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How Obama Really Did It
The social-networking strategy that took an obscure senator to the doors of the White House.

奥巴马如何竞选总统
——把一位名不见经传的参议员引向白宫大门的社交网络策略
By David Talbot
戴维•塔尔博特 著
[1] Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign manager and Internet impresario , describes Super Tuesday II--the March 4 primaries in Texas, Ohio, Vermont, and Rhode Island--as the moment Barack Obama used social tech¬nology to decisive effect. The day's largest hoard of delegates would be contested in Texas, where a strong showing would require exceptional discipline and voter-education efforts. In Texas, Democrats vote first at the polls and then, if they choose, again at caucuses after the polls close. The caucuses award one-third of the Democratic delegates.
[1] 乔•特里皮（霍华德•迪恩的2004年总统竞选经纪人兼网络经理）把“第二个超级星期二”（3月4 日俄亥俄、得克萨斯、佛蒙特和罗德岛的四场初选）称为巴拉克•奥巴马利用社交技术取得决定性成果的时刻。当天需要争夺的最大票仓是得克萨斯州，只有通过出色的组织工作和选民培训才能在此地胜出。在得克萨斯，民主党人首先在投票站投票，如果他们愿意，将在投票结束之后进行预备会议。预备会议确定民主党代表的三分之一人员。
[2] Hillary Clinton's camp had about 20,000 volunteers at work in Texas. But in an e-mail, Trippi learned that 104,000 Texans had joined Obama's social-¬networking site, www.my.barackobama.com, known as MyBO. MyBO and the main Obama site had already logged their share of achievements, particularly in helping rake in cash. The month before, the freshman senator from Illinois had set a record in American politics by garnering $55 million in donations in a single month. In Texas, MyBO also gave the Obama team the instant capacity to wage fully networked campaign warfare. After seeing the volunteer numbers, Trippi says, "I remember saying, 'Game, match--it's over.'"
[2] 希拉里•克林顿阵营在得克萨斯有2万现场志愿者。但在一封电子邮件中，特里皮了解到，有10.4万得州人参与到奥巴马的社交网站www.my.barackobama.com，即众所周知的MyBO。MyBO和主要的奥巴马网站已经将他们取得的成绩输入计算机，特别用来帮助收集现金。上个月，这位来自伊利诺伊州的新议员以单月存储5500万美元的捐款而创下美国政坛的记录。在得克萨斯，MyBO也能给予奥巴马竞选班子即时进行完全网络化竞选战的能力。特里皮在看过志愿者的人数后说：“我记得曾说过：‘游戏，比赛——结束。’”
[3] The Obama campaign could ★get marching orders to the Texans registered with MyBO with minimal effort. The MyBO databases could slice and dice lists of volunteers by geographic micro¬region and pair people with appropriate tasks, including prepping nearby voters on caucus procedure. "You could go online and download the names, addresses, and phone numbers of 100 people in your neighborhood to get out and vote--or the 40 people on your block who were undecided," Trippi says. "'Here is the leaflet: print it out and get it to them.' It was you, at your computer, in your house, printing and downloading. They did it all very well." Clinton won the Texas primary vote 51 to 47 percent. But Obama's ¬people, following their MyBO playbook, so overwhelmed the chaotic, crowded caucuses that he scored an overall victory in the Texas delegate count, 99 to 94. His showing nearly canceled out ¬Clinton's win that day in Ohio. Clinton lost her last major opportunity to stop the Obama juggernaut. "In 1992, Carville said, '★It's the economy, stupid ,'" Trippi says, recalling the exhortation of Bill Clinton's campaign manager, James Carville. "This year, it was the network, stupid!"
[3] 那些轻而易举在MyBO上登记注册的得州人可能会告别奥巴马的竞选活动。MyBO数据库可以根据微型地理区把志愿者划分成各种序列，并给人们匹配适当的任务，包括布置附近选民准备预备会议的程序。“人们可以到网站上下载他们附近100个人的姓名、地址和电话号码，然后出去投票，或者下载周围40个尚未下定决心的人的姓名。”特里皮说。“‘这是一张传单，把它打印出来，送给他们。’你待在家里，在电脑旁，打印下载。他们做得很好。”克林顿曾赢得得州初选51%到47%的选票。但支持奥巴马的人，按照MyBO的操作说明，以压倒性优势控制了拥挤而混乱的预备会议，因而他以99比 94取得全面胜利。他的战绩几乎抵消了克林顿当天在俄亥俄州取得的胜利。克林顿丧失了最后一次阻止奥巴马崇拜的重要机会。 “卡维尔1992说：‘经济才是重点，笨蛋。’”特里皮一边说着，一边回忆着比尔•克林顿的竞选经纪人詹姆斯•卡维尔的劝告。“而今年却是：网络才是关键，蠢货！”
[4] Throughout the political season, the Obama campaign has domi¬nated new media, ★capitalizing on a confluence of trends. Americans are more able to access media-rich content online; 55 percent have broadband Internet connections at home, double the figure for spring 2004. Social-networking technologies have matured, and more Americans ★are comfortable with them. Although the 2004 Dean campaign ★broke ground with its online meeting technologies and blogging, "people didn't quite have the facility," says ¬Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who has given the Obama campaign Internet policy advice (Lessig wrote The People Own Ideas! in our May/June 2005 issue). "The world has now caught up with the technology." The Obama campaign, he adds, recognized this early: "The key networking advance in the Obama field operation was really deploying community¬-building tools in a smart way from the very beginning."
