Tulsa Town Hall: Nutrition a valuable tool in health care
Label: HealthWeil spoke as part of the Tulsa Town Hall series of speakers.
The United States has an expensive health-care system that doesn’t produce good results, he said.
“Something is very wrong with this picture,” he said. “We’re spending more and more and we have less and less to show for it.”
Changes in diet can be an effective treatment for many conditions, but American physicians are functionally illiterate in nutrition, he said.
“The whole subject of nutrition is omitted in medical education,” he said.
There are many ways of managing diseases other than drugs, he said. Integrative medicine, which can include dietary supplements and practices like meditation, is the future of health care, he said.
The health system is resistant to change because of entrenched vested interests. That includes pharmaceutical companies that do direct-to-consumer advertising, which should be stopped, he said.
“As dysfunctional as our health-care system is at the moment – and it is very dysfunctional – it is generating rivers of money,” he said. “That money is going into very few pockets.”
Weil has developed an anti-inflammatory diet based on the Mediterranean diet but with Asian influences.
Inflammation is associated with some heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and some cancers, he said. And as a result, people should be eating real, unprocessed foods and whole grains. They should stay away from sugar-sweetened beverages, including fruit juice, he said.
“The new research that’s being done on sugar is not very comforting,” he said.
The aging process can’t be avoided, but age-related diseases can be avoided by proper care, he said.
“The goal should be to live long and well with a big drop off at the end,” he said.
Weil is the director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine.
Tickets to the Tulsa Town Hall series are sold as a $ 75 subscription and cover five lectures. Tickets for individual lectures are not available.
To subscribe, visit tulsaworld.com/tulsatownhall, call 918-749-5965 or write to: Tulsa Town Hall, Box 52266, Tulsa, OK 74152.
Future speakers include journalist Ann Compton on Feb. 8; author James B. Stewart on April 5; historian and cinematographer Rex Ziak on May 10.
Original Print Headline: Speaker highlights nutrition
Shannon Muchmore 918-581-8378
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Canadian October home sales dip, latest sign of cooling
Label: WorldTORONTO (Reuters) – Sales of existing homes in Canada fell in October from September and year-over-year sales were down as well, the Canadian Real Estate Association said on Thursday in the latest signal that the housing market is slowing.
The industry group for Canadian real estate agents said sales were down 0.1 percent in October from September. Actual sales for October, not seasonally adjusted, were down 0.8 percent from a year earlier.
The housing market, which roared higher in 2011 and the first half of 2012, started to slow after the government tightened rules on mortgage lending in July in a bid to cool the market and prevent home buyers from taking on too much debt.
“Housing market trends in Canada for 2012 can be characterized as before and after regulatory changes,” TD Economics senior economist Sonya Gulati said in a research note.
“In the first half of the year, sales and price gains were modest, but positive. More stringent mortgage rules and tighter mortgage underwriting rules have ‘purposely’ knocked the wind out of the housing market sails,” she said.
The home sales data showed diverging paths in Canadian housing depending on location. In Toronto and Vancouver, where sales and price gains were red hot in 2011 and early in 2012, the market has been cooling. But markets in the resource-rich western provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta have been gaining strength.
“Opinions differ about how sharply sales have slowed depending on the local housing market,” Gregory Klump, CREA’s chief economist, said in a statement.
Led by Calgary, sales in October were up from a year earlier in almost two-thirds of local markets. Sales remained blow year-earlier levels in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, CREA said.
“These results suggest that the Canadian housing market overall has returned to a more sustainable pace,” Klump said.
CREA’s Home Price Index rose 3.6 percent in October from a year earlier, the sixth consecutive month in which gains in prices slowed, and the slowest rate of increase since May 2011.
While tighter mortgage rules have worked to slow the market, TD’s Gulati said the big question is what will happen when that temporary cooling effect wears off in early 2013.
“What happens thereafter is less certain. The low interest rate environment could pull homeowners back onto the market, causing home prices to once again trek upwards. Alternatively, an absence of pent-up demand may leave the market in a bit of a lull until interest rate hikes resume in late 2013,” she wrote.
“Under either scenario, it is safe to say that there is a low probability of out-sized home price gains over the near-term.”
A total of 402,322 homes traded hands via Canadian MLS systems over the first 10 months of 2012, up 0.8 percent from the same period last year and 0.4 percent below the 10-year average for the period, the data showed.
The number of newly listed homes fell 3.8 percent in October following a jump in September. Monthly declines were reported in almost two-thirds of local markets, with Toronto and Vancouver exerting a large influence on the national trend.
Nationally, there were 6.5 months of inventory at the end of October, little changed from the reading of 6.4 months at the end of September.
(Editing by Peter Galloway)
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At Washington’s James Bond exhibit, villains are forever
Label: LifestyleWASHINGTON (Reuters) – Fans of fictional super spy James Bond rely on the durable film franchise for must-have elements, such as jaw-dropping stunts, great clothes, sultry women – and villains who are drop-dead evil.
An exhibition that opened on Friday makes clear that the nasty types that 007 has battled for five decades have changed but one constant remains. The only true match for the world’s greatest secret agent are characters that moviegoers love to hate.
“Exquisitely Evil: 50 Years of Bond Villains” at the International Spy Museum in downtown Washington, is dedicated to the most memorable bad guys and gals in the 23-film series.
From the eponymous “Dr. No” in 1962 to the just-released “Skyfall,” the exhibit shows links between fact and fiction and how villains have kept pace with an evolving world.
“Bond seems the same, but the villains have all changed. They have changed to reflect the changing times,” Anna Slafer, the museum’s director of exhibitions, told a news conference.
In “Dr. No,” the villain schemes against the U.S. space program. Probing the nuclear fears of the 1970s, tycoon Karl Stromberg plots genocide in “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977).
The information age turns up with Max Zorin, who lusts to corner the microchip market in “A View to a Kill” (1985). In “Skyfall” cyberterrorist Silva tries to hack British intelligence computers.
THINK BIG
But some things have remained the same for the Bond villain, said Alexis Albion, a guest curator and intelligence historian.
They are highly successful, often charming, live in isolated places, generate fanatical loyalty, and think big, she said. “They are on a level that we have to send someone like James Bond after them.”
They also “are off physically,” Albion said. Le Chiffre in “Casino Royale” (2006) weeps blood, Dr. No has a magnetic claw in place of a hand, and the hitman Jaws in “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “Moonraker” (1979) is a giant with steel teeth.
A galaxy of well-known actors – and a few actresses – from around the world have faced off against the six men who have played Bond, from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig.
Yaphet Kotto, Max von Sydow, Sean Bean, Javier Bardem, Donald Pleasence, Christopher Lee, Michael Lonsdale, Lotte Lenya, Mads Mikkelsen, Jeroen Krabbe, Christopher Walken and Telly Savalas all have gone mano-a-mano with 007, and lost.
