Obama and Internet Politics One Year After: A First Look at the Digital Presidency

In the 2008 Presidential campaign, Barack Obama masterfully employed the internet as a platform for fundraising, citizen engagement, volunteer organization, and message distribution. After the election, many observers and citizens on both sides of the Atlantic expected that the internet would enable the people who had helped elect Obama to stay connected with each other and to support the President in the business of government. Two million profiles on my.barackobama.com, almost four million donors, five million contacts on social networking sites and thirteen million email addresses could be powerful allies in the “permanent campaign” and could even lead to an overhaul in the tools and strategies for Presidential “going public”, which was originally conceptualized as a television phenomenon and could now be expanded to digital media. Obama himself claimed that the engagement tools on his campaign website would remain active during his presidency for citizens to use in order to engage in the political process and provide input and support to the President. Looking at the Obama presidency from Europe fifteen months after inauguration, it seems to us that most of these promises are still unfulfilled and that the potential of the internet as a tool for government politics has been underdeveloped compared to Obama’s spectacular use of the new media for electoral politics. In these reflections, we wish to discuss how the President has so far employed the internet to engage public opinion and issue publics in order to mobilize consensus on policy proposals, put pressure on stakeholders in the legislative process, and keep supporters involved. As Ronald Reagan reinvented the bully pulpit for the television age, many expected that Obama would update Presidential communication for the digital age. In this essay, we argue that it has not yet happened and suggest various possible explanations. Our observations come from a distance, as we have witnessed the American debate from Europe. We hope that, from our particular viewpoint, we will be able to provide an interesting angle on these phenomena