Obama and Roosevelt: Fireside Blogging
I was looking through the BeamItDown collection of iPod Touch/iPhone books the other day when I stumbled across something really interesting, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Fireside Chats’. Between 1933 and 1944 (the Great Depression) Roosevelt used to broadcast fireside chats that addressed a wide variety of topics. There were 29 chats in all and they ranged from ‘On Economic Conditions’ to ‘On the Fall of Rome’.
Now, if you match this with the Obama administrations early talks about online monitoring and interaction from January 2009 and the current economic crisis, is it that ridiculous to suggest that Obama is bringing Roosevelt’s fireside chats to web2.0?
Will Obama blog about the economic crisis, the Iraq war and international relations? Will obamaspeaks.com become the fireside venue for comforting the American people?
I truly hope so. Although I wouldn’t fancy the idea of Brown replicating.
Addressing the nation has become a very autonomous process, call a press conference, spin out some tired trite phrases and then watch the media pull your words apart. I was talking to Sam Oakley, a Wolfstar colleague, recently and he believes that public speakers have fallen from grace in the past ten years. Can you remember a recent speech that resonated and hit fever pitch? No. Who can match Mandela, Kennedy, King or Malcolm X for their ability to unite people and give them a voice?
The world has grown cold to politicians who use the media to broadcast their message – we’re savvy to it. The same can be said for brands using the media; people want two-way communication. People are tired of being lied at. If Obama decides to replicate Roosevelt’s fireside chats I think that he’ll endear himself not only to the nation, but to the world. I’m not calling for Obama to spin out thirty minutes of propaganda and then use social media to broadcast it, but for him to understand the values that the world wants. Honesty, morality and humanity. The world is sick of politicians, we want humans.