The International Spy Museum‘s show was timed to the release of “Skyfall” and done in cooperation with EON Productions, which makes the Bond movies.
The exhibit, which includes more than 110 movie and historical artifacts, including Jaws’ teeth, interactive stations, and videos, runs through 2014. General admission to the museum is $ 19.95.
(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Paul Simao)
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Jamaica to abolish slavery-era flogging law
Label: WorldKINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) — Jamaica is preparing to abolish a slavery-era law allowing flogging and whipping as means of punishing prisoners, the Caribbean country’s justice ministry said Thursday.
The ministry said the punishment hasn’t been ordered by a court since 2004 but the statutes remain in the island’s penal code. It was administered with strokes from a tamarind-tree switch or a cat o’nine tails, a whip made of nine, knotted cords.
Justice Minister Mark Golding says the “degrading” punishment is an anachronism which violates Jamaica’s international obligations and is preventing Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller‘s government from ratifying the U.N. convention against torture.
“The time has come to regularize this situation by getting these colonial-era laws off our books once and for all,” Golding said in a Thursday statement.
The Cabinet has already approved repealing the flogging law and amendments to other laws in the former British colony, where plantation slavery was particularly brutal.
The announcement was welcomed by human rights activists who view the flogging law as a barbaric throwback in a nation populated mostly by the descendants of slaves.
“We don’t really see that (the flogging law) has any part in the approach of dealing with crime in a modern democracy,” said group spokeswoman Susan Goffe.
But there are no shortage of crime-weary Jamaicans who feel that authorities should not drop the old statutes but instead enforce them, arguing that thieves who steal livestock or violent criminals who harm innocent people should receive a whipping to teach them a lesson.
“The worst criminals need strong punishing or else they’ll do crimes over and over,” said Chris Drummond, a Kingston man with three school-age children. “Getting locked up is not always enough.”
The last to suffer the punishment in Jamaica was Errol Pryce, who was sentenced to four years in prison and six lashes in 1994 for stabbing his mother-in-law.
Pryce was flogged the day before being released from prison in 1997 and later complained to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, which ruled in 2004 that the form of corporal punishment was cruel, inhuman and degrading and violated his rights. Jamaican courts then stopped ordering whipping or flogging.
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Film defrocks church hierarchy over handling of sex abuse
Label: LifestyleNEW YORK (Reuters) – Four deaf Wisconsin men were some of the first to seek justice after suffering childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a priest, and a new documentary about the Catholic Church‘s poor handling of such cases stemming from the Vatican seeks to make their voices heard.
“Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” explores the impact of the Roman Catholic Church’s protocol as dictated from the Vatican for dealing with pedophile priests. It opens in U.S. cinemas on November 16, and will air on cable channel HBO in February.
Though American media coverage about child sex abuse by clergy has been extensive since a slew of cases came to light in Boston in 2002, Oscar-winning documentary director Alex Gibney wanted to connect individual stories with what he sees as systemic failures stemming from the top of the church.
“A lot of individual stories had been done about clerical sex abuse, but I hadn’t seen one that really connected the individual stories with the larger cover-up by the Vatican, so that was important,” Gibney told Reuters in an interview.
The film centers on the group of deaf men and their experiences as young boys attending St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wisconsin.
In a letter to the Vatican in 1998, the late Rev. Father Lawrence Murphy admitted abusing some 200 deaf boys over two decades beginning in the 1950s.
Murphy claimed he had repented, and asked to live out his last years as a priest, and was never defrocked or punished by civil authorities. He died in 1998.
In the film, the men communicate their frustrating attempts to bring their experiences to the attention of religious and civil authorities with effusive sign language and facial expressions, paired with voiceovers by actors such as Ethan Hawke.
The film also traces a convoluted bureaucracy – right up to the cardinal who is now Pope Benedict – to reveal a set of policies that the film portrays as often seeming more interested in preserving the Church’s image.
STRUGGLING TO BE HEARD
“These were deaf men whose voices literally couldn’t be heard, so there was a silence from them, and there was also this silence coming from the church, a refusal to confront this obvious crime, in part because they were covering it up,” said Gibney.
The Vatican has denied any cover-up in the Murphy case and in 2010 issued a statement condemning his abuse. It has criticized media reports about the Church’s handling of the cases as anti-Catholic.
Contrasting that, the film shows interviews with former church officials who talk openly of church policies to handle cases by “rehabilitating” abusive clergymen and snuffing out scandal.
Gibney said that all of the Vatican officials he contacted declined his interview requests.
Raised Catholic himself, Gibney no longer practices organized religion, but empathizes with Catholics who feel a sense of loyalty to the religion’s institutions and acknowledges that criticism of the church can feel like a personal attack.
“Mea Maxima Culpa,” a Latin phrase meaning “my most grievous fault” focuses on the failures of the Catholic Church‘s hierarchy. But Gibney – who won an Oscar for “Taxi to the Dark Side” – said the film’s theme transcends religion and is also relevant for secular institutions.
“This is obviously about the church, but it’s also a crime film,” he said. “It’s about abuse of power and it’s about how institutions instead of reckoning with problems try to cover them up. It’s always the cover-up that creates the problem.”
He cited the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal that rocked Penn State University recently, and the BBC’s poor handling of abuse allegations against the late British TV personality Jimmy Savile as examples of secular institutions brought low by similar issues.
“The thing about predators is that they tend to hide in plain sight,” Gibney said. “You’re seeing it now with Sandusky, you’re seeing it now with Jimmy Savile in Great Britain, and you saw it with Father Murphy in the film.”
Gibney thinks that the public’s stubbornly rosy perceptions of charismatic authority figures, including priests, is a major factor in such scandals.
“They’re often involved in charity or good works,” he said of high-profile abusers. “That seems to give you license to do unbelievable things because people cut you all sorts of slack that they wouldn’t normally do for other people.”
(Editing by Christine Kearney and Richard Chang)
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Novartis’ vaccines business gets chance to prove itself
Label: HealthZURICH (Reuters) – The European Medicines Agency has thrown Novartis‘ loss-making vaccines business a lifeline by recommending its meningitis B shot for approval, which means the pressure is on to make the product a commercial success.
Novartis paid $ 5.1 billion to gain full control of U.S. vaccine maker Chiron Corp in 2006 in a major bet on vaccines designed to reduce its dependence on prescription drugs ahead of a wave of patent expiries.
But the division has gobbled up research and development cash with little return, making the European backing for its “MenB” vaccine Bexsero a key event.
“(It) will allow breathing space for management that has been under investor pressure to improve the outlook for the sub-scale vaccines division,” said Deutsche Bank analyst Tim Race.
Chief Executive Joseph Jimenez has stood by the division, saying he still believed it could be a “profitable and important part of the company.” But he has also denied that Novartis is “wed” to any of its units.
