Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House | Garrett Graff | Talks at Google

Hi, I'm Rick Clow on the content partnerships team here at Google, and I found out Garrett was coming this morning and was very excited to be able to be here. I got to know Garrett on the Howard Dean campaign. I was a volunteer at the time, living in Illinois, and got to spend some time in Burlington, got to meet Garrett and the rest of the team on the technology staff in the Dean campaign. But that's not all Garrett did or does, and he really brings a rather remarkable background here today to talk about his book. In addition to being the editor at large at the Washingtonian magazine, he also founded Fishbowl dc, a great media culture blog about what's going on in dc. He was the first credentialed blogger to attend a White House press event. He also today is a professor at Georgetown University talking about new media and technology and politics. Thrilled to have Garrett here at Google and looking forward to hearing more about the book. Garrett, welcome.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining me. I'm very excited to be here. This is. I can't even tell you how many different Google tools I used in the course of writing this book over the course of two years. So it's very exciting to be here and to talk about politics and technology, especially this week as we sort of see for the first time some semblance of order coming to what has been one of the most unpredictable presidential campaigns that we have seen in a very long time. So my book, and the title of the book, the First Campaign, comes from the argument and the thesis that 2008 will be the first campaign of the information age, that it will be the first campaign of the 21st century where we will see the issues of technology come to the fore in the campaign, both with technology as a policy tool and as a campaign tool that candidates are talking about issues like innovation. I know that you all have had almost all of the presidential candidates come through, through this campus here. And this is where Barack Obama in November gave his big innovation speech and announced that he would appoint the first Chief Technology Officer for the United States if he is elected president. And at the same time, we're seeing them campaign online in ways that were unimaginable even to The Dean campaign four years ago. And we have seen the YouTube debates, which were a huge step forward in small d Democratic government and governance and public policy debate. This is a topic that I first came to, as Rick said, I've been sort of working at this intersection of politics and technology for about four or five years now, starting with the Dean Campaign and Then later on in Washington and now in journalism. And this particular book grew out of work that I was doing in 2005 when I started covering the 2008 presidential race, which at that point was still three years away in the future. And I was covering Mark Warner, who was then the governor of Virginia, a tech entrepreneur, one of the founders of Nextel, made about 100, $200 million for himself, which I know at Google is small change, but in Northern Virginia is a relatively large amount of money. And he was governor of Virginia and very, very information driven. Sort of his big project at the time was the wiring for broadband and wireless technology of Southwest and South side Virginia, which is this incredibly impoverished region of the state that's been hit both by the decline of the tobacco industry and then the decline of the textile industry in globalization. And he really understood that the cities and towns in the country that will succeed over the coming decades are the ones that are wired for broadband and for wireless. And that being left off of a broadband network is going to be the equivalent to a town in the 1800s being left off the railroads when the railroads come through. And that this was sort of his big initiative and his big wiring project. And it was part of this larger philosophy that he had that the United States really needs to figure out how to compete in this globalized, interconnected, wired world. What Thomas Friedman has sort of labeled the flat world. And that that should be the defining characteristic of this next presidential race. And how the United States really focuses on these issues will determine the economic success and the competitiveness of the United States for the next 40 or 50 years. And that we have seen mostly over the last eight years that these issues have been almost entirely ignored on the national level. And so I sort of saw, I followed Warner across the country as he was talking about these issues and just became really interested in this question. And this sort of gradually gave rise to this book and my argument about the first campaign and the tools and the technologies that are at the campaign's fingertips today. It's clear already that 2008 is a once in a lifetime election. This is the first time since 1920, when Republican Warren Harding battle Democrat James Cox, that there has been no president or vice president involved in a presidential election. There's one exception to that. It was 1952, Dwight Eisenhower, a five star general who just won World War II and was offered the nominations of both political parties. So sort of I leave that one off to the side. It's also the first time in, since 1940, since before World War II, that the Republican nominee has not been clear two years out from the election, which is sort of a stunning thing that it was really only yesterday here, some, you know, nine months before the election, that the Republican nominee became clear. Every other election since 1940, the Republican nominee has been clear two years out from an election. You know, George w. Bush in 98, Bob Dole in 90, in 1994, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So this is an unprecedentedly open election. Even before we begin to talk about technology and globalization in this race, it's also an election where we have seen in incredible ways our world transform since the last open presidential election. If you go back to the day that the Supreme Court decided Bush V. Gore in 2000, just I want to give you some context for just how different the world was on that day. