O’Conall Street

Obama’s big win in South Carolina with over 80% of the black vote is already prompting comments that the US is voting along racial lines. Some in the Clinton campaign spent the past week trying very hard to box Barack off as the ‘Black Candidate’ and the Obama campaign now have a very big job to ensure the label does not stick. Hillary can win without the black vote but Obama needs to cross the divide and reach out to whites and hispanics to secure the nomination.

Super Dooper Tuesday is now an effective national poll. The campaign teams can no longer rely on intense state campaigning and town hall meetings. For the next week and a bit the new and traditional media will be the principle stomping ground. This makes the race card a potentially devastating one.

It also pits two communications styles, empowering versus articulate, head to head. Take a look at Obama’s victory speech last night and Clinton’s in New Hampshire for a better sense of the differences.

In PR terms things will really hot up now and we will see what impact social and digital campaigning is having at a national level. There is no doubt the Obama campaign in particular used this media to great effect in Iowa but convervely it offers a perfect platform to those who would wish to push the race question for Hillary’s benefit between now and Super Dooper Tuesday.  

To track the big blogs and US media commentary I have signed up to NetVibes.comwhich allows you to collect on one screen live feeds from all your favorites. I have also uploaded the Obama application on Facebook. It’s a very impressive tool bringing together, again on one screen all the campaign’s output including commentary, video and blogs.    

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 8:45 am and is filed under Current Affairs, Politics, Public Relations, Technology, The Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.