The First Ever 'Clean Campaign' Worked...

http://www.democracycorps.com/strategy/2008/11/the-extraordinary-campaign/

Overview

Deeply grounded in contemporary social currents and political passions, the Obama campaign took the scope of campaign communication and activity into whole new realms and, in the process, dwarfed McCain’s efforts. Obama’s election was produced by an extraordinary shift in the way the citizenry gets information and relates to candidates and the Obama campaign’s ability to exploit that at every level.

Their vast financial advantage allowed the Obama campaign to reach voters and states with fewer trade-offs – but the Obama campaign did more than that: they developed new, innovative and effective forms of communicating with voters, particularly new voters and those traditionally unengaged in the electoral process.

The post election survey conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and the Campaign for America’s Future confirms that the tireless efforts of the Obama team to engage, educate and turn out voters were well rewarded on Election Day.

Methodology
This report is based on a survey of 2,000 voters conducted on November 4-5 by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and the Campaign for America’s Future.

I have to admit I am not only impressed, but amazed! I had never followed a Election cycle campaign in my 47 years and the interest that began was purely incidental. I was pissed at my wife, my life and my circumstances and saw a bad picture of Hillary Clinton splashed on the front page of The Financial Times. It made me angry. Angry at the spin-master's of the media, angry at the people who distort images and people who try to make a difference in this world, Hillary became the under-dog [like me] and the world had just taken on a fight they were about to lose.

People were going to change, the world was going to change and the people preventing that from happening were going to change. That was all there was to it. Seeing that distorted picture of Hillary changed my life [and many others] it was the beginning of making 'change' permanent and 'real'. No more rhetoric, no more silent nods to indifference, we were all going to be in this 'struggle' and be in it together [for better or worse].

Some real things had to change, and arrogance and indifference could not - in fact would not, be altered without everyone 'feeling the pain' and working toward alleviating that pain and pressure. We needed to be in this together as a global community to fix what had been slowly eroding and had been 'broken' over not just the last eight years, but the last 25 or so.

If change could [and would] come to America, the rest of the world would follow [whether it liked it or not]. All of the de-coupling theories, the 'New World Economies' and other non-nonsensical theories just didn't add up when you looked at the 'numbers' [They never lie unless they are inflated, inaccurate or mis-represented] the 'numbers tell all.