While going through some books for an upcoming piece about work ethic, I noticed a series of questions I wrote after this passage in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs:

“And the continuing democratization of memory can only accelerate the obsolescence of history as we once understood it. History has been revealed as a fluid intellectual construct, susceptible to revisionism, in which a set of individuals with access to a large database dominates another set with less access. The age-old notion of ‘knowledge is power’ is overturned when all memory is copy-and-paste-able–knowledge becomes wisdom, and creativity and intelligence, previously thwarted by lack of access to new ideas, can flourish.”

Here are the questions I jotted down. They were probably written in 2006:

• What effect does the internet have in combating revisionism?
• Do crowdsourced resources (Wikipedia) prevent a single monopolistic information source from practicing revisionism?
• Does Wikipedia fall into the trap of revisionism by the masses, where majority rule outweighs objective truth?
• When Wikipedia relies on “reputable outside sources,” does it not end up reflecting the same biases as the media conglomerations behind those sources? Is a crowdsourced article more likely to just be a difference of style instead of substance?
• What is a reliable source in a 2.0 world?

It is interesting to look at these questions years later. Anyone feel like addressing any of these questions now that we are in 2010? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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There is a meme going around started by Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution where bloggers and writers are listing the 10 books that have influenced them the most. Scott McLemee of Inside Higher Ed posted one as did Matthew Yglesias. Some of the writers chose to go with their guts in coming up with their lists. While there were a couple books that were obvious to me, I had to really think about mine.

My list would differ depending on my topic. For example, if on this site I focused on international relations (my field of study at Arizona State University) it would include different books such as Clausewitz’s On War and Jervis, Lebow, and Stein’s Psychology and Deterrence. I decided to choose my list based on influences to my overarching philosophy and those that influenced my ideas and writing on this site. This list also only includes individual books that influenced me. Bertrand Russell has been one of my great influences, but in toto, not with a single work. Same for Langston Hughes.

Without further ado, here is my top 10 list.

1: Abraham Maslow – The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

In 1998 I was a junior in high school and picked this up at a free book fair for the students. I was in AP Psychology at the time and was familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and concept of self actualization, so I was intrigued when I saw this. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature is a collection of essays Maslow compiled himself addressing various topics.

Prior to reading this book I was entirely unfamiliar with Maslow’s education philosophy, but reading his “Education and Peak Experiences” and “Goals and Implications of Humanistic Education” crystallized my own budding philosophy of education. Maslow’s explanation of humanistic education and the critical weaknesses of the traditional education system felt to me as if he had taken all of the embryonic fragments of my thoughts and ideas and comprehensively developed them in a way I could not at the age of 15.

All of his essays have been extremely influential to my thinking, and the same copy of this book that I picked up twelve years ago has always been within arms reach of my bed or desk ever since.

Classroom learning often has as its unspoken goal the reward of pleasing the teacher. Children in the usual classroom learn very quickly that creativity is punished, while repeating a memorized response is rewarded, and concentrate on what the teacher wants them to say, rather than understanding the problem. Since classroom learning focuses on behavior rather than on thought, the child learns exactly how to behave while keeping his thoughts his own.

2: Dr. Robert Cialdini – Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Anyone that reads this site regularly is sure to have seen me reference this book multiple times. My younger brother gave me my copy after taking a social psychology class with Dr. Cialdini at Arizona State. I flew through it in one sitting and immediately began thinking about new applications of the ideas in the book. Since my first reading six years ago I have periodically re-read it at least 30 times, and I see something new or think of another application every time.

With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species, we have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information-laden that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.

3: Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle

Cat’s Cradle was the first Vonnegut book I ever read. His stylistic black humor and irreverence toward ‘taboo’ topics stuck with me. His invention of the fictional religion of “Bokononism” with its unique concepts and vocabulary put a mirror up to not only religion but society as a whole. He took on technology, the arms race, religion, and the human condition in a single broad stroke. Vonnegut was a fearless writer, and I had never seen anyone take on so many important themes in that way before, and come to think of it, since. He showed me that humor can be a powerful tool even when dealing with the most serious issues.

We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kun-kun, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended.

4: Jessica Stern – Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill

I was first exposed to Jessica Stern’s work in 2002 when I read her contributions to Jonathan Tucker’s Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons. In 2004 I purchased my copy of Terror in the Name of God and it changed the way I looked at extremism. Stern is not the kind of academic that stays safely ensconced in an ivory tower. Her hands-on approach to research often took her into territory that is hostile to women and Jews, yet Stern, a Jewish woman, courageously entered that territory and was able to get extremists, who in other situations would have advocated for her death, to openly discuss their beliefs and actions. I was influenced not only by the words on the pages of her book but also by what it took to put them there.

The bottom line, I now understood, is that purifying the world through holy war is addictive. Holy war intensifies the boundaries between Us and Them, satisfying the inherently human longing for a clear identity and a definite purpose in life, creating a seductive state of bliss.

