ShareThisMoveOn Endorses Obama
In what will probably be the big Democratic political news of the day, MoveOn.org announced its membership had decided to endorse Barack Obama for president. It appears that Obama narrowly got over the two-thirds-vote hurdle that MoveOn had created for this cycle in terms of an endorsement. In 2000, Howard Dean narrowly missed a lower majority-vote threshold for the endorsement.
What will the impact be? The MoveOn press release linked to above unsubtly notes that 1.7 million members of the organization live in Super Tuesday states. There will also almost certainly be an unsubtle effort in the news media to link Obama to some of MoveOn's more controversial actions, particularly the famous "General Betrayus" ad last September. But at a time when the Super Tuesday competition was already tightening up, the endorsement will most likely be viewed as another contributor to a late surge by Obama.
One of the things I'm very curious about is the synergies betwee MoveOn's network-style organization and the Obama campaign's use of social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. A thread just started in the discussion group on Obama's Facebook profile ... any idea where this is likely to be discussed on MySpace?