The LA Times had an interesting piece on the “web gap” between Obama and McCain. (Short story shorter: Obama is featured in many more, and much more flattering, YouTube videos than his presumed opponent.)
Jon Henke, at the new Next Right, proposes a solution:
There’s a simple answer for how to fix this: build a multi-million dollar right-of-center online infrastructure with many companies who do right-of-center digital advocacy, produce strategic messaging and content and hire top blogging and video production talent so that the talent can do this sort of thing full time.
Have you spotted what’s missing?
Obviously, infrastructure and investment are incredibly important, and something that the Right needs to work on. Still, the tubes don’t just provide a new medium for old messages — they also reflect the new sensibilities of new constituency. Call us “Gen Y” or “Millenials” or “those darn kids,” but we don’t want politics that sounds like it’s been through a focus group.[1]
McCain’s problem isn’t that people dislike him — people dislike any, and occasionally every, politician — but that the people who do like him don’t like him very much. Real enthusiasm can’t be generated by a multi-million dollar infrastructure, or by fat paychecks to bloggers.[2]
What we really want — what the Right is going to need — is message.
A huge and important part of political campaigning is, and will always be, getting a message heard. Equally important, though, is crafting the message in the first place, and young people want to hear different things than Boomers do. (Case in point: my parents failed utterly to grasp the hilarity of this.)
Far more than traditional media, which takes the form of authority telling, new media functions around community and conversation. This is incredibly powerful for the campaign that knows how to take advantage of it: if you can appeal to the people who make things happen on blogs and videos, they’ll do your job for you. The really telling example here isn’t Obama but Ron Paul, who beats McCain and Clinton combined for YouTube hits. He has an infrastructure now, but it grew virally — and that’s what Web 2.0 is all about.
I love Web 2.0 as much as the next Digg/Twitter/Flickr-er, but it seems like the fact that Ron Paul has amassed more YouTube hits than any of the other candidates yet still is getting shit for votes says something about the relative unimportance of Web 2.0, not its importance, no?
But Paul would be even MORE nowhere if it weren’t for Web 2.0. It’s not just a question of viral outreach — that’s where the infrastructure and investment are incredibly important.
An online-only campaign would be very silly, but a campaign with no web presence would be hopeless. Web 2.0 is just one aspect of a candidate’s media outreach, but it has to be done right.
First, I’ll trade you an internet team for a field staff any day of the week and twice on Saturdays. What we’ve seen in this election is that the web is great for raising money, good for messaging to young people and pretty worthless for the real work of elections: winning votes. Hence Ron Paul.
Or put differently, Obama had his best field team in Iowa while Clinton had hers in New Hampshire. Upsets both times.
What I really wanted to ask though, is if you buy the thesis that the left and the Paulites run the internet because we are ideologically more aligned with the technology. The conservatives are too authoritarian for it to work. I’m pretty sure I don’t, but I really am not in the GOP world enough to know.
I’m not claiming that politicians should reject traditional campaign methods for the web! Simply that, when they DO pay attention to the web (as they should and will), they need to do it intelligently.
There are two things going on with the politics of the internet. The first is that the techies — the people who make the whole thing actually work — are overwhelmingly libertarian. (The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, etc.) This is an ideological affiliation, but there aren’t enough of them to make a huge difference, I don’t think.
The second, of course, is that the most technologically savvy people tend to be younger, more urban, better educated, and more affluent than average, and that tends to break demographically left. But I don’t think it’s that the Interwebs appeal to more left-leaning people…