If President-elect Barack Obama had run in 2004, he would not have won the election, says HuffingtonPost founder and political pundit Arianna Huffington. That's partly due to the variety of web 2.0 technologies that were available to the Obama campaign that either weren't around or weren't used effectively during the last election -- both in terms of fundraising and distribution of information.
"Were it not for the internet, Barack Obama would not be president," said Huffington, while speaking on a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. "Were it not for the internet, he wouldn't even have been the democratic nominee. By contrast, the McCain campaign didn't have a clue. The problem wasn't the age of the candidate, it was the age of the idea."
"The internet has killed Karl Rove's politics. Those of us in the blogosphere suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder, so after Sarah Palin told us she had always been opposed to the bridge to nowhere at the Republican Convention, online there was an obsessive campaign to prove it wrong. And the McCain campaign repeated the line for a few days, and then they stopped because they couldn't get away with it. In 2004, they would have gone on repeating it."
But that means that politicans have to watch everything they do now.
"We have now entered a phase where you are always exposed," said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. "I have to watch myself singing 'I left my heart in San Francisco' on YouTube and it won't go away. I can't get it to go away. [The internet is] an extraordinary thing, but I do think there will be a lot of collateral damage as we come to the realization that we're in a reality TV show."
*Photo: *Fllickr/jdlasica
