The title of this entry is an excerpt from a quote by John Hawkins of Right Wing News after IM'ing me a link to this video:

[h/t Allah]

Please discuss (sans action figures).

Remember the now infamous speech Barack Obama gave behind closed doors at a fundraiser in San Francisco where the meme "Bittergate" developed?

How could we ever forget.

Beyond Bittergate, another nugget has emerged from that same speech that Chris Chiasson has unearthed through his close listening to the audio of Barack's speech which is worth noting in this space.

As transcribed by Chris (emphasis and line-breaks to aid readability mine):

Starting at 14 minutes and 50 seconds:

I want to make a point about fund raising because I think it is illustrative of what else is going on. We raised 55 million dollars last month. ... I'm sorry. We raised 55 million in February; we raised 40 million that last month. Now, these are gaudy numbers. But, what's interesting is not the amount raised. 90% of what we raised came over the Internet. 50% were for $50 or less. Our average donation is less than $100.

Now, essentially what we've done is we've created a parallel public financing system. That using the Internet and mobilizing people all across the country - over 1.3 million donors - we've created a system where ordinary people can actually finance, can fuel, a campaign at the highest levels.

It's the same way that we've competed organizationally. We didn't have all the fancy endorsements early on. We remember - you know, we had some courageous endorsements from Barbara Williams and some other folks - but most of the big names here in ... California went the other way. And yet, we were able to compete everywhere.

Why is that? Essentially, groups formed themselves using technology. We have an Open Source system. For people to just grab onto good ideas. They start organizing their neighbors, organizing their friends. And, next thing you knew, we'd built the best political organization in the country. And that's what we have. I mean, we have the best national political organization that anybody has seen in a generation.

This realization by Barack that his success is due (at least partly) to the connectivity of the Internet is important.

There is a Revolution taking hold of American politics. I only fear that this Revolution continues to thrive on the wrong side of the aisle.

We continue to have work to do. I hope you're with me.

Today was the first bloggers briefing of 2008 and to kick things off, Bruce Bartlett came by to plug his new book, Wrong on Race, which sets the record straight on the Democrats record on race relations. Jim Pinkerton told us about his new project, Fence by Date Certain, which is a pledge he wants all lawmakers to sign that will build a fence to secure the US border by a set date. We also got the scoop on the Supreme Court's upcoming decision on an Indiana photo ID law that will have wide-ranging implications for vote fraud in the US.

Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried
Bruce Bartlett joined us to discuss his new book Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. He explained that there two major misconceptions that black voters have about the GOP regarding race. One is that the South is all racist, therefore since the South now votes Republican, Republicans are all racist. The second is that the GOP is held to a ridiculous double-standard. So when Trent Lott compliments Strum Thurmond, he’s pilloried in the media, but when Chris Dodd praises Robert Byrd, a former leader in the KKK, no one utters a peep.

Bartlett noted that the Republican message was appealing to the black voters. He gave the example of Tom Tancredo speaking to the NAACP in Detroit. He was the only Republican to show up for the NAACP’s debate and he,

Gave anti-immigrant rant, and got a standing ovation.

When asked how the Democrats nomination of Barack Obama would affect Republican efforts to reach out to black voters, Bartlett responded that while Barack would certainly pull a lot of support from the black community, his nomination would still be an enormous advantage for the GOP, because we’ll see new leadership take charge of the black community pushing aside the Jesse Jackson’s and Al Sharpton’s, who are extremely liberal.

Fence by Date Certain

Jim Pinkerton, Newsday columnist and Fox News contributor told us about his latest effort, the "Fence by Date Certain" pledge.

According to Pinkerton, the pledge is:

dedicated to one clear-cut goal: We want the US government to build a secure double fence across the US-Mexico border. And we want federal politicians to pledge to do so by a date certain.

Heritage’s Conn Carroll thought that the pledge was too focused on terrorism, and needed to talk more about economic issues.

Pinkerton agreed and stated that he had no qualms about other people/groups using or modifying the pledge, and actively encouraged people to do so.

Pinkerton also described a conversation he had with Mike Huckabee about illegal immigration, wherein Huckabee told him that the first question he always got at town hall meetings was on illegal immigration.

Pinkerton thought that politicians like Huckabee and Mitt Romney, are behind this issue, because:

When politicians see a winner, they tend to ride it.

Vote Fraud

Michael Thielen from the Republican National Lawyers Association came by to give us the run down on tomorrow’s Supreme Court Decision about an Indiana photo ID law.

