’re even on the talk shows and in the newspapers.
The TV and print media has made out like bandits (it thinks) under Bush
— these media are in his party’s pocket as never before. (To the right, naturally, right-wing hack and AP head William Dean Singleton.)

McCain’s got the buggywhip makers sewn up. How can he lose?

What’s happening in the polls is that the voter screens pollsters
are using are horseshit. They don’t know what the Obama ground game has
produced. They don’t know how many new voters are in the process, how
many people have been activated by the events of the last year. They’re polling based on 2004 and coming out with close numbers.

The Biden roll-out is a perfect example of this cupidity. The media
was completely flummoxed. They had no idea what was going on or why.
They couldn’t get anyone in the Obama campaign to leak. So when the
Secret Service finally made it plain that Biden was the choice they
jumped on the story, then claimed victory over the evil blogosphere.

They missed the story entirely.

This was about testing a list.

The Obama campaign used the
impending announcement to build an immense list of cell phone numbers
and active e-mail addresses, then performed a technical
demonstration of contacting them. That’s why the message went out at 3
AM. That’s when any transaction system performs its tests and updates.

The result wasn’t just that a lot of people got the message about
Biden when they woke up. The result was that the Obama campaign could
measure, in awe-inspiring detail, bounces and returns. That’s how you
maintain the quality of a list, by constantly measuring it, pinging it,
checking bounces and returns and editing it. 

So the Obama campaign not only has an enormous list, of untold size
really, but it knows which of those numbers are good, which of those
numbers can be depended on to be good through Election Day, with 90%
accuracy.

The Obama campaign isn’t about TV. It’s not about blogs. It’s about
message discipline and scaled systems. It’s about doing the homework
necessary so that, when the time comes to move, everyone moves at once.
It’s logistics, baby.

The press is looking at PCs running Windows while the Obama people have built a Google-like cloud.

This November 4 is going to be the biggest logistical feat since
D-Day. Literally. No one, in any business, has ever tried to pull off
the technical coup that the Obama campaign is planning.

Call it the Audacity of Bits.

The campaign has spent upwards of $100 million — probably more —
scaling these systems, building this database, registering new voters
and testing. They’ve probably got a better customer database system than WalMart.
They’re ready.

So stop with the panic. Let the other side panic. Work the plan.
Support the candidate. Get on the list, and be ready to move when
called.

This is going to be the biggest thing to hit our politics, ever. And no one in the media has a bloody Clue.

But now you do.