Obama Raises Funds for Hurricane Victims

Today the Obama campaign sent out requests for donations to help people recover from the damage being caused along the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Gustav. Of course they used e-mail to contact their supporters, but they also sent out a mass text message to the phone numbers they gathered with the VP announcement gimmick.

The text message I received read as follows:

Barack asks that you give to the Red Cross: give 5 dollars by texting GIVE to 24357 or give more by calling 1-800-435-7669 or at redcross.org/donate. Please fwd

This confirms my suspicion that Obama's strategists intend to use their massive list of texting-enabled phones to do more than just generate buzz about the campaign or even raise money.

If Obama wins in November, I pretty much expect people to be getting texts urging them to contact their Congressional representatives and voice their support for Obama's health-care plan, etc. And because he has the states and zip codes for quite a few of the numbers on the list, many of the messages could be quite narrowly tailored.

This is the beginning of a whole new kind of politics--a kind that has just now become technologically feasible.