Thielen noted that this issue is a top concern for Barack Obama. He‘s single-handedly blocking the White House’s nominees to the FEC over this issue, and the biggest bill he has in the Senate would put a major chill on poll watching.

Thielen explained that every year we lose elections because of vote fraud, and the same thing will happen this cycle; but the best way to prevent vote fraud is by having strong, enforced Voter ID laws on the books.

Rob Bluey wrote a great column for Townhall on the Voter ID issue as well, that you should check out.

New changes at facebook were announced today.

Today, Facebook Ads launched with three parts: a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads™; and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about.

Politicians and facebook have been around for a while now and a politician on facebook is a strange animal. While they are people they don’t mess with their profiles. With the advent of new facebook pages a politician can now fit in a little better.

So far Barack Obama has the first facebook page that I have found

The new pages look like a profile/group hybrid. They are designed for companies to have a facebook presence and gather fans, the ability to do a mass mailing to all your fans, as well as way to integrate targeted facebook ads.For a politician on a grand scale i.e. presidential elections this will have an impact but on a smaller local scale I think pages will have a tremendous effect.A county commissioner can set up a facebook page, gather supporter and also run targeted facebook ads to just the conservatives in his town above the age of 18. Think google ads combined with a facebook page for your politician/business with targeting down to, age, sex, region, keywords etc.To bad it was released after the Nov 6th election cycle, it would have been fun to test out.

Those are my half formed thoughts after messing with pages for an hour so put on your thinking caps and discuss how this can help us techrepublicans.

IMHO - it's going to be BIG

Republicans need to understand what's happening here:

This is the result of just three emails sent by the Obama campaign. It's more than Mike Huckabee raised last quarter. It's probably more than any Republican raised online last quarter with the exception of Ron Paul.

Think about that. One email. $650,000.

Imagine what their nominee will do to us with the entire weight of the online Democratic Party behind them. I'm thinking $1 to $2 million an email.

Each email is the equivalent two or three fundraising dinners. Each of which probably require hundreds of man hours to produce. That's only for of one email, not the three that have been sent this week. One email that probably took someone an hour or two write, that took a few hours to get approved, that took another hour or two to be formatted and sent. (And "stripped down" email is even more efficient.)

All because they were able to build up a huge list in the hundreds of thousands using proven list-building techniques that, to some degree, can be duplicated by anyone.

At the end of Q2, the campaign claimed 235,000 BarackObama.com members. Given his astronomic traffic the first half of the year, the fact that they incredibly claimed more donors than online supporters, and growth since then, I have to think the mail universe they're sending to is closer to 500,000.

So I'm going to guess their metrics for this campaign look like this:

500,000 emails sent175,000 opened the message40,000 clicked through20% conversion rate8,000 donors @ $80 per donation = $640,000

But as successful as Barack has been online, not all their campaigns have been this successful. Their end of quarter campaign, for instance.

Comparing this blog post with their fundraising graphic, Obama picked up 9,439 contributions in the last three days of the quarter, having sent an email each of those days. Assuming $80 a contribution (the going rate for Democratic online contributions, at least according to John Edwards's ActBlue page), that's just shy of $750,000. Or $250,000 an email.

How did they more than double their fundraising performance per email?

First, the message of this campaign is a lot stronger. It opened up on Tuesday with an email from BO himself called "Hillary's money." They're going negative on Hillary. That's attention grabbing.

Second, the goal is audacious but ultimately realistic. $2.1 million sounds like a lot. Unless you know you can count on at least $500,000 an email and show measurable progress towards the goal through a live counter. In 2004, Joe Trippi talked about the $100 Revolution -- 2 million people giving 100 bucks to match President Bush. That probably struck a lot of folks as pie-in-the-sky. $2.1 million is doable. Set big goals you can realistically achieve with a short but powerful burst of activity.

Third, the message of the end-of-quarter campaign was so weak by comparison. It was basically: we're 34/35ths of the way there -- help put us over the top. That's not inspiring. That tells people they're not needed because they're so close anyway, they're just a statistic and someone else will fill the gap. Even though 10,000 new donors is a lot. They would have been better off resetting the counter to zero.

How much does the stripped down format help? Probably only at the margins. It probably means your message gets read more, but arguably the point is not to get people to read. It's to get people to click. The first time they tried stripped-down email was in the end of quarter campaign and it probably didn't help much. Message matters more.

This is all part of a pattern of experimentation that is vital in every campaign. The Obama team probably saw they weren't getting the results they were used to getting in previous quarter-ending efforts, so they tried something different, using real dollars and starting the counter at zero.

