INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS BARACK OBAMA: PEOPLE’S PRESIDENT www.choicesvideo.net Choices, Inc. 3740 Overland Ave. Ste. F Los Angeles CA 90034 1 All interviews conducted by Danny Schechter. For private use and/or educational use only. Any reproduction outside of those areas is prohibited except with written permission from Choices Inc. 2 Interview with Jonathan Alter, Newsweek 12.29.08 0:16 D: How did he do it? Barack Obama came from nowhere now he’s President of the United States. JA: He did it because in his bones and in his own resume he’s an organizer and a planner and he thinks long and hard a few steps ahead of where most other people would. And so I think you could even argue he’s a genius organizer. I don’t think he’s a genius all together, but when it comes to this, just take one example that has not been commented on at all either by Obama or people writing about him. 0:57 JA: In 1992 he ran a voter registration drive the registered more than 100,000 African Americans in Chicago which help elect the first African American to the Senate from Illinois, Carolyn Mosby Braun and help Bill Clinton carry Illinois that year. I’m not sure why they didn’t want to talk about it, but maybe because it had some association to ACORN and because they were all black. But that was an astonishing feat of organization. So he managed Bill Clinton basically did it….. 1:34 JA: Barack Obama basically did it because he a genius organizer, developed himself into a highly inspirational speaker and motivator and because he had some good fortune. So organization, motivation and luck. 1:54 D: What about the grassroots campaign? I don’t think we seen anything like that ever really, the number of people involved and the degree in a way of it being decentralized. People were out there doing their own thing, but doing it under the guidance of the campaign. 2:10 JA: You had a perfect meeting in 2008 of man and moment and technology. A lot of changes take place in life because technology ripens at a particular time. In the same that Roosevelt understood the potential of radio, Barack Obama understood the potential of the internet and social networking to create a much more decentralized and yet potent organization. And he also trusted younger people with great responsibility. He trusted his own ability to convey the kind of person that he wanted what they call and No Drama Obama person who is not on any kind of ego trip. That filtered all the way down through the organization so if you had empire builders and ego trippers they were quickly flushed out. And then he also, starting with Camp Obama in 2007, where they would train organizers they created an, almost an Amway type of approach were you went to try to convince someone else to either work for Obama or support Obama. You bore witness; you tell your story about how you had come to Obama and why he can be meaningful in this other person’s life as well. So they used….Let me take the Amway comparison back. What they did was use almost a quozy religious, but not in a scary way approach of baring witness to why Obama was meaningful. And so when they would have meetings or when you’d go to the door or when you would create what they called your MyB.O. page online, you would be explaining what it meant to you personally and that would then unleash interest on the part of other people. 4:25 D: There was a lot of focus on neighbor-to-neighbor activity. Phone banks, they made a million phone calls in Iowa alone. 4:32 JA: One of the things that is fascinating about their phone banks is that they did no in-state phone bank work at all in the general election. They wanted all of their people in state, who lived in state to do door to door canvassing and the phone banking was all outsourced. So for instance California residence who were not particularly relevant because everybody knew it was a blue state, they made millions of telephone calls in the fall of 2008. They have these massive phone bank, banking operations, most of which could be done from home and they had all sort of new technological ways of making more calls per hour then under the old system. They 3 were extraordinarily well organized the way they would tee up their lists and keep very careful lists of who had been contacted. 5:28 D: Where they getting instructions from websites, from Barack Obama websites? 5:25 JA: They were…It was a lot of instruction from the Obama website. There would be webcast with advice, but none of that was proprietary, in other words anyone that went onto the site could get this. So they had quite a high level of transparency. Although if you were a reporter they were much more closed about decisions that were not online. But online they created an enormous sense of community that you could easily join. They when some people would kind of go rouge a little bit and build a successful organization a local Obama organization, instead of saying oh you didn’t listen to us from Chicago Headquarters, they would say great join us. And they would bring them into the fold. And they were very inclusive that way as long as you were delivering results. 6:27 D: In a sense do you think that he understood that the major media could be positive or negative toward him and it was better to build his own media his own media system that could build his base? 6:39 JA: Well online I think they posted something like 1,500 different Obama videos and they created their own content and their own communication channels both to their supporters and to the American public, but then they also worked traditional media as well. So they two pronged approach, but they definitely widened what the definition of media means and how to interact with the American public. And what’s going to fascinating to see how that plays out in his administration. 7:16 D: What about the reaction of the other campaign to all this? The McCain campaign, the Clinton campaign. 7:20 JA: Well everybody had a website and they had for years, but they were just way behind in understanding the full potential of the internet. They were organized for the basically still organized for the pre-internet era, the way they had cylos in their campaign. The Obama campaign, yeah there would be a fundraising department and there would be a field organization on the traditional…But they interacted with each other and they reinforced each other much than any other campaign. So they…really from the very beginning partly as a result of Obama’s old friends who came out of the tech world. They understood much better than the other campaigns the potential of technology to change the outcome. 8:11 D: What I saw on TV was a lot more punditry, experts commenting on polls and campaign advertising, not doing very much reporting on the ground. What’s your sense of it? 8:23 JA: Well I think what’s happened is since you have 24 hour chatter, and unfortunately or rather fortunately for me, you know I’m a part of that, it does detract from one’s ability to go out and report. Also the whole structure of the media business now has changed. And I would summarize it this way. Talk is cheap and reporting is expensive. In other words if my new organization or any other news organization wants to have me chattering either in print or online or on TV, I can do that from home. If I’m going to go to Baghdad or even out to Iowa and meet, that’s expensive. So if talk is cheap and reporting is expensive as the profits from news gathering kind of evaporate and dead tree media starts to move off stage with very very serious economic consequences (newspapers) yeah start to move into America’s past they’ll still be around but not as dominate. And once print recedes and you have this new model, it’s very alarming because if talk is cheap and reporting is expensive, who’s going to gather the news that everybody else just chews over all the time. Somehow we have to create models that allow people to go out and continue to gather the news. 4 There’s actually going to be fewer reporters covering the Obama administration, with all the news that’s going to be coming out of Washington; fewer reporters and that’s a very alarming thing. 10:11 D: Do you think Obama’s people knew what was happening in the media and in a sense didn’t get caught up in satisfying the mau sort of speak? You know pumping stuff into it, but creating their own way of doing it. Fewer press conferences events that were not big debate type events. 10:29 JA: The Obama folks thought through the new media environment in a way in ways that the other candidates did not. But that was true not just for media across the board. The Obama campaign was thinking strategically. The other campaign whether it was Hilary’s or McCain’s or any of the others were thinking tactically and ultimately if you have a strategy and it’s the right strategy you stick to it you’re going to be in better shape than going back and forth.