5: Aldous Huxley – Island

I sought out Huxley’s last and relatively unknown novel after reading Maslow’s mention of it in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. While Huxley is better known for his distopian Brave New World, Island is a utopian novel that expounds his ideas on humanity’s potential, society’s ills, and humanistic education. In actuality it is more a treatise on humanism than a piece of literary art. Huxley recognized that the society of Pala that he created is an impossibility, but he designed it as an ideal about values, not as a literal prescription for social planning. To me, Island is the antithesis of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

“So you think our medicine’s pretty primitive?”
“That’s the wrong word. It isn’t primitive. It’s fifty percent terrific and fifty percent nonexistent. Marvelous antibiotics–but absolutely no methods for increasing resistance, so that antibiotics won’t be necessary. Fantastic operations–but when it comes to teaching people the way of going through life without having to be chopped up, absolutely nothing. And it’s the same all along the line. Alpha Plus for patching you up when you’ve started to fall apart; but Delta Minus for keeping you healthy. Apart from sewerage systems and synthetic vitamins, you don’t seem to do anything at all about prevention. And yet you’ve got a proverb: prevention is better than cure.”

6: Urvashi Vaid – Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation

I first read Virtual Equality in 2003 when I started working on LGBT issues at Arizona State University. It is one of, if not the most, honest and comprehensive analyses of a contemporary social movement by one of its members. Reading this book has deeply influenced how I look at the progressive and youth movements and is one of the reasons I am willing to be publicly critical of these movements when necessary. There are myriad lessons to be learned from Vaid regardless of your specific cause, and it continues to be an invaluable resource to me both as an organizer and a writer.

Our failure to turn a personally oriented experience of discovery into a movement for political reform, much less fundamental political change, is a critical barrier to gay political progress. On any given Saturday night, the people in the bars, nightclubs, and discos of one major city would far outnumber the members of gay political organizations. Thus, the primary locus of the gay community in every part of the country remains the gay and lesbian bar, not the gay community center or the gay political organization. In midsize or small cities, the disparity is even more noticeable: a handful of political activists run the all-volunteer political group, yet hundreds of politically uninvolved gay and lesbian people gather weekly at social events, sports leagues, church services, or other community events.

7: Sinclair Lewis – Elmer Gantry

Lewis is one of the greatest American writers at using fiction as a cutting social commentary. My first experience of Lewis’ writing was his novel Arrowsmith, but Elmer Gantry is my favorite of his works. It led me to seek out all of his books and Richard Lingeman’s excellent biography. This book is not only frequently banned by conservatives, but at the time of publication led Christian fundamentalists to actively call for Lewis’ execution. It served as a clarion call warning us against the danger and hypocrisy of radical religion, a harbinger of the Christian Right of today.

“So you’re a bunch of Erasmuses! You ought to know. And there’s no hypocrisy in what we teach and preach! We’re a specially selected group of Parsifals–beautiful to the eye and stirring to the ear and overflowing with knowledge of what God said to the Holy Ghost in camera at 9:16 last Wednesday morning. We’re all just rarin’ to go out and preach the precious Baptist doctrine of ‘Get ducked or duck.’ We’re wonders. We admit it. And people actually sit and listen to us, and don’t choke! I supposed they’re overwhelmed by our nerve! And we have to have nerve, or we’d never dare to stand in a pulpit again. We’d quit, and pray God to forgive us for having stood up there and pretended that we represent God, and that we can explain what we ourselves say are the unexplainable mysteries!”

8: Arthur Schopenhauer – Essays and Aphorisms

Sure, Schopenhauer was frequently the guest of honor at his own pity parties, but when he wasn’t busy feeling sorry for himself he could be pretty insightful. His philosophy is pessimistic, but there are glimmers of hope in human intellect and art. It was my first exposure to a philosophy based not on the divine but on human will. To read Schopenhauer is to get a glimpse of human suffering and an understanding of how people attempt to assuage that suffering.

Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms of — one might almost say two words for — the same thing, the essence of which is that a man’s energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others; the outcome being partly that he is overloaded with work, partly that his needs are very inadequately met.

9: J.D. Salinger – Franny and Zooey

For most people Catcher in the Rye is the Salinger title that speaks to them. While I certainly count Catcher in the Rye as one of my favorite books, Franny and Zooey had a much greater influence on me. Growing up in a Hollywood family and ending up in the political world, Franny’s breakdown in reaction to ego and empty affectation resonated with me, as did her feeling “sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.” Salinger evokes the importance of genuine human connection while maintaining the importance of being true to one’s self.

But the thing is, you raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam ‘unskilled laughter’ coming from the fifth row. And that’s right, that’s right–God knows it’s depressing. I’m not saying it isn’t. But that’s none of your business, really. That’s none of your business, Franny. An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.

