Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Sharing campaign methodology

The interaction between British and American political campaigns has been going on for a long time. Reagan learned from Thatcher. Clinton learned from Blair and Blair from Clinton. Now Brown hopes to benefit from lessons learned from Obama.

Yes we can: Labour election campaign to adapt Barack Obama's blueprint
In 1992 and 1996 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown came back from the Clinton Democrats with a suitcase of tools – the soundbite, the war room and rapid ­rebuttal – tools that helped them deliver an ­election landslide in 1997. Now Labour, facing a most difficult election, has returned to the Democrats for inspiration and insight.

In January 2009 Douglas Alexander, Labour's election coordinator, went to speak to the Obama team expecting them to tell him "modern campaigning begins and ends with the internet"...

Alexander quotes David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager arguing: "What people on the ground said to one another was just as important, if not more important, than what Obama said himself. We could not put a price on it — regular people briefing Obama's message to their neighbours, serving as our ambassadors, block by block, throughout the battleground states."

Labour has as a result invested ­heavily in a means whereby party members in their own homes can contact voters and build a relationship…

"Historically Labour has used tech­nology as a form of control. We would use ­pagers and faxes to send out ­messages telling people what line to take. The key learning from the Obama campaign is to use technology to empower your supporters."

The Tory database, Merlin, he believes, is nowhere near as empowering…



Labour: voters' 'submerged optimism' will stop Tory win
Labour plans to stop the Tories winning the general election by tapping into a "submerged optimism" about the future and by applying Barack Obama's reliance on word-of-mouth campaigning, backed by the internet, Douglas Alexander, Labour election co-ordinator, discloses today in a Guardian interview.

He also reveals that Labour's campaign slogan will be "A future fair for all" – a phrase designed to compete with what Alexander describes as David Cameron's "valueless promise of change"...

He said: "We must not allow the Tories to frame the election as a choice between status quo and change. What we want is a choice between two competing visions of the future."…

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