BREATHING
FIRE
campaign relied on the efforts of its
supporters at the grassroots level,
empowering them and deploying
them to win over new voters.
It was the same community organizer ethos that drove the 2008
campaign. But it took getting whupped twice by this model for Republicans to finally wake up and
realize that Sarah Palin’s mockery
of Obama’s community organizing
days was, in fact, tone deaf — and
had led the party to dismiss exactly the kind of outreach it should
have been pursuing.
The Obama campaign did a masterful job of organizing and analyzing data to facilitate this process.
Journalists Sasha Issenberg, Alexis
Madrigal and others have written at
length about the tactical and technological wizardry of the Obama
campaign. There also has been
much talk on the Republican side of
the need to copy this approach.
But a remark by Obama campaign’s chief technology officer, the
tattooed, pierced former Threadless CTO Harper Reed, caught my
attention. Reed told Mother Jones
that he seized on the idea of “micro-listening” as a foundational
value behind the way the campaign
built all of its technology.
In June 2011, about one month
HUFFINGTON
01.20.13
after taking the job on the Obama
campaign — his first job on any political campaign ever — Reed went
to Foo Camp, an annual get-together of the technorati organized by
Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly
Media and an influential advocate
“GET HUNGRY, GET
HUMBLE, AND GET
TO KNOW MORE
PEOPLE WHO
AREN’T LIKE YOU.”
for open source technology.
I called Reed to find out more
about what he learned. He told me
that at one session, he asked for
input from others.
“I sat there and I basically said,
‘I’m the CTO for Obama’s reelection campaign, and I want to know
what you guys think we should be
focusing on,’” Reed said.
O’Reilly sat across from him and
said, Reed recalled, “You hear a
lot about micro-targeting in campaigns. I want to suggest that there
should be more micro-listening.”
“That really resonated with