Diversifying into vaccines looked a good bet, given they are biological medicines that are less exposed to generic competition. Moreover, the world vaccine market is growing and expected reach $ 40 billion by 2015, according to the Centre for Vaccine Ethics and Policy.
But Novartis’ division has struggled to catch up with market leaders GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi and Merck. It posted a $ 22 million operating loss in the third quarter – the only one of Novartis’ five units to be in the red.
PROBLEM CHILD
“You can say it’s the problem child of Novartis,” said Birgit Kulhoff, a money manager at private bank Rahm & Bodmer in Zurich. “2014 will be the year when they make the ultimate decision about what they’re going to do with the division.”
The European drug agency’s recommendation, which is likely to be formally endorsed early next year, is clearly good news – but it will not automatically translate into sales.
Bexsero’s success hinges on convincing cash-strapped government healthcare systems to add it to their vaccination programs – and that may not be easy, given the fact that MenB disease, while serious, is becoming rarer.
Bernstein analyst Tim Anderson, for example, forecasts 2020 sales of $ 700 million for the vaccine, a far cry from the multi-billion dollar sales potential heralded by some a few years ago.
Novartis’ head of vaccines Andrin Oswald said he was “quite confident” countries which have a high incidence of the disease, like Britain and Ireland, would add Bexsero to their programs, although he downplayed expectations of strong 2013 sales.
“We plan to start selling next year and then we expect the vaccine to start to ramp up nicely over the years,” Andrin Oswald told Reuters in a telephone interview on Friday.
Oswald disputed that there was a deadline hanging over the division, saying the business had come a long way, having already won approval for another meningitis vaccine Menveo and anticipating approval of its cell culture flu vaccine.
“If I look at our pipeline there are other promising products in there. It may take another few more years but I think as long as we deliver and bring good vaccines and innovation to the market we are on the right track.”
Oswald said Novartis was still in discussions with U.S. health regulators, where there was some skepticism about the public health need for a single MenB shot given the low disease incidence at present.
He said Novartis favored a possible combination shot of Bexsero with Menveo. “If the discussions go as we think we may be able to start Phase III (clinical trials) in a reasonable amount of time,” he said.
PROFITABILITY VS GROWTH
Some analysts are skeptical if the division will be able eke out a profit this year after racking up an operating loss of $ 291 million in the first nine months, despite seasonal flu sales.
“The unit barely breaks even on the back of the seasonal flu vaccine only,” said Vontobel analyst Andrew Weiss. “There’s a huge amount of expenses in R&D really in trying to get away from this seasonality and being a rounder business.”
Jefferies analyst Jeffrey Holford says Novartis could create more value if it were to divest the business – which also contains a diagnostics segment – in two separate parts.
A standalone vaccines business could fetch $ 6.3 billion, while disposing of the diagnostics business could bring in a further $ 1.3 billion, he argued in a September research note.
But Oswald said it took time to build up a vaccines business, arguing: “The key priority right now is not to make the business more profitable but to grow it.”
(Editing by Ben Hirschler and Jane Merriman)
Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Petraeus says al Qaeda role known early on
Label: BusinessWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former CIA Director David Petraeus told Congress on Friday that he and the spy agency had sought to make clear from the outset that September's deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, involved an al Qaeda affiliate, lawmakers said.
Petraeus told the House of Representatives intelligence committee that "there were extremists in the group" that launched the initial attack on the diplomatic mission, describing them as affiliates of al Qaeda and other extremist groups, said Representative C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, the committee's top Democrat. "The fact is that he clarified it."
Another lawmaker, Republican Representative Peter King, said Petraeus' account in the closed-door session differed from the assessment that the CIA chief gave to Congress two months ago, just days after the September 11 attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
"He also stated that he thought all along he made it clear that there were significant terrorist involvement, and that is not my recollection of what he told us on September 14," King said.
Petraeus later appeared before the Senate intelligence panel. His appearances before lawmakers came the week after he quit as CIA chief because of an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. Lawmakers said a somber Petraeus told them his resignation had nothing to do with issues related to Benghazi or any reluctance to testify before Congress.
"The general did not address any specifics of the affair, of that issue," Democratic Representative Jim Langevin said. "What he did say in his opening statement was that he regrets the circumstances that led to his resignation."
Petraeus, a retired Army four-star general, slipped into the closed sessions unseen by a swarm of media.
The assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi has turned into a flash point between President Barack Obama and Republicans, who accuse the White House of misleading the public in the days following the attack.
Some Republicans have suggested that Obama and his aides wanted to downplay the idea they had failed to prevent a terrorist attack, which might have dampened the president's re-election chances on November 6. Obama has denied that implication.
Petraeus' testimony to the House and Senate intelligence committees seems unlikely to dampen the controversy over why the Obama administration had asserted for days after the Benghazi attack that it had sprung from a spontaneous protest prompted by an anti-Muslim film.
Republicans have targeted Obama's U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, who in five Sunday talk show appearances on September 16 said the assault was prompted by the video and then morphed into a more violent act. But she told CBS's "Face the Nation" that day that it was "clear that there were extremist elements that joined in and escalated the violence."
Rice aides and White House officials have said that she had based her remarks on talking points provided by the CIA.
'A FRIEND'
Lawmakers appeared to treat the question of his personal life with kid gloves. They said the questioning was sometimes awkward against the backdrop of the Broadwell scandal and because some of them have known Petraeus for years and think highly of his military service in which he ran the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"I consider him a friend, which made the questioning tough, to be honest with you," King told reporters.
"I've known him for nine years now. I actually asked him to run for president a few years ago," he said.
The affair has raised questions about whether any classified information was divulged to Broadwell that would affect national security. So far, FBI investigators have not discovered anything to suggest that was the case, law enforcement sources said.
Before his resignation, Petraeus had gone to Libya to interview people about what happened in Benghazi on September 11, when there was a series of escalating attacks on the diplomatic mission and a nearby CIA annex.
Ruppersberger said the committee learned on Thursday during a closed hearing in which it saw a real-time film of the events in Benghazi that the attack on the diplomatic mission was different than the subsequent attack on the nearby annex.
"The first incident was a lot different than the second incident in the annex," he said. The attack on the mission involved looters and people setting buildings on fire, while the attack on the annex was "well-organized" and involved people who had experience in conducting attacks, he said.
(Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Will Dunham)
Petraeus testifies on Benghazi attack
Label: BusinessWASHINGTON (AP) — Ex-CIA Director David Petraeus told lawmakers during private hearings Friday that he believed all along that the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya was a terrorist strike, even though that wasn't how the Obama administration initially described it publicly.
The retired four-star general addressed the House and Senate intelligence committees as questions continue to persist over what the Obama administration knew in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and why their public description did not match intelligence agencies' assessments.