10: Thomas Paine – The Age of Reason

I’ve pretty much been agnostic since I was 5, when my Sunday school teachers could not answer my questions and treated the asking of such questions as an affront. I’m the only agnostic in my family and it wasn’t until late in high school that I met others (at least others who were open about it). Going through school the rejection of organized religion seemed like a rare abnormality. You never read about people not being religious in classes. It was not until my first year of college that I heard that Thomas Paine wasn’t just the author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man, but also of a tract that was extremely critical of dogma and organized religion. Written in a blunt style I often find myself unconsciously emulating, The Age of Reason attacks religious conventions systematically and without mercy. Such views coming from one of the heroes of American history was a refreshing validation for me. I only wish that I had discovered it sooner.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

Honorable Mention: Honore de Balzac – “El Verdugo”

This is actually a short story, and there is not much for me to say about it other than it has haunted me since the day I read it.

So 2,200 words later there is my list. Who’s next?

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The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory

For youth organizations, the concept of peer-to-peer campaigning is nothing new. The Young Democrats of America have used peer-to-peer as the core of their campaigns for years, and organizations like the Bus Project have been innovating in the field with such methods. The Obama campaign embraced peer-to-peer as the most effective way to get voters to show up to the polls, especially new and infrequent voters. As Plouffe says, “the best way to get new people to caucuses and polls was to have a family member, friend, or neighbor ask them to go.”

Peer-to-peer served multiple purposes for the Obama campaign: turnout and GOTV, list-building, and persuasion. Using peer-to-peer to build strong organizations in the states was elevated in the Obama campaign more than in presidential campaigns in the past:

This time I believed that our state campaigns should be the driving factor. Registering voters, person-to-person persuasion, building strong local organizations, boosting turnout where we needed to, and gathering as big an e-mail list as possible would be more important than advertising to our ultimate success. It is much more effective to throw late-stage surplus funds on TV than to field operations, which need time and infrastructure to grow.

Peer-to-peer grows organically, and as such it takes time to coalesce into an effective state or local organization. Friends, family, and neighbors recruit friends, family, and neighbors, who in turn reach out to their own networks. Young voters talk to and organize other young voters at the places where they live and hang out. The Obama campaigns state organizations were built on person-to-person outreach and trust, which made them very strong and cohesive as they grew.

Trust and similarity make for effective organizers:

We believed local people talking to their neighbors, friends, and family, to address these doubts, could create a permission structure whereby voters rationalized, ‘Well, you’re supporting him enthusiastically . We think alike, live the same types of lives. You see something in him, and that’s important to me.’

The campaign’s message is much more convincing when delivered by a trusted person or someone who seems to be in a similar place in life. They Obama campaign took advantage of this by making sure every supporter was equipped with the right message:

Through e-mailed talking points, postings on the website, and conversations with local field organizers, our volunteers were stressing the same arguments Obama, Biden, Ax, and Gibbs were delivering on any given day. Our philosophy was that John from Durango needed to be as current on the campaign as the candidate was. We wanted to build a message-delivery army in perfect harmony from top to bottom.

Because this organizing was being done by volunteers and supporters, and these supporters were encouraged to be unyielding in their efforts, they were able to focus on non-traditional voters and not solely a traditional campaign universe:

Our supporters’ involvement couldn’t end at making calls or knocking on doors from preapproved lists; they had to approach everyone they could, no matter their electoral history, and make a personal case for why their targets should support Obama. It was the surest way to expand the electorate in our favor.

The Obama campaign proved to many doubters what youth organizers have been saying for years: peer-to-peer wins elections.

Check out the other posts in this series:
Young Voters in The Audacity to Win
Technology in The Audacity to Win

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The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory

“Technology played a key role in our success. Reaching an audience involves more than just figuring out who your audience is; it also means knowing how to find them. Part of the reason our campaign was so successful is that we were able to identify early that many of the people we wanted to reach were spending more of their time on the Internet. We realized that a smart, and large, Internet presence was the best way to provide people with the opportunity and the tools to get involved in the campaign–they were already immersed in the world of technology and would be more likely to encounter us there. We met people where they lived, instead of forcing them to deviate from their habits or lifestyle to seek us out. Our early commitment to a digitally based platform paid huge dividends.” – David Plouffe

The Obama campaign utilized technology and the internet more effectively than any campaign in history. Throughout The Audacity to Win David Plouffe reveals how and why they were so successful.

Online Advertising

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post about the role of young voters in the campaign, they used specifically targeted online advertising to reach young voters and other underrepresented demographics to promote information about how to caucus or vote early.

There was a strong long-tail effect with the efficacy of their online ad spending:

Our return on Internet advertising was unbelievable. Each dollar invested in list growth returned several times that–immediately. Over time, as these new recruits game more money (and time), the return grew even greater. This result was highly unusual. Customarily, organizations are paying several dollars just to get someone to sign up on their list, only to see many people decline to take the next step of involvement, like contributing.

The ability to micro-target ads for certain demographics or specific online searches, combined with a pay-per-click structure, made online advertising a much higher return on investment than traditional pay-per-spot blanket advertising. In addition, the online advertising was trackable and provided valuable metrics.