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade center and the Pentagon were more than a year away. Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were still in power. Blogs and podcasts barely existed in 2000. Cell phones were still a relative novelty. They were far from the commonplace tools that we have today. BlackBerry's were just a year old. The iPhone, sorry, the ipod was still an idea on the drawing board at Apple. Google was in its infancy. It was handling about 100 million queries a day. And in 2000, the big news was that Google launched the first Google toolbar, Gmail. And all of that was still years ahead in the Future, as was MySpace, Facebook, YouTube. YouTube, of course, is even new. And online video is even basically new since the last presidential election four years ago. In 2000, much of the world was still on the slow and noisy dial up connections. But by the beginning of last year, nearly 90% of Americans were reported that they were using broadband to connect to the Internet, up from just 50% a year earlier. And one out of three Americans is using the web primarily wirelessly today. Technology that again, the last time we saw a presidential election without an incumbent didn't exist. The very technology that over the last decade has transformed sort of every aspect of American culture and society and politics is also today transforming this race. It will be run as much on the World Wide Web as it is in union halls and on television over the past eight years, Americans can see or could see this change sort of at every turn. When you picked up a plastic good with a Made in China label, anything with lead paint in it with a Made in China label, or picked up a telephone and called customer service and ended up talking to someone in Bangalore. Industries and businesses that were once local are now international and companies that were once wedded to a particular city are not even wedded to a particular country today. Today, there are now more new economy, quote, unquote, creative workers than there are traditional blue collar workers in the American economy. A tremendous change from just eight years ago. A blog like the leftleaningdailycoast.com has more inbound links, I.e. sites linking to it then The Chicago Tribune has daily subscribers. And the right leaning blog Instapundent has more inbound links than a site like Sports Illustrated. In this brave new world, even Al Qaeda, which has become a very savvy web operator, can post videos on YouTube and recruit through jihadist websites and raise money around the world. Technology, of course, is being adopted at an increasingly fast rate, and that's reshaping every aspect of our lives. To put that in a little bit of context, Internet penetration in the decade ending in the early 2000s went from 9% of the US population to 70%. That's a tremendously fast adoption of new technology. It took cars about 55 years to reach a quarter of the US population from the time that they were commercially introduced. It took electricity about 46 years. It took television over a quarter of a century. Computers it took just 15 years. Cell phones just 13 years, and broadband just 6 years. Nearly 10% of the population, myself included, no longer has a telephone that plugs into a wall. That number rises dramatically when you're talking about under 30s. One out of three people under 30, it doesn't have a telephone that plugs into a wall, which has incredibly profound implications for the way that marketing and polling is done in the United States because you can't legally telemarket or poll to cell phones. And so you have sort of this huge chunk of the under 30 population that is disappearing. For marketers and pollsters, by the end of this year, one third of all houses will have a DVR like TiVo, which allows them to skip ads. And we now see Apple allowing you to rent videos on demand through itunes. We're living at a time when not even the glaciers are moving at glacial speed anymore. The two big glaciers in Iceland, the Helheim and the Jacobshoven glaciers, are accelerating to the point where they're now moving at speeds exceeding 14 km a year, or roughly an inch a minute, fast enough that you can stand there and watch them move. Alas, we're just beginning to see the very, very profound ways that this will change our presidential politics and this election and future elections in important ways. The 2008 election will seem like the previous ones. America's stance towards Iraq, Iran and North Korea will be a key issue, as well as the terror and Al Qaeda and jihadist groups around the world. Homeland security will be debated, as will the hot button wedge issues like abortion, gay marriage, flag burning, etc. But every one of these issues, though, pales in comparison to the importance of how the United States will compete in globalization. In the same way, the questions of how the candidates align themselves on the usual issues pales in comparison to the question of what is their vision for America's role in today's world and whether they will commit the time, resources and leadership of their campaigns to confronting the challenges of this