Results tagged “john mccain” from Chad

From the conference site:
"Marketers and activists alike have taken notice of the strategies and tactics that helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Jascha will discuss the tools and techniques used by the presidential campaign's record breaking online efforts. In addition to telling the inside story of the campaign's online engagement efforts, he will also discuss how these strategies and tools can be applied to a variety of other sectors beyond politics."

Speaker - Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Technology Officer & Founding Partner, Blue State Digital

The important thing is recognizing that all clients have a bigger issue they're trying to get around.

How do you incorporate those actions around the world into the web site

We have a platform of tools we use, centered around a CRM tool

Early 2007 through present

More than 1B emails to 13 million addresses
>1m sms subscribers
200,000 offline events planned via the web - NOT official campaign events
35,000 local volunteer groups

14.5M YouTube viewing hours - Does NOT include Wil.I.Am - Cost for this viewing time would have probably cost $40-50 million

$770,000,000 35% Offline / 65% Online

Campaign was able to shift from state to state, they were able to already see who had started grass-roots groups and then parachute professionals into the


How did they do it

UPDATE: My audio narration of this and part two of this post got picked up by Frontline's Digital Nation series. The clip they're featuring is below:

This is something I wrote, and was talked down from posting. A recent exchange (part two of this post), however, got me fired up to post this, as well as the followup to the very ignorant things that were recently posted on my Facebook wall this morning.

I'm probably going to offend a former classmate of mine from high school with this, but then again, I didn't start it, and I'm too fascinated by it to not share it with others. Especially after another friend I read this to couldn't help but burst out laughing.

A couple weeks ago, I was reunited, via Facebook, with a high school classmate I hadn't spoken to in at least 10 - 15 years.

Right off the bat, after having read some of my status updates, she posts on my wall:

"Go Republicans! Don't tell me you want O'butthead??? Come on Chad! How have you been? Married? Kids?"

Since this was sitting out there on my wall, I didn't really want to let it go unadressed. So I wrote back:

"I want a lot of things. I want the Constitution to not be pissed on any more, I want the word 'elitist' to be used appropriately, I want tolerance to become so a part of the fabric of our country that we don't even talk about it because it's such a given, I want a president who wouldn't dare call his wife the C word in front of the media, who has enough respect for his fellow Americans to actually look them in the eye when debating them, who doesn't try to 'save the country' only after the poll numbers look bleak, and who doesn't attempt to pick fights with the same media outlet it quotes 60-plus times during the campaign (New York Times), I want a president who might actually help my parents pay for their medical bills and who isn't afraid of being intellectually curious. Oh yea, and I also want Obama to win by a landslide. I'm married with no kids at the moment. Things are generally good and looking to be much better come January ;-)"

We also got into a pretty intense Facebook IM chat, that I unfortunately didn't save and can't seem to find an archive of. (Facebook folks, please make make chat archives available like Gmail does. Thanks!)

Note: If you'd like to see a PDF of the Excel sheet I made to come up with these nifty calculations, click here.

Fairness. The Environment. Intelligence. Preparation. Causes bigger than one's self. The Constitution. Equality. Diversity. Hope.

None of these things appear to be what the election is about, if you listen to the very latest attempt by the McCain campaign to make its case.

Instead, it's all about taxes. And "socialism." And taxes. Oh, and I heard them complaining about Barack Obama wanting to "spread the wealth around." And how that's so wrong.

Well, I'm always willing to have a discussion with people who I disagree with, and even entertain their premise for a bit to see if I can see things their way.

This time around, however, I just can't seem to do figure it out.

The problem, it appears, is math. It just doesn't add up.

I took a look at some recent tax and election numbers. The tax numbers, by way of taxfoundation.org (thanks @baratunde) show federal spending received per dollar of taxes paid by state from 2005. A quick glance at this, shows a pretty obvious display of how the federal government already "spreads the wealth around."

This clip will have no bearing on the election. Unlike certain SNL skits that do much to reinforce a "heightened reality" as Lorne Michaels put it to Sarah Palin during her appearance.

http://view.break.com/592648

I have done a lot of talking to people, and reading people's opinions about, the upcoming election between Barak Obama and John McCain. I have heard a lot of explanations about who people plan to vote for and why. These include people in New Hampshire when I recently went canvassing there, people from the Midwest, people from other countries and people in and around my current hometown of Quincy, Mass.

I have heard a lot of people say they are voting based on character. I can respect that. I sometimes wished I had asked certain people what they define as character.

I like the definition that goes "Character is what you do when no one is looking."

So it is that I came across these two stories within a couple minutes of each other while surfing the web, twittering, and playing on Facebook.

The first one, by Rolling Stone, offers a pretty damning look at what makes up the character of Sen. John McCain. The excerpt below details a 1974 conversation between McCain and John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who like McCain was imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals (McCain) and the son of a prizefighter (Dramesi) turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran."

"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.

"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.

"Why? Where are you going to, John?"

"Oh, I'm going to Rio."

"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"

McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

"I got a better chance of getting laid."

In a story that originally appeared in the Norwegian magazine VG, American English-speaking Oslo blogger Leisha translated a story about Barak Obama that occurred 14 years after McCain's party plans.

A newlywed 31-year-old was waiting at the gate at the Miami Airport awaiting a reunion with her husband in Norway. She had no money, and carefully packed up all of the possessions she was going to take with her to start a new life.

She had no money, and just found out she would need 103 dollars to take the possessions with her.

In tears, she heard a voice from behind her, offering to pay the fee. That person (duh) was Barak Obama.

"He was my knight in shining armor," she said.

I believe these stories, say a lot about who we're choosing between in just about a month. While neither nugget has anything to do with specific policy, tax code, numbers of houses one owns or what their preacher might say in a sermon, I believe they do much to illustrate the guiding principles that each candidate will use when making difficult decisions that will affect both us and future generations of Americans.

I just deleted a few sentences that explained why, but in re-reading both of the excerpts above, it occurred to me that it's already pretty obvious.