In the past two weeks, the emergence of so-called ‘birthers’ into the mainstream political consciousness has been met largely with astonishment and disdain. The birthers are conspiracy theorists who question the validity of Barack Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate, alleging that the president was born in either Kenya or Indonesia.

But this is no ordinary conspiracy theory, and we need to understand the birthers in order to understand the underside of the new political world created by technology and by the election of our first black president. Catapulted into the limelight by internet organizing and the remnants of the radical right fringe, the birther movement is emblematic of the ways American politics has changed during the past decade.

The fervor of the birthers has been incubated in the strange backwaters of the right-wing blogosphere, an environment not so unlike the ascendant left-wing ‘netroots’ that helped bring Obama to power. Both have their minor celebrities, significant major party connections and cause célèbres. In fact, Robert Gibb’s “15 dollars and a web domain” comment neatly describes what most people call (in other contexts) the democratic potential of internet publishing. Websites like WorldNetDaily have mobilized highly motivated people via a drumbeat of criticism (repeated in the echo-chamber blogosphere), and then allowed these highly motivated people to project what would otherwise be an invisible issue into the limelight — with YouTube and crowding internet polls as their chief weapons.

Which is not to say all net-movements are created equal. The shrill nativism of the birth certificate conspiracists makes them particularly dangerous as the US embarks on a radical reconfiguration of its relations with the world post-Bush. They are the backlash and the defenders of the old guard, and their power must be accounted for as the rest of the country moves forward.

The fervor of the birthers should be understood in its broader context. Essentially, the birthers represent a dethroned white right-wing movement, grasping for some kind of kill switch that will short-circuit the course of change charted by the Obama administration. Many on the right see a host of changes — in the role of government, in the relationship of the US to other countries, and in race relations — and correctly recognize them as a death knell for traditional American conservatism. The birth certificate issue becomes a way to delegitimize everything Obama stands for — and in the case of his legal changes, literally a way to wipe the slate clean.

The same pattern emerges with other prominent conspiracy theories. The 9/11 ‘truthers’ gained steam as the Bush administration went to war in Iraq and a vast network of civil liberty violations came to light. Truthers saw 9/11 as the lynchpin of Bush administration’s power to do most of whatever it pleased, and sought to destabilize the entire administration by revealing the ‘truth’ of what happened on 9/11/01.

Of course, all this could be resolved with the release of one simple document, right?

Not really. Gibbs was right when he said that the birther conspiracy is here to stay, because any facts presented to defend Obama’s American past will be viscerally delegitimized in the eyes of the birthers, who see Obama as a threat to their long held worldview. The birthers’ standard of proof is dictated by a set of values that make any defender of Obama un-American and therefore untrustworthy. The only people worth trusting are fellow reactionaries, who see America’s fall written everywhere — those who don’t must be blind to the truth, and therefore could never read the birth certificate for what it ‘really’ is.

In fact, the birther conspiracy theory evokes the supposedly American values that Obama transcends — notions of rights of birth, rigid identity borders and the ‘Homeland’ that proliferated in the darker days of the Bush administration, and have taken root in some parts of the American psyche. The idea of ‘proof of citizenship’ shows up in a number of right-wing arguments about welfare and voter registration, and in the massive ICE workplace raids that deport anyone funny looking who can’t immediately produce proof of their citizenship. Basically, for the birthers, America belongs to Americans, and if you disagree with what they think the country stands for — well, then you must not be from here.

That’s why I think that mainstream commentators miss the mark when they present official statements and internet print-offs as the final question on this issue. The real battle here is a battle over values — those demanding Obama’s birth certificate espouse the notion that someone becomes great primarily by right of birth, while many of Obama’s supporters backed him because they thought he would be a worthwhile leader in troubled times. The best way to defeat the birthers is to return to talking about the big issues facing our world today. There are more than enough

1. Read a lot – People have been writing for a long time, and chances are that you aren’t the first person to think about what you want to write about.  Reading other authors sharpens your perspective on subjects you want to write about, but also keeps your writing fresh – hopefully by reading others, you keep tabs on overused clichés and overlaps in content or form.

2. Know your favorite authors and why they’re your favorite authors – I suspect that if you write, you’ve taken inspiration from some source that inspired you to write.  Go back to those writers and think about what spurred on your passion.  Keep track of why you like them – not just as stylistic source material, but to understand what makes readers want to keep reading.

