McCain Camp Said No To Text Messaging
Republicans have been kicking themselves for not thinking of some innovations that Barack Obama's campaign rolled out one after another, but in some cases John McCain's strategists were presented the same ideas and gave them a thumbs-down. One infamous case: text messaging supporters with the announcement of a vice presidential pick. Online GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini writes on TheNextRight.com that he's heard from "numerous" people inside the McCain campaign who say the idea of announcing online or via text message was floated "months before" the Obama camp made its announcement. Senior staff "shot down" the proposal as "undignified."
That's a dangerous mindset, Ruffini warns. "The notion that this is somehow not mainstream enough, that this is somehow not dignified, too cutting edge, too bleeding edge, is just so self-defeating and so illustrative of the problem that I think it must be discussed," Ruffini said in an interview with NationalJournal.com. Former McCain Web staff denied to NationalJournal.com any notion texting was dismissed for being "undignified" but confirmed that it was considered before being disapproved on concerns it would disrupt the rollout of a surprise pick.
The campaign strategy was to "ride the wave of the pop," and "anything that would have mitigated that pop we couldn't do," said the McCain Web staffer. The surprise factor (announcing little-known Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin while the media focused on Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty) successfully drove thousands to JohnMcCain.com, and the campaign raked in $4.5 million in donations from the Web during the 24 hours after the pick, with thousands signing up for campaign e-mails.
No single tactic would have been likely to change the outcome of the election, but the Obama campaign used anticipation of its VP announcement to harvest thousands of e-mail addresses and phone numbers that fed its database and later were used to drive turnout and raise money. Ruffini says Obama's decision "clearly fueled his dominance in swing states and on the airwaves."
But McCain's staff was focused on stepping on Obama's post-convention bounce with a splashy announcement on television, with its much larger audience, just one day after the end of the Democratic National Convention. Ruffini dismisses that strategy as "a very old-school mentality" that disregards the importance of building the database. The media would have covered the announcement no matter where it was made and would have broadcast a Web video if it were posted, while the campaign raked in voter contact information and generated buzz for an eventual televised press conference, Ruffini contends.
Still, back-to-back conventions restricted what the McCain campaign could do without risking an accidental leak coming before Obama even left the podium as he accepted the nomination, which could have been perceived as "dirty politics." And then there are the polls. McCain's surprise strategy resulted in one of his only leads of the campaign after the Republican National Convention. Although both the McCain surprise strategy and the Obama database-building strategy have their merits, Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, suspects that if the McCain campaign had enough time and resources, it would have done both. In other words, they are not mutually exclusive.
The campaign's mistake was in having to make a choice at all. "His Internet team was strapped for cash from their very beginning," Rasiej said. "The fundamental problem was not enough time and not enough understanding of the potential for technologies -- whatever they were, you name it -- at a high enough level." -- Lucas Grindley
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