Campaign '08 never gave us that embarrassing photo-op of Obama in bright new orange hunting garb, the kind we saw John Kerry don for his best Elmer Fudd impersonation for the press back in 2004. I may have discovered why when talking with Ford O'Connell and Steve Pearson, now at ProjectVirginia. After stints in rural outreach with the McCain/Palin campaign, they're rejuvenating Virginia GOP politics from the ground up. And they're using technology to accomplish it. But their ultimate goal doesn't end there.
Obama was out there in rural America where distant farms and farmers now keep tabs on events and the latest crop news via applications like Facebook, Twitter and, of course, blogs. But only Web users and the tech-savvy might have known it. And that's only one cutting edge of technology in politics. But it's the one upon which Ford and Pearson are staking their claim.
It can be argued that, in part, states like Colorado went from Red to Blue due to tech and the spending it took to pull it off. O'Connell knows this first hand, having been bested at times by Obama and his tech-savvy gunslingers who could touch growing numbers of rural voters right in their homes. And they did it in traditional GOP areas where a genuine McCain campaign presence was rarely if ever known.
Some critics still attempt to blame Sarah Palin for what then-President George W. Bush described as a "five spiral crash" in the offing that eventually took place as McCain went down. But there may be a better case to be made that the race was lost by old hands whose entire knowledge of tech ended with looking like VIPs, campaign-issued Blackberrys in hand. When it came to the sophisticated technology-driven approach Obama's team employed, their Blackberrys simply couldn't keep up.
Driven by their McCain campaign and other relevant experience, O'Connell and Pearson started ProjectVirginia to ensure a future for Virginia that's Red on the political map where it matters most - from the ground up. If all politics is local as is so often claimed, there is nothing like technology to empower a campaign to be local everywhere, in essence being everywhere at once.
O'Connell and Pearson may be starting from the ground up but they have some very interesting top down views given their history and campaign experience. They're not only concerned with implementing the technology, but making sure end users on a broad scale are adequately trained and able to take advantage of it, as opposed to simply leaving it on the shelf.
Recent political events and the rise of Obama suggest that if efforts like ProjectVirginia aren't important to every candidate who wants to run for office at any level, they may be running in circles while their opponents use technology to run circles around them, instead.
To more fully understand what they're doing from the ground up in Virginia see here and see here for their blog. Or, simply click into the site and click around for yourself.
Going forward, more and more politicians who don't take advantage of the right technology may find themselves looking for another job. In those cases, perhaps ITT Tech, or some other re-training program might be best suited for them and their staffs.
It's a thought worth thinking seriously about. Or, I suppose you could simply buy a Blackberry to call home upset after the campaign you ran ended with a potentially avoidable loss.
This entry is cross-posted from Riehl World News.