3. Take notes – both on the books you see and the people you see.  Memory is in short supply, and the act of writing something down allows you to build on a passing thought by putting a bead on it and giving it extended thought.  This provides fodder for content and constructive reflection on ideas that strike you but may need substance to become viable foundations for larger pieces.

4. Outline obsessively – There should be no rush to finish off an article, and I think the final drafting stage should be the shortest step of what you do. Much of the final product should come cut and pasted from outlines and documents where the bulk of your thinking occurred.

5. Think about media – this means understanding the audience’s experience of reading in the format you select to write in.  Reading on the printed page directs thought in different ways than reading on the internet; your work should embody conventions that best suit the medium you – and the reader – have selected.

6. Don’t be afraid to change tack mid-work – your original inspiration isn’t a sacred calling that you must follow to the ends of thought.  If an opportunity presents itself to write a compelling piece on a subject you never intended to, it may be because your first idea wasn’t the real story, and you should shift gears.

7. Don’t look for bad guys and good guys – simple narratives are boring and clichéd caricature turns readers off.  In my experience, unambiguous good and evil almost never exists, and hammering human existence into simple narratives means your story will probably fail, in a myriad of ways.

8. Write every day, or as often as possible – keep the wheels greased linguistically.  You have to practice constructing ideas to find your best work and best ideas.  Treat daily writing as a process of sifting out the good ideas from the bad, and a sandbox for new techniques.  These shouldn’t be published necessarily, but having folks read daily writing might be helpful.

9. Don’t just be a writer – have a passion that allows you to put fervor and purpose in your writing.  I try to take the “80% of life is showing up” maxim to heart, in the sense that you only get an ear in on 20% of the interesting bits of life by spending all your time thinking about/through writing.  I’m an activist, and connections generated through my activist work has generated a huge number of valuable leads, numbers, and story lines that can distinguish a good article from a great one.

10. Take note of the environments where you work best, and create those environments – this is a point about work environments.  Think about pieces you were happiest with, and then think through the environments that let you produce your best work.  Seek out environments like those to write in the future.  I personally know I work best in semi-public, quiet spaces like libraries or study rooms, with people around but research resources at hand.

11. Never hold your best stuff. (Stolen from Clay Felker) If you have a scoop, a story, or a good idea, run with it.  Holding off working on or publishing a good story helps no one, least of all yourself.

12. Treat writing as something more (and less) than a calling. Understand and feed your passion, but know there is a utilitarian angle to what you’re doing.  Your passion and inspiration only take you so far – you must take into account the needs of your readers, and the needs of an industry that surrounds writing and publishing.  Understand the ends-means function of writing from the get go, and you’ll be more successful from the outset and  get over the feeling of soul-burnout in the long run.

