Mark McKinnon

Mark McKinnon says it's unsurprising that Obama has dropped the "change" charade.

[T]he presidency is all about politics. Obama did an artful job of creating an image of someone divorced from the nitty-gritty of hardball, brass-knuckled politics. But it’s far from reality. Obama got elected, in part, because he put a team around him of combat-proven veterans who know how to, as Bill Clinton once famously said, put his opponents’ teeth on the sidewalk. [...]

It was pretty clear to me early on that President Obama understood the importance of maintaining and fueling a political machine. He was presented with the option to kill the budget for the political operations that work out of the White House. It would have sent a powerful signal about ending politics as usual. But then he would have handicapped his ability to enact the kind of change he’d promised his supporters.

This is exactly right. Obama has been more artful at this "iron fist in a velvet glove" game than most, but he's always been a ruthless machine politician.  The appointment of Rahm Emanuel was a very clear signal that Obama had no intention of changing the game.

Obama knows his strength, his brand, is his ability to appear conciliatory, thoughtful and sympathetic.  He can't be the Bad Guy in his administration.  So Obama has hired a Chief of Staff who can handle the Enemies List.   Rahm Emanuel will be the ruthless guy who knocks heads, threatens opponents and generally does the dirty work, leaving Barack Obama to sweep in as the nice guy who wins friends and charms enemies.  Good cop, bad cop.  We won't necessarily see it happening, but it will happen over and over again.

I measure the seriousness of a politician by how willing they are to work against their own interests to enact good policy.  It is a rarity.  As McKinnon points out, Obama's unwillingness to close the political shop - to elevate governance above politics - is a sign that he'll probably be an effective advocate of his policies....but he certainly wasn't serious when he wrote "it's not enough to just change the players. We have to change the game."

Democrats have not changed the game.  They aren't even changing the players.

Mark McKinnon - with whom I work in other contexts - has an interesting post at Internet Evolution on the impact of the internet.  He is specifically discussing Twitter, but I think his point about bilateral communication is applicable to the internet media in general...

The greatest impact the Internet has had on politics is democratization. And nowhere is this trend more evident than in the current use of microblogs like Twitter. [...]  People are listening to and analyzing every single word that John McCain and Barack Obama say, so the campaigns don’t necessarily need another channel for communicating to the public. But people are also paying attention to which campaigns and politicians are actually listening to the people as well, and it may be that the true value of Twitter for political campaigns is in listening more than talking. Twitter is more than just a large, unorganized focus group; it is a link to real-time constituent consciousness.

We have been conditioned by traditional communication channels - broadcast and print - to think in terms of Push Media; that is, using the media to push a message in front of an audience.   Campaigns, electoral and advocacy, are sometimes (very slowly) getting a little better at Pull Media (media that draws an audience organically), but even the Push/Pull media is only half of the value these organizations can draw from the internet.

As McKinnon says above, campaigns should listening.  There are a variety of values in this...

• Early Warning Intelligence: campaigns, or any organization, can get a tremendous amount of intel and insight out of the online world.  The internet is the tip of the spear for their opposition.  Stories and frames frequently emerge online well before they bubble into the public consciousness.  Early warning allows campaigns to take preemptive action to mitigate or even prevent those probems.
• Better Ideas: Ideas don't always need to originate from the campaigns. The best messages and the best research often comes from the crowd, and the internet - particularly the blogosphere - is a rich source of ideas.  Campaigns do this to some extent already (see: Joe the Plumber), but there is a great deal more idea-farming they could do.
• Sound Boarding: If a message and theme is working online, then it works.  Online buzz is not a scientific way to test messages, but it can be a very valuable sounding board for campaigns to evaluate existing messages and ideas.  It can also be a useful way for campaigns to find the holes in an argument before they leap onto it.

 The evolution from Push to Pull Media is important; learning to listen better will improve their Push and Pull media efforts.