[4] 竞选期间，奥巴马的竞选班子控制了新式媒体，将发展趋势的汇合转化为自己的优势。美国人更能够在线接触含有多元媒体的内容；55%的人家中有因特网宽带连接，是2004年春季的两倍。社交网络技术已经成熟，更多美国人对它们感到满意。虽然2004年迪恩竞选开始使用网上会议技术和博客，“人们还没大有这些设备，”向奥巴马竞选提出因特网政策建议的斯坦福法律教授劳伦斯•莱斯格说（莱斯格在本刊2005年5 /6月期上著有《群众拥有思想》一文）。“现在人们已掌握了这一技术。”他补充说，奥巴马竞选班子很早就认识到这一点：“从一开始，奥巴马竞选现场运行中的关键网络的进步就在对建设社会的工具进行着很好的配置。”
[5] Of course, many of the 2008 candidates had websites, click-to-donate tools, and social-networking features--even John McCain, who does not personally use e-mail. But the Obama team put such technologies at the center of its campaign--among other things, recruiting 24-year-old Chris Hughes, cofounder of Facebook, to help develop them. And it managed those tools well. Supporters had considerable discretion to use MyBO to organize on their own; the campaign did not micromanage but ★struck a balance between top-down control and anarchy. In short, Obama, the former Chicago ★community organizer , created the ultimate online political machine.
[5] 当然，2008年候选人中的很多人有网站、一键捐款工具和社交网络的特色——甚至连约翰•麦凯恩都有这些特色，尽管他并没有亲自使用过电子邮件。但奥巴马竞选班子把这些技术置于竞选的中心地位——除了其他事情之外，还有招募Facebook 的合伙人、24岁的克里斯•休斯来帮助研发。奥巴马竞选班子把这些工具管理得很好。支持者利用MyBO进行自我组织是很慎重的；竞选活动没有微观管理，而是在自上而下的控制和无政府状态之间取得平衡。简言之，这位前芝加哥社区组织者奥巴马创建了最佳的网上政治机器。
[6] The Obama campaign did not provide access or interviews for this story; it only confirmed some details of our reporting and offered written comments. This story is based on interviews with third parties involved in developing Obama's social-networking strategy or who were familiar with it, and on public records.
[6] 奥巴马的竞选班子并没有让人们接触或采访这个内情；它只是确认了我们报道的一些细节，并提供了书面意见。这个内情是通过采访参与制定奥巴马社交网络策略的第三派别或者熟知它的人和查阅公开档案而得到的。
An Online Nervous System
网上神经系统
[7] A row of elegant, renovated 19th-century industrial buildings lines Boston's Congress Street east of Fort Point Channel. On any given day, behind a plain wooden door on the third floor of 374 Congress, 15 to 20 casually clad programmers tap away at computers. On the day I visited, the strains of Creedence Clearwater Revival filled the room; a Ping-Pong table dominated the small kitchen. This is the technology center for Blue State Digital, which means that it is also the nervous system for its two largest clients, the Barack Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Founded by alumni of the Dean campaign, Blue State Digital added interactive elements to Obama's website--including MyBO--and now tends to its daily care and feeding . The site's servers hum away in a Boston suburb and are backed up in the Chicago area.
[7] 一排修复过的优雅的19世纪工业建筑矗立在要塞岬海峡东岸的波士顿国会街。在任何一个约定的日子，在国会大楼374号三楼一扇普通木板门的后面，15 到 20个穿着随便的程序员在电脑旁敲打着。在我参观的那天，克里登斯清水复兴合唱团的歌声飘荡在房间；一个乒乓球台占据着小厨房。这就是蓝州数码公司的技术中心，也就是说，这也是它最大的两个客户巴拉克•奥巴马竞选班子和民主党全国委员会的神经系统。由迪恩竞选班子成员建立的蓝州数码公司给奥巴马的网站加上了互动元素——包括MyBO——现在则计划负责其日常维护和馈送。网站的这个神经系统在波士顿郊区忙碌着，却由芝加哥地区支持着。
[8] Jascha Franklin-Hodge, 29, greeted me with a friendly handshake and a gap-toothed grin. He has a deep voice and a hearty laugh; his face is ringed by a narrow beard. Franklin-Hodge dropped out of MIT after his freshman year and spent a few years in online music startups before running the Internet infrastructure for the Dean campaign, which received a then-¬unprecedented $27 million in online donations. "When the campaign ended, we thought, 'Howard Dean was not destined to be president, but what we are doing online--this is too big to let go away,'" he says. He and three others cofounded Blue State Digital, where he is chief technology officer. (Another cofounder, Joe Rospars, is now on leave with the Obama campaign as its new-media director.)
