NEW MEDIA--FLASHBACK Arianna: "Were It Not For The Internet, Barack Obama Would Not Be President"

If President-elect Barack Obama had run in 2004, he would not have won the election, says HuffingtonPost founder and political pundit Arianna Huffington. That's partly due to the variety of web 2.0 technologies that were available to the Obama campaign that either weren't around or weren't used effectively during the last election -- both in terms of fundraising and distribution of information.

"Were it not for the internet, Barack Obama would not be president," said Huffington, while speaking on a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. "Were it not for the internet, he wouldn't even have been the democratic nominee. By contrast, the McCain campaign didn't have a clue. The problem wasn't the age of the candidate, it was the age of the idea."

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