Lawmakers said Petraeus testified that the CIA's draft talking points written in response to the assault on the diplomat post in Benghazi that killed four Americans referred to it as a terrorist attack. But Petraeus told the lawmakers that reference was removed from the final version, although he wasn't sure which federal agency took out the reference.
"The general was adamant there was no politicization of the process, no White House interference or political agenda," said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. "He completely debunked that idea."
But Republicans are still critical of the administration's handling of the case. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Petraeus' testimony showed that "clearly the security measures were inadequate despite an overwhelming and growing amount of information that showed the area in Benghazi was dangerous, particularly on the night of September 11."
Petraeus, who had a long and distinguished military career, was making his first Capitol Hill testimony since resigning last week in disgrace over an extramarital affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell. Lawmakers said he did not discuss that scandal except to express regret about the circumstances of his departure and say that Benghazi had nothing to do with his decision to resign.
Petraeus testified that the CIA draft written in response to the raid referred to militant groups Ansar al-Shariah and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb but those names were replaced with the word "extremist" in the final draft, according to a congressional staffer. The staffer said Petraeus testified that he allowed other agencies to alter the talking points as they saw fit without asking for final review, to get them out quickly.
The staffer wasn't authorized to discuss the hearing publicly and described Petraeus' testimony to The Associated Press on a condition of anonymity.
Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., said Petraeus explained that the CIA's draft points were sent to other intelligence agencies and to some federal agencies for review. Udall said Petraeus told them the final document was put in front of all the senior agency leaders, including Petraeus, and everyone signed off on it.
"The assessment that was publicly shared in unclassified talking points went through a process of editing," Udall said. "The extremist description was put in because in an unclassified document you want to be careful who you identify as being involved."
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said it's still not clear how the final talking points emerged used by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice five days after the attack when the White House sent her to appear in a series of television interviews. Rice said it appeared the attack was sparked by a spontaneous protest over an anti-Muslim video.
"The fact is, the reference to al-Qaida was taken out somewhere along the line by someone outside the intelligence community," King said. "We need to find out who did it and why."
King said Petraeus had briefed the House committee on Sept. 14 and he does not recall Petraeus being so positive at that time that it was a terrorist attack. "He thought all along that he made it clear there was terrorist involvement," King said. "That was not my recollection."
Schiff said Petraeus said Rice's comments in the television interviews "reflected the best intelligence at the time that could be released publicly."
"There was an interagency process to draft it, not a political process," Schiff said. "They came up with the best assessment without compromising classified information or source or methods. So changes were made to protect classified information.
Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said it's clear that Rice "used the unclassified talking points that the entire intelligence community signed off on, so she did completely the appropriate thing." He said the changes made to the draft accounts for the discrepancies with some of the reports that were made public showing that the intelligence community knew it was a terrorist attack all along.
Lawmakers spent hours Thursday interviewing top intelligence and national security officials, trying to determine what intelligence agencies knew before, during and after the attack. They viewed security video from the consulate and surveillance footage by an unarmed CIA Predator drone that showed events in real time.
The congressional staffer told the AP that they also watched the cellphone video that has been on YouTube showing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens being carried out by people who looked like they were trying to rescue him.
___
Associated Press writers Nedra Pickler, Larry Margasak and Andrew Miga contributed to this report.
How Obama’s Tech Team Helped Win the Election
Label: TechnologyThe Obama campaign‘s technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong.
Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they’d lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else.
They were talking with people at Amazon Web Services, but all they knew was that they had packet loss. Earlier that day, they lost their databases, their East Coast servers, and their memcache clusters. Thayer was ready to kill Nick Hatch, a DevOps engineer who was the official bearer of bad news. Another of their vendors, StallionDB, was fixing databases but needed to rebuild the replicas. It was going to take time, Hatch said. They didn’t have time.
They had been working 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, trying to reelect the president, and now everything had been broken at just the wrong time. It was like someone had written a Murphy’s Law algorithm and deployed it at scale.
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And that was the point. “Game day” was Oct. 21. The election was still 17 days away, and this was a live action role playing (LARPing!) exercise that the campaign’s chief technology officer, Harper Reed, was inflicting on his team. “We worked through every possible disaster situation,” Reed said. “We did three actual all-day sessions of destroying everything we had built.”
Hatch was playing the role of dungeon master, calling out devilishly complex scenarios that were designed to test each and every piece of their system as they entered the exponential traffic-growth phase of the election. Mark Trammell, an engineer who Reed hired after he left Twitter, saw a couple of game days. He said they reminded him of his time in the Navy. “You ran firefighting drills over and over and over, to make sure that you not just know what you’re doing,” he said, “but you’re calm because you know you can handle your sh–.”
The team had elite and, for tech, senior talent–by which I mean that most of them were in their 30s–from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some of Chicago’s own software companies such as Orbitz and Threadless, where Reed had been CTO. But even these people, maybe especially these people, knew enough about technology not to trust it. “I think the Republicans f—– up in the hubris department,” Reed told me. “I know we had the best technology team I’ve ever worked with, but we didn’t know if it would work. I was incredibly confident it would work. I was betting a lot on it. We had time. We had resources. We had done what we thought would work, and it still could have broken. Something could have happened.”
In fact, the day after the Oct. 21 game day, Amazon services–on which the whole campaign’s tech presence was built–went down. “We didn’t have any downtime because we had done that scenario already,” Reed said. Hurricane Sandy hit on another game day, Oct. 29, threatening the campaign’s whole East Coast infrastructure. “We created a hot backup of all our applications to U.S.-west in preparation for U.S.-east to go down hard,” Reed said.
“We knew what to do,” Reed maintained, no matter what the scenario was. “We had a runbook that said if this happens, you do this, this, and this. They did not do that with Orca.”
The New Chicago Machine vs. the Grand Old Party
Orca was supposed to be the Republican answer to Obama’s perceived tech advantage. In the days leading up to the election, the Romney campaign pushed its (not-so) secret weapon as the answer to the Democrats’ vaunted ground game. Orca was going to allow volunteers at polling places to update the Romney camp’s database of voters in real time as people cast their ballots. That would supposedly allow them to deploy resources more efficiently and wring every last vote out of Florida, Ohio, and the other battleground states. The product got its name, a Romney spokesperson told NPR, because orcas are the only known predator of the one-tusked narwhal.
The billing the Republicans gave the tool confused almost everyone inside the Obama campaign. Narwhal wasn’t an app for a smartphone. It was the architecture of the company’s sophisticated data operation. Narwhal unified what Obama for America knew about voters, canvassers, event-goers, and phone-bankers, and it did it in real time. From the descriptions of the Romney camp’s software that were available then and now, Orca was not even in the same category as Narwhal. It was like touting the iPad as a Facebook killer, or comparing a GPS device to an engine. And besides, in the scheme of a campaign, a digitized strike list is cool, but it’s not, like, a game changer. It’s just a nice thing to have.