[8] 29岁的杰西卡•富兰克林•霍奇友好地跟我握手，裂嘴一笑，迎接我。他声音低沉，开心大笑；他脸上长着稀疏的胡须。富兰克林•霍奇在大学一年级后从麻省理工学院退学，花了几年时间开始搞网上音乐，后来为迪恩竞选班子管理因特网下部结构，收到了当时为空前的2700万美元的网上捐款。他说：“当大选结束时，我想：‘霍华德•迪恩不会注定当总统，但是我们正在做的网上的东西——它太大了，不能让它走掉。”他和其他三位共同创建（他作为首席技术官的）了蓝州数码公司。（另一位共同创建者乔•罗斯帕尔斯即将离开奥巴马竞选班子，不再担任它的新媒体主管。）
[9] The MyBO tools are, in essence, rebuilt and consolidated versions of those created for the Dean campaign. Dean's website allowed supporters to donate money, organize meetings, and distribute media, says Zephyr Teachout, who was Dean's Internet director and is now a visiting law professor at Duke University. "We developed all the tools the Obama campaign is using: SMS [text messaging], phone tools, Web capacity," Teachout recalls. "They [Blue State Digital] did a lot of nice work in taking this crude set of unrelated applications and making a complete suite."
[9] 从根本上说，MyBO工具是根据原来为迪恩竞选班子创造的版本而重建和合并的。以前当过迪恩的因特网主管、现在是杜克大学客座法律顾问的泽飞尔•蒂侨特说，迪恩的网站允许支持者捐款，组织会议和配给媒体。蒂侨特回忆说：“我们研制了奥巴马竞选班子目前使用的所有工具：SMS（发送文本信息），电话工具，网络容量。它们（蓝州数码公司）拿到这一套粗糙、毫不相关的应用程序，做成完整的一套，做了很多很好的工作。”
[10] Blue State Digital had nine days to add its tools to Obama's site before the senator announced his candidacy on February 10, 2007, in Springfield, IL. Among other preparations, the team ★braced for heavy traffic. "We made some projections of traffic levels, contribution amounts, and e-mail levels based on estimates from folks who worked with [John] Kerry and Dean in 2004," recalls Franklin¬-Hodge. As Obama's Springfield speech progressed, "we were watching the traffic go up and up, surpassing all our previous records." (He would not provide specific numbers.) It was clear that early assumptions were low. "We ★blew through all of those [estimates] in February," he says. "So we had to do a lot of work to make sure we kept up with the demand his online success had placed on the system." By July 2008, the campaign had raised more than $200 million from more than a million online donors (Obama had raised $340 million from all sources by the end of June), and MyBO had logged more than a million user accounts and facilitated 75,000 local events, according to Blue State Digital.
[10] 这位参议员于2007年2月10日在伊利诺伊州斯普林菲尔德宣布其候选人资格时，蓝州数码有九天时间把它们的工具添加到奥巴马网站上。除了其他准备工作，该小组为繁忙的通讯做了准备。富兰克林•霍奇回忆说：“根据曾在2004年和（约翰）克里及迪恩一起工作过的成员估计，我们为交通等级、捐款数额和电子邮件级别制定了一些方案。”随着奥巴马的斯普林菲尔德演说的进展，“我们当时观察到网站流量越来越拥挤，超过以前的所有记录。”（他不愿意提供具体数字。）很清楚，早期的假设太低了。“我们在2月份放弃了所有的这些（估计内容）。”他说。“因此我们不得不做很多工作，以确保我们能跟上他在网上的成功所带来的巨大访问需求。”据蓝州数码说，到2008年7月止，竞选班子已从100多万网上捐款人那里筹集2亿多美元（到6月底为止，奥巴马已从各种渠道筹集到3.4亿美元），MyBO已记录了100多万用户帐户，推动了7.5万地方性活动。
[11] MyBO and the main campaign site made it easy to give money--the fuel for any campaign, because it pays for advertising and staff. Visitors could use credit cards to make one-time donations or to sign up for recurring monthly contributions. MyBO also made giving money a social event: supporters could set personal targets, run their own fund-raising efforts, and watch personal fund-¬raising thermometers rise. To bring people to the site ★in the first place , the campaign sought to make Obama a ubiquitous presence on as many new-media platforms as possible.