new wired economy. It happens that this election is coming along precisely at a time when the hour is getting very late. Marjorie Williams, the Vanity Fair's political correspondent whose life was cut tragically short by cancer in 2005, wrote that the failures that really matter in Washington happen so slowly that that no single person ever gets blamed for them. And such that is where we find ourselves today, with creeping crises in education, health care, energy, immigration, and the basic day to day economics that aren't the fault of any one person, one party, or even a single branch of government. Once identified, though, these issues and these crises are all of ours to meet and fix, and the leadership to address these creeping crises over the next decade will be the responsibility, first and foremost, of the President that we elect in November of this year. As Winston Churchill said in 1936 as he watched Hitler rise in Germany, quote, the era of procrastination, of half measures or soothing and baffling expedients of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are finding a period of consequences. The 2004 election focused on events of the past, the intelligence involved in the Iraq invasion and the meritorious or otherwise conduct of the various candidates in the Vietnam War a generation ago. Much to the exclusion of any debate about America's future, the threads of politics, technology and globalization have now woven themselves into American society and intertwined to reshape our lives and our future. And the challenge for the 2008 candidates will be to recognize these changes and relate them to the political realm. They must help the nation tackle the seemingly desperate but seemingly, seemingly disparate but actually very interconnected issues of technology, health care, trade, energy and the environment and unite them into a governing philosophy. Aided and driven by these new technologies that we've seen since Bush v. Gore, the war has obscured fundamental changes in the global economy, changes that won't wait until the US Forces have departed from a stable Baghdad, whenever that actually comes to pass. As Ed Luce, the former bureau chief for the Financial Times in South Asia told me last year, I believe that 50 years from now when history is written, the rise of India and China will be seen as far more important than the rise of al Qaeda and 9 11. These are truly apocal events that will change the face of the world. But their rise is happening very slowly. They're not happening in news bites. The rise is just study. What's that saying? The urgent drives out the merely important. Globalization won't remain just important for much longer. Without quick and decisive action by the leaders elected in 2008, America's role as the most powerful, most prosperous, most creative economy in the world will be under threat. Now the US Risks being overtaken in the world that over the last half century we created. Some recent headlines point to this troubling trend for the first time. In 2007, the world's best high energy particle accelerator was located outside of the United States. The US Is no longer a net exporter of high tech, switching from a $54 billion surplus in 1990 to a 50 billion deficit by 2001, a number that's only grown since then. In 2005, out of the 25 largest IPOs worldwide, only one was held in the United States. Out of 120 billion dollar plus chemical plants being built around the world, only one is in the United States and 50 are in China. Only three of the top 10 recipients of US patents are now US companies, which is a stunning moment, stunning figure if you think about it. And then as we have heard candidates talk about when they've come to Google's campus over the last couple of months, as a percentage of GDP, federal R&D dollars have fallen from nearly 2% in 1965 to less than 3/4 of a percent in today's government. Meanwhile, in the last decade, China's R and D investment by GDP has more than doubled to over one and a half percent. Candidates must recognize the new landscape of this first campaign and have a plan for tackling the world as it actually exists today. One where terrorists, goods and jobs all move around the world almost effortlessly. Solutions for problems on such a grand national scale will not come magically from the open market system. In centuries past, the US Government has recognized the massive investments it needed to make in order to ensure the country's economy could succeed and prosper. Projects from the Erie Canal to the Panama Canal, the Brooklyn Bridge to the Hoover Dam to the interstate highway system and the transcontinental railroad were all undertaken by the government with the idea of commerce first and foremost in mind. Acting and addressing today's challenges in such a complicated political environment will require serious reconsideration of some popularly long held beliefs. Search for Senator Ted Stevens on Google and One of the first results you'll get about the man who until this year was third in line for the presidency is his famously clueless characteristic of the Internet as a series of tubes. President Bush similarly addled descriptions of the web he has of course referred to using the Google have been pure gold for Saturday Night Live. After Bush alluded during a 2004 presidential debate to rumors on on the Internet about an Iraq war draft, Will Forte, who impersonates the President on the show, gleefully played Bush, saying, I think that the problem here may be more a question of getting rid of the bad Internets and just keeping the good Internets, you know, because I think we can all agree there are just too many Internets these days. In fact, technology really shouldn't be such a