[...] This Obama campaign, which I have probably cursed by saying this out loud, looks from the outside like a well-run, contemporary business: seemingly the right mix of enthusiasm and discipline, encouragement and focus. I view organisations like that as a sort of minor miracle, because the working environment has changed so radically in the last decade that I despair of anyone getting it right. You're safer using the old disciplines, but at a cost: that's what makes your company or image appear distant and inhuman compared to the bumbling, chaotic but adventurous alternatives. Bush's skill was appearing human despite that kind of frozen discipline, and you only had to see how badly Gore and Kerry were at imitating the same relaxation to see the challenge of covering up all that machinery.
I suspect that if Obama gets in, they'll be an awful lot of Fast Company-style books written about this campaign, and how to build your business the same way.
That's how Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka post "the business of barack" (via an instant message from Cecily) ends.
[...] When you absorb the visuals, it doesn't come off like a political convention; it comes off as a mass gathering of ordinary people.
Somewhere, Saul Alinsky is grinning.
And that's the end of Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish post "Watching the Crowd."
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