[11] MyBO和主要竞选网站让捐款——任何竞选的燃料——变得易行，因为它为广告和工作人员付费。访客可以使用信用卡进行一次性捐款，或者注册，逐月进行捐款。MyBO也使捐款成为一项社会活动：支持者可以确立个人目标，进行自己的募捐活动，关注私人募捐活动的升温。为了让人们把网站成为首选，竞选班子力求让奥巴马普遍出现在尽可能多的新媒体平台上。
[12] The viral Internet offered myriad ways to propagate unfiltered Obama messages. The campaign posted the candidate's speeches and linked to multimedia material generated by supporters. A music video set to an Obama speech--"Yes We Can," by the hip-hop artist Will.i.am--has been posted repeatedly on YouTube, but the top two postings alone have been viewed 10 million times. A single YouTube posting of Obama's March 18 speech on race has been viewed more than four million times. Similarly, the campaign regularly sent out text messages (at Obama rallies, speakers frequently asked attendees to text their contact information to his campaign) and made sure that Obama was prominent on other social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace (see New-Media King" chart above). The campaign even used the micro¬blogging service Twitter, garnering about 50,000 Obama "followers" who track his short posts. "The campaign, consciously or unconsciously, became much more of a media operation than simply a presidential campaign, because they recognized that by putting their message out onto these various platforms, their supporters would spread it for them," says Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, a website covering the intersection of politics and technology (and another Dean alumnus). "We are going from the era of the sound bite to the sound blast." [12] 病毒似的因特网为传播未经过滤的奥巴马信息提供了种种方式。竞选班子张贴候选人的演说，链接到由支持者制作的多媒体材料。由街头说唱音乐艺术家“我将要”制作、发送到奥巴马的演说《是的，我们能》的一个音乐视频在YouTube网站上不断被重复张贴，而单单头两个张贴的视频就已被浏览了1000多万次。奥巴马3月18日关于种族的演说在YouTube上的一份张贴视频就已被浏览了400万次。同样，竞选班子定期发送文本信息（在奥巴马的竞选集会上，演讲者经常请与会者把他们的联系方式方面的信息留给竞选班子），确保奥巴马在其他社交网站[比如Facebook 和 MySpace（参看上面的《新媒体之王》栏目]上占主导地位。竞选班子甚至利用微博客服务网站Twitter召集大约5万个追踪奥巴马短帖子的奥巴马“追随者”。“个人民主论坛”（一个融政治和技术于一体的网站）的创始人安德鲁•拉西耶（（也是一名迪恩竞选班子成员）表示：“竞选班子有意无意地让自己更像媒体运作机构，而非仅仅是个总统竞选班子，因为他们意识到，通过把他们的信息发送到不同的平台，他们的支持者就会替他们传播。我们正从声音侵蚀的时代到声音爆炸的时代。”
[13] Money flowed in, augmenting the haul from big-ticket fund-raisers. By the time of the Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2008, the Obama campaign had more than $35 million on hand and was able to use MyBO to organize and instruct caucus-goers. "They have done a great job in being precise in the use of the tools," Teachout says. "In Iowa it was house parties, looking for a highly committed local network. In South Carolina, it was a massive get-out-the-vote effort." MyBO was critical both in the early caucus states, where campaign staff was in place, and in later-¬voting states like Texas, Colorado, and Wisconsin, where "we provided the tools, remote training, and opportunity for supporters to build the campaign on their own," the Obama campaign told Technology Review in a written statement. "When the campaign eventually did deploy staff to these states, they supplemented an already-built infrastructure and volunteer network."
[13] 金钱的涌入提高了巨额资金的转运速度。到2008年1月3日爱荷华州预备会议时为止，奥巴马竞选班子手头已筹集了3500万美元，并能够利用MyBO组织和培训与会者。蒂侨特说：“在利用工具做到准确无误方面他们做得很好。在爱荷华，通过室内聚会寻找一个高度负责的地方网络。在南卡罗莱纳，是工作量很大的计票工作。”奥巴马竞选班子告诉《技术评论》杂志：在最先召开预备会议、竞选把子成员所在的各州和后来投票的各州（比如得克萨斯、科罗拉多和威斯康星，在这些地方，“我们提供了工具、远程培训和支持者自己搞竞选的机会”）MyBO都显得至关重要。“当竞选班子最终向这些州派送工作人员时，他们追加了一个早已建好的网络下部结构和志愿网络。”
[14] Using the Web, the Obama camp turbocharged age-old campaign tools. Take phone banks: through MyBO, the campaign ★chopped up the task of making calls into thousands of chunks small enough for a supporter to handle in an hour or two. "Millions of phone calls were made to early primary states by people who used the website to ★reach out and connect with them," Franklin-Hodge says. "On every metric, this campaign has operated on a scale that has exceeded what has been done before. We facilitate actions of every sort: sending e-mails out to millions and millions of people, organizing tens of thousands of events." The key, he says, is tightly integrating online activity with tasks people can perform in the real world. "Yes, there are blogs and Listservs ," Franklin-Hodge says. "But the point of the campaign is to get someone to donate money, make calls, write letters, organize a house party. The core of the software is having those links to taking action--to doing something."