laughing matter in public policy. As a nation, we wouldn't tolerate such ignorance if it came from any other area. Would we be amused if it came out that Joe Biden, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wasn't clear about the difference between Shiites and Sunnis or couldn't find the Sudan on a map? How about if Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, wasn't entirely sure what the term subprime mortgage meant? And you can be sure that if Susan Collins, the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, fumbled over what exactly a dirty bomb was, pundits and polls on both sides of the aisle would have had her head. So why is it so funny to us that the octogenarian Stevens, the top Republican on the committee who regulates the Internet, doesn't know the difference between the Internet and an email? Now I understand certainly in this campus some of this stuff gets really technical, but some of this stuff is also pretty easy. Some presidential candidates, you know, the ones who always talk about ensuring that the United States can talk, can, can compete in this fast moving tech savvy world, seem to be getting a pass on the technological literacy as well. Answering a campaign question earlier this year, Mitt Romney, who of course dropped out yesterday, the former entrepreneur whose high tech background should have made him the best informed tech candidate, didn't appear to know the difference between the video sharing website YouTube and MySpace, the respectively fourth and sixth most popular sites on the Internet according to assorted rankings. Can you imagine if John Edwards had shown that he didn't know the difference between Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, and Pakistan, the sixth most populous country in the world? Or the differences between Chevron, number four on the Fortune 500 list, and General Electric, which is number six? It would have been a huge gaffe, a multi day story in which pundit after pundit decreed him unfit to lead the nation. But Romney's faux pas didn't even muss his hair. So why is it that we blithely allow our leaders to be ignorant of the force that probably more than any other, will drive the US economy for the next 40 or 50 years? Is it because that we're used to our parents or grandparents struggling to program the VCR so that it doesn't blink 12 o' clock all the time? Or because we think it's cute that they grew up in simpler times? The humor newspaper the Onion teased the earlier last fall with the mock headline Google Launches the Google for Older Adults. The Onion quoted the project's fictional director as saying, the Google will have all of the same information found on regular Google, but with the added features of it won't steal your credit card number or give your computer all kinds of viruses. Sure, it's sort of endearing that our parents and grandparents can't figure out how to make a cell phone work or how to use an Emmett Khan on Gchat. But our economic future and security requires much more from the leaders that we're going to elect in November. Historically, national economic advancement has only come through government assistance. The railroads received huge government banking backing to crisscross the nation. And a century later, Eisenhower, who was a Republican, understood that the interstate highway system, the largest public works project ever undertaken, was critical to commerce and the economy. The Internet, of course, would have never existed without early financial help and development from the Defense Department. And so it must be today. Reforms of healthcare and further expanding access to education will not come in a free market. Neither will a national broadband network or an energy policy that saves us from a future plagued by global warming. Today, we must address a wide variety of issues under this first campaign umbrella, from the harsh and nonsensical post 911 immigration laws that have been encouraging the world's best and brightest to stay in their home countries and innovate there rather than here in Mountain View to the health care crisis that is forcing General Motors to spend more per car on its health care than on the steel that makes up the car, or that is forcing Starbucks to spend more each year on health care than it does on coffee beans, we must focus on an education system that isn't keeping up the challenges of today's world. After World War II, American society was transformed forever by the relatively modest investments of the GI Bill, which educated an entire generation to levels that they never could have imagined and helped drive the American economy for half a century. The GI Bill's transformative effects were amplified a decade later when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and Congress responded with the National Defense Education act, which emphasized education in science and technology. As one example, the NDAA helped boost annual PhDs in math in this country from 100 in 1961 to 1,400 a year just a decade later. Today we're seeing what amounts to a reverse GI Bill an entire generation in danger of having their future standard of living radically lowered by missed educational opportunities. The government's National Report Card shows the US Falling further behind other nations in math and science. In Detroit, where Mitt Romney announced his presidential bid almost a year ago, the public school system manages to graduate only about a third of the students who enter as freshmen. Nationally, the number stands at 1.1 million students drop out of high school every year, 6,000 every day, one every 29 seconds. Their lifetime of opportunities dry up In a wired world today, whereas 25 years ago black men were three times