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Comment by kirubakaran | Hacker News Reader

No more election news after tomorrow, yay!

No, that's when the retrospective "This is how [Obama|McCain] won" articles start about who was best organized, who used technology best, etc :)

I would LOVE to study Obama's campaign as a retrospect. He did things nobody else ever thought of. He is the first real Internet candidate.

Howard Dean doesn't count?

Dean was the first one to realize the Internet could be used. But Obama built up an incredibly powerful campaign force in part by using the Internet to coordinate vast amounts of people.

I think you need to get more than 8 total votes to count. Dean and Ron Paul were both web fads, but Obama used it as an organizational tool and got results from it. Even if he doesn't win, he's forever changed the way campaigns will be run.

Dean wasn't a web fad, he was leading all the polls until about two weeks before the first primary when he opened his mouth and started saying stupid shit.

I agree, Obama wasn't the first to capture the Internet as an organizational tool, but he did it to a new level and made it a powerful weapon in his arsenal.

Ron Paul was the first. Obama copied much of what he was doing and brought it off line.

What did Ron Paul do that was at all comparable to Obama's my.barackobama.com?

Yeah. Ron Paul went viral, but not because of anything he did. Obama beat the two greatest political machines of our age and he did it almost entirely grassroots.

Obama grassroots? I don't think you are using the term correctly. It doesn't just mean "has popular support".

Grassroots, as I understand it, is when the movement is not orchestrated, but just springs up around the politician. Ron Paul and Huckabee certainly qualify, but I don't see how Obama does.

I'm sorry. I thought "grassroots" meant something akin to "community organization." My bad!

Okay, Obama isn't grassroots. But he has still put together the single most powerful team of volunteers any election has seen. And he's orchestrated a lot of it over the Internet.

Congratulations, go to the head of the class.

Nothing at all. Ron Paul was pretty much unknown to everyone who doesn't read Digg.

I never understood how the internet crowd moved from Paul to Obama. The two could not be on more opposite ends of the spectrum from an economic theory perspective.

I supported Paul because I'm a big fan of the concept of federalism. States band together for the few things that benefit greatly from collective action, like national defense, but keep the rest of the powers for themselves. It's kind of what the Constitution says in the first place, but even from a purely practical perspective, you have more say over a government that governs fewer people.

Government is a compromise between the benefits of collective action and the drawbacks of other people influencing those actions. We're not in the right place on the spectrum.

I support Obama because he has a reasonable approach to foreign policy, he cares about open government, he's ridiculously intelligent, his party isn't theocratic, and Sarah Palin isn't his running mate. I could do without the anti-trade sentiment, continuing the coupling of healthcare to employment, etc, but you work with the hand you've been dealt.

I don't think they did; it was different subsets of the "Internet crowd".

sometimes you just want to feel heard.

As some people have said to me (I'm Canadian) - no, that's when the lawsuits start.

If I ran a newspaper, I'd have both articles already written, so I could hit the press as soon as the result was confirmed...

I promise you that everyone who actually does write a newspaper already does. They do that with sports or just about anything that runs late at night but needs to be printed early.

And don't forget obituaries. Usually the job of interns is to write obituaries so that they're ready when someone unexpectedly dies.

Unless it's Fidel Castro. I work at a newspaper in South Florida. His (incomplete) obituary is very long and has not been written by an intern.

You may have seen an example of this happening recently when Bloomberg killed off Steve Jobs:

http://gawker.com/5042795/bloomberg-runs-steve-jobs-obituary

"dewey defeats truman!"

"How McCain/Palin stole the presidency even though they lost"

Oh give it a rest.

You don't think that's a possible outcome given the last couple of elections? :/

There will be rioting in the streets if there is an upset.

Surely nothing as bad as the rioting of 2000 after that election was stolen? just sayin' ;)

No, much worse than the small disturbance of 2000.

Compare the graphs here ( http://electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Pres/ec_graph-2008.html ), particularly the ones that leave out the "barely" states.

People are much less politically apathetic in the US than they were in 2000, and I'd bet money on a serious people-dying riot in the case of another shady election deal. The 2000 elections were close enough to fudge, this was a landslide.

I can't remember another time in my life where a lot of people were overcome with emotion to the point of tears at the result of an election in the US.

A small price to pay for the privilege of not living under a dictator or king.

What's so bad about Kings? Most modern Monarchies seem to do just fine.

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