While the jubilance and joy that washed over our world with the election of Barack Obama was shared by (almost) all of us, for one group of people, whose history of oppression, repression, social ridicule, and cultural denigration goes back decades, if not centuries, Obama's election had special meaning. It was a crowning achievement of their combined efforts, both as individuals and as a group; without their enthusiastic support and dedication to the Obama campaign, the historic electoral landslide simply wouldn't have happened. Only by drawing on their outrage at the Bush Administration, their simmering resentment of the status quo, and their pride as a people were they able to work their magic and bring Obama to office.
I speak, of course, of Nerds.
For eight years the collective Nerdery has stared in astonishment as the atavistic Bush Administration went to war against nearly everything that was sacred to this proud people. Myopic executive orders on stem cell research, purposeful obfuscation of climate change science from official government sources, attempts to bind and silence outspoken critics of the Administration's science policy, the subtle war on Network Neutrality, the betrayal of the telephone companies when they gave free access to their customer data to the Administration without even a hint of a warrant, the weak and impotent plan for future space travel and the trivialization of NASA – the list goes on and on.
Personally, I attribute the beginning of the Nerd Resistance to the Administration to its moralistic banning of Internet poker. Lots of Nerds like to kick back and gamble away a few hundred in the privacy of their own homes, and when Bush took that away it left them with a lot of free time on their hands. So they went after Bush-Cheney like an army of avenging Jedi Knights.
Obama's campaign benefited from the irate geeks, from the top down. The campaign was technologically adept to the point of elegance, running the first truly 21st century political campaign. Websites, YouTube, email, Twitter, Facebook, and Crackberries were the battlegrounds for this struggle, the products of nerdy dreamsmiths. McCain's campaign was so tremendously outclassed that he could have spent double on television advertising and still not made a dent in the final result. Obama's fund-raising juggernaut was almost entirely Internet based, and his pet nerds kept it pumping life-giving funds into the campaign. It even became kind of competitive – could they beat last-month's total with a last-minute targeted email? Nothing jazzes a nerd like competitive technical tweaking.
First among the Nerds must be counted Markos Moulitsas, the archwizard of the netroots – that group of leftist websites that so effectively kept alive the idea that a Democrat could beat a Republican by running like a Democrat. His website, the Daily Kos, is a hotbed of liberal thought that was able to help channel the rage of the Nerdery into efficient, decisive activism. Color him a policy nerd with fighting spirit and broad vision, a kind of left-leaning Jedi Master, Kos has become a powerful spokesnerd and an early advocate of Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy. Obama couldn't have done it without him, and neither could have dozens of other Democrats in tight races.
Obama's Jedi masters of the targeted database used a detailed strategy to target individual voters for personal attention. Not content to stop at "soccer moms" as a demographic, Obama's campaign honed in on such microniches as "iPhone users over 40 with masters degrees in suburban areas" and went after them aggressively. They were also able to identify and skip over likely McCain voters, keeping their campaign marketing amazingly efficient. When volunteers showed up to canvass, they weren't merely given maps and brochures, they were handed entire packets with each street broken down into individual houses, each house tagged with a suggestive line of approach – or a note to skip the home altogether. Afterwards the results of the canvass would be plowed back into the database, giving daily updated results that could be quickly scanned for trends.
The volunteer effort itself was highly organized, thanks to the technical magic of the Obama nerd machine. Results from canvassing often suggested potential leaders among the volunteers who could be separated out for advanced training in community organizing, and weak spots in the GOTV campaign could be spotted and corrected with blinding efficiency. Taking technical ideas like scalability and decentralized processing and applying them to the campaign organization gave Obama a tremendous advantage.
If nerds were welcomed to Obama's fold, neither Hillary nor McCain either properly appreciated or paid proper respect to the issues near and dear to the geeky heart. Hillary's campaign was so overwrought with political machinations that her internet campaign was a weak shadow of Obama's. McCain . . . well, the man doesn't use email. What a newb. While there were doubtless some nerdy hold-outs on the GOP side, most of my Republican pals confirm that anyone who did anything more complicated than email was often viewed with some suspicion by the party faithful, who preferred to rely on expensive mass direct mail advertising and television spots. It's no accident either that the amazing wave of relief and hope that arose from Obama's victory felt suspiciously familiar to a chapter out of Nerd mythology: the destruction of the Death Star.
Nerds live to tweak systems for greater and greater efficiency and elegance, and their handiwork is all over the campaign. No doubt Obama will repay their loyal and outstanding service by addressing some of their most vital concerns: restoration of sound government science, climate change, Net Neutrality, energy policy, the space program, and yes, internet gambling. While other policy initiatives will likely take priority, the nerds should get their due – and should be basking in the glow of their accomplishments.
For we are a proud people, long oppressed and disregarded, but we are powerful and serve a new master, now.
Score one for the Jedi.