Obama Policymakers Turn to Campaign Tools

President-elect's administration wants to capitalize on high-tech campaign tools -- online videos, blogs, e-mail alerts -- and social networking techniques to generate political momentum for restructuring the health-care system. The Washington Post reports.

... The Obama team chose to begin its high-tech grass-roots experiment on the issue of health care because "every American is feeling the pressure of high health costs and lack of quality care, and we feel it's important to engage them in the process of reform," said spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter.

It started with a simple 63-second video posted on
Change.gov, in which health advisers Dora Hughes and Lauren Aronson posed the question "What worries you most about the health-care system in our country?"

That triggered 3,700 responses, from personal tales of medical hardship to complaints about "socialized medicine." The cyber-conversation was interactive, allowing individuals to reply to one another and rate responses with a thumbs up or down. The top-scoring comment, a pitch for a "paradigm shift" toward prevention, had 82 thumbs up.

The Obama technology gurus then built a "word cloud" showing the 100 most frequently used words in the responses. The cloud's biggest words -- indicating those used most -- include "insurance," "system," "people" and "need."

"The Obama administration has learned that listening may be even more important than talking, because it diffuses opposition," said Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a nonpartisan Web site focused on the intersection of politics and technology.

Read full article.

emily | 9:52 AM | Political Videos |
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