How Did Jon Ossoff, 33, Get Within Reach of a Senate Seat? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Mr. Ossoff had just finished his freshman year at Georgetown University and had never worked on a campaign before. But in an initial three-hour meeting, he pitched Mr. Johnson, a local politician with a small law office, on using the internet to communicate with Democratic primary voters as well as donors, reporters and bloggers elsewhere.
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“He wanted to use blogs and this new thing that I’d never heard of, Facebook, and so I gave him license to do that,” Mr. Johnson said. “It immediately put my campaign on the map. It got my campaign national attention.”
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“You remind me of another time in my own life,” Mr. Lewis said to Mr. Ossoff in an Ossoff campaign video posted to Facebook in April, before Mr. Lewis’s death in July. “When I was 17 years old growing up in rural Alabama, I wrote a letter to Dr. King, and he wrote me back and sent me a round-trip Greyhound bus ticket and invited me to come to Montgomery and meet with him. And it changed my life.”
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Michaeleen Crowell, who worked as Mr. Lewis’s legislative director and overlapped with Mr. Ossoff, said the congressman had received hundreds of letters from ambitious young people and that a parade of interns had come through his office. Mr. Ossoff, she said, made a special connection with the civil rights leader.
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Mr. Ossoff attended the prestigious Paideia School in Atlanta. In 2003, he read Mr. Lewis’s biography and talked his way into a volunteer position in the congressman’s office the next summer.
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Nonetheless, they sat down at a table for about an hour and a half and talked. “I’ll tell you, by the end of that lunch I was so impressed with him and his knowledge about policy and politics and his insight that it made me want to help the campaign even more,” he recounted. “I went from being offended to overly impressed,” Mr. Satcher said.
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Mr. Johnson went on to beat Ms. McKinney and won accolades for his tech-savvy campaign. National Journal wrote that Mr. Johnson’s campaign had “the most unique blog strategy” and quoted Mr. Ossoff saying that blogs were “effective in reaching out to the people who make the news, the people who determine what’s hot and what’s not.”