[14] 奥巴马阵营利用网络对旧竞选工具进行改造，大大提高了它们的威力。以电话银行为例：通过MyBO,竞选班子把打电话的任务分割成数千足够小的板块，以便支持者能够在一两小时内解决。“在进行初选的各州，利用网络招揽和联系它们的人要打数百万个电话。”富兰克林•霍奇说。“不管以任何标准来衡量，这次竞选的规模前所未有。我们让任何一种行动变得简便易行——向数百万人发送电子邮件，组织数万个活动。”他说，关键是，把网上的活动和现实世界中人们能够进行的任务紧密整合在一起。富兰克林•霍奇说：“是的，有很多博客和电子邮件列表。竞选班子的目的是让人捐款，打电话，写信，组织室内集会。这个软件的核心是把这些环节付诸行动，即做点什么。”
★Pork Invaders
猪入侵者
[15] If the other major candidates had many of the same Web tools, their experiences show that having them isn't enough: you must make them central to the campaign and properly manage the networks of supporters they help organize. Observers say that ¬Clinton's campaign deployed good tools but that online social networks and new media weren't as big a part of its strategy; at least in its early months, it relied more on conventional tactics like big fund-raisers. After all, Clinton was at the top of the party establishment. "They [the Obama supporters] are chanting 'Yes we can,' and she's saying 'I don't need you,'" Trippi says. "That is what the top of that campaign said by celebrating Terry McAuliffe [the veteran political operative and former Democratic National Committee chairman] and how many millions he could put together with big, big checks. She doesn't need my $25!" The two campaigns' fund-raising statistics support Trippi's argument: 48 percent of Obama's funds came from donations of less than $200, compared with 33 percent of Clinton's, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
[15] 如果其他主要候选人拥有相同网络工具中的很多个工具，他们的经验表明，仅仅拥有它们是不够的：必须将其置于竞选班子的中心，并恰当管理他们组织起来的支持者的网络。观察人士说，克林顿竞选班子把工具配置得很好，但是网上社交网络和新媒体并非其战略的一大部分；至少在早先几个月，它更多地依赖比如巨额资金筹集人之类的常规策略。毕竟，克林顿处在政党机构的顶端。“他们（奥巴马的支持者）在唱着《是的，我们能》，而她却唱着《我不需要你》。”特里皮说。“这就是那个竞选班子的高层通过庆祝特里•麦考利夫（老资格政工和民主党全国委员会前主席）所说的话，和他能用很大很大的支票把数百万人凝聚起来的原因。她不需要我的25美元！”两个竞选班子的筹款统计数字支持特里皮的论点：据响应政治中心说，奥巴马资金中的48%来自200美元以下的捐款，与此相比，克林顿筹款中的33%来自200美元以下。
[16] Clinton's Internet director, Peter Daou, credits the Obama campaign with doing an "amazing job" with its online social network. "If there is a difference in how the two campaigns approached [a Web strategy], a lot of those differences were based on our constituencies," Daou says. "We were reaching a different demographic of supporters and used our tools accordingly." For example, he says, the Clinton campaign ★established a presence on the baby-boomer social-networking site Eons.com, and Clinton herself often urged listeners to visit www.hillaryclinton.com. But Andrew Rasiej says that the conventional political wisdom questioned the value of the Internet. "As far as major political circles were concerned," he says, "Howard Dean failed, and therefore the Internet didn't work."
[16] 克林顿的因特网主管彼得•道尔把奥巴马竞选班子所做的惊人的工作归功于其网上社交网络。“如果这两个竞选班子在怎样取得（网络策略）方面有差别的话，其中很多差别是在选民方面，”道尔说。“我们形成了不同的人口统计理论，并相应地使用自己的工具。”他说，例如，克林顿竞选班子在婴儿潮一代社交网站Eons.com确立优势地位，克林顿本人经常敦促听众访问www.hillaryclinton.com。但是安德鲁•拉西耶说，传统的政治智慧对因特网的价值表示怀疑。他说：“就主要政治圈子来说，霍华德•迪恩失败了，因此因特网没有起作用。”
[17] While it's hard to tease out how much Clinton's loss was due to her Web strategy--and how much to factors such as her Iraq War vote and the half-generation difference between her and Obama's ages--it seems clear that her campaign deëmphasized Web strategy early on, Trippi says. Even if you "have all the smartest bottom-up, tech-savvy people working for you," he says, "if the candidate and the top of the campaign want to run a top-down campaign, there is nothing you can do. It will sit there and nothing will happen. That's kind of what happened with the Clinton campaign."