Text Messaging

The most impressive decision in terms of mobile that the campaign made was to announce Biden as the Vice-Presidential candidate via text to build their list of mobile numbers:

The idea appealed to me on two levels. First, it was consistent with other key junctures in the campaign–reporting fund-raising numbers, the decision to limit our primary debates, opting out of the public funding system–where we had communicated first directly to our supporters. This was their campaign as much as ours, and they deserved to get a heads-up from us about important decisions. Those previous announcements had all been made by e-mail or Web postings; this would be our first large-scale text-only notification. Second, this was a great way to grow our text-messaging list. Rospars was right about the increasing gap in our contact figures: our e-mail list was now over 6 million, but our list of mobile numbers was in the low six figures. Making a big announcement by text would ignite a spark and juice the latter number.

It sure did. By August 22, the night before we announced Biden, over 2 million people had signed up to receive the VP announcement by text. Our first communication announcing the ‘Be the First to Know’ campaign had happened on August 10. In less than two weeks, we had grown our list over fifteen-fold.

Mobile is often under-utilized or ignored by campaigns. The commitment to the platform that led to the Biden announcement decision paid off. With 2 million people on the mobile list the campaign could send rapid response texts, vote reminders, and event invitations through a medium with an extremely high open rate.

Online Fundraising

The Obama campaign made history with their online fundraising success. One reason they were so successful is that they showed a genuine appreciation and respect for low-dollar online fundraisers:

In our campaign, grassroots supporters started to raise money. Generally, they brought in relatively small amounts–$100, $500, $1,000–using a tool on our social-networking site to keep track of the money they raised and to ask others to contribute.

Over time this grew into a powerful force. We treated these citizen fundraisers as no less important than our larger raisers. They were asked to join conference calls with Barack, me, and other senior staff so we could thank them for what they were doing and give them updates on the campaign. They believed their effort was valued–and it was–so they dug deeper and kept raising. This was not a tactical relationship. It was authentic. And that authenticity became a very powerful driver in the connection between Barack Obama and his supporters.

The campaign also realized that these initial low-dollar donors were in for the long haul. They “believed that making a financial contribution would lead people to feel more invested in the campaign and could result in higher degrees of activism” and if they could ensure these donors “felt part of and connected to the whole campaign, they might be more generous over time.”

E-mail

The Obama campaign had a massive e-mail operation, and because of this and their commitment to metrics and research they were able to learn a lot about their techniques and what supporters wanted.

We also learned a lot about the regular e-mail messages we were sending out. People wanted information, and a lot of it. We could send more e-mail than we originally thought advisable, which spoke to the heightened interest in the race and the commitment of our supporters. To keep things fresh, we varied the length and tone of the messages–some were long and informative, others quite short and informal. Perhaps most important, we learned that people responded very well to e-mails from Michelle Obama and that we needed to use Barack somewhat sparingly–when he signed an e-mail it always produced by far the biggest response, but we did not want this to become a stale event. So many of the e-mails came from me, though when we needed a big response to an ask–for money, volunteer time, or to watch an event–we made sure the e-mails came from the Obamas.

It is important to note how many variables the campaign looked at when making decisions about e-mail. They consciously saved their big guns for the most important messages as opposed to having every e-mail come from the Obamas. The variety of the messages help decrease the feeling that supporters are receiving standard list blasts. They also made an effort “to include a lot more videos in our e-mail communications–the data suggested that supporters spent more time with these e-mails than with the text-only versions.” By constantly tracking what was and wasn’t working in their e-mail messaging they were able to keep improving their game over the long campaign.

The campaign also learned that using e-mail to share campaign strategy with supporters helped strengthen the sense of purpose and discipline with supporters:

What we found when we researched things a bit more was that we were not doing enough internal communication to ensure that our supporters, and even staff, knew exactly what our strategy was and how their efforts fit into the puzzle.

This internal communication allowed everyone that was involved in the campaign to be on message and as effective as possible when talking to friends, neighbors, and other potential voters:

Through e-mailed talking points, postings on the website, and conversations with local field organizers, our volunteers were stressing the same arguments Obama, Biden, Ax, and Gibbs were delivering on any given day. Our philosophy was that John from Durango needed to be as current on the campaign as the candidate was. We wanted to build a message-delivery army in perfect harmony from top to bottom.

Online Video and Live-Streaming

Online video has become a game-changer in politics, and the Obama campaign’s understanding of the importance of the medium and willingness to experiment allowed them to consistently bypass the media filter and go directly to supporters.

As was the case throughout the campaign, most people did not watch the speech on TV. It was delivered on a Tuesday morning, when just about everyone was at work. Instead, people watched it online, most of them on YouTube, either as it was happening or at their leisure later that day or in the days to come. Eventually, tens of millions of voters saw the speech through various outlets.