So, it was with more than a hint of schadenfreude that Reed’s team hears that Orca crashed early on Election Day. Later reports posted by rank-and-file volunteers describe chaos descending on the polling locations as only a fraction of the tens of thousands of volunteers organized for the effort were able to use it properly to turn out the vote.
Of course, they couldn’t snicker too loudly. Obama’s campaign had created a similar app in 2008 called Houdini. As detailed in Sacha Issenberg’s groundbreaking book, Victory Lab, Houdini’s rollout went great until about 9:30 a.m. on the day of the election. Then it crashed in much the same way that Orca did.
In 2012, Democrats had a new version, built by the vendor NGP VAN. It was called Gordon, after the man who killed Houdini. But the 2008 failure, among other needs, drove the 2012 Obama team to bring technologists in-house.
With Election Day bearing down on them, they knew they could not go down. And yet they had to accommodate much more strain on the systems as interest in the election picked up toward the end, as it always does. Mark Trammell, who worked for Twitter during its period of exponential growth, thought it would have been easy for the Obama team to fall into many of the pitfalls that the social network did back then. But while the problems of scaling both technology and culture quickly might have been similar, the stakes were much higher. A fail whale (cough) in the days leading up to or on Nov. 6 would have been neither charming nor funny. In a race that at least some people thought might be very close, it could have cost the president the election.
And, of course, the team’s only real goal was to elect the president. “We have to elect the president. We don’t need to sell our software to Oracle,” Reed told his team. But the secondary impact of their success or failure would be to prove that campaigns could effectively hire and deploy top-level programming talent. If they failed, it would be evidence that this stuff might be best left to outside political technology consultants, by whom the arena had long been handled. If Reed’s team succeeded, engineers might become as enshrined in the mechanics of campaigns as social-media teams already are.
We now know what happened. The grand technology experiment worked. So little went wrong that Trammell and Reed even had time to cook up a little pin to celebrate. It said, “YOLO,” short for “You Only Live Once,” with the Obama Os.
When Obama campaign chief Jim Messina signed off on hiring Reed, he told him, “Welcome to the team. Don’t f— it up.” As Election Day ended and the dust settled, it was clear: Reed had not f—– it up.
The campaign had turned out more volunteers and gotten more donors than in 2008. Sure, the field organization was more entrenched and experienced, but the difference stemmed in large part from better technology. The tech team’s key products–Dashboard, the Call Tool, the Facebook Blaster, the PeopleMatcher, and Narwhal–made it simpler and easier for anyone to engage with the president’s reelection effort.
But it wasn’t easy. Reed’s team came in as outsiders to the campaign and, by most accounts, remained that way. The divisions among the tech, digital, and analytics team never quite got resolved, even if the end product has salved the sore spots that developed over the stressful months. At their worst, in early 2012, the cultural differences between tech and everybody else threatened to derail the whole grand experiment.
By the end, the campaign produced exactly what it should have: a hybrid of the desires of everyone on Obama’s team. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars online, made unprecedented progress in voter targeting, and built everything atop the most stable technical infrastructure of any presidential campaign. To go a step further, I’d even say that this clash of cultures was a good thing: The nerds shook up an ossifying Democratic tech structure, and the politicos taught the nerds a thing or two about stress, small-p politics, and the significance of elections.
YOLO: Meet the Obama Campaign’s Chief Technology Officer
If you’re a nerd, Harper Reed is an easy guy to like. He’s brash and funny and smart. He gets you and where you came from. He, too, played with computers when they weren’t cool, and learned to code because he just could not help himself. You could call out nouns, phenomena, and he’d be right there with you: BBS, warez, self-organizing systems, Rails, the quantified self, Singularity. He wrote his first programs at age 7, games that his mom typed into their Apple IIC. He, too, has a memory that all nerds share: Late at night, light from a chunky monitor illuminating his face, fingers flying across a keyboard, he figured something out.
TV news segments about cybersecurity might look lifted straight from his memories, but the b-roll they shot of darkened rooms and typing hands could not convey the sense of exhilaration he felt when he built something that works. Harper Reed got the city of Chicago to create an open and real-time feed of its transit data by reverse engineering how they served bus location information. Why? Because it made his wife Hiromi’s commute a little easier. Because it was fun to extract the data from the bureaucracy and make it available to anyone who wanted it. Because he is a nerd.
Yet Reed has friends, such as the manager of the hip-hop club Empire who, when we walk into the place early on the Friday after the election, says, “Let me grab you a shot.” Surprisingly, Harper Reed is a chilled vodka kind of guy. Unsurprisingly, Harper Reed read Steven Levy’s Hackers as a kid. Surprisingly, the manager, who is tall and handsome with rock ‘n’-roll hair flowing from beneath a red beanie, returns to show Harper photographs of his kids. They’ve known each other for a long while. They are really growing up.
As the night rolls on, and the club starts to fill up, another friend approached us: DJ Hiroki, who was spinning that night. Harper Reed knows the DJ. Of course. And Hiroki grabs us another shot. (At this point I’m thinking, “By the end of the night, either I pass out or Reed tells me something good.”) Hiroki’s been DJing at Empire for years, since Harper Reed was the crazy guy you can see on his public Facebook photos. In one shot from 2006, a skinny Reed sits in a bathtub with a beer in his hand, two thick band tattoos running across his chest and shoulders. He is not wearing any clothes. The caption reads, “Stop staring, it’s not there i swear!” What makes Harper Reed different isn’t just that the photo exists, but that he kept it public during the election.
Yet if you’ve spent a lot of time around tech people, around Burning Man devotees, around startups, around San Francisco, around BBSs, around Reddit, Harper Reed probably makes sense to you. He’s a cool hacker. He gets profiled by Mother Jones even though he couldn’t talk with Tim Murphy, their reporter. He supports open source. He likes Japan. He says fuck a lot. He goes to hipster bars that serve vegan Mexican food, and where a quarter of the staff and clientele have mustaches.
He may be like you, but he also juggles better than you, and is wilder than you, more fun than you, cooler than you. He’s what a king of the nerds really looks like. Sure, he might grow a beard and put on a little potbelly, but he wouldn’t tuck in his T-shirt. He is not that kind of nerd. Instead, he’s got plugs in his ears and a shock of gloriously product-mussed hair and hipster glasses and he doesn’t own a long-sleeve dress shirt, in case you were wondering.
“Harper is an easy guy to underestimate because he looks funny. That might be part of his brand,” said Chris Sacca, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist and major Obama bundler who brought a team of more than a dozen technologists out for an Obama campaign hack day.
Reed, for his part, has the kind of self-awareness that faces outward. His self-announced flaws bristle like quills. “I always look like a f—— idiot,” Reed told me. “And if you look like an a——, you have to be really good.”