[17] 要弄清楚由于网络策略的原因克林顿的损失有多少，这个问题很难，要弄清楚由于诸如她的伊拉克战争选票和她与奥巴马之间年龄相差1/2代等因素导致的损失，这个问题也很难。特里皮说，看上去很明显，从一开始她的竞选班子就轻视了网络策略。他说，即使你“有最精明的自下而上的精通技术的人为你工作，如果候选人和竞选班子高层想进行自上而下的的竞选，你也无计可施。它会赖在那儿，无动于衷。克林顿的竞选就有点这样。”
[18] Republican Ron Paul had a different problem: Internet anarchy. Where the Obama campaign built one central network and managed it effectively, the Paul campaign decided early on that it would essentially be a hub for whatever networks the organizers were setting up. The results were mixed. On the one hand, volunteers organized successful "money bombs"--one-day online fund-raising frenzies (the one on November 5, 2007, netted Paul $4.3 million). But sometimes the volunteers' energy--and money--was wasted, says Justine Lam, the Paul campaign's Internet director, who is now the online marketing director at Politicker.com. Consider the supporter-driven effort to hire a blimp emblazoned with "Who is Ron Paul? Google Ron Paul" to cruise up and down the East Coast last winter. "We saw all this money funding a blimp, and thought, 'We really need this money for commercials,'" Lam says.
[18] 共和党人罗恩•保罗的问题不同——因特网的混乱状况。奥巴马竞选班子建立了一个中心网络，并且管理有效；而保罗竞选班子从一开始就决定，它实质上将是各个组织者建立的各种网络的中继站。结果就乱套了。保罗竞选班子因特网主管、现今Politicker.com网站网上营销主管贾斯汀•兰姆说，一方面，志愿者成功地组织了“钱弹”——网上一日捐的狂暴（2007年11月5日的募捐行动，给保罗带来430万美元的纯收入）。但有时志愿者的精力——还有金钱——被浪费掉了。想想由支持者推动的这项活动：雇佣死心踏地的人去年租用一艘飞艇漫游在东海岸，颂扬着“谁是罗恩•保罗？用Google搜索一下罗恩•保罗！”兰姆说：“我们一边看到所有这些捐款花在飞艇上，一边想：‘我们真地需要把这些钱用于商业方面。’”
[19] Then there is McCain, who--somewhat ironically--was the big Internet story of 2000. That year, after his New Hampshire primary victory over George W. Bush, he quickly raised $1 million online. And at times last year, he made effective use of the Internet. His staff made videos--such as "Man in the Arena," celebrating his wartime service--that gained popularity on YouTube. But the McCain site is ineffectual for social networking. In late June, when I tried to sign up on McCainSpace--the analogue to MyBO--I got error messages. When I tried again, I was informed that I would soon get a new password in my in-box. It never arrived. "His social-networking site was poorly done, and people found there was nothing to do on it," says Lam. "It was very insular, a walled garden. You don't want to keep people inside your walled garden; you want them to spread the message to new people."
[19] 然后是麦凯恩，具有某种讽刺意味的是2000年因特网大新闻与他有关。那年，在新罕布什州的初选中击败乔治•W•布什以后，他从网上迅速筹集了100万美元。并且在去年他不时有效地利用因特网。他的工作人员制作视频（比如《竞技场上的人》）庆祝他战时的服役，这在YouTube网站上获得人气。但麦凯恩网站在社交网络方面却无效。在6月末，当我试图在类似于MyBO的 McCainSpace网站上注册时，得到的却是错误信息。当我再次尝试时，我被告知我很快就会从邮箱中得到新密码。但却从没发来。“他的社交网站做得很差，人们发现在上面什么都干不成，”兰姆说。“它很孤立，像一座有围墙的花园。你不想让人待在带围墙的花园；你想让他们把信息发送给陌生人。”
[20] McCain's organization is playing to an older base of supporters. But it seems not to have grasped the breadth of recent shifts in communications technology, says David All, a Republican new-media consultant. "You have an entire generation of folks under age 25 no longer using e-mails, not even using Facebook; a majority are using text messaging," All says. "I get Obama's text messages, and every one is exactly what it should be. It is never pointless, it is always worth reading, and it has an action for you to take. You can have hundreds of recipients on a text message. You have hundreds of people trying to change the world in 160 characters or less. What's the SMS strategy for John McCain? None."
[20] 共和党新媒体顾问戴维•奥尔说，麦凯恩的组织对于支持者的老基地发挥着作用，但它好像并不了解交流技术方面最近转移的广度。“25岁以下整个一代人不再使用电子邮件，甚至不使用Facebook；大多数人使用文本通信方式，”奥尔说。“我收到奥巴马的文本信息，每一条都恰如其分。它从不是空洞的，它总是值得一读，它有一个行动，供你选择，让你采取。在一份文本信息上你可以写上数百个收件人。有数百人在160个字左右的文字中试图改变世界。约翰•麦凯恩的短信服务策略是什么？根本没有。”
[21] The generational differences between the Obama and McCain campaigns may be best symbolized by the distinctly retro "Pork Invaders," a game on the McCain site (it's also a Facebook application) styled after Space Invaders, the arcade game of the late 1970s. Pork Invaders allows you to fire bullets that say "veto" at slow-moving flying pigs and barrels.