This marked a fundamental change in political coverage and message consumption, and one that will only continue as technology rolls forward: big moments, political or otherwise, will no longer be remembered by people as times when everyone gathered around TVs to watch a speech, press conference, or other event. Increasingly, most of us will recall firing up the computer, searching for a video, and watching it at home or at the office–or even on cell phones.

The campaign used live-streaming both to give supporters the opportunity to see events live from across the country and to turn the campaign website into a “real ‘home’ for our supporters and a one-stop shopping place for anything campaign related.”

An interesting lesson the campaign learned was the importance of authenticity in online video. After putting out a video with webcam picture quality, they “tried the next one with better lighting and an actual high-definition camera. The results looked much more produced. Our supporters hated it. They thought it seemed inauthentic, staged, and less personal.” By being authentic, transparent, and honest with supporters in their videos, they were able to get great results:

This was not a mere tactic to get more money or volunteer time. It was what we believed. This video message was one of the most effective ones we sent; the response factors we could measure–contributions, spike in volunteer hours–unmistakably bore this out, but we also received a lot of anecdotal feedback from our staff in the states and in conversations our supporters were having with Chris Hughes’s online organizing team. People felt like they were being leveled with, that we were explaining clearly how their time and money was being utilized. And they felt that we valued and needed them.

List-Building and Events

The Obama campaign viewed every event as a list-building opportunity. This gave the campaign a huge advantage because of the size of the crowds that Obama was able to draw. By having people RSVP for events ahead of time and checking in at the event they built their list and were able to trace people back to the voter file. Of course, this opportunity only presented itself at their own events:

So while candidates were thrilled to have a big audience to speak to at an existing event, we were more interested in building events that would feed into our specific voter targets and that included trying to attract a lot of people who do not like to pay to go to a political event.

The campaign chose to put the additional work in to create their own events instead of taking the easy way out by attending existing fundraising dinners and state party events. By holding events in areas where a lot of unactivated potential Obama supporters could attend, many times in locations that were not used to seeing candidates personally, the campaign was able to sign up new voters and further expand the electorate.

Supporters were told “that nothing was more important than getting additional people signed up on the site so we could communicate with them and try to convert them to donors and volunteers.” The list was able to grow organically as supporters, through peer-to-peer contact, recruited new supporters who then did the same.

The Role of Technology in Staff

Plouffe’s view of the role of ‘new media’ within the campaign structure really resonated with me:

The new media group (online communications, Web-page development and maintenance, texting) in most campaigns reports to the communications department, and its department head is not considered an equal of other senior staff. But I saw how important the burgeoning online world was to our overall success; new media would touch just about every aspect of our campaign. So I had that department report directly to me.

Having been the person in that role in the past, his take on it is 100% accurate. I also agree with his following prediction: “I assume in future campaigns this department will be called digital strategy, not new media–it’s not new anymore and it’s not just media.”

As we have seen technology played a integral role in the campaign at every level of organization and strategy. Both internal and external communication, list-building, field and voter contact, GOTV, finance; all these areas were bolstered by the effective use of technology.

Also check out Learning from Obama: Lessons for Online Communicators in 2009 and Beyond by Colin Delany.

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The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory

Those of us in the progressive youth movement have been talking about the importance of young voter outreach for a long time now. We tried to drive home the point that young voters are not apathetic, but disengaged due to that self-fulfilling prophecy of traditional campaign ‘wisdom.’ Youth political organizations kept succeeding, increasing youth turnout in 2004 and 2006. David Plouffe, David Axelrod, and Barack Obama eschewed tradition by deciding from the beginning that organizing young voters to expand the electorate would be the key to victory.

“One of [Paul] Tewes’s ideas was to make sure we were working every community, no matter how small. African American, Latino, high school kids, Republicans–we had staff assigned to all of the demographics, months ahead of our competition.” The Obama campaign began by working hard to turn out the potential voters that traditional campaigns write off. While critics of the youth vote claim that 2008 was a fluke and just about Obama, it is clear that the campaign worked hard to organize youth that had never been asked for their vote by a campaign. The campaign knew that they “would win Iowa only on the backs of independents, Republicans, young voters, and new registrants–a scary proposition, to say the least.”

The campaign was able to look at the election through the lens of a young voter. “At least 95 percent of our six thousand employees were under the age of thirty, most under the age of twenty-five.” While it is not uncommon for a lot of campaign staff to be young, what was exceptional about the Obama campaign was the respect for them and the willingness to trust their instincts on what was happening on the ground.

We adjusted accordingly, adding more media and Internet advertising geared exclusively to younger voters; we prepared to do a lot more instructional and informative work with our supporters so they knew how to caucus, while trying not to spook them; and we redoubled our efforts to attract support from conventional caucus Democrats so our newbies in certain precincts were matched with some grizzled veterans.

