The author of the memo, Peter P. Swire, who was also the attorney for the New Media team during the Obama-Biden transition, argues that the transition from a campaign to the White House is not just a transition to fewer staff members, but also a transition from having to scale from 10 million motivated supporters to 300 million Americans. While it would be great if the White House could respond to every comment on a blog individually, it would be hard to scale this with just a handful of people running whitehouse.gov (and, because this is Washington, there is already a White House Correspondence Office that is officially charged with answering letters and calls from citizens).

From Talking Points to Policy

In addition, responses now also have to be 'cleared,' that is, vetted by all the relevant agencies. As Swire points out, it was easy to ask a North Korea expert about what to say about a developing situation in North Korea during the campaign and to use that expert's opinion as a talking point, but now, White House bloggers don't just speak for the campaign, but for America, and a talking point could have real, potentially dangerous consequences. Now, the White House team has to get clearance to post about pretty much any topic.

Video

Swire also talks about the White House's extensive use of video. Thanks to using YouTube and other vendors, scale is not an obstacle for the New Media team, and thanks to the fact that these videos tend to be short, it is relatively easy to get clearance for these videos.

The Purple Folder

According to Swire, President Obama receives a purple folder every night, with 10 letters, faxes, or emails from the general public that are "broadly representative of the day's news and issues."  However, while it is nice that the President would read these letters, maybe it would also be nice if he read a couple of blog posts from representative political blogs every day as well (of course, we don't actually know that he doesn't do that already anyway).

It's All About Scale

The one recurring motif in this memo is that it is hard for the White House to scale its operation in order to really engage the public, and that politics obviously often get in the way. It obviously also doesn't help that the White House staff can't rely on the hundreds of volunteers that the Obama campaign was able to recruit at a moment's notice, as that would open up a whole other range of political issues.

Thanks to the Resource Shelf for pointing us to this memo.

On Facebook, the crowd is still very young, with an average age of 22.96 as of this February. Typically, the youth vote, although coveted, could not be counted on thanks to low turnout of young voters at the polls. However, this small time local election may prove to be one of the first examples of the huge impact Gen Y can have on the political process.

According to Rearden Killion Communications, the St. Petersburg advertising firm that handled the campaign of Kevin Beckner in the District Six democratic primary for the Hillsborough County Commission, the Facebook effort comprised of content, video production, and media buying valued at around $7000. There was also a Facebook app which let supporters put a campaign button on their own pages and provided a link to Beckner's page. The overall effort increased Beckner's Facebook group membership by 50 percent.

In this local election of this County Commissioner, you have to wonder if this is a hint of things to come in the upcoming presidential election here in the U.S. The Obama campaign has defined themselves by the way they have embraced technology. From blogs to social networks to even SMS text messages announcing the VP, the campaign is "a revolutionary shift in our country's political media ecology," says Andrew Rasiej over on techPresident. Although it has yet to be seen whether or not the use of technology will propel Obama into the Oval Office, the results of this local election prove that there is merit to targeting the online crowd and asking for their vote.

"The rise of the Obama Campaign tells us that Scale Matters. It means that The Long Tail is validated (in politics at least)," says Garcia. "It also means that size doesn't matter after all; rather, it is the quantity that matters. Scale Matters."

That's an important point, and echoes what we said earlier this month about the paradigm shift in political fundraising. The Internet has allowed campaigns to tap into the Long Tail of politics for fundraising and organizing. Obama and Paul are attracting people to the political process who have never participated before, and while their message and rhetoric has a lot to do with that, it is the web tools that have enabled it and allowed it to happen.

What Howard Dean started in 2004 with his now famous use of Meetup.com to mobilize a grassroots campaign across the US, has developed further in this election cycle with the use of tools like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. "It is technology that is driving the grassroots effort in such a fast and scalable fashion for these new campaigns," writes Garcia. "By enabling users and donors to contribute their dollars, content and time through online tools the speed and efficiency in which these efforts grows takes on a network effect that accelerates campaigns quicker than ever. In many ways, its the network effect of user participation and user empowerment that is driving the Obama campaign."

New software has created a political landscape where voters feel more connected to candidates and each other than every before. Citizens are able to participate in the political process on a personal level more easily as a result of web 2.0.

Because of that development, political campaigns in 2008 are able to tap a previously unreachable Long Tail of voters (or potential voters). What Obama and Paul are tapping into also echoes the commentary Alex Iskold made about the Long Tail of the blogosphere last November. "You can make money on the Long Tail but not in the Long Tail. The precise point of Anderson's argument is that it is a collective of the Long Tail amounts to substantial dollars because the volume is there," he wrote.

It is important to note that what Obama and Paul are doing is exploiting the massive scale of the Long Tail, they're not a part of it. While neither is a centrist candidate, they are also not fringe candidates. The Long Tail, as it applies to candidates, exists with third parties and independents. The argument that Garcia is making is not that Obama and Paul are Long Tail candidates, but that they are tapping into the Long Tail of voters to power their campaigns.

(It is also probably important to note that Garcia has a vested interest in his theory as the CEO of Central Desktop, which makes software that was used by the Obama campaign to connect to voters in California.)