as likely to be in college than to be in prison, by 2000 there were three black men in college. For every four of their peers in prison, the annual cost of maintaining a prisoner is roughly equal to a year of tuition at Stanford. But of course the social costs are much, much higher. On the workforce front, the last major overhaul of the employment safety net was under President Kennedy In 1962, when the industrial mass production economy was preeminent and the U.S. s economic power in the world was unchallenged, meaning that the regulations and standards used are ill suited for a technology driven world today. In the new economy, companies are turning over faster than ever. According to Dun and Bradstreet, from 1935 to 1981, around 15,000 businesses failed every year. By 1996, which is remembered as one of those great Clinton era boom years, some 70,000 companies failed every year. By another measure, the business landscape is changing faster than it ever has as well. In the 60 years after 1917, it took an average of about 30 years to replace half of the thousand largest public US companies in the country. But in the 20 years that followed, from 1977 to 1998, it took only an average of 12 years for that to turn over. Our ongoing efforts to develop and recruit human capital will just be as important today as our investment in physical capital. At the Charleston, South Carolina YouTube debate last summer, anyone who journeyed just a mile and a half from the Citadel's debate site to Cooper Rivers Court, a rundown public housing project, would find that YouTube, the Internet and the flood of information and opportunities that they provide a rare luxury. One reporter there talked to 14 year old Tiara Reed, who was who lived a 30 minute walk from the public library where she's allowed to use the Internet up to two hours every day. The digital divide and the country's reluctance to wire its citizens to participate in this information revolution that we're seeing today was readily on display. The need for investment in tech infrastructure was readily evident in the city that YouTube chose, where only 40 to 45% of people have access to broadband Internet connections either at home or at work. At one level, the quote at one level the YouTube debate shows that the web has really become a centerpiece of American political culture. At another level, it shows that the debate is not for everybody and it's certainly not available to all Americans, said Lee Rainey, the director of American Life Project. Andrew Ruscha, a tech entrepreneur in New York who ran for public advocate in 2005 on the subject on the topic of trying to unite the city under a wireless broadband connection, argues that the digital divide is worse today than it was when the issue first arose because so little has been done to address, even to address it on the education level. Even as Fortune 500 companies wire their employees today to be online 24. 7. When he was here just last fall, Barack Obama called the darkness on the famed search results map that shows where people are searching around the world, the disconnected corners of the interconnected world where Africa and much of Asia remains dark even today. Our safety in this new world cannot be assured until those disconnected areas and disconnected corners get connected. Then there's a little question of how the US will power itself over the information age. How we can keep the environment clean when China plans to bring online a new coal fired power plant every week for the next 30 years. And how we will keep the environment clean when India's Tata, which is about to buy away from Ford Motor Company, the Land Rover and Jaguar brands, is introducing a $2,500 car that will bring tens of millions of new fossil fuel consumers into the heart of India's already congested and overcrowded roads and cities. We'll never wake up one morning and see wall to wall coverage of the education crisis or the healthcare crisis. We won't see 24 hour coverage from towns that don't have broadband access or from factories that have closed. The Day After Tomorrow movie notwithstanding, it's unlikely that we'll see a massive global climate change overnight. There's not a single day when all of these first campaign issues will become a crisis. Instead, they'll creep along day by day, month by month, year by year. Even the Collapse of the I35 West Bridge in Minneapolis last year, which should have and could have focused the nation on the crumbling infrastructure of the Industrial Age and how to update it for the Information age, garnered only a few days of front page stories. That lack of a focus in crisis, though, doesn't make any of this less important, and it certainly doesn't change the impact that these issues should have on our next president. Indeed, the historical reputation of the next president will likely ride on these issues more so than any other challenge of the coming years. Just as we remember the day, remember the way that the two Roosevelts, Teddy and fdr, updated the American economy in their respective times, the very technology that has transformed the global economy has also transformed the way that races are run today. Of course, there's never been a presidential campaign. There have been presidential campaigns in which candidates broke new ground in technology. We saw that in 2000 with John McCain and Bill Bradley, and in 2004 with Howard Dean. And there have been campaigns in which new technology has also broken the candidates, as we saw in 1960 with Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in the first televised debates. But it appears that 2008 will be the first campaign defined at every level by technology, the first where technology is