The campaign invested in “advertising specifically geared toward women, seniors, and younger voters, African Americans and Latinos.” The messaging of the youth advertising reflected an understanding of the generation: “spots for those under thirty were very aspirational, a call to action, focusing on issues like Iraq and the environment, and calling on younger voters to get involved in shaping the future.” Young voters, used to being ignored, were finally being engaged by a campaign with the same effort and respect showed to seniors.

The Obama campaign conceived of and executed a strategy to expand the electorate by registering and turning out young voters and other traditionally underrepresented demographics. Here are a few passages from The Audacity to Win on how this strategy became a winning one:

As the returns came in we could see the traces of our strategy’s design: by registering over one hundred thousand new voters, producing strong turnout among African Americans and young voters, and winning college-educated whites thanks to our stand against the gas tax, we had made ourselves unbeatable in North Carolina.

We registered many thousands of new voters in both states, and these voters participated at high rates, defying the conventional view that new registrants turn out in very low numbers. A strong showing from African Americans and younger voters might put both these states in play in the general election.

If we did not register enough African Americans and young voters in North Carolina and then turn them out on Election Day, we could not win. Facing a traditional electorate meant we shouldn’t even bother with a state like North Carolina, no matter how much money we spent.

By focusing their attention on young voters and actually spending resources on research, the campaign learned new things about new and young voters. An example was when their numbers showed that they were not meeting their initial goals for youth early voting:

First, many young voters were so excited by this election that they couldn’t envision doing anything besides voting for Barack Obama in person at the polling location. When we raised with them the possibility of long lines, or the potential to free themselves up to volunteer, they simply wouldn’t budge. This was a big moment for them and they felt it would seem bigger if they voted at the polls. In any case, they were still dead-set on participating, which relieved us.

The second lesson was that there was still some confusion about who was eligible to vote early and how it worked. Armed with these findings, we made sure our communications to younger voters included even more remedial information about the nuts and bolts of early voting. Soon enough, their numbers began to climb. In many states we lowered our expectations for the under-twenty-five early vote (but not for overall turnout), and we eventually hit those numbers in most battlegrounds.

Republicans have spent a lot of effort in previous campaigns spreading misinformation to young voters about such things as early voting, residency, and registration. By putting in the effort to combat that misinformation, the campaign was able to empower and turn out voters who were unsure of the sometimes complex election laws.

As we now know, this strategy of reaching out to young voters paid off, despite the naysayers from the media and the old school political establishment:

Our base–African Americans, sporadic-voting Democrats, and younger voters–was turning out in larger numbers than McCain’s base in most states.

The share of the electorate over sixty-five actually dropped between 2004 and 2008, not because fewer older voters turned out but because younger ones showed up in droves.

Because the Obama campaign was committed to putting effort and resources in registering and turning out young voters, treating them with the same respect as other demographics, they were able to build on the work done by youth organizations since 2000 to culminate with those voters carrying Obama to victory and the presidency. However, culminate may not be the appropriate word. The work in further expanding the electorate by turning out young voters to elect Democrats is far from over. There is more potential for the Millennial generation to not only expand the electorate in an election, but to fundamentally alter the country for the better.

I’ll leave you with David Plouffe’s words on our generation:

I left the campaign extraordinarily confident about the future of the country, because of the talent and drive of the young men and women who made our victory possible. Certainly, we would not have won the primary or the general without a surging youth turnout in any number of states, Iowa most importantly. But their impact on the election goes beyond casting ballots. Most of our staff was under thirty, many of them were under twenty-five, as were a sizable chunk of our most active volunteers. As I witnessed, sometimes in awe, their performance and desire to look beyond themselves and contribute to a better world (and they have a distinctly global outlook) it gave me extreme comfort to know that in the not so distant future they will be taking the reins and leading our companies, campaigns, and institutions. For my generation, the rocking chair beckons–these kids are that good. I can’t wait to experience their leadership and vision in the years to come.

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Mike Lux’s The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be is a thoughtfully examined analysis of the dichotomy of progressive and conservative philosophy and the long-term effects of each when they prevailed.

The central thesis is that American history has been a long battle between conservative philosophy and its proponents, focusing on individualism and maintaining the wealth and power of the economic elite using fear as its weapon, and progressive philosophy and its proponents, focusing on equal rights and community by utilizing hope. This conflict has existed at the core of American society from the first calls for independence to the 21st century, and when progressives are on the winning side America advances and prospers.

Lux argues that in history dramatic change occurs for three major reasons: “earthshaking events” such as war, disaster, and revolutionary technologies, groundbreaking new policies such as the New Deal and civil rights legislation, and “intellectual change moments” when a speech or debate dramatically alters public sentiment. He observes that many of the major events that fall under the previous categories are bunched together within certain decades, and while he believes that the theories of historical and generational cycles have merit, such dramatic change also requires strong leaders or an important movement:

History has big patterns and trends, but very little is inevitable. The decisions, courage, and failures of individual leaders and mass movements of people determine its course.

