Open Source Blog

McCain’s slow acceptance that technology was an important element in his campaign is surprising, given that he was formerly chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

McCain’s technology platform was to, “Encourage investment in innovation; develop a skilled work force; champion open and fair trade; reform intellectual property protection; keep the Internet and entrepreneurs free of unnecessary regulation and ensure a fully connected citizenry.”

There were few areas where his manifesto differed markedly from Obama’s. Mostly, there were subtle variations on the same themes. Whereas Obama said he would hire the first federal chief information officer (CIO), McCain said he would push for a renewed emphasis on innovation through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) where industry and government enter into public/private projects. “This way the government is a leader of the technology revolution and not simply a beneficiary,” he said.

But McCain’s campaign was never very strong on technology, despite having the likes of Hewlett-Packard chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina and former eBay president and CEO Meg Whitman advising him.

Indeed analysts noted that much of the tech talk surrounding McCain focused on his self-self-confessed computer ignorance. "I'm an illiterate who has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance that I can get," McCain said in an interview with Yahoo/Politico earlier this year. McCain also admitted that he has, "Never felt the particular need to email."

It became something of a running joke that McCain talked about the need for ‘net neutrality’ yet wasn’t someone who even used email himself. His lack of technology prowess was lampooned in the press, and at the tech-savvy Personal Democracy Forum conference in June, Mark Soohoo, McCain's deputy e-campaign director, drew laughter when he said, "You don't necessarily have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country ... John McCain is aware of the Internet."

Realising that having your country run by a guy who can’t use the Internet is perhaps not such a great idea, McCain was forced to back-pedal to the extent that he told the New York Times, “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don't expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”

But Obama’s campaign team was way ahead of him. In sharp contrast to McCain, Obama's campaign constantly updated Obama's Twitter account with the candidate’s latest activities on the campaign trail.

Twitter is a service that people usually use to provide friends and acquaintances with personal updates and on-the-spot thoughts. For a presidential candidate to use the service showed he was bang up-to-date with the younger generation, or the ‘Millenials’.

On July 4th, for example, Obama's campaign ‘tweeted’ [it’s what you do on Twitter] that the candidate was "hosting a 4th July family picnic in Butte, MT, and celebrating Malia's 10th Birthday!”

But even more important to Obama’s success in the elections, no doubt, was the fact that his campaign website helped bring in over $200m towards the campaign fund, from over a million donors. 850,000 participated in what became the Obama social network.

McCain was able to raise just a fraction of this amount through online donations, and indeed because his ‘small-dollar’ Internet fundraising operation was so lacking, he had to embark on an aggressive schedule of some two dozen ‘high-dollar’ fund-raising events back in May.

The amount of fundraising brought in by small donors through Obama’s campaign website should not be under-estimated. In 2004, George W. Bush and John Kerry, the Democratic party nominee, raised $696 million between them. In this campaign, Obama probably raised more than that on his own – he had raised $650 million by late October.

More than three million people donated to Obama’s campaign, twice as many as any presidential candidate has received money from in the past. Nearly half the money came from people giving less than $200, many of them donating through his website. Obama outspent McCain on advertising at times by four to one, in almost every medium, from national television to video games and indeed, the Internet.

So whatever you think of Obama’s attitude to science and technology, it’s all too clear that technology, and the Internet in particular, helped him win the US presidential election. He has Web 2.0 to thank, at least a little bit.

I also wrote a blog on what Obama’s presidency is likely to mean for science and technology, here.