both the medium and the message. As candidates talk about innovation, the challenges facing America by the rise of India and China, and how technology is intricately linked to crises like arresting soaring healthcare costs. They're trying to raise money online, respond to YouTube attack ads, and send text messages to sites like TW. Add to these new media the breakthroughs and advances in micro targeting, the tools and databases pioneered by the Bush campaign in 2004 that allow a candidate to address individual voters on their most important issue, and we're in the midst of a presidential campaign transformed and driven by technology at every level. Remember, the 2008 presidential election. Today might have been very different, except for the August day in 2006 when Virginia Senator George Allen was caught on YouTube saying in the famous Macaca video. Up until that moment, he had been the Republican frontrunner for the presidential campaign. The YouTube video Lost George Allen both the race and delivered the U.S. senate to Democrats in the 06 election. And to see how technology has already reshaped this presidential race, look no further than the candidate's original announcements a year ago. In November of 07, the night before her sorry. In November of 06, the night before her husband Tom announced his presidential bid, Kristi Vilsack, Tom Vilsack's wife, sent out an email to her supporters talking about their first dinner together in Iowa and what that meant, that moment meant for the presidential race. As it was coming up on the night before John Edwards announced his candidacy to the national press corps in New Orleans, he sent out a text message to supporters cell phones saying, I have a special announcement. Visit johnedwards.com now and a few weeks later, just about a year ago, an email arrived from Barack Obama saying for the first time that he was interested in running for president. Most people hadn't read a news article or seen a television report about Obama's decision before they clicked on the link to his website and watched the three minute video where he talked about his decision. The same thing happened a few days later on Saturday from the former First Lady Hillary Clinton. And in this election, the candidate's main audience is going to be less and less the mass media. Instead, they're reaching out past the mass media to grab the voters personally and let their own personalities shine. As I lay out in much greater depth in the book, the 08 election will be transformed by four online video, cell phone, blogs and social networking sites providing unparalleled power to ordinary voters. And together they have created a new infrastructure for launching and rebutting political ads. Add in the power of grassroots small dollar online fundraising, where we've seen Barack Obama raise over a million dollars a day every day so far this year, and you have a 2008 election that will be conducted on a playing field where the party establishment has the least control of any election in American history. It will also force campaigns to adapt, becoming ever more creative to win the eyeballs that they were once able to purchase with a few network television ads on the evening news and primetime sitcoms. An important distinction and common thread to examine here is that since its inception, the Internet has always happened to candidates. They've always lagged behind in adoption of technology, failing to realize what it could do and thus being swept along with it as ordinary citizens step up and transform the process. People like Rick Klein right here. Anyone who has watched Barack Obama's Will, I am yes we can video in the last week will agree that the history books will likely reflect that. The 2008 election is about voter generated content, ordinary people seizing the moment and using the increasingly powerful tools at their fingertips to create and spread information without any help from the candidates. There's no telling whether the candidates in this general election will run the first campaign or run the last campaign all over again. But so far there are the signposts of the first campaign, their stops here being a great sign of that and how far we have come in this debate and the changes wrought by technology and how far we still have to go. The brand new playing field of the 2008 election, completed with cell phone cameras and a global economy linked like never before, will help determine this uniquely important campaign. A campaign covered by reporters, covered by people that reporters a generation ago could have never imagined and focused on issues that candidates of a past generation could have never imagined. One thing though should be clear to all of us, and that's that the first campaign of a new era is upon us. So that's my prepared remarks. I'd love to take questions or comments or thoughts from any of you if you have them. I think that Rick has a microphone here if anyone has questions or comments or thoughts. Anyone? Okay, Rick.

So there was an article, there was an article in the Washington Post three days ago and Michael Turk who ran, which I would agree, he was the guy that ran the Bush Cheney technology efforts in 04. He was asked by the Washington Post reporter, how is technology changing this race? And Turk's comment was, well, I don't think any campaign is really moving the ball forward in this cycle would be interested for you to survey campaigns both still ongoing and anybody that's dropped out to this point. Do you agree? Do you think that these campaigns today are just simply copying what was done in 04, both by Bush, Cheney, by Kerry, by Dean, or are they doing things that are truly innovative that Michael is just not acknowledging?