Each chapter progresses through American history by identifying the core philosophical and policy battles, the players on both sides of the debate, and the results of either the progressive or conservative victory. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and the progressive vs. conservative debate during the formation of the United States and how conservative misinterpret them to lend support to their own beliefs.

The Progressive Revolution also identifies many of the setbacks and failures of progressive causes, leaders, and today’s Democratic Party. For example, how the alliance of the civil rights and feminist movements broke down after male abolitionists took a deal to pass the 14th Amendment by excluding women from its protections, how following 1968 “the movement quite literally allowed itself to fall to pieces by focusing on identity politics and single-issue causes,” and how the Democratic Party has been held back from making major progress in the last couple of decades because of a “culture of caution.”

Lux believes that we have the chance now to create a “big change moment.” As the American people struggle in the wake of George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency and eight years of conservative philosophy in practice and the progressive movement “emerge[s] from its period of relative slumber,” the time is right to launch a new progressive era. The organizational power of the internet and the rise of the Millennial generation increase this potential:

Young people are becoming engaged again in the political fray, voting and volunteering at levels one could only dream of just a few years ago–a trend that was helped, though not started, by Barack Obama’s campaign.

The Democratic Party can once again be the party of progress if they “think big and bold, rather than small and cautious” and run as “strong progressives, rather than as careful, defensive-sounding centrists.”

The Progressive Revolution provides us as readers with the historical context and philosophical grounding to carry forth the progressive banner of Paine and Jefferson, Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Martin Luther King and the Kennedys, and write our own chapter in American history.

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Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America by Susan J. Marks provides an analysis of the emerging water crisis in America by looking at its causes, governing structures, and potential solutions.

The United States uses approximately 408 billion gallons of water every day, 345 billion gallons of that usage being freshwater. The largest usage of water in the United States by far — 195.5 billion gallons — is for energy production. When most people think about water they tend to focus solely on drinking water and household usage, yet domestic use ranks a distant third behind agriculture with 46.9 billion gallons per day. Water is used in every aspect of our civilization and is a critical component of every supply chain. Droughts have an enormous economic impact on the country, costing between $6-8 billion annually in losses.

Dr. Peter Gleick sums up the global water crisis:

The easiest way to describe the world water problem is that a billion people don’t have access to safe drinking, and 2.5 billion don’t have access to adequate sanitation services, which leads to 2 million or so preventable deaths every year from water-related diseases.

Most people know that the amount of water on Earth does not change. However, water’s movement, form, purity, and pollution sources are all dynamic. One of the major causes of the change of these qualities is climate change. Increased global temperatures have reduced snowfall in many mountain areas of the United States, with melting snowpack being the main resource for summer water. Climate change also affects storm frequency, intensity, and drought.

According to Joseph Dellapenna of Villanova University “the root of the water crisis historically is not so much population growth but change in the way we use water, change in per-capita water demand.” The Clean Water Act was able to actually decrease the gallons of water used per person per day from 1980-2000 by limiting water discharge for industries and power plants, causing these industries to research and implement new ways to reuse water. The success of the Clean Water Act shows that good legislation and smart planning can go a long way in improving America’s water situation.

Unfortunately, our water infrastructure and urban planning have been contributing to the problem instead of improving our efficiency. Most of the water infrastructure in the United States is antiquated: storm sewers and drainage systems leak large amounts of freshwater, paving large areas in cities and suburbs prevents water from soaking back into the ground to replenish aquifers, and leaky pipes waste 7 billion gallons of clean drinking water every day. Poor planning has caused even areas with high precipitation to have water shortages because of these factors.

Water infrastructure development and maintenance has been at a stand-still since the 1980s. The country has not built a major water storage system since Reagan was President, and our dams, aqueducts, and storage systems were designed for a different climate than we currently experience. Old pipes can allow contaminants into the water supply, and while water treatment facilities are normally able to kill bacteria and parasites, these antiquated systems are not well-enough equipped to deal with modern pollutants: pesticides, industrial chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. The NRDC estimates that more than 7 million Americans get sick from contaminated water annually.

People tend to turn to bottled water as an alternative to tap, believing that it makes them safer. Unfortunately this is both not the case and leads to the usage of even more water. Bottled water isn’t safety tested as often as tap water, and most bottled water is from taps and public reservoirs anyway. The real problem is that the amount of water used to make the plastic bottles and in the gasoline fuel to transport those bottles. Instead of demanding we improve our water infrastructure, people purchase bottled water which actually causes greater depletion of our water reserves.

Improving our water infrastructure and urban design would go a long way into securing our water supplies through the 21st century. Porous pavement, water-friendly landscaping, rain gardens, and vegetated swales would help rain water soak into the ground to replenish aquifers. Reducing nonpoint source pollution, which is recognized as the primary threat to American water quality, would prevent fresh water from being ruined. Fixing those leaky pipes and leaching storage systems would prevent the waste of billions of gallons of water.

