Politics/Policy

What changes do I think the Obama administration will bring? That’s the meme with which I was recently tagged by David Wescott.

Hopefully, there will be a slew of political and policy changes that will make this country a better place to live and less of a joke overseas. Hopefully, we will edge closer to universal health care. Hopefully, the badly-listing ship that is our economy will right itself, the slip-slide of the Supreme Court to the far-right will be reversed and we’ll find a way out of the Iraqi conflict sooner rather than later. But those are all simply hopes for change. There are many more factors at play than one man, one administration and a stirring call to change, “Yes we can.”

What interests me from a marketing and social media perspective is a fundamental change that has already happened that makes these hopes realistic. As David says in his post, Obama understood that the instant communication and connectivity made possible by mobile and social media technologies fundamentally changed the nature of the game:

President-elect Obama didn’t create this change. He’s said so himself. He simply understood its existence. He used the tools people use today to communicate with each other, and by doing so he convinced us he knows politics is not a lecture.

Now he has to prove he gets it, and I’m not just talking about social media. We’re long past the point where you convince people you get it by publishing a blog or putting together a spiffy YouTube channel. They’re just tools. He’ll have to listen and respond. (emphasis mine, not David’s)

Ah, that’s the key. Use the tools to listen. And respond. Not simply to broadcast your point of view.

That’s the real interactive change I see in an incoming Obama administration. The key players — all the way up to the man himself — actively use the tools themselves. One of the top transition stories this week has been whether Obama will be able to keep his beloved Blackberry. An NPR segment yesterday described Attorney General designate Eric Holder as a “technology junkie.” It’s been widely reported that Obama intends to have a laptop in the Oval Office, another first.

Contrast that to an increasingly disconnected, soon-to-be-former President GW Bush who admitted in 2003 that he doesn’t read newspapers and the stunningly uninformed Sarah Palin who couldn’t recall the name of a single newspaper she reads.

This means that there’s a better than average chance that the incoming administration “gets it,” that they understand that our democracy requires a conversation with the American public, not a benevolent (?) dictator deciding what is best for the American public.

It isn’t that they used Twitter in the campaign or that the weekly address to the nation will be archived on YouTube. Both of those things are cool, but politicians have been embracing online tools, with varying degrees of success, for some time now. That’s not the change.

The change is that these communication tools, which are so much a part of our lives, are also part of theirs. These tools that we use to stay informed, to collaborate, to converse, to respectfully disagree, to battle it out, to reach consensus, to connect are their tools too. They don’t cut themselves off from the rapid flow of information. Like us, they revel in the hum of the Blackberry that says new email has arrived.

For all these reasons, I want to believe, I really do, that the first and most important change of an Obama administration is that the President-elect understands that the President is the representative by, for, and of the people. Our proxy, not our replacement.

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Final snarky aside: Of course, it helps that Obama was actually elected president, versus being named president. I can see how the Bush administration got confused there.

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Oops. Forgot to tag some others. I’d like to read what KD Paine, Elisa Camahort Page and Doug Haslam think. What changes will an Obama administration bring?