Nearly a quarter of a million people signed up on Max Lucado’s site to pray – others may not have signed up there, or even heard of him, but they too prayed.

And then what?

How easily we forget. If Biblical Christianity is indeed correct, then the battle of evil against good hasn’t stopped just because we had a nice bit of a prayer in January. Who’s praying now? And who’s getting ready to say, “Well, I don’t like what Obama says, or does, or stands for” … without having added their voice to what I suspect is the pitifully small number of people still praying? Do we only pray for our leaders when we feel like it? That’s not Biblical. Do we abandon them – stop praying for them – when they don’t follow a policy we believe in? That’s not Biblical either.

Let’s change that.

Politics is a hard enough arena to be in – let’s at least look after the people we voted about. One single vote in a presidential election seems a tiny thing when we compare it to the many millions needed to elect someone – but it all adds up, and every vote counts in one way or another. A prayer also seems to be an inconsequential thing – but each one matters.

We expect President Obama to make good decisions on our behalf about seats on the Supreme Court, foreign relations, the economic crisis – everything. It’s his job.

We should get back to our job – praying for our leaders.

What are your thoughts? Leave them in the comments…

I blogged about the Obama/McCain twitters last November, about how Obama’s team really understood the concept early on, but McCain’s team just didn’t get it until very late in the play. Now I’m seeing something else about Twitter for President-elect Obama – according to TwitterCounter.com, on January 1 he had 152,041 followers; by Jan 2 another 1,130, the next day an additional 546, then 757, then an incredible 7,949 (8,000 new followers in a day!), then 2,913. Yesterday a mere 78 new followers picked him up.

Past Week's Obama Twitter Followers

Now it’s true that Twitter has had its problems, and it could be that the enormous number might be simply a reload of a number of followers who were deleted earlier (there was a massive drop from Dec 31 to Jan 1 of 5,757 followers – running a trend line over the previous points of the graph would suggest they didn’t actually stop following him, and it does seem unlikely for such a mass migration in a single day).

Nevertheless, the point is clear – his last Twitter was on November 5, when he had 117,021 followers. In the 2 months since then, 48,393 people have added themselves as followers to a feed that has sent nothing – a rate of 768 per day! And why? In order to add yourself as a follower, you usually go to the person’s main twitter page, where you would see that nothing has been sent out since the election ended.

More significantly, as President, and by extension as President-elect, anything he puts onto Twitter becomes instant public knowledge that cannot be pulled back (rather like the Presidential Records Act on steroids). There’s no way anyone with a brain would add that risk to all the others that go with the job already. Keeping the account clean and untouched since the end of the elections is much smarter.

So why, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the account has been dormant for 2 months and that it is unlikely to be used going forward, are people piling onto it at such a rate? I suppose the logic is ‘just in case’ and ‘if he doesn’t send anything it won’t matter anyway’. One sad possibility – he’s following 5,000 more people than are following him, which suggests an automatic response to the follow request; I suppose there could be twitterers who want to boost their ‘twitter grade’ by following him – although that would be taking the picayune to a whole new level.

I tell you this, though: with this many followers, if he does post anything, it may bring Twitter to its knees!

I’m not a particularly savvy person, but I noticed that both Obama and McCain used Twitter in their campaigns. I went to their Twitter pages to see their connections and such. Here’s what I found, looking only at the top page of each (the top page shows the latest 20 Twitter messages -

here’s McCain’s (click to enlarge)

and here’s Obama’s ).

Obama was communicating about 3 times as frequently as McCain

McCain stopped broadcasting on October 24 (11 days before the election) – his last 20 Twitters cover Sept 27 through October 24 … 28 days, or an average of about 0.7 Twitters per day. On the other hand, Obama stopped broadcasting on November 5 (the day after the election) – his last 20 Twitters cover October 27 through November 5 … 10 days, or an average of 2 Twitters per day.

The content is decidedly different

These last 20 Twitters break down as follows:

McCain: campaign info: 9; attack: 9; complaints: 2; references to opponents: 6.

Obama: campaign info: 16; attack: 0; complaints: 0; references to opponents: 0; 4 appeals, mostly to vote; 1 “thank you” at the end.

Across the whole campaign, Obama was Twittering 12 times as long as McCain and at about the same rate overall

McCain started using Twitter: Sept 19 … 46 days before the election, while Obama started using Twitter on April 29, 2007 … 555 days before the election!

Total Twitters throughout McCain’s campaign: 25, compared to 263 total Twitters throughout Obama’s campaign.

Obama built up a following more than 25 times the size of McCain’s

People following McCain: 4,863 – while a massive 130,340 people followed Obama.

My rough interpretation

1. Obama’s team understood the value of this technology early on in the run-up; McCain’s team did not. They both have nice web sites, but having a good web site was the “we’re impressive” thing to do back in 1996 – it’s de rigueur now. One of the ‘in’ technologies in the past couple of years has been Twitter. Obama’s team recognized it very early on; McCain’s team took nearly 17 months to catch on.
2. Cost of reaction vs action: time spent telling people how bad your opponent is is time and opportunity lost telling them how good you are. In a race that focuses so much on personality, it’s rarely useful to point to the other person for any reason.
3. Recall that toward the end of the 1996 election, Dole finally gave in to his advisors who had been recommending that he attack Clinton on character. It was a significant (and very noticed) volte-face. On the other hand, Clinton stopped most attacks, and came off looking like the gentleman politician. The impact was that the attacks hurt Dole a great deal more than Clinton. The public gets very tired of constant mud-slinging and wingeing. McCain’s team did not seem to have learnt this lesson. Again, toward the end, Obama’s team stayed relatively clean here, and he came across as the ‘bigger man’. Perception and name retention are everything in trying to sway voters at this late point in a campaign, so McCain’s team were in effect campaigning for Obama at this point.

The above clearly isn’t the single determining factor – or even necessarily a main reason – of who won and who lost. But it might well be symptomatic.

</politics>!