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Sunday, November 18, 2007
The Internet and politics: You can lead a horse to YouTube, but can you make it watch?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If necessity is the mother of invention, then - at least when it comes to politics - the Internet has become the overworked midwife.
Anyone with eyebrows had them raised several inches two weeks ago, when Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul - a libertarian-minded afterthought in both debates and national polls - raised a record $4.2 million in a single day via a web-based fund drive.
On the Democratic side, Barack Obama has gone deepest into Internet campaigning, and has more supporters on the Facebook social network than all his rivals combined — though the numbers are slightly tighter on MySpace.
Videos posted on YouTube by Paul and Obama have been seen by a combined 10.4 million viewers — accounting for about 40 percent of the total traffic created by presidential videos, according to techpresident.com., which keeps track of such data.
None of this has gone unnoticed in Georgia. Last week, Dale Cardwell, one of four Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate, rolled out the beginnings of an Internet-based campaign.
The former TV journalist had raised only $72,000, with $35,000 in the bank, as of Oct. 1. Cardwell can’t afford to appear on the medium that once gave him a living.
His solution is tens of thousands of e-mails linking recipients to a set of YouTube videos that are very much modeled after the reports he once fashioned for WSB-TV — but which are actually intended to subvert the stranglehold that TV has on statewide politics.
“The domination of television is coming to an end. The Internet is destroying that monopoly in front of our very eyes,” Cardwell predicted. “I think this will be the last election cycle where television advertising determines who is elected to office. And I’m not quite sure it will do it this time.”
Cardwell’s videos are unbridled attacks on Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss, salted with requests for small campaign donations. A WSB video truck appears in one. And Cardwell’s campaign colors are a WSB blue, red and yellow.
“I want to put people in the mental framework of what I’ve done for the past 12 years,” he said. Cardwell said he’s had no complaints from his former employer. “They haven’t said a word,” he said.
Democrats in Georgia aren’t the only ones who see the Internet as a way around the limitations imposed by an empty wallet. A certain Sonny Perdue was a pioneer. In 2002, he used the Web to distribute a video that portrayed Gov. Roy Barnes, the Democratic incumbent, as a giant rat.
This year, Republicans trying to boost their numbers in the U.S. House have found themselves on the short end of the fund-raising stick. In past cycles, the GOP has poured money into campaigns against Georgia’s two white Democrats, John Barrow of Savannah and Jim Marshall of Macon.
Not so this time. So far, Republicans haven’t even been able to field a well-financed candidate against Barrow.
David All, a former staffer for U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston of Savannah, has proposed a tactic to match the party’s strapped situation. He wants to arm hundreds of college-aged Republicans with video cameras and send them out to document every public word uttered by select Democratic congressmen — including Barrow and Marshall.
“Let’s pick the 30 most vulnerable House Democrats and let’s focus our limited resources,” said All, now a 28-year-old media consultant in Washington.
The idea would be an organized hunt for “macaca” moments of the sort that tanked the U.S. Senate campaign of Republican George Allen. The practice would not be new — campaigns have stalked rivals for decades.
“The difference is now with YouTube, the material can actually be distributed making minor flip-flops a serious problem,” All argued on techrepublican.com — back in May.
All said the project is gathering steam. “It takes a while to get it around to the right people,” he said last week.
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