How the Obama White House has won the hashtag wars

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/29/obama-white-house-hashtag-wars

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The administration's latest attempt to excerpt pressure on congressional Republicans for a deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff" comes in the form of a hashtag: #My2K.

Obama urged supporters to use the tag to let their representatives know what the personal cost would be of the $2,000 tax hike coming if a compromise isn't reached and the Bush tax cuts expire. The White House personnel and communications staff throw hashtags out with the ease and frequency of the millennial generation they are typically a part of, encouraging website visitors to participate in #WHchat or opine about congressional #compromise. The president's calls to electronic activism are more rare: by my count, they've come in just four waves.

Last April, he asked those with student loans to weigh in with #dontdoublemyrate, and the previous winter saw him similarly leverage #40dollars – the amount, according White House calculations, an average American worker would give up every two weeks if the payroll tax holiday expired. In less policy-specific outreach, Obama has also asked Americans to #thankateacher and give reasons to #visitUS.

It could be that Obama doesn't promote hashtags more often primarily because it still sounds weird to hear "tweet at" come from the mouth of the commander-in-chief – either because of the underlying threat that Dad will screw up his next attempt to talk like the young people do, or the even more uneasy prospect that Dad has total mastery of this newfangled technology, this space we thought was reserved for us kids to play around in but has now been co-opted by The Olds.

And while the "(laughter") that follows in almost every transcript of Obama's Twitter shoutouts suggests the former, the success of the legislation promoted by the Twitter campaigns suggests the latter. (Whether people are more thankful for teachers or whether tourism is up have less binary outcomes.) Obama may still say "tweet at" like he's pronouncing it phonetically from a cue card, but the White House has gotten what they wanted when it came to the payroll holiday and student loans.

I'm trying to avoid saying that the hashtag "worked". I'm not even sure what that would mean. Twitter even makes it difficult to measure the number of times a hashtag is used, unless you're looking at trends in the last 24 hours. And maybe, that doesn't matter: all e-activism is less a form of protest than it is advertising, and like advertising, one measures its effectiveness not in the one-to-one ratio of "ads seen" to "individual action taken", but in the sedimentary accumulation of conventional wisdom or social norms. It's less important that every voter on Twitter contribute a thought on #my2k than it is that the Obama administration has put another mark on the tablet of public knowledge that represents not just its policy goals but the kind of relationship it wants to have with voters: one of the most self-consciously interactive in the history of politics.

This is not to say that it's a relationship of equals, or that internet users have as much control over the conversation as the White House does. They can always pull the plug. (Or, more ominously, see who else you're talking to – and about what.)

Rather, the Obama communications team has, over time, recognized that they don't control the conversation completely, and that attempting to excerpt control over it will limit its fruitfulness as well its unwelcome digressions.

Think about it: with the awareness that comes with a popular hashtag comes the risk – almost the certainty – that not everyone is going to stay on message. Encouraging conventional forms of voter pressure doesn't carry the same kind of risk. Making sure voters have their congressman's number doesn't guarantee they'll agitate for the policy you want, but they also can't hijack the very message you want to send, turn it against you in a way that can make what the message intended just an afterthought.

Conservatives have tried to sabotage Obama's hashtag strikes in exactly this way. #dontdoublemyrate generated cynical spoofs and the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation purchased the ability to advertise their take on the tax debate right alongside #my2k within hours of the president pushing it.

Yet, neither the GOP nor the Romney campaign showed the same facility or confidence about letting a message run free in the wild that the Obama team has. Their dexterity with the language of memes reached a hilarious apex when Obama's official Twitter account jumped on the #eastwooding concept, though the president's willingness to subject himself to a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session is probably a better example of their self-assuredness.

Republicans' consistent lag in manipulating social media (except when it's by accident) invites the theory that there's just something inherently, internally at odds between conservative principles and new media, a hypothesis that's been worked over enough that I won't try to recapture it here. What matters at the moment is whether they can win this fiscal cliff flame war – and honestly, they're off to a good start. (Not buying the promotion space around your own hashtag is a genuine fail.)

There is also the question of what it would mean to win this debate: presumably, letting the Bush tax cuts expire. It would not exactly be a great sign for their future if conservatives' biggest political success in the digital sphere was to stop something from happening. But at least it would be in character.