New Media leader exposes myth of Obama's 'bottom-up' Internet-driven 2008 campaign
UPDATED: More storm clouds gathering on the Left
End-of-year media pieces tend to be boring rehashes but occasionally a thoughtful person will use the opportunity for some genuinely original and useful thinking about the most recent past. Such is Micah Sifry's powerful and significant post on Personal Democracy Forum's Tech President, "The Obama disconnect: What happens when myth meets reality."
Remember how the Mainstream Media endlessly told us in 2008 about how the Obama campaign was blazing new trails by raising millions of dollars of campaign donations and creating the first-ever bottom-up, people-driven Internet-focused presidential campaign apparatus?
Sifry's post is a must-read for those across the political spectrum who seek to understand why the truth about the Obama campaign in 2008 was almost exactly the opposite of that mythic rendition that was at the heart of the conventional wisdom.
Sifrty's post also makes clear why many of the Obama administration's major political and personnel decisions events of 2009 make little sense apart from that truth.
Sifry summarizes the difference between the truth and the myth at the outset of his post, noting that "the truth is that Obama was never nearly as free of dependence on big money donors as the reporting suggested, nor was his movement as bottom-up or people-centric as his marketing implied.
"And this is the big story of 2009, if you ask me, the meta-story of what did, and didn't happen, in the first year of Obama's administration. The people who voted for him weren't organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests--banks, energy companies, health interests, car-makers, the military-industrial complex--sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting. Read the rest.
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