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Upstart
Business Journal
Obama:
'Time' person of the year
(and leader of an awesome geek squad)
by J. Jennings Moss, Editor
December 19, 2012
“You
do understand that as
President of the United States, the amount of power you have is
overstated in
some ways,” Obama tells Time magazine. “But what you do have the
capacity to do
is to set a direction.”
If
there's a message for
entrepreneurs and startup founders from Time magazine's selection of
President
Barack Obama as its Person of the Year for 2012, it's this: Surround
yourself
with geeks.
The
magazine spills considerable
ink talking about the significance of Obama—the first African-American
president, a man who campaigned openly on a platform of raising taxes,
a
politician who ended the military's ban on gay service members and who
ultimately backed same-sex marriage—winning a second term. The magazine
described him as being the "architect of the New America."
But
in words and in photos, Time
also devoted considerable praise to a group of people who helped Obama
win—the
data miners manipulated social media to get pro-Obama voters to the
polls and
to encourage more people to contribute financially to the campaign.
"Message
is one thing, but in
modern presidential politics, it can’t go very far without a machine.
And
during Obama’s 2012 campaign, that machine was fueled with new methods
devised
by a geek squad convened from multinational ad agencies, corporate
consultancies and high-tech start-ups," starts a story about this team
from Time's Michael Scherer.
Read
the rest of the article at Upstart
Business Journal
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