It was a lesson he learned early out in Greeley, Colo., where he grew up. “I had this experience where my dad hired someone to help him out because his network was messed up and he wanted me to watch. And this was at a very unfortunate time in my life where I was wearing very baggy pants and I had a Marilyn Manson shirt on and I looked like an a——. And my father took me aside and was like, ‘Why do you look like an a——?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t have an answer.’ But I realized I was just as good as the guys fixing it,” Reed recalled. “And they didn’t look like me and I didn’t look like them. And if I’m going to do this, and look like an idiot, I have to step up. Like if we’re all at zero, I have to be at 10 because I have this stupid mustache.”
And, in fact, he may actually be at 10. Sacca said that with technical people, it’s one thing to look at their resumes and another to see how they are viewed among their peers. “And it was amazing how many incredibly well regarded hackers that I follow on Twitter rejoiced and celebrated [when Reed was hired],” Sacca said. “Lots of guys who know how to spit out code, they really bought that.”
By the time Sacca brought his Silicon Valley contingent out to Chicago, he called the technical team “top notch.” After all, we’re talking about a group of people who had Eric Schmidt sitting in with them on Election Day. You had to be good. The tech world was watching.
Terry Howerton, the head of the Illinois Technology Association and a frank observer of Chicago’s tech scene, had only glowing things to say about Reed. “Harper Reed? I think he’s wicked smart,” Howerton said. “He knows how to pull people together. I think that was probably what attracted the rest of the people there. Harper is responsible for a huge percentage of the people who went over there.”
Reed’s own team found their coworkers particularly impressive. One testament to that is several startups might spin out of the connections people made at the OFA headquarters, such as Optimizely, a tool for website A/B testing, which spun out of Obama’s 2008 bid. (Sacca’s actually an investor in that one, too.)
“A CTO role is a weird thing,” said Carol Davidsen, who left Microsoft to become the product manager for Narwhal. “The primary responsibility is getting good engineers. And there really was no one else like him that could have assembled these people that quickly and get them to take a pay cut and move to Chicago.”
And yet, the very things that make Reed an interesting and beloved person are the same things that make him an unlikely pick to become the chief technology officer of the reelection campaign of the president of the United States. Political people wear khakis. They only own long-sleeve dress shirts. Their old photos on Facebook show them canvassing for local politicians and winning cross-country meets.
I asked Michael Slaby, Obama’s 2008 chief technology officer and the guy who hired Harper Reed this time around, if it wasn’t risky to hire this wild guy into a presidential campaign. “It’s funny to hear you call it risky, it seems obvious to me,” Slaby said. “It seems crazy to hire someone like me as CTO when you could have someone like Harper as CTO.”
The Nerds Are Inside the Building
The strange truth is that campaigns have long been low-technologist, if not low-technology, affairs. Think of them as a weird kind of niche start-up and you can see why. You have very little time, maybe a year, really. You can’t afford to pay very much. The job security, by design, is nonexistent. And even though you need to build a massive “customer” base and develop the infrastructure to get money and votes from them, no one gets to exit and make a bunch of money. So, campaign tech has been dominated by people who care about the politics of the thing, not the technology of the thing. The websites might have looked like solid consumer Web applications, but they were not under the hood.
For all the hoopla surrounding the digital savvy of President Obama‘s 2008 campaign, and as much as everyone I spoke with loved it, it was not as heavily digital or technological as it is now remembered. “Facebook was about one-tenth of the size that it is now. Twitter was a nothing burger for the campaign. It wasn’t a core or even peripheral part of our strategy,” said Teddy Goff, digital director of Obama for America and a veteran of both campaigns. Think about the killer tool of that campaign, my.barackobama.com; It borrowed the “my” from MySpace.
Sure, the ’08 campaign had Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, but Hughes was the spokesman for the company, not its technical guy. The ’08 campaigners, Slaby told me, had been “opportunistic users of technology” who “brute forced and bailing wired” different pieces of software together. Things worked (most of the time), but everyone, Slaby especially, knew that they needed a more stable platform for 2012.
Campaigns, however, even Howard Dean’s famous 2004 Internet-enabled run at the Democratic nomination, did not hire a bunch of technologists. Though they hired a couple, like Clay Johnson, they bought technology from outside consultants. For 2012, Slaby wanted to change all that. He wanted dozens of engineers in-house, and he got them.
“The real innovation in 2012 is that we had world-class technologists inside a campaign,” Slaby told me. “The traditional technology stuff inside campaigns had not been at the same level.” And yet the technologists, no matter how good they were, brought a different worldview, set of personalities, and expectations.
Campaigns are not just another Fortune 500 company or top 50 website. They have their own culture and demands, strange rigors and schedules. The deadlines are hard and the pressure would be enough to press the T-shirt of even the most battle-tested start-up veteran.
To really understand what happened behind the scenes at the Obama campaign, you need to know a little bit about its organizational structure. Tech was Harper Reed‘s domain. “Digital” was Joe Rospars’s kingdom; his team was composed of the people who sent you all those e-mails, designed some of the consumer-facing pieces of BarackObama.com, and ran the campaigns’ most-excellent accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, video, and the like. Analytics was run by Dan Wagner, and those guys were responsible for coming up with ways of finding and targeting voters they could persuade or turn out. Jeremy Bird ran Field, the on-the-ground operations of organizing voters at the community level that many consider Obama’s secret sauce . The tech for the campaign was supposed to help the Field, Analytics, and Digital teams do their jobs better. Tech, in a campaign or at least this campaign or perhaps any successful campaign, has to play a supporting role. The goal was not to build a product. The goal was to reelect the president. As Reed put it, if the campaign were Moneyball, he wouldn’t be Billy Beane, he’d be “Google Boy.”
There’s one other interesting component to the campaign’s structure. And that’s the presence of two big tech vendors interfacing with the various teams–Blue State Digital and NGP Van. The most obvious is the firm that Rospars, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, and Clay Johnson cofounded, Blue State Digital. They’re the preeminent progressive digital agency, and a decent chunk–maybe 30 percent–of their business comes from providing technology to campaigns. Of course, BSD’s biggest client was the Obama campaign and has been for some time. BSD and Obama for America were and are so deeply enmeshed, it would be difficult to say where one ended and the other began. After all, both Goff and Rospars, the company’s principals, were paid staffers of the Obama campaign. And yet between 2008 and 2012, BSD was purchased by WPP, one of the largest ad agencies in the world. What had been an obviously progressive organization was now owned by a huge conglomerate and had clients that weren’t other Democratic politicians.
One other thing to know about Rospars, specifically: “He’s the Karl Rove of the Internet,” someone who knows him very well told me. What Rove was to direct mail–the undisputed king of the medium–Rospars is to e-mail. He and Goff are the brains behind Obama’s unprecedented online fundraising efforts. They know what they were doing and had proven that time and again.
The complex relationship between BSD and the Obama campaign adds another dimension to the introduction of an inside team of technologists. If all campaigns started bringing their technology in house, perhaps BSD’s tech business would begin to seem less attractive, particularly if many of the tools that such an inside team created were developed as open source products.
