What was the greatest thing about this campaign?

For me it was the story about the 2000 Texas students who marched 7 miles along a highway to vote during the primaries after their campus was allocated only one early voting booth for the 8000 students there.


Aerial photos:

http://media.myfoxhouston.com/news/2008-02-19/pvamuvote/index.html



http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/politics/5552259.html

Hooray for Prairie View!!
I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of those students got most of their election information from their i-Phones and not from TV ads or pundits.
Say what you like about gizmos, you're entitled. I'm also sure that at some point in history someone said :
"This printing press thing will never catch on, what are they going to do, fire all the scribes?"

Joe(News alert to your phone from Dylan: Times, they R aChange N)Nation

Now thats an unfair assessment of what was said by several of us. YOU seem to be easily impressed by "stuff", the tools of information. As each decade passes, the time span of occurence to news delivery becomes infinatessimally small. Soon we will be able to travel inn tim e before the issues and be back to report them last week.

THat is NOT what the greatest thing about the election was. If the tools of communication helped drive an increased participation of a heretorfore silent voting bloc, thats great. However, the difference between being a habitual gamer or getting political news on a blackberry is what? To me, the important thing was the societal reaction, the "awakening giant" of youth that hadnt been heard of since the 60's. (Remember how they communicated?) Actually you do because I do and youre a year or so older.


Do you sell TV and Appliances?

Farmer (relax , wait till you see the new generation of hi res- email cameras) man

Does the source of the information matter more than what people do with the information? I sure think that what people do is the key.

As much as I am fascinated by media, I think Marshall McLuhan may not be relevant to this sort of question.

Good question.

I don't mean to be unfair, besides I agree with you that the awakening of the young voter was an incredibly wondrous thing. I just think that one of the changes brought about by this past political season is the way campaigns are run as in how voters are contacted.
I love the irony of the fact that the base of the Obama campaign lay in it's 700 offices of -- --- ready -----?--- community organizers(!) heh heh. Those are the people who got all the volunteers on their cellphones, email, and web pages and then out the door to knock on millions of doors. (One story said they knocked on a million doors last Monday alone.) Add that to the thousands of You-Tube videos and Obama's Facebook page (done on Day one.) and you have an energetic, unstoppable, base to spread the word.

I have friends who haven't voted since Richard Nixon won the White House, they got involved again because they saw how involved young people were.

And those young people were brought into the campaign using, like it or not, technology : email, text messages, alerts, twitters and social web boards like this one.

Joe(Starting in Iowa)Nation

What was the greatest thing about this campaign?

Uhm . . . the canapes?

Setanta!
I haven't spoken to you in months.

Joe(maybe years)Nation

Holding bad habits in abeyance is not a good justification for taking them up again, Joe . . .

The really big procedural or Gizmalogically greatest thing was Obama opting out of the Campaign Finance stream. He was able to, by employing the rapid communications via his organization ( which was developed as a function of the protracted primary battle with Hillary), to raise a huge amount of quick cash and pay for a media blitz over the campaign.

Observers have said that, while most folks have their minds made up early, there were several percentages(/) of folks who actually changed a fence sitting position by Obamas last televison speech that was played during the World Series. SInce the SEries was not a nationally big draw, Obama could fit his presentation in and (as it drew a huuge audience), these people were actually swayed that close to election.

You are absolutely correct.

It's the end of public financing for elections.
The conservatives should be happy as clams at high tide except they have just figured out that millions and millions of small donations will trump huge whomper ones everytime.

Joe(buh bye)Nation