Obama Saves Face(book)

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has become a clear favorite among young voters. Just check his Facebook profile.

In the new frontier of Internet campaigning, many of the 2008 candidates have created official profiles on the popular social networking Web site Facebook.com. But Obama’s number of friends easily eclipses those of his opponents on both sides of the party line. As of Nov. 15, Obama had over 162,000 supporters. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), by contrast, has only 52,000 online Facebook backers.

The active youth-focused arm of the campaign, “Students for Barack Obama,” grew out of a Facebook group. And the campaign even started its own social networking site, my.BarackObama.com, where his supporters can interact and learn how to help contribute to the campaign, in essence coalescing the group via an electronic medium.

Through Internet and student campaigning, the Obama campaign and its campus supporters hope to galvanize the youth vote into a movement to help him secure the Democratic presidential nomination. Skeptics, however, question if Obama’s immense Facebook support will translate into votes, pointing to the low voter turnout of 18-24-year-olds and the failure of 2004’s Web-friendly candidate, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean.

But the Obama camp argues that the youth vote and the power of the Internet as a valuable organizing tool should not be underestimated.

“Senator Obama and the campaign believe that people don’t give young people enough credit, and that the challenges and the issues facing young people are very serious,” said Jen Psaki, an Obama spokeswoman. “Even back in 2004, more young people voted than ever before. This is a group we need to give more credit to. Our goal here is to provide people with tools to take organizing into their own hands.”

Syracuse University political science professor Grant Reeher also cited higher voter turnout among younger age brackets in 2004 as a counter to skeptics. He said while young people don’t often vote in high numbers, they should not be discounted. “It’s a challenge,” he said of courting youth votes, “but not an insurmountable one.”

Reeher added that a charismatic candidate like Obama can bring a greater number of youth voters to the polls, as Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s and 90s.

George Washington University political science professor Michael Cornfield praised the Obama campaign’s Internet strategy.

“What Obama is doing is he is using the Internet to gather supporters and get them communicating but he is also getting them to meet face to face,” said Cornfield, the author of Politics Moves Online: Campaigning and the Internet. “And I think that is very, very smart.”

But as for Facebook friends turning into votes, Cornfield said he isn’t sure what to predict.

“I have some skepticism about this,” he said. “You need a lot more than a lot of friends and YouTube hits to raise money and win elections.”

Either way, a strong Internet presence is an important feature for campaigns, said David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. It is not surprising that the cyberspace aspects of the Obama campaign attract the Internet generation.

“You want to go where people are and people — especially young people — are on the Internet,” said Weinberger, who served as senior Internet advisor for Dean’s 2004 campaign and is a current volunteer advisor for the John Edwards (D-N.C.) presidential campaign.

As to those skeptics who use Dean’s failure to dismiss the Internet’s impact on the campaign, Weinberger said such reasoning is a fallacy.

“There are a lot of reasons Dean isn’t our president now,” he said. Most memorable is Dean's infamous yell and brash style.

Obama’s strong youth support is not a new development. Students began expressing their support for Obama long before he declared his candidacy this February. In July 2006, Bowdoin College senior Meredith Segal — now executive director of Students for Barack Obama — wanted to find a way to see if other young people shared her support for the Illinois senator who had caught her attention after his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. She turned to Facebook.

The group she created titled, “Barack Obama for President in 2008,” quickly gained support, reaching nearly 22,000 members by November 2006 and more than 50,000 by February of this year.

“I was hopeful that if we were successful in amassing a large number of members, it could help to encourage him to run for president,” Segal said. “But I had no idea the group would grow in numbers so fast. It really astounded me to see how many young people joined.”

“What was more interesting and inspiring to me was the number of people who contacted me to express eagerness to do more,” she said.

The group decided to take their activities from cyberspace to the real world. In December 2006, they set up a national leadership team, began creating chapters on college campuses, and registered as a PAC with the Federal Election Committee.

When Obama announced his candidacy in February, the group worked with Obama’s team to morph into its current incarnation as the official student arm of the campaign.

SBO currently has chapters on more than 500 college and high school campuses and aims to excite young people about Obama, a candidate the group feels will bring about much needed change.

Through SBO, “Obama is not just thanking young people for their support but asking them to engage and play active roles in this campaign,” Psaki said.

SBO has worked with the Obama camp in many ways, including co-planning a rally at George Mason University that drew more than 3,500 people to an Obama speech. The rally, which was planned and advertised almost entirely online, demonstrated the potential of Web campaigning, especially among young people, said Tobin Van Ostern, SBO’s deputy director and a sophomore at George Washington University.

“We do spend a lot of time to make sure we have a huge presence online.”

Yet Van Ostern was also quick to acknowledge the limits of the Internet as a campaign resource.

“It is important to realize that the Internet is important, but it is never designed to be used exclusively,” he said.

Cornfield agreed, “It’s August, but are the Facebook supporters going to show up in November? How is the Obama camp going to make sure they go to vote?”

Obama even garnered the brief support of Caroline Giuliani, daughter of Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani (R-N.Y.). The 17-year-old, who entered Harvard this fall, was a member of the popular Facebook group: "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack),” but quickly withdrew after Slate magazine learned the news.

Win or lose, Obama’s campaign will help political analysts further study the Internet’s impact on American politics.

“The value of social networking sites to political campaigns is still a question mark,” Cornfield said. “2008 will give us the first answers.”