Labour looks to Obama

By Douglas Alexander

This week sees the inauguration of what they are calling the first ‘YouTube presidency’. Obama’s campaign was an inspiration to Labour supporters in the UK and to progressives around the world. Yet Obama’s victory was not simply a victory for an extraordinary individual; it was also a victory for a body of ideas and a new approach to political campaigning.

Obama was decried by opponents as a socialist and a redistributor. But he kept making the case for expanded healthcare, for supporting the unemployed and for progressive taxation. He knew that this was not the time for government simply to get out of the way.

Obama’s campaign offered both a convincing analysis and a credible response, with compelling rhetoric bringing it all to life. But his campaign team also used his message to engage and excite online communities and used the web to bring politics to a new generation. This is the big challenge for progressives around the globe and a challenge that LabourList.org is directly responding to.

If you type ‘yes we can’ into Google, you go straight to the YouTube video setting Obama’s New Hampshire concession speech to music. With over 15 million views and over eighty thousand comments, this ‘viral’ sets the gold standard for political campaigns.

The fact that the success of most virals are based on a split second of humour or just a few minutes of entertainment can put off those of us who take our politics seriously. There is nothing more annoying than having your inbox filled with junk – and we’ve all got a friend who sends us too many links that aren’t that funny or aren’t that interesting – but what’s so compelling about viral emails is that they are delivered by a trusted third party: a friend or relative.

US think tank President Simon Rossenberg argues that all good campaigns in future will be internet based. He suggests that Obama might scrap the traditional Presidential weekly radio address and replace it with a youtube address, translated into different languages and accessible around the globe. The process has begun already with change.gov, the official website for the office of the President elect, hosting videos and blog postings and encouraging citizens to interact and feed in ideas of their own.

Back home, as Peter pointed out last week, the often archaic nature of the web and the organic way that word spreads online is completely alien to the way he used campaign discipline in his time at Millbank.

Personally, I’m really impressed by the way LabourList.org is opening up a new space for debate and discussion. I’ve been a fan of the way Progress has developed online and I hope LabourList can both offer a home to a Labour supporting online community and encourage other left of centre groups to develop their own online offerings still further.

As the Tories found to their cost, it can be difficult for political parties to try and force their way into online social networks. Tim Montgomerie, editor of ConservativeHome, recently told the FT he felt the Tories had little to show for more than a million pounds they spent targeting social networking sites. Again, it is Obama’s 2 million plus facebook site that provides the gold standard for comparison.

Let’s face it, it is going to be difficult for the Tories to learn too many lessons from Obama’s campaigning approach because their ideological core runs so counter to his. Obama’s campaign understood that a call for change is meaningless unless you set out clearly what change is necessary.

Politics on both sides of the pond is now dominated by fundamental questions about the right relationship between markets and governments, between wealth and power. And in this process it is Conservatism that has been found wanting.

The Right – on both sides of the Atlantic – is disoriented and diminished by recent global events. As I argued recently in the Telegraph, David Cameron, like John McCain, finds himself stranded in the wrong place because you can’t privatise, deregulate or even nudge your way out of a global financial crisis.

Modern elections are won by a fusion of change and substance. Last week Labour has again showed substance by taking action on jobs. In the same week, we set out the change we want to improve social mobility. By contrast, the Tories are doing old style poster launches and have settled on their policy of letting the recession run it’s course.

So as a new Presidency commences and a new progressive era begins, the fundamental choices facing the electorate are becoming clear.