This has become a problem that we as a country have put off until tomorrow, and today we are faced with expensive repairs that scare politicians. Cost estimates for the replacement of drinking and wastewater infrastructure range from $485 billion to $1.2 trillion over the next 20 years. So far the United States has only allocated $945 million for such projects, which was included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act earlier this year. From any estimate that only covers a sliver of the necessary repair.

According to Marks, “the biggest obstacle to solving the nation’s water problems is refusing to admit they exist.”

Aqua Shock also includes some informative chapters about water laws, the people who control water, the cost of water, and whether our water can be saved. The book definitely does its job in informing the reader about our water problems and water policy, and would be valuable to anyone that is interested in conserving resources and developing our country’s infrastructure for the 21st century.

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Barack Obama’s new campaign book, Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise,is now available for purchase at amazon.com.

The book contains his written plans for America, transcripts of a number of his speeches, and a new foreword by Sen. Obama.

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In Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy, Jeffrey Feldman analyzes the use of violent language by right-wing pundits and how it undermines the American tradition of working together to solve our problems. He looks at the debates on gun control and immigration, the use of September 11th, the language of Bill O’Reilly and James Dobson, as well as the perceived “war against Christmas” in order to illustrate how pervasive the violent framing of civic debate has become.

Feldman’s aim is to “take a longer, more detailed look at what right-wing pundits have said with the goal of understanding the kind of public conversation their words have built.” He calls his readers to action to “refuse to accept it, talk about the important issues it obscures, and work together to improve our civic discourse.”

He believes that America’s “lost passion for discussion in politics and the rise of a mass media with entertainment for profit as its central goal” is enabling the violent framing of political debates to continue without check. The public needs “a media with an interest in that conversation that is prioritized above the bottom-line.”

Feldman offers six suggestions to help re-frame the political debate:

1. Stop using “war” metaphors.
2. Revive expository journalism.
3. Invest in local media.
4. Increase citizen participation.
5. Introduce a rating system for political entertainment.
6. Create new deliberative forums.

Feldman looks to the rise of the Millennials as hope for the creation of new deliberative forums.

In many ways, the generation referred to as the “Millennials” (those born post-1980) is already involved with this task, creating and inhabiting these new forums with regularity and enthusiasm.

The rise of the Millennials is also leading to discussions about “harnessing social networking technology for the practice of government itself.”

Here are some of the questions and thoughts I wrote in the margins of my copy while reading:

• It is possible that the polemic writing about the failures of the Bush administration are less effective than expository writing about the failures themselves would be. Polemic writing tends to lead readers to believe that the article is biased political propaganda and turns off all but the choir. Writing modeled after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle could have a much greater effect in reaching and convincing moderate and even right-leaning citizens.
• What role will expository journalism have on blogging, and conversely, what role will blogging have on expository journalism?
• We should create public awareness programs on the use of new media and citizen journalism.
• What will be the role of traditional media companies and larger websites in facilitating citizen journalism. Currently CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, YouTube, and MTV have created such outlets.
• The use of violent metaphor leads people to believe that solutions are external and are the fault of an enemy. The goal becomes combating the enemy and the only solution is their defeat. It undermines the concept of personal responsibility and the idea that people can work together to create solutions to problems.
• James Dobson’s violence as authority teachings makes the ability to inflict pain a sign of power and authority. This may lead people to use violence against one another in order to show dominance and feel like it is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.
• Those Americans whose culture was the monolithic American culture in the past fear the loss of their cultural hegemony in the wake of the new multiculturalism in America. Instead of realizing that their culture is not being damaged or attacked, only joined by others, they believe that the acceptance of any cultures other than their own is a “war” against their own.

Have you read the book? What are your thoughts? If not go pick yourself up a copy and come back to join the conversation.

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Andrei Cherny, a young Arizona Democrat and all-around rock star was interviewed on The Colbert Report last night promoting his new book The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour.

Video of Stephen Colbert’s Interview of Andrei Cherny

Andrei’s book is extremely timely in the light of the current attitude towards diplomacy held by the current administration and of Republican nominee John McCain. The book’s subject is the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, when the United States continuously flew food and supplies to West Berlin after the Soviet Union blocked off all food transportation routes into the city.

The air lift began only three years after the end of World War II, and many Germans held an antagonistic view of the United States, associating the country with bombing their homes and defeating their country. The commitment of the United States in supporting the people of West Berlin changed the perceptions of the U.S. held by those people. Where once they were associated with aggressiveness and violence, they became associated with compassion and survival. Andrei’s chosen title, The Candy Bombers, is based on the American pilots who dropped candy bars with parachutes down to the children of West Berlin.

The Candy Bombers is valuable reading for those who want to remember what American foreign policy used to be about. By showing compassion for the people of other nations we built the reputation and standing as a great nation supported by the international community. From Andrei’s book we may be inspired to seek a better foreign policy strategy, one the does not antagonize, but wins the hearts and minds of the international community with compassion.

Go ahead and pick up The Candy Bombers at your local bookstore or on Amazon.com.

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