As the Gulf Coast gets ready to evacuate and plans for the Republican Convention have been throw into disarray, an interesting question has emerged. To what extent can the Obama campaign use its well-established, grass-roots network to assist the official recovery effort?
Yesterday in Ohio, Senator Obama said he would mobilize its e-mail list of supporters to encourage them to volunteer or send contributions:
We can activate an e-mail list of a couple million people who want to give back. I think we can get tons of volunteers to travel down there if it becomes necessary.
Helping victims of crises can be politically-expedient, as well as the humanitarian thing to do. When Russian-Israeli tycoon Arcadi Gaydamak used his money to build “refugee” camps for victims of Hezbollah’s rockets he wrote himself into Israeli politics.
Barack Obama does not have money, but it is common knowledge that his campaign’s e-mail/grass-roots network is the largest in political history, and campaign team expects to raise $1 billion online during the 2008 campaign, 12 times as much as John Kerry raised through online fundraising in 2004. Many analysts believe that Obama, despite what the national polls say, will eventually pull ahead of McCain because of the national, internet-aided network.
But the idea of using this network for national, non-partisan purposes is novel, though logical. If it is eventually used to help victims of the hurricane and if Obama is elected to the White House could this network be “federalised” or serve as a nucleus of a new Kennedy-style Peace Corps or a way to take the newly-established Civilian Reserve Corps a step further?