[21] 奥巴马班子和麦凯恩班子之间这两代的差别也许由具有明显叛逆精神的《猪入侵者》得到最好的确认。《猪入侵者》是麦凯恩网站（同时也是Facebook的一个应用程序）上的一个游戏，该游戏模仿1970年代末的电子游戏《太空入侵者》的风格。《猪入侵者》可以让你对缓慢运动的飞猪和桶发射说“否”的子弹。
[22] But it's not that the campaign isn't trying to speak to the youth of today, as opposed to the youth of decades ago. Lately McCain has been having his daughter Meghan and two friends write a "bloggette" from the campaign trail. The bloggette site features a silhouette of a fetching woman in red high-heeled shoes. "It gives a hipper, younger perspective on the campaign and makes both of her parents seem hipper and younger," says Julie ¬Germany, director of the nonpartisan Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at George Washington University. The McCain campaign did not reply to several interview requests, but Germany predicts that the campaign will exploit social networking in time to make a difference in November. "What we will see is that the McCain online campaign is using the Internet just as effectively to meet its goals as the Obama campaign," she says. Over the summer, the McCain campaign refreshed its website. But Rasiej, for one, doubts that McCain has enough time to make up lost ground.
[22] 但这并非说竞选班子如同对几十年前的年轻人做法相反，没有试图说服今天的年轻人。最近，麦凯恩一直让女儿麦格恩和两个朋友以竞选班子的思路写博客。博客网站在显著位置勾画了一个穿红色高根鞋的迷人的妇女的侧影。乔治•华盛顿大学非党派政治民主因特网学院院长朱丽•哲曼尼说“它从一个比较新潮、比较年轻的角度展现大选，使得她父母都显得比较新潮、比较年轻。”麦凯恩竞选班子对几次采访的请求都没有答复，但是哲曼尼预测竞选班子将会及时利用社交网络，以便在11月有所突破。她说：“我们将看到的是麦凯恩网上竞选活动在有效利用因特网，就像奥巴马班子达到其目标一样那么有效。”夏季期间，麦凯恩竞选班子更新了它的网站。但拉西耶，作为其中一个，对于麦凯恩有足够时间弥补损失表示怀疑。
A Networked White House?
网络化的白宫？
[23] The obvious next step for MyBO is to serve as a get-out-the-vote engine in November. All campaigns scrutinize public records showing who is registered to vote and whether they have voted in past elections. The Obama campaign will be able to merge this data with MyBO data. All MyBO members' activity will have been chronicled: every house party they attended, each online connection, the date and amount of each donation. Rasiej sees how it might play out: the reliable voters who signed up on MyBO but did little else may be left alone. The most active ones will be deployed to get the unreliable voters--whether MyBO members or not--to the polls. And personalized pitches can be dished up, thanks to the MyBO database. "The more contextual information they can provide the field operation, the better turnout they will have," he says.
[23] 显然，MyBO下一步采取的措施是在11月充当计票引擎。所有的竞选人员都要仔细检查登记注册要参加投票和是否在过去的选举中参加过投票的公众档案。奥巴马竞选班子将能够把这一数据归并到MyBO。所有MyBO会员的活动将被记录下来——他们参加的每次聚会，每次的网上联系，每次捐款的数据和数量。拉西耶明白它会怎样完成任务：在MyBO注册登记但除此之外几乎不做什么的可靠投票人将被单独留下来。最活跃的投票人将被用来引导不可靠的投票人（不管是否MyBO会员）去投票。根据MyBO数据库可以进行个性化投票。他说：“对于现场运行他们能够提供越多前后联系的信息，他们就有越多的参加者。
[24] If Obama is elected, his Web-oriented campaign strategy could carry over into his presidency. He could encourage his supporters to deluge members of Congress with calls and e-mails, or use the Web to organize collective research on policy questions. The campaign said in one of its prepared statements that "it's certain that the relationships that have been built between Barack Obama and his supporters, and between supporters themselves, will not end on Election Day." But whether or not a President Obama takes MyBO into the West Wing, it's clear that the phenomenon will forever transform campaigning. "We're scratching the surface," Trippi says. "We're all excited because he's got one million people signed up--but we are 300 million people in this country. We are still at the infancy stages of what social-¬networking technologies are going to do, not just in our politics but in everything. There won't be any campaign in 2012 that doesn't try to build a social network around it."
