Roger Cohen’s NYT column, “The Obama Connection,” starts off with a play on Bill Clinton’s famous line from his first presidential campaign (“It’s the economy, stupid”): “It’s the networks, stupid.” Ironically, it’s Bill’s wife and heir-apparent, Hillary, who is implicitly the “stupid” one this time.
More than any other factor, it has been Barack Obama’s grasp of the central place of Internet-driven social networking that has propelled his campaign for the Democratic nomination into a seemingly unassailable lead over Hillary Clinton. Her campaign has been so 20th-century. His has been of the century we’re in.
I’d already been following Obama’s use of the Internet for fund-raising and organizing and energizing volunteers (see, Adios, Sound Bites & Fat Cats – Obama is Changing Politics and Barack Obama Is Rocking the Youth Vote and Obama Supporters Are Hip and Artistic and Home Agents Calling for Barack Obama). Cohen’s column nicely connects the dots and lets the picture emerge more clearly.
As Joshua Green chronicles in an important piece in The Atlantic, Obama has used social networking and his user-friendly Web site to develop the money machine, and the youthful engagement, that has swept him forward.
So, I found Green’s article, “The Amazing Money Machine,” and read that, too. It’s Read the rest of this entry »
This is great satire in The Daily Kos: “Clinton demands Mars be seated.” 
Nothing new at all in this NYT article, “