Well, I think that he is largely right that we have not seen a ton of innovation coming out of the campaigns this year. We have seen, I think, two notable exceptions. On the Republican side, we've seen Ron Paul's presidential campaign, which has just had a tremendous run, but that has been mostly grassroots powered, that that is not the central campaign organization organizing and raising that money and driving that campaign forward. And that it's really been the voters and supporters enthusiasm that has really transformed that race. My favorite example is the Ron Paul blimp, which I don't know whether you guys heard about over on the West Coast. But the Ron Paul supporters organized, funded and launched a blimp that for a number of weeks flew up and down the east coast to major events and keep early primary and caucus states to fly around and try to raise visibility for Ron Paul. The other side is I think that Barack Obama's campaign has done a very good job of utilizing technology and also encouraging and benefiting from the use of the online voter generated content that I was talking about. Barack Obama has been doing very innovative and thoughtful things at terms of text messaging on cell phones, which has been very key, I think, to helping reach that under 30 audience that I was talking about that doesn't have landlines. Studies have shown that cell phone based voter mobilization is the cheapest and most effective type of voter mobilization that you can have at the cost of, I think it was less than 5% of most of the traditional ways that people reach voters. And so we haven't seen a ton of innovation, but I think that we have seen the innovation that has been happening benefit the candidates who have been innovating, both Obama and Ron Paul, and that certainly if in this election Barack Obama ends up as the nominee, it will be thanks entirely to the small dollar online fundraising base that he's built. Any other questions? Yeah.

Hi. Do you think that Barack Obama's success in caucus states is kind of related to his understanding of technology and then the way people are participating in the Internet, they're also more participatory in caucuses in general?

Yes. And I think one of the things that has benefited Barack increasing incredibly in the way that he won some of those early caucus states was in getting these young people to turn out. Young voters turned out in the Iowa caucuses at a rate three times of that of the.04 election and went for Barack by 40 to 50 points. So that it will really be sort of the young wired voters who deliver this nomination to Barack if it ends up actually being Obama at the end of this race in the next couple of weeks. Any other questions?

We have a question coming from Santa Monica.

Okay. The question is, do you think that the major effect of technology is that it allows the voters to control the way campaign materials are used rather than having the candidates control the way they're used? Yes, I think that we really have seen in this election that the most compelling viral campaign materials that we have seen have come from voters. I was actually last week sort of going back over the pieces of campaign material that have gone viral in this election. And there's really only one piece, Hillary Clinton's Sopranos parody ad that was a campaign consultant produced sort of traditional media ad and that sort of everything else has been. Been stuff like the Obama girl or the Giuliani girl or this Obama will. I am. Yes, we can video that just went up in the last week and that it's really fascinating to me how much today people are sort of using these technologies to create their own campaign literature and create their own campaign moments that they feel sort of better express the way that these candidates connect with them than. Than what they're seeing come out of the traditional media. Other questions? Yeah, I was wondering, excuse me.

Why is it that Ron Paul seems to be disproportionately represented online?

And if his online presence, or if online presence in general is so important, why is his campaign. Why has it got no traction? Yeah, I think so. The question was sort of why Ron Paul has been so successful online and why that hasn't really necessarily translated into him winning anything. I think what's interesting about Ron Paul and interesting about the way that the Internet organizes online is it allows for small niche communities that would otherwise be disconnected to connect online. So there may only be, and I'll sort of randomly choose a number here, 2 million Ron Paul supporters in the entire country. Four, eight, 12 years ago, it would have been very difficult for those 2 million people to find each other. Today, though, they can go online and self organize and raise money in very targeted ways in such a way to help that they really are able to raise a candidate's profile to a level that they would not have been able to before. I think by the traditional measures of actually winning delegates. Ron Paul has been a. An unsuccessful presidential candidate, but at the same time, he went from a year ago at basically zero, sort of in that asterisk level in the presidential race to winning in the first six states, basically tying with Rudy Giuliani in each of those first six elections. And that to me is a tremendous success. I mean, that they were able to turn someone who had no name recognition, no money, no resources, into someone who was able to garner a politically viable level of support against much better funded and much more better known candidates. Any other questions? Anything else in Santa Monica? Okay, well, thank you all for coming. I appreciate you taking time out of your lunch hour or whatever this is for you and thanks for being here.