In the same way that celebrities – the human pseudo-event – are always our contemporaries (Boorstin, 1961 p.63), the political pseudo events are necessarily contemporary, relying on current events and still-circulating symbols of power or prestige to work.  Boorstin’s own examples suffice to show how this is true.  He gives a long invective on the subject of Congressional press releases, which only involves current sitting members of Congress (p. 18); his claims about the access of the President to the press-corps similarly concerns the person currently filling the office (p. 40).  Additionally, his leading example of an event planned to ‘celebrate’ the 30th anniversary of a hotel opening (p. 9-10) demonstrates how the pseudo event requires a relationship to an audience for its existence and efficacy, and the rough dynamics of how the pseudo event creates attention.  What makes the celebration he describes an ‘event’ is the participation of a “prominent banker, a leading society matron, a well-known lawyer, [and] an influential preacher,” all of whom already exist as agents of a public, and allow news of the event to circulate within the audiences that already recognize them.  The language used to describe the significance of the participants in the celebration reveals the real nature of the pseudo event itself, which relies on the self-reflective attention of the audience – their ‘prominence’ in ‘society’ itself makes the event ‘well-known’ and therefore ‘influential.’  The contemporary-ness of the pseudo event should focus our attention on the means by which attention gets created by the mediums that cover and produce the news.
I believe that the advances that connect pseudo events and ‘images’ described by Boorstin when he says “[t]he very same advances that made [pseudo-events] possible have also made the images …more vivid, more attractive, more impressive and more persuasive than reality itself” (p.36) in fact constitute a unified media environment driven by certain technological and economic relationships that constitute contemporary power, persuasion and the public sphere.  Before getting into the connections between pseudo events and other mediated realities described by Boorstin, I’d like to briefly address the nature of these technological/economic advances.  Boorstin describes the development of a “Graphic Revolution” whereby the production of images and news becomes an industrial affair, with steam-powered presses fed by supply lines of telegraphs stretching across the world (p. 12-13). He also puts significant weight on the founding of the Associated Press, at which point “news began to be a salable commodity” (Boorstin, 1961 p.13).  The pseudo event becomes possible because of an attitude and aesthetic of news-production derived during this period of industrialization.  However, I believe Boorstin overlooks one crucial point: what becomes a commodity during the ‘graphic revolution’ is not news, but rather audiences.  The technologies that developed to “make, preserve, transmit, and disseminate precise images” (p. 13) developed in order to market those images to audiences that news outlets then marketed to advertisers.  They became feasible investments because they sparked (and created) a kind of interest that became highly salient with desirable audiences for advertisers. Newspaper owners stoked the fires to sell more papers and reach a bigger audience for its advertisers by beginning to issue more ‘updates,’ and adopting a sensationalism-friendly style.  The key point of the role of the audience in the economic production of the news means that we must supplement Boorstin’s thoughts on the cultural production of the news:  “With more space to fill, [the newsman] had to fill it ever more quickly.  In order to justify the numerous editions, it was increasingly necessary that the news constantly change or at least seem to change… News gathering turned into news making.” (Boorstin, 1961 p.14)  In order to understand why and how news outlets cover pseudo events, it must be understood that ‘news making’ also became ‘audience making’, a development that continues to shape the nature of political and corporate power.
The pseudo event as described by Boorstin is consistent with a larger media environment that commodifies not just the relationship of an individual to information, but the relationship of consuming individuals to other individuals consuming that information.  The creation of fast-updating media markets by way of accelerated production of titillating news products accounts for Boorstin’s introductory note, as well as most of the rest of his book.  In the introduction, Boorstin describes a series of lofty, contradictory expectations that he claims Americans hold with regard to their world.  For instance: “We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat or take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not think less of others for not believing” (Boorstein, 1961 p. 4).  The explanation lies precisely with the media-production system described above, which uses a series of emotionally charged stories with rapid turnover to sell news.  The tensions between the points that Boorstin lists is never felt by the individual media consumer, because each position is held in terms of the atomized, quickly disappearing news story.  The sections of The Image following that on pseudo events expand more effectively on the role of the audience in contemporary society.  Here I will seek to show how these connect back to the pseudo event as a audience-centric event.  First, the celebrity as someone who is ‘famous for being famous’ turns a relationship to an audience into a source of outreach to larger audiences, personal cachet and income – “Celebrities are made by the people. … The celebrity is a tautology” (Boorstin, 1961 p.74). Thinking of celebrity as the product of audience participation explains the intimate love/hate relationships fans develop to what they know to be a façade of self image celebrities construct – their expressions of love and hate assert the basic power they have to create or destroy the celebrity in all of their splendor. A similar dynamic emerges in the concealing/revealing dialectic in news reporting, which often goes ‘behind the scenes’ to expose how politicians pander to the audience they need.  Additionally, the rise of best-seller culture (decried by Boorstin at p. 119-125) shows how popularity, understood as the interaction of a text with a large general audience, becomes a commodity all of its own.  In a similar though distinct vein, the proliferation of ‘digests’ that Boorstin sees as the fragmentation of originality in fact reflects a similar kind of attention-commodification.  The digest trades in assumptions about audiences and popularity – articles get reprinted based on where and among whom they previously circulated in other publications.  The ‘quality’ of those publications – and the assumed social significance of their audiences – impart importance onto the texts published within them, making them candidates for cataloging in the digest.  The attention of audiences becomes an explicit commodity in these types of texts.
