The Audacity to Win

"This is by the chief strategist and unsung hero of the Obama campaign. He is a political consultant like me and he created the most successful political campaign in history. Well, they did it from the grassroots upwards instead of the normal way which would be top-down. They didn’t want to rely on the party machine or the officials. The internet was the most obvious tool. People don’t understand that the Obama campaign was to engage voters in real life. If you went to the website you then got sent more and more information and messages designed to engage you in the whole process. He got 68 million votes and on the election day he had 14 million volunteers – more than one in four. It would be impossible to get that kind of force from the electorate in the UK. If Jesus Christ came back he wouldn’t get one in four volunteering because there just isn’t that culture. They broke all the records and it was a completely different campaign. They tried to create 68 million different conversations and allowed people to organise themselves to talk. In 2004 Howard Dean used a website called meetup.com, a bit like Facebook, where people created a meeting and invited friends and then got together in a bookshop or café – little events talking about politics. It was that kind of thing. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"