Obama team preparing first 'digital presidency'

Presidential addresses on YouTube. Online chats with administration officials. And millions of energized Barack Obama backers ready for the next e-mail or text message calling them to action.

It's been called White House 2.0, the first truly digital presidency. If the nascent effort succeeds, government and politics may never be the same.

Building on the president-elect's pioneering, tech-savvy campaign, his team aims to connect the incoming administration directly with citizens through Web sites, blogs and online social networks.

For Obama, the effort also promises to give him powerful new tools that can rally public support for his agenda while bypassing traditional media.

A preview of things to come popped up Tuesday on change.gov, the Obama transition Web site. A new discussion feature invited people to form online communities that provide "instant feedback" about Obama's top issues, starting with health care.

Looking ahead to a wired White House, "our first priority is making sure that we keep the millions of people who played an integral role in the campaign engaged in the process," Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. "We also recognize now that we have a much larger audience to include: people who didn't vote or didn't vote for us."

Obama's 21-month campaign was an Internet powerhouse, raising more than $500 million from 3 million online donors, his team says. Those donations, the vast majority of them in increments of $100 or less, accounted for the bulk of the more than $600 million his campaign raised.

The online organizing of supporters and volunteers also had unmatched scale. The campaign's e-mail list contains about 13 million addresses. Another 1 million people signed up to receive campaign text messages, such as those that announced Joe Biden as the vice presidential pick and mobilized supporters on Election Day.

The campaign's social network, MyBarackObama.com, or MyBO, includes 2 million profiles and about 400,000 blog posts. About 5 million supporters signed up on other social networks, with more than 3 million on Facebook.

"The lesson every elected official should take away from the Obama campaign's use of social media is that the Internet has now flipped the entire campaign process around and put individual voters truly in charge of the information they receive," said Republican Congressman John Culberson of Houston, who uses online networking tools such as Twitter.

He said those voters, empowered by technology, can now peer into "every nook and cranny of the government" and sniff out falsehood and both liberal and conservative bias.

While Obama's team is working to bring its online experience to governing, restrictions prohibit the White House from using the campaign e-mail list. The list's future use, possibly through the Democratic National Committee or an re-election organization, is still being decided.

But the transition team has already begun assembling a new database of supporters and interested people through change.gov.

That registry is just the beginning, said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who managed Howard Dean's 2004 campaign.

"When John F. Kennedy said the words 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,' had the Internet and Facebook and MySpace and YouTube existed, we have no idea how many millions of Americans would have signed up immediately," Trippi said. "We're about to find out."

Trippi said Obama's past and future networks of supporters will make his presidency immensely powerful.

For example, he said, if 25 members of Congress stand in the way of passing the president's health care overhaul, those lawmakers will find themselves "between a rock and a hard place."

"The rock is Barack Obama and the hard place is millions of Americans who are going to be pounding on them, calling them, e-mailing and knocking on their district office doors," Trippi said. "That's never happened before. There's no president who has been that directly connected to that many million Americans."

However, attempts by the Obama administration to exert pressure this way could backfire, said Karl Rove, former adviser to President George W. Bush.

"Such strong-arming irritates allies, infuriates fence sitters and enrages opponents in Congress," Rove wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal. "Lawmakers dislike grass-roots lobbying by those representing people in their states or districts. They'll be livid if the White House facilitates it."

Trippi said Obama won't even have to ask for help since his supporters feel so invested in the president they helped elect.

Since the election, Obama's team has already moved to advance their embrace of new media.

Less than two weeks after Election Day, Obama began recording a weekly address to the nation. Updating the traditional presidential radio address, video of the speech was released on YouTube. That video has been viewed there about 1 million times.

Days later, as wildfires ravaged Southern California, the campaign site Barackobama.com asked for volunteers and donations for the victims.

The incoming administration also is considering outreach with online question-and-answer sessions and regular video messages from officials.

During the campaign, Obama pledged to use the Web to make government more open and accountable. He said bills on his desk will be available for online perusing for five days before he signs them.

The transition Web site also has posted behind-the-scenes videos of policy team discussions and messages from team members.

So far, the Obama White House has given only positive indications that it will use the Internet to make government more transparent, said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, which works for the goal of government openness through technology.

But Culberson said he is skeptical whether the Democrats in Congress and the incoming administration are sincere when promising to use new media to reduce government secrecy. He said Democrats have turned the House floor into "the deepest, darkest hole in Washington," where massively expensive legislation receives too little public scrutiny.

"Social media is a two-edged sword that will cut quickly and deeply any elected official who refuses to allow the public to see the public's business," he said.

In what may be a preview of political debates to come, a kind of online backlash happened in July after Obama indicated he would vote in the Senate for an intelligence surveillance law. More than 20,000 of his supporters used MyBarackObama.com to protest his stance.

While the protest did not sway Obama's vote, the important lesson is that he listened and responded online to those critics, said Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the techPresident blog, which covered the use of the Web during the presidential campaign.

"Obama has telegraphed in speeches that he will listen to us, even more so if we disagree," he said. "We now have an engaged citizenry that is expecting to continue to have a two-way dialogue with its elected leaders ./././ wiki-style government is coming to America."