Finally, I would like to examine the political issues associated with this understanding of our contemporary media environment.  In particular, I would like to focus on how attention and popularity constitute their own particular kinds of power.  As a corollary to this, I would like to claim that ‘discussion’ and ‘debate’ do not serve to deconstruct power, but rather manifest it by focusing further attention onto the subjects at the center of the particular debate.  The not-quite-un-truth of the pseudo event shows how the interests of established power centers lie not in concealing the truth, but rather controlling the terms under which it gets discussed, and furthermore encouraging more discussion about it in the terms desired.  Additionally, the reliance of the pseudo event on previously circulating symbols of community means that the pseudo event creates a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of notoriety for the participants involved, which becomes its own kind of continuing political power.
The central thrust of my argument is the connection between attention and power.  I understand power very broadly, defining it as ‘the ability to determine what is possible.’ The pseudo event determines what is possible by determining what people even know by controlling and focusing attention.  For example: Boorstin cites the case of Joseph McCarthy, who was able to stage a national communist witch hunt and set the tone of anticommunism for decades, despite the fact that he was one of the most written about – and condemned – public figures of his times (p. 22).  His power came from the ability to quickly and effectively publicize his accusations in such a way that refutations would be un-remembered or only able to mitigate the impact of the accusations.  He accomplished this goal simply by having a bigger megaphone for his platform, and in the process became enormously influential.  Similarly, despite the pseudo-ness of the current presidential campaign process, and the need for only “pseudo-qualifications” (Boorstin, 1961 p.43), the winner still gets to be President of the United States.
Popularity – creating and holding attention – becomes a political and economic commodity.  Barnum turned even bad press into ticket sales.  George Bush turned mixed (virulently pro- and anti-) press into a certain kind of cachet in the 2004 election. His ‘flip-flopper’ attack against John Kerry essentially reduced to a rephrasing of Bush’s relative well known-ness in comparison with his opponent: while voters may hate Bush, at least they know him, with Kerry they have an unknown.  This shows how mere familiarity with a public figure constitutes a kind of power that translates into political success. The power of popularity and familiarity manifests itself in other ways, such as the intractability of incumbents in US Congressional elections, where largely disliked but familiar members of Congress have something like a 90% and up re-election rate.  Attention plays a role in corporate power as well – in the successful Schlitz beer campaign highlighting the bottles’ ‘steam-clean,’ the effectiveness of the campaign seemed to be merely its mildly compelling narrative and substantial ad budget, rather than any intrinsic significance to the claim (Boorstin, 1961 p.215).  The purpose of the claim about steam-cleaning is to provide a pretext to discuss the Schlitz name at the expense of discussion about other beers.  While not relying on explicitly bad press but rather irrelevant press, Schlitz still embraced the adage ‘any press is good press.’ The ability of attention to create and sustain credibility is at the core of modern political power.
Boorstin hints at the attention getting/focusing function of pseudo events through his discussion of their relation to reality, where he claims that “counterfeit happenings tend to drive spontaneous happenings out of circulation” (Boorstin, 1961 p. 40).  The ‘driving out’ occurs as the news production process shifts to the development of a large number of emotionally compelling stories, at which point our understanding of power should shift from the production of truth and lies to the production of attention, and the relationship to audiences.  In this sense, I would like to reverse Boorstin’s claim about pseudo events and propaganda- while he says that “Pseudo-events appeal to our duty to be educated, propaganda appeals to our desire to be aroused” (Boorstin, 1961 p.34), I believe propaganda appeals to our desire for education or ‘truth’, while pseudo events appeal primarily to our desire to be aroused (or at least engaged by the news over our morning coffee).  Ultimately, I believe this arousal-economy of attention defines some of the key features of contemporary political power.  Understanding the salience of mere attention in shaping political power allows us to think differently about how to create resistance.  Too often, political movements attempt to approach power as if it operated using propaganda as I described it – they attempt to unmask for the sake of discovering truth.  Understanding this mode of power as passé is vital to crating more effective resistance to power. From this point, we can take that efforts at refuting or disproving the intended meaning of a particular political act often reinforces its power by allowing the act to frame your discussion and by focusing more attention upon it.  Efforts to ignore the act will likely also fail (and usually involve a kind of refutation to encourage people to ignore it).  The most salient resistance might be the staging of counter pseudo events that challenge the single narrative established by a prior act, without directly engaging or refuting it.  Resistance must take into account the economy of attention as one of the keys to power, and begin to deconstruct it productively.
Boorstin’s description of the rise of the pseudo event offers an important jumping off point for understanding the constitution of power.  The importance of attention to the function of the pseudo event should signal a reconfiguration in the theorization and practice of politics both.