[24] 如果奥巴马当选，他的以网络为中心的竞选策略将延续到他的总统任期。他会鼓励支持者向国会议员不断打电话，发送电子邮件，或者利用网络对政策问题组织集体研究。竞选班子在其中一份准备好的声明中说：“可以确定的是，巴拉克•奥巴马和支持者之间，以及支持者之间早已建立起来的关系将不会在大选日结束。”但是，不管作为总统的奥巴马是否将把MyBO并入West Wing，很明显这一现象将永远完全改变竞选。特里皮说：“我们在尝试。我们都感到很兴奋的是有100万人注册，但是我们这个国家有3亿人口。我们仍然处于社交技术的初始阶段，不仅仅在政治上，而是在各个方面。2012年不会有不尽力围绕竞选而建立社交网络的任何竞选，”
[25] Lessig warns that if Obama wins but doesn't govern according to principles of openness and change, as promised, supporters may not be so interested in serving as MyBO foot soldiers in 2012. "The thing they [the Obama camp] don't quite recognize is how much of their enormous support comes from the perception that this is someone different," Lessig says. "If they behave like everyone else, how much will that stanch the passion of his support?"
[25] 莱西格警告说，如果奥巴马赢了，但没有按照他承诺的开放和改革的原则进行管理，支持者也许不会对于在2012年作为MyBO的无名小卒很感兴趣。莱西格说：“他们（奥巴马阵营）没有十分搞清楚的是，对他们的巨大支持有多少来自这样一种认识，即这是一个不同的人。如果他们像其他任何人一样，这将会多么压抑支持者的热情？”
[26] But for now, it's party time. At the end of June, after ¬Clinton suspended her campaign, MyBO put out a call for the faithful to organize house parties under a "Unite for Change" theme. More than 4,000 parties were organized nationwide on June 28; I logged in and picked three parties from about a dozen in the Boston area.
[26] 但目前是聚会时间，6月末，当克林顿退出竞选时，MyBO向忠诚于奥巴马的人发起一个主旨为“为改革而团结起来”组织一次室内聚会的呼吁。6月28日，全国大约组织了4000多次聚会；我注册和参加了波士顿地区大约一打聚会中的三次聚会。
[27] My first stop was a house party in the tony suburb of ¬Winchester, where several couples dutifully watched an Obama-supplied campaign video. Host Mary Hart, an art professor in her 50s, said that Obama and his website made her "open my house to strangers and really get something going." She added, "I'm e-mailing people I haven't seen in 20 years. We have this tremendous ability to use this technology to network with people. Why don't we use it?"
[27] 我的第一站是参加一次在繁华的温彻斯特郊区举行的聚会，在那里，有几对夫妇忠实地观看奥巴马提供的一张竞选视频。聚会组织者、50来岁的艺术教授哈里•哈特说，奥巴马和他的网站使她“向陌生人打开房门，真正做点事情。”她补充说：“我在给20年没见面的人们发电子邮件。我们有这种强大能力利用这一技术和人们进行网络活动。为什么不用它呢？”
[28] Next stop was a lawn party in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, whose organizer, Sachielle Samedi, 34, wore a button that said "Hot Chicks Dig Obama." She said that support for the Obama candidacy drew neighbors together. At the party, Wayne Dudley, a retired history professor, met a kindred spirit: Brian Murdoch, a 54-year-old Episcopal priest. The two men buttonholed me for several minutes; Dudley predicted that Obama would bring about "a new world order centered on people of integrity." Murdoch nodded vigorously. It was a fine MyBO moment.
[28] 下一站要参加一次在波士顿附近的洛克斯贝里举行的草坪聚会。这次聚会的组织者，34岁的萨奇尔•萨默迪衣服上钉着一粒纽扣，上面写着：“热情的年轻妇女欣赏奥巴马。”她说，对奥巴马候选人地位的支持把邻居们紧紧团结在一起。在聚会上，一位退休的历史学教授韦恩•达德利找到了知音——一位54岁的主教牧师布莱恩•默多克。两人硬把我拉住谈了几分钟；达德利预测奥巴马将带来“一种以人的团结为中心的新世界秩序。” 默多克用力地点头。这是一段美妙的MyBO时刻。
[29] My evening ended at a packed post-collegiate party in a Somerville walk-up apartment. Host Rebecca Herst, a 23-year-old program assistant with the Jewish Organizing Initiative, said that MyBO--unlike Facebook--allowed her to quickly upload her entire Gmail address book, grafting her network onto Obama's. "It will be interesting to see what develops after this party, because now I'm connected to all these people," she shouted over the growing din. Two beery young men, heading for the exits, handed her two checks for $20. Herst tucked the checks into her back pocket.
[29] 晚上我最后参加了在萨莫维尔的无电梯公寓举行的一次拥挤的本科后聚会。23岁的主人瑞贝卡•赫尔斯特是“犹太组织首创精神”的一名项目助理。他说，MyBO与Facebook不同，允许她迅速上传她的整个Gmail邮件地址簿，把她的网络连接到奥巴马的网络。对着越来越大的喧嚣声她喊道：“看到这次聚会后的发展变化将会很有趣，因为现在我已跟所有这些人连接上了。”两个喝啤酒喝得醉熏熏的年轻人一边朝门口走，一边递给她两张20美元的支票。赫尔斯特把支票塞进她的后口袋里。