The Obama Connection

I support Mr. Obama because he is going to the next President of the United States. I believe that he is because the political organization that he has built is a 21st Century political organization and the other candidates are back in the 1980’s.

When I saw what the Obama organization did in Chester County very early in 2008 I understood that nothing like this ever happened in Chester County. The possibility that any other candidate can beat the Obama organization in Chester County is just not there.

When you add that the Chester County Republicans are split almost evenly between McCain and Ron Paul (that is the Republicans who cannot vote for a Democrat). And that people are aware of the problems with certain Republican committeepersons you can conclude that:

We are looking at a landslide victory for not only Mr. Obama but all Democratic candidates in Chester County in November.

Jim Pitcherella
_______________________________________
May 26, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Obama Connection
By ROGER COHEN
It’s the networks, stupid.
More than any other factor, it has been Barack Obama’s grasp of the central place of Internet-driven social networking that has propelled his campaign for the Democratic nomination into a seemingly unassailable lead over Hillary Clinton. Her campaign has been so 20th-century. His has been of the century we’re in.
That’s not surprising. Obama spent only 10 years of his adult life in the split world of the cold war, double that in a post-Berlin Wall world of growing interconnectedness. MAC — mutually assured connectivity — has replaced the MAD — mutually assured destruction — of cold-war days.
For Clinton, born in 1947, that ratio is different. Her mental paradigm is division. When her husband last ran for president in 1996, the Internet was marginal. The thinking and people from that campaign have proved unable to fast-forward a dozen years. They’ve been left like deer blinded by the Webcam lights of the Obama juggernaut.
This cultural failure has been devastating for Clinton. As Joshua Green chronicles in an important piece in The Atlantic, Obama has used social networking and his user-friendly Web site to develop the money machine, and the youthful engagement, that has swept him forward.
Green notes, “Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete.” He gives some other Obama campaign numbers: 750,000 active volunteers and 8,000 affinity groups. In February, a month in which he raised $55 million ($45 million over the Internet), 94 percent of donations were of $200 or less, a number dwarfing small contributions to Clinton and John McCain.
Obama has been a classic Internet-start up, a movement spreading with viral intensity and propelled by some of Silicon Valley’s most creative minds. As with any online phenomenon, he has jumped national borders, stirring as much buzz in Berlin as he does back home.
He could not have achieved this without a sense of history, a conviction that the nature of the post-post-9/11 world — the one beyond war without end — is going to be determined by sociability and connectivity. In the globalized world of MySpace, LinkedIn and the rest, sociability is a force as strong as sovereignty.
I’ve searched in vain for a sense of this pivotal historical moment in Clinton. Her threat to “totally obliterate” Iran, her stomach-turning reference to the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy as a reason to stay in the race, her Bosnian fabrications, all reflect a view of history as something that’s there for political ends rather than as a source of inspiration or reflection.
It’s history as “Me, me, me.” That tends to be blinding.
Her most crippling blindness has been to networks, national and global, the threads that bind and have changed society. As David Singh Grewal writes in his excellent new book, “Network Power,” a core tension in the world is that: “Everything is being globalized except politics.”
Grewal continues: “We live in a world in which our relations of sociability — our commerce, culture, ideas, manners — are increasingly shared,
READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/opinion/26cohen.html?hp