Wiki-wiki to the White House?

As the Obama saga develops many have taken note of what has empowered a relatively unknown and inexperienced politician to his present heights. Geraldine Ferraro is probably right and serendipity plays a large role in our fortunes, but the more important factors that will continue to propel Obama's campaign forward go beyond race and luck.

The focus of many analysts is on Obama's prescient application of new technologies that employ the power of networks. "It's the Network, Stupid" is the paraphrased mantra of this campaign. (A couple of articles here and here.)

It's the new media MySpace Facebook YouTube viral campaign. And it's worked.

What's significant about this is that Obama has managed to raise more than $250 million so far, most of it from small contributions over the Internet. This is the Howard Dean campaign finance model perfected. His success has led him to reject public financing, as was just reported today. Big surprise. But citizens voting with their pocketbooks is a lot more meaningful than polling. This suggests Obama has a significant edge in the level of commitment of his support.

Beyond the money is the organizational power. Web-based technologies can organize faster at much less cost than the old methods through social and economic institutions like unions and churches. It appears that Obama has powered his campaign at minimal cost through the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing is a form of mass collaboration when the masses contribute their efforts to the common cause for little or no remuneration or the possibility of winning a prize. Think reality TV. This is the current rage in business circles, but the open commons has its limits in economics. It really only works when the product is shared by all, not just the owners of the business. We might think of crowdsourcing as a more modern form of feudalism, where the serfs get to contribute to welfare of the lord.

However, with the public good of democracy, it may just be a viable strategy and this is the promise Obama is selling. (Of course, as president he will be Lord of the Manor, but it's a dirty job and somebody has to do it.)

The danger here is that wikipolitics may just empower a minority to win an election over a less well-organized majority. (Hmmm, just like non-democratic politics of the past.) This result would be similar to Bill Clinton's win in 1992 with only 43% of the vote, though that was due to the three-way split between Clinton, Bush and Perot.

But if Obama is able to win the presidency with minority positions on the issues we can probably expect the same kind of backlash Clinton got in in his first term in office. It remains to be seen how committed Obama is to the liberal agenda he's followed in the past, but the country is ideologically center-right, and that, my friends, has not changed.