By Edward Luce
Financial Times:
Hope, change, friends. At a certain point in the past few years, Barack Obama and Facebook began to overlap in people’s minds. Not only did Mr Obama’s 2008 campaign demonstrate Facebook’s potency as an electoral tool, it also hired Chris Hughes – a Facebook co-founder – to do the job.
Mr Hughes is a donor to the Obama 2012 campaign. So too is Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, who recently hosted a fundraiser for Mr Obama in her home. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s principal founder, is one of three American inventors Mr Obama cites when he extols US innovation – the other two being Thomas Edison and Bill Gates.
In the same way that Halliburton offered a corporate expression of the Bush administration, Facebook captures the zeitgeist of Mr Obama’s. It is little surprise the freshly-listed Facebook faces the same overblown expectations with which Mr Obama started out. It may be too late for Facebook to learn from Mr Obama and since its valuation it has $104bn worth of reasons not to care.
But it is not too late for Mr Obama to transcend the social marketing values that seem to characterise his re-election campaign. Its vocabulary is often indistinguishable from Facebook’s. In his IPO filing, Mr Zuckerberg promised to find ways to allow advertisers to “join the conversation” with registered Facebook users. Some may say this is another form of eavesdropping.
The Obama campaign also has a habit of calling for “conversations”. Likewise, whether it is an email from Michelle Obama asking you to “surprise” her husband on his birthday with a donation, or another $3 lottery solicitation to win dinner with Barack and Joe, Obama 2012’s terms of endearment often match Facebook’s faux-intimate undertones.
There are plenty of sceptics about Facebook’s record-breaking valuation. Given the legal uncertainty on how – and what – it will be able to harvest from our personal information, doubters wonder if the launch price could redeem the hype. Facebook may justify the exuberance by turning into an all-encompassing platform for email, search, networking and entertainment – as it hopes to do. Or it could be a disappointment.
Mr Obama’s frothy initial valuation offers parallels. Having marketed himself as the man who would transcend Washington’s cynical ways, Mr Obama’s brand was quickly tarnished. It was one thing to promise and fail to close Guantánamo Bay. It was quite another to produce a new rationale for indefinite detention without trial. Or his promise to clean out the lobbyists, who have never had it so good. Or the fact that Mr Obama has now prosecuted more people for leaking under the Espionage Act than all former administrations combined. And so on.
Like most successful tech start-ups, Mr Obama remains captive to the same voices with which he secured his dazzling initial success. But unlike Facebook, or Google, he now has an opportunity to start again. He should begin by breaking out of the marketing worldview with which he has imprisoned himself.
That would require a reappraisal of what brought him to power in 2008. One friend and adviser to the White House describes the misperception as follows: “They caught the [anti-George W. Bush] wave beautifully in 2008 but they didn’t invent it. They still think they did.” The wave has long since crested. But the self-belief – and complacency about the limitations of Mitt Romney as an opponent – are still strong.
Mr Obama’s approval ratings remain stuck at well below 50 per cent and voters say they trust his opponent more on the economy. This is unsurprising given that re-election campaigns are usually referendums on the incumbent. Most Americans consistently say they do not think their children will be better off than them. And trust in public institutions, which was at a historic nadir when Mr Obama took office, has not budged. Mr Obama’s stubborn poll numbers echo scepticism about Facebook: Last week 59 per cent of Americans said they did not trust it to protect their privacy.
Mr Zuckerberg will have to find ever better ways to slice and dice the data of his 901m customers. Mr Obama is approaching his own customer base in precisely that frame of mind. In contrast to 2008, Mr Obama’s re-election campaign is betting that this year’s race will be won through mobilisation rather than persuasion. His priority is thus to appease aggrieved elements in the Democratic base, such as Hispanics, unions, the young and gays – and presumably, at some point, the environmentalists.
Sometimes micro-targeting works. Getting out the base, with a dollop of character assassination thrown in, was how Mr Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004. It may work for Mr Obama in 2012 – and it would obviously help if he could define Mr Romney as a heartless asset-stripper. But it is a poor mandate on which to govern. Witness how quickly the oxygen went out of Mr Bush’s second term. It is also a poor substitute for a genuine “conversation” (apologies) about the daunting challenges America faces.
In 2008 Mr Obama stuck throughout with the motif “Change you can believe in”. In 2012 brand Obama is no longer an exciting start-up. People are cynical. The president needs to convince them he is running a viable enterprise that knows where it is going and which can deliver on performance. His latest, and probably fleeting, attempt at an election slogan is “Forward”. To what, exactly, is by no means obvious.
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