The basic failure that led to the economic crisis we face today is the failure to account for the possibility of unforeseen risk.  Taleb believes risk should be understood as the average of all potential outcomes of a transaction, accounting for the magnitude of relative gains and losses, where a large but rare gain or loss can overwhelm the impact of small but more likely outcomes.  He believes large gains or losses exhibited in the market can be understood as necessarily a product of the random chance of eventually inevitable outlier events, rather than the particular skill of investors.  For this reason, Taleb believes investors or traders should avoid entering into trades that introduce potentially excessive risks. This shows why the failure to account for the possibility of large risk is different than the inability to see risks developing – the nature of risk means that future outcomes cannot be fully known – but rather that the massively over-leveraged, interconnected financial system took bets of a certain systemic magnitude that made some kind of crisis occur.  The phenomena of traders ‘blowing up’ occurred on a large scale, the product of the asymmetric nature of catastrophic, black swan events.  Traders in the market collectively made decisions to engage in certain types of risk (Credit Default Swaps, the re-packaging of sub-prime loans in an originate-to-sell fashion) that exhibited a bias towards counting short-term visible gains and underestimating system-wide losses that outweigh temporary gains.  Taleb articulates an argument that explains that a small risk of a massively negative event outweighs the gains of engaging in certain activities – the paradigmatic example of such a game being Russian Roulette with a payout for surviving a pull of the trigger (p. 99).
The psychological explanation for engaging in economically risky behavior leading to the current crisis is essentially a kind of bias towards tangible results and the development of a fast-paced, 24 hour media environment surrounding investing today, both of which over-emphasize the meaning of largely random information.  In a ‘Bull’ market (Taleb problematizes this term for precisely its inability to measure invisible but massive risk, but it serves to explain a situation where generally investors make profit as a class), pervasive short-term ‘evidence’ of investors taking profits distracts or blinds them to systemic risks yet to materialize – even when those systemic risks might erase the value of their assets over the longer-term.  Basicly, the impact of short term random fluctuations of the market led to a systemic blindness to Black Swan type outlier events that would later be dismissed as random or highly unpredictable.
The debate between Robert Schiller and George Will that Taleb describes on pages 37-39 explains how this bias towards tangible but random results manifested itself in the media environment of traders and investors, defined by constant news coverage and instantaneous news stories that focus on near-trivial information.  Journalists like George Will are bound by daily deadlines that force them to make judgments on gains and losses on the market that probably in fact are meaningless to the overall trends of the economy.  However, this short term information exhibits a pull on the consciousness of investors disproportionate to its utility because of its vividness in comparison with yet-exhibited losses, and the effort of journalists to impose a story onto events. Distortion comes in the form of statements like “the market today rose by 75 points on information that such-and-such company’s quarterly earnings exceeded expectations” that give small insignificant events meaning.  The small-scale frame of financial gains led to the relative blindness of traders to the inevitability of a crisis at the level the entire over-leveraged system, exactly demonstrating Taleb’s claim that “the problem is that we read too much into shallow recent history, with statements like ‘this has never happened before,’ but not from history in general (things that never happened before in one area tend eventually to happen)” (p. 108).  Widespread profit-taking, occurring in an emotionally manipulative media environment led to the mis-perception of large risks to the economic system with the potential to wipe out profits.
Bankers and traders used specific tools in the years leading up to the emergence of the current crisis that exhibited some of the most dangerous aspects of risk misperception in a random environment fraught with the potential for outlier events.  Generally, the current economic crisis could be seen as a crisis of a variety of “superstitions” (p. xl) – about the rising price of homes, the pricing and rating of economic tools, and the role of CDS – that were at the core of theories about investing previously.  One key piece for explaining the relationship of randomness and risk perception to the current crisis is “the formula that sunk Wall Street,” a copula formula for assessing the risk of default in securitized loan tranches, using the current price of Credit Default Swaps for certain companies to rate securities (Salmon, 2009). The formula coupling CDS to ratings made fast and easy ratings of collateralized debt obligations that underestimated the risk of default by way of a poor data set, and ignorance of the possibility of linked, snowballing losses.
The copula formula demonstrates the worst of the biases introduced by “low resolution” risk assessment tools (Taleb, 2004 p. 231).  Specifically, CDS is a recent financial innovation, at least at the trading levels that would lead to a useful measure for rating default risk. The relative newness of the product means that a connection between the rise and fall of CDS with defaults could not be made as firmly as necessary to justify the level of risk assumed by companies issuing/buying on the ratings provided.  Companies issued ratings to borrowers and lenders which could not establish within a reasonable margin the real risks or gains involved.  Taleb explains the problem with short term measurements in the analysis above, but the potential for snowballing once-in-a-lifetime risks associated with securitization of mortgages made the copula particularly virulent in our current market.
Subprime loans originated by banks with an ‘intent to distribute’ fed a great deal of financial growth before the current crash, as securities built on the asset of a home with rising value were traded and re-traded between banks.  The assumption of rising home values undergirded the perceived strength of these loans, where even in the case of default assets could be recovered at a higher worth than initially invested, covering for cases where assets could not be recovered.  The entry of large number of home buyers via adjustable rate subprime loans buoyed the price of homes while simultaneously setting up a domino effect of linked events that could create catastrophic risk.  The character of risk associated with loan defaults and foreclosures tied the fate of relatively well-off borrowers and lenders to subprime borrowers on adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs). The use of ARMs meant that large numbers of borrowers would exit the market and increase housing supply on regular schedules as their mortgage rates increased drastically leading to defaults.  Once these borrowers defaulted and foreclosed, they exited the market and deflated demand while increasing supply of homes – brining down prices.  Also, foreclosed homes tend to begin bringing down the value of homes around them dues to lack of upkeep and scavenging crime.  As home values began to cease increasing or drop, borrowers expecting to refinance high-interest loans found themselves unable to post adequate collateral to get new loans, forcing them to default and leading to more declines in home prices.  From there, the dominos fell, leading to higher than expected foreclosure rates, undermining the quality of supposedly highly rated collateralized debt obligations and disrupting the balance sheets of all the banks associated with subprime loans.  The basic problem at the core of the copula formula reduces to a mismatch of CDS to bond ratings, and the inability to measure risk as an interconnected, escalating problem.
The nature of the current crisis also could be understood as the product of a general survivorship bias that encouraged consumers to take on higher and higher levels of leverage and risk.  The 90s saw an explosion of retail or consumer investing, where more non-financial professionals invested their savings, pension or retirement in the stock market or other financial markets.  The proliferation of casual investing could be understood as a kind of large-scale ‘attribution bias’ (Taleb 2004 p. 243), where a long rise in the value of stocks was interpreted as  the product of a sound investment system run by well-trained professionals. In fact, the profits of investors during the bubble most likely can be explained by random chance. The mass-marketing of investment firms to casual consumers built on a kind of trust that used returns as a measurement for skill, when in fact high returns during a bull market might in fact mean little about the underlying skills of the investment professionals involved.  Popularization of investment meant that more people were exposed on a personal level to the risks investors created, widening the scope and severity of the current crash.
The problems created by traders in the years running up to the crisis of 08-09 arose out of basically human but very dangerous attitudes towards risk and investment. Again, I think it’s important to emphasize that the problems do not necessarily arise out of a failure to predict large risks, which by nature cannot be fully predicted, but rather a failure to sufficiently protect against the impact of those unforeseen risks.  Risk perception and checks on catastrophe were undermined by poor measurement tools and an underestimation of the coupled impact of certain types of risk.  All this occurred simultaneous will a historically large exposure of the general population to the impact of economic catastrophe.