So, perhaps the tech team was bound to butt heads with Rospars’s digital squad. Slaby would note, too, that the organizational styles of the two operations were very different. “Campaigns aren’t traditionally that collaborative,” he said. “Departments tend to be freestanding. They are organized kind of like disaster response–siloed and super hierarchical so that things can move very quickly.”
Looking at it all from the outside, both the digital and tech teams had really good, mission-oriented reasons for wanting their way to carry the day. The tech team could say, “Hey, we’ve done this kind of tech before at larger scale and with more stability than you’ve ever had. Let us do this.” And the digital team could say, “Yeah, well, we elected the president and we know how to win, regardless of the technology stack. Just make what we ask for.”
The way that the conflict played out was over things like the user experience on the website. Jason Kunesh was the director of UX for the tech team. He had many years of consulting under his belt for big and small companies like Microsoft and LeapFrog. He, too, from an industry perspective knew what he was doing. So, he ran some user interrupt tests on the website to determine how people were experiencing www.barackobama.com. What he found was that the website wasn’t even trying to make a go at persuading voters. Rather, everyone got funneled into the fundraising “trap.” When he raised that issue with Goff and Rospars, he got a response that I imagine was something like, “Duh. Now STFU,” but perhaps in more words. And from the Goff/Rospars perspective, think about it: the system they’d developed could raise $ 3 million *from a single email.* The sorts of moves they had learned how to make had made a difference of tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Why was this Kunesh guy coming around trying to tell them how to run a campaign?
From Kunesh’s perspective, though, there was no reason to think that you had to run this campaign the same as you did the last one. The outsider status that the team both adopted and had applied to them gave them the right to question previous practices.
Tech sometimes had difficulty building what the Field team, a hallowed group within the campaign’s world, wanted. Most of that related to the way that they launched Dashboard, the online outreach tool. If you look at Dashboard at the end of the campaign, you see a beautifully polished product that let you volunteer any way you wanted. It’s secure and intuitive and had tremendously good uptime as the campaign drew to a close.
But that wasn’t how the first version of Dashboard looked.
The tech team’s plan was to roll out version 1 with a limited feature set, iterate, roll out version 2, iterate, and so on and so forth until the software was complete and bulletproof. Per Kunesh’s telling, the Field people were used to software that looked complete but that was unreliable under the hood. It looked as if you could the things you needed to do, but the software would keep falling down and getting patched, falling down and getting patched, all the way through a campaign. The tech team did not want that. They might be slower, but they were going to build solid products.
Reed’s team began to trickle into Chicago beginning in May 2011. They promised, over-optimistically, that they would release a version of Dashboard just a few months after the team arrived. The first version was not impressive. “Aug. 29, 2011, my birthday, we were supposed to have a prototype out of Dashboard, that was going to be the public launch,” Kunesh told me. “It was freaking horrible, you couldn’t show it to anyone. But I’d only been there 13 weeks and most of the team had been there half that time.”
As the tech team struggled to translate what people wanted into usable software, trust in the tech team–already shaky–kept eroding. By Februrary 2012, Kunesh started to get word that people on both the digital and field teams had agitated to pull the plug on Dashboard and replace the tech team with somebody, anybody, else.
“A lot of the software is kind of late. It’s looking ugly and I go out on this field call,” Kunesh remembered. “And people are like, ‘Man, we should fire your bosses man…. We gotta get the guys from the DNC. They don’t know what the hell you’re doing.’ I’m sitting there going, ‘I’m gonna get another margarita.’ “
While the responsibility for their early struggles certainly falls to the tech team, there were mitigating factors. For one, no one had ever done what they were attempting to do. Narwhal had to connect to a bunch of different vendors’ software, some of which turned out to be surprisingly arcane and difficult. Not only that, but there were differences in the way field offices in some states did things and how campaign HQ thought they did things. Tech wasted time building things that it turned out people didn’t need or want.
“In the movie version of the campaign, there’s probably a meeting where I’m about to get fired and I throw myself on the table,” Slaby told me. But in reality, what actually happened was Obama campaign chief Jim Messina would come by Slaby’s desk and tell him, “Dude, this has to work.” And Slaby would respond, “I know. It will,” and then go back to work.
In fact, some shake-ups were necessary. Reed and Slaby sent some product managers packing and brought in more traditional ones like former Microsoft PM Carol Davidsen. “You very much have to understand the campaign’s hiring strategy: ‘We’ll hire these product managers who have campaign experience, then hire engineers who have technical experience–and these two worlds will magically come together.’ That failed,” Davidsen said. “Those two groups of people couldn’t talk to each other.”
Then, in the late spring, all the products that the tech team had been promising started to show up. Dashboard got solid. You didn’t have to log in a bunch of times if you wanted to do different things on the website. Other smaller products rolled out. “The stuff we told you about for a year is actually happening,” Kunesh recalled telling the field team. “You’re going to have one log-in and have all these tools, and it’s all just gonna work.”
Perhaps most important, Narwhal really got on track, thanks no doubt to Davidsen’s efforts as well as Josh Thayer’s, the lead engineer who arrived in April. What Narwhal fixed was a problem that’s long plagued campaigns. You have all this data coming in from all these places — the voter file, various field offices, the analytics people, the website, mobile stuff. In 2008, and all previous races, the numbers changed once a day. It wasn’t real-time. And the people looking to hit their numbers in various ways out in the field offices–number of volunteers and dollars raised and voters persuaded–were used to seeing that update happen like that.
But from an infrastructure level, how much better would it be if you could sync that data in real time across the entire campaign? That’s what Narwhal was supposed to do. Davidsen, in true product-manager form, broke down precisely how it all worked. First, she said, Narwhal wasn’t really one thing, but several. Narwhal was just an initially helpful brand for the bundle of software.
In reality, it had three components. “One is vendor integration: BSD, NGP, VAN [the latter two companies merged in 2010]. Just getting all of that data into the system and getting it in real time as soon as it goes in one system to another,” she said. “The second part is an API portion. You don’t want a million consumers getting data via SQL.” The API allowed people to access parts of the data without letting them get at the SQL database on the backend. It provided a safe way for Dashboard, the Call Tool (which helped people make calls), and the Twitter Blaster to pull data. And the last part was the presentation of the data that was in the system. While the dream had been for all applications to run through Narwhal in real time, it turned out that couldn’t work. So, they split things into real-time applications like the Call Tool or things on the web. And then they provided a separate way for the Analytics people, who had very specific needs, to get the data in a different form. Then, whatever they came up with was fed back into Narwhal.
By the end, Davidsen thought all the teams’ relationships had improved, even before Obama’s big win. She credited a weekly Wednesday drinking and hanging-out session that brought together all the various people working on the campaign’s technology. By the very end, some front-end designers who were technically on the digital team had embedded with the tech squad to get work done faster. Tech might not have been fully integrated, but it was fully operational. High fives were in the air.
