In yesterday's midday open thread, Kos linked to a Washington Post story about how conservatives are going to try to move more forcefully onto the internet in the future (despite the current countervailing meme that the netroots has been repudiated by post election events like the Senate letting Joe Lieberman hold onto his chairmanship).
Earlier this week, as a part of my own studies into iPhone programming, I ran into a similar story on Politico, about a discussion group about the use of technology in the 2008 presidential campaign that included staff from both the Obama and McCain camps.
"We're very jealous. We loved your iPhone application," she [McCain-Palin veteran Becki Donatelli] told her co-panelists from the Obama campaign, Joe Rospars and Sam Graham-Felsen, explaining that the McCain campaign had wanted to harness the iPhone for their effort as well. "We had it sketched out. We had it planned and no way to get it done."
First, let me just say that you would have to ask whether there would have been enough McCain/Palin-oriented iPhone users to make it worthwhile for the campaign. Personally, I think there would have been (for reasons you will hear in a minute). The main thrust of the Politico story, however, was that the McCain team was whining about how so much of the high-tech community supported Obama that they just couldn't get their ideas out of the gate.
To which I say: codswallop.
"Memo to self: next time get the co-founder of Facebook on your team," said McCain-Palin veteran Becki Donatelli. "The CEO of Google was in the Obama commercial. I mean, you don't get more out front than that."
Speaking on a panel about the role of technology in the 2008 campaign, Donatelli said the McCain team had plans for using the Internet to reach voters, but ultimately lacked the resources and the personnel to put them into action.
Oooh, Obama had Facebook and Google on his side! Well, last I heard, McCain's national campaign co-chair was former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, someone he floated as a potential Treasury Secretary when asked about that position in the second presidential debate. Surely in her decade at eBay she made a few technically-inclined contacts? And last I looked, there were plenty of programmers around the world eager for work if they couldn't find someone in the US who wanted to work for McCain.
Not that it should have taken that many people. The Obama iPhone application was developed by a 10-person volunteer team of mostly Portland (Oregon) and Bay Area programmers and designers over the course of two months.
In other words, for the "we didn't have the resources" complaint to be valid means that McCain's people couldn't manage to find some way to outperform a team of unpaid Obamaphiles that could be counted on two hands. How pathetic would that be, if it's true? Ot is it just as likely that they were so incompetent that they didn't think of doing it and now they're lying about it? Considering how Republicans tend to run things, it could be either one of those or a combination of both.
And just as a final nail in the touchscreen of this story, although the iPhone App Store just went online this spring, followed by the public release of the iPhone Software Development Kit, it's been possible since last year to write Web 2.0-based iPhone applications. That's what Ron Paul's campaign did, back in July of 2007.
Since much of the attention Rep. Ron Paul gets comes from the buzz from his Internet-savvy supporters, it may not be that surprising that the Texas Republican is the first candidate to offer a platform on the much-hyped iPhone.
The application lets users access the campaign's social networking tools and videos. "The Ron Paul campaign continues to utilize new technologies to spread Dr. Paul's message of freedom, peace and prosperity," said eCampaign director Justine Lam.
And Ron Paul's older than John McCain.
This is the reason why I think the McCain team's failure to either recognize the potential of iPhone networking or failure to follow through on their haphazard plans (if they existed) may have made a difference. I doubt it would have won them the election, and I think that fact that they claim either reason stood in their way is illustrative of the way they probably ran the rest of the campaign operation, but if you want a window into an epic fail of a relatively manageable project, here you go.
[This is a revised version of an article that I posted on darrelplant.com.]