Arianna Huffington: Microtrends vs Macrotrends: Why Obama is Winning

[babylonsister]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/microtrends-vs-macrotrend_b_88962.html

Microtrends vs Macrotrends: Why Obama is Winning
Posted February 28, 2008 | 02:59 PM (EST)


CHICAGO -- Should Barack Obama end up winning his party's nomination, he will give his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 28 -- 45 years to the day Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

If this moment happens, it will be because of what Sir Martin Sorrell (CEO of the conglomerate WPP, which includes among its many companies Mark Penn's Burson-Marsteller) said. "Mark Penn," he told me the other night in Los Angeles, "literally wrote the book on microtrends, but this election is about a macrotrend."

Penn and the Clintons set about slicing up the electorate into the "small forces behind tomorrow's big changes" that Penn described in his 2007 book Microtrends. They then devised policies and personas to try to appeal to each one -- only to watch dumbfounded as their microtrend sandcastles were washed away by the macrotrend tidal wave of the Obama campaign.

"Hillary Clinton's campaign model," David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist told me this morning in Chicago, "is a very tired Washington model: 'I'll do these things for you.' Barack's model is 'Let's do these things together.' This has been the premise of Barack's politics all his life, going back to his days as a community organizer. He has really lived and breathed it, which is why it comes across so authentically.

"Of course, the time also has to be right for the man and the moment to come together. And, after all the country has been through over the last seven years, the times are definitely right for the message that the only way to get real change is to activate the American people to demand it."

snip//

It's too early to sign the death certificate, but should the Clinton campaign end up in need of an epitaph, it won't need to look further than Penn's book. "Small is the new big," he wrote. "Many of the biggest movements in America today are small."

Except when they are very big, and getting bigger by the day. And you've missed th

[Demeter]

1. I Would Call It a Tsunami

and with any luck, it will wash the filth and crime off the face of American politics for a generation or two.