Slaby, with typical pragmatism, put it like this. “Our supporters don’t give a shit about our org chart. They just want to have a meaningful experience. We promise them they can play a meaningful role in politics and they don’t care about the departments in the campaign. So we have to do the work on our side to look integrated and have our shit together,” he said. “That took some time. You have to develop new trust with people. It’s just change management. It’s not complicated; it’s just hard.”
What They Actually Built
Of course, the tech didn’t exist for its own sake. It was meant to be used by the organizers in the field and the analysts in the lab. Let’s just run through some of the things that actually got accomplished by the tech, digital, and analytics teams beyond of Narwhal and Dashboard.
They created the most sophisticated e-mail fundraising program ever. The digital team, under Rospars leadership, took their data-driven strategy to a new level. Any time you received an e-mail from the Obama campaign, it had been tested on 18 smaller groups and the response rates had been gauged. The campaign thought all the letters had a good chance of succeeding, but the worst-performing letters did only 15 to 20 percent of what the best-performing e-mails could deliver. So, if a good performer could do $ 2.5 million, a poor performer might only net $ 500,000. The genius of the campaign was that it learned to stop sending poor performers.
Obama became the first presidential candidate to appear on Reddit, the massive popular social networking site. And yes, he really did type in his own answers with Goff at his side. One fascinating outcome of the AMA is that 30,000 Redditors registered to vote after president dropped in a link to the Obama voter registration page. Oh, and the campaign also officially has the most tweeted tweet and the most popular Facebook post. Not bad. I would also note that Laura Olin, a former strategist at Blue State Digital who moved to the Obama campaign, ran the best campaign Tumblr the world will probably ever see.
With Davidsen’s help, the Analytics team built a tool they called The Optimizer, which allowed the campaign to buy eyeballs on television more cheaply. They took set-top box (that is to say, your cable or satellite box or DVR) data from Davidsen’s old startup, Navik Networks, and correlated it with the campaign’s own data. This occurred through a third party called Epsilon: the campaign sent its voter file and the television provider sent their billing file and boom, a list came back of people who had done certain things like, for example, watched the first presidential debate. Having that data allowed the campaign to buy ads that they knew would get in front of the most of their people at the last cost. They didn’t have to buy the traditional stuff like the local news, either. Instead, they could run ads targeted to specific types of voters during reruns or off-peak hours.
According to CMAG/Kantar, the Obama’s campaign’s cost per ad was lower ($ 594) than the Romney campaign ($ 666) or any other major buyer in the campaign cycle. That difference may not sound impressive, but the Obama campaign itself aired more than 550,000 ads. And it wasn’t just about cost, either. They could see that some households were only watching a couple hours of TV a day and might be willing to spend more to get in front of those harder-to-reach people.
The digital and tech teams worked to build Twitter and Facebook Blasters, a project that had the code name Täärgus for some reason. With Twitter, one of the company’s former employees, Mark Trammell, helped build a tool that could specifically target individual users with direct messages. “We built an influence score for the people following the [Obama for America] accounts and then cross-referenced those for specific things we were trying to target, battleground states, that sort of stuff.” Meanwhile, the teams also built an opt-in Facebook outreach program that sent people messages saying, essentially, “Your friend, Dave in Ohio, hasn’t voted yet. Go tell him to vote.” Goff described the Facebook tool as “the most significant new addition to the voter contact arsenal that’s come around in years, since the phone call.”
Last but certainly not least, you have the digital team’s Quick Donate. It essentially brought the ease of Amazon’s one-click purchases to political donations. “It’s the absolute epitome of how you can make it easy for people to give money online,” Goff said. “In terms of fundraising, that’s as innovative as we needed to be.” Storing people’s payment information also let the campaign receive donations via text messages long before the Federal Elections Commission approved an official way of doing so. They could simply text people who’d opted in a simple message like, “Text back with how much money you’d like to donate.” Sometimes people texted much larger dollar amounts back than the $ 10 increments that mobile carriers allow.
It’s an impressive array of accomplishments. What you can do with data and code just keeps advancing. “After the last campaign, I got introduced as the CTO of the most technically advanced campaign ever,” Slaby said. “But that’s true of every CTO of every campaign every time.” Or, rather, it’s true of one campaign CTO every time.
Exit Music
That next most technically advanced CTO, in 2016, will not be Harper Reed. A few days after the election, sitting with his wife at Wicker Park’s Handlebar, eating fish tacos, and drinking a Daisy Cutter pale ale, Reed looks happy. He had told me earlier in the day that he’d never experienced stress until the Obama campaign, and I believe him.
He regaled us with stories about his old performance troupe, Jugglers Against Homophobia, wild clubbing, and DJs. “It was this whole world of having fun and living in the moment,” Reed said. “And there was a lot of doing that on the Internet.”
“I spent a lot of time hacking doing all this stuff, building websites, building communities, working all the time, ” Reed said, “and then a lot of time drinking, partying, and hanging out. And I had to choose when to do which.”
We left Handlebar and made a quick pit stop at the coffee shop, Wormhole, where he first met Slaby. Reed cracks that it’s like Reddit come to life. Both of them remember the meeting the same way: Slaby playing the role of square, Reed playing the role of hipster. And two minutes later, they were ready to work together. What began 18 months ago in that very spot was finally coming to an end. Reed could stop being Obama for America’s CTO and return to being “Harper Reed, probably one of the coolest guys ever,” as his personal Web page is titled.
But of course, he and his whole team of nerds were changed by the experience. They learned what it was like to have–and work with people who had– a higher purpose than building cool stuff. “Teddy [Goff] would tear up talking about the president. I would be like, ‘Yeah, that guy’s cool,’ ” Reed said. “It was only towards the end, the middle of 2012, when we realized the gravity of what we were doing.”
Part of that process was Reed, a technologist’s technolgoist, learning the limits of his own power. “I remember at one point basically breaking down during the campaign because I was losing control. The success of it was out of my hands,” he told me. “I felt like the people I hired were right, the resources we argued for were right. And because of a stupid mistake, or people were scared and they didn’t adopt the technology or whatever, something could go awry. We could lose.”
And losing, they felt more and more deeply as the campaign went on, would mean horrible things for the country. They started to worry about the next Supreme Court justices while they coded.
“There is the egoism of technologists. We do it because we can create. I can handle all of the parameters going into the machine and I know what is going to come out of it,” Reed said. “In this, the control we all enjoyed about technology was gone.”
We finished our drinks, ready for what was almost certainly going to be a long night, and headed to our first club. The last thing my recorder picked up over the bass was me saying to Harper, “I just saw someone buy Hennessy. I’ve never seen someone buy Hennessy.” Then, all I can hear is that music.
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