"Barack's VP: Be the First to Know"

This evening I received the following interestring email from the Barack Obama for President campaign:

Dear Jeff --

Barack Obama is about to make one of the most important decisions of this campaign -- choosing a running mate.

You have helped build this movement from the bottom up, and Barack wants you to be the first to know his choice.

Sign up today to be the first to know:

http://my.barackobama.com/vp

You will receive an email the moment Barack makes his decision, or you can text VP to 62262 to receive a text message on your mobile phone.

Read more.

Once you've signed up, please forward this email to your friends, family, and coworkers to let them know about this special opportunity.

No other campaign has done this before. You can be part of this important moment.

Be the first to know who Barack selects as his running mate.

Thanks,

David

David Plouffe

Campaign Manager

Obama for America

The email ends, of course, with a Donate button the reader can click to give more of their money to support Barack Obama's use of the so-called "parallel public financing system" he turned to once he realized the campaign's potential to grab far more cash outside the public system than within it.

As a person who often gets up to three emails a week from the Barack Obama campaign (all of which do little more than what Obama's site as a whole does -- ask for money) , I was a bit surprised by two points in this email.

First, Plouffe (or, more accurately, his ghostwriter) eschewed the usual tone of every one of his emails: the entreaty for recipients not to sign up to learn something, but to sign up to participate in something. I know it makes perfect sense to invite folks to join the exclusive fraternity of the first-to-learn about an event or decision (a misleading prospect here, by the way; does anybody seriously think this campaign won't leak the chosen running mate to party insiders, media figures, and more before actually letting hoi polloi in on the secret?) rather than to invite them to help make that decision.

All the same, though, doing it this way goes against the way the Obama campaign has done business to date. The campaign generally sends out an email asking for money and offering, in return for that donation, an opportunity to "join in" the "historically open process" the Obama campaign claims to be working with.

The second surprise was that the email did not make an overt request for a donation from the recipient. This may be the first Obama email, out of the several dozen I have received, regardless the subject, from primary campaigning to the Denver worshipfest, that did not make asking for donations its main focus. That was very interesting to me, indeed.

An expected email about the Veep selection would have encouraged recipients (a) to donate, and (b) to text or email their choice for Obama's running mate.

The emails and texts would have been summarily ignored, of course, outside of adding to the text messaging and emailing lists the campaign has been compiling, but such an approach would have furthered the appearance (read: facade) on the part of the campaign that they were genuinely trying to incorporate the great unwashed in America into weighty decisions of campaign strategy.

I personally signed up for the text message alert, and received an "emergency" priority response to my phone saying:

Welcome to Obama Mobile. You will now be one of the 1st[sic] notified when the VP candidate is selected. Text HELP for help. Std charges apply. Please forward.

Based on the fact that, as I mentioned before, being added to Obama's email list meant the receipt of several emails a week, I am very curious to see how much my cell phone will now be spammed by Obama campaign requests for further help funding the "parallel public financing" of his presidential effort.

I'll also be sure to post whatever they text me vis-à-vis the VP pick when I get it, as well. I know I'm certainly not the only journalist to sign up for the text message alert, but I'll certainly try to be the quickest to my computer :-)