Ron Paul's campaign in the second quarter was everything its supporters so fervently claimed: distributed and supporter-driven. They raised $2.4 million. In the third quarter, they used technique to boost that return dramatically, putting a live fundraising counter on their homepage. That raised $5.1 million. Technique and gathering momentum doubled the return. And now, in the ultimate test of whether radical transparency and audacious goals can transform fundraising, they're looking to leapfrog the frontrunners with a $12 million goal.

The lesson here is get in the game. Always try new stuff. Do bold audacious things to first build your list and then monetize it. Try everything at least once, but don't get distracted by the shiny new Web 2.0 toys. Socnets still can't raise what email can. And realize that the Web is more than just a medium for getting your message across. It's a medium for moving people and money.

The next presidential dialogue for the MySpace/MTV crowd is set. It's October 29th in Cedar Rapids. Information here at the Flektor-Blog. Why is this important?

The inaugural MySpace / MTV Presidential Dialogue, with former Senator John Edwards, reached a wide audience on-air, online and on mobile phones. Held September 27 at the University of New Hampshire, the event was broadcast live on MySpace and www.ChooseorLose.com, and since its online premiere, has been streamed approximately 350,000 times. The on-air broadcast (7-8 pm ET) was the #1 program for viewers aged 18-24 across all of cable for the time period, and was seen by a total of nearly two million viewers overall (all ages). Nearly 2,300 questions were submitted for Senator Edwards by online viewers during the course of the one hour Dialogue. Adding to its historical significance, the Dialogue with John Edwards was the first-ever Presidential forum to be broadcast live on mobile phones, via MTV Mobile.

That's a lot of young voters, and Edwards and Obama are getting first crack at them. There are Republicans that will be a part of the process, but it's clearly not as big of a deal. Republican candidates should be clamoring to get in front of this audience, and they're not.

Some of us may think it's because MTV is so liberal. Well, the liberals think MySpace is dominated by Murdoch rightwingers, and it's not stopping them. It's a space we need to be more active in, and if you any influence on a candidate, now is the time to be speaking up.

Flektor's polling tool has been a good story, and there's more to come after the event. Full disclosure: Flektor is a client of mine, but in this case, I'm posting not to push Flektor, but to let conservatives know there are tools and events out there we should be taking advantage of.

An excellent example is Doug Ross's Journal, and his post on Unintended Consequences, which discussed the wiretapping law and the holdup by the Democrats. I took his post and made it into a video, complete with music from Chopin and some slick transitions. Took me thirty minutes. If you are struggling to come up with online content - check out Flektor. It's free, and easy to use and embed on your site.

And for Obama's event. Here's a chance to hear him speak in an hour long format. It's a lot of information, and gives you a much better sense of what you're up against. Edwards event was a real eye-opener. It wasn't all soundbites and set piece speeches, which itself is extraordinary in presidential campaigns.

Crossposted from Eyeon08.

So I went to accept a LinkedIn invitation. You’ll never guess from who. But, in any case, I get to the screen, and there is Barack Obama asking a question.

This strikes me as a pretty clever way to use LinkedIn. This is a crowd that, if you engage, can probably turn donor. And they are probably pretty well connected to other people. They are relatively wealthy. And, if someone responds, Obama can highlight answers. By answering, people take some ownership. Wiki-politics plus social networks. Very impressive.

A little discussion of why this is so clever. When you ask a question on LinkedIn, it appears to 3 degrees of seperation. There are 1.4m people within 3 degrees for me. That’s a lot of people. And they are relatively well targeted. After all, if someone responds, they are, by definition, a friend of a friend of a supporter. (and probably wealthy) If someone responds, you know which of your supporters to have work the guy over.

Rudy Giuliani, via Katie Harbath, also has a LinkedIn account, but so far they just offer "friendship"

I am consistently impressed by the way Obama uses social networks and technology

Barack Obama's campaign has an interesting example of the online-offline integration I talked about a few weeks ago. Having signed up for their text messaging list, I texted in my addresses to get a free Obama bumper sticker. It came yesterday and looks like this:

Aside from feeling some mild disappointment in not receiving the standard Obama'08 sticker to add to my collection, I got to thinking, and this is an interesting viral strategy. If I had to guess, the last thing they want is for this to actually be placed on cars -- you can barely see the call to action. Rather, the point is for it to be stuck on the outside of dorm room doors, where it can spread virally offline among college students. The amount of thought that went into this campaign (I got an SMS telling me my bumper sticker was being packaged up in Chicago with some TLC) shows you the premium they are placing on text messaging versus other forms of online communication.