Taleb, Nicholas Nassim (2004). Fooled by Randomness. New York : Random House.

Salmon, Felix (2009). “Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street” Wired Magazine, February 23rd. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all

Bill Thompson just opened a new website designed by Blue State Digital, which also designed Barack Obama’s campaign site.

First of all, I’m increasingly inclined to give my qualified support Thompson for mayor – I don’t know if it was pure election-grandstanding, but it seems like every time he makes a public announcement of some kind, like his workaround of the MTA fare-hike, it’s generally sensible, effective, and conscious of class dynamics in the city (for instance, as Comptroller he got city pension funds to remove their money from companies that privatise formerly public housing in the city).

But that’s beside the point – I think this will be a test case in how well folks other than Obama can use his organizing model in their campaign strategy. While I trust that Blue State won’t apply the Obama model whole-cloth, many of the central elements of the Obama campaign revolved around him specifically, and might not translate well into other campaigns. When someone wins, it always makes their system look better than it probably is, and thevalidity of the organizing model will be need to be tested in a vareity of contexts.

Here are some of the risks I see in adopting the Obama model:

-Looking like an Obama hanger-on: to stick in people’s minds, you need to develop a distinctive personality. The individualist tendancy in American politics asks that politicians be in a way self-made. Trying to ride the coattails too overtly undermines credibility and might hurt the campaign.

-Social Media can hurt too: trying to mobilize folks via twitter/Facebook/etc. can become a conspicuous display of a lack of support as well. Having 50 people on a Facebook group demonstrates weakness in a citywide or statewide campaign. Thompson should be sure that embracing new media will build support among his target constituencies before over embracing the technology.

-You need a good story: Obama mobilized a series of glittering generalities based on his personal story. Thompson needs to develop a central story that reduces to a short-worded theme and three key policy proposals to organize people behind the campaign. One of the clear differences between Obama and Thompson’s site is the lofty quote Obama put on the top of every page. Thompson doesn’t have the same type of cred, or story to get people together.