Inside the Obama Machine GARRETT M. GRAFF ARTIKEL /ARTICLES I t is important that it be understood from the outset that in any other election Barack Obama would have lost. Here was a junior, unknown politician running against the best established, most powerful, and well­financed Democratic machine in modern history – the Clinton family. So how did a man just four years removed from the Illinois State Senate catapult himself to the White House in a landslide victory in which he defeated two of the best-known brands in politics, Hillary Clinton and John McCain? How did he pull off a staggering margin of nearly 200 electoral votes and 8.5 million popular votes and win nine states George W. Bush took in 2004? The simple answer is that Barack Obama understood that since the last open presidential election in 2000, the technological revolution that has changed every aspect of American life had fundamentally realigned the power dynamic in politics as well. So while Hillary Clinton and John McCain set out to run the previous campaign all over again, Obama forged ahead and ran the first campaign of the twenty-first century. The Online/ Offline Campaign To say that Obama won because of the Internet would be oversimplifying. It’s more accurate to say that he couldn’t have won without the Internet. »In my search for the ›killer app,‹ or evidence of how technology was used in groundbreaking new ways, I’ve come to realize that what really hap­pened with Obama is far more complicated and nuanced,« explains Michael Silberman, who headed Howard Dean’s online organizing efforts in 2004 and now is managing director of the Washington office of Inter­net strategy firm EchoDitto.»The game-changer in the Obama campaign, as I found in talking to key staff – and in volunteering myself – was that technology and the internet was not an add-on for them. It was a carefully considered element of almost every critical campaign function.« ipg 2/2009 Graff, Inside the Obama Machine 11