Candidates choose the Web to drive ’08 presidential campaign

WASHINGTON DC: On August 11, 2006, Virginia University engineering student SR Sidharth uploaded on YouTube a video of Republican Senator George Allen calling him a “Macaca” during a re-election campaign. Macaca is a racial slur used for dark-skinned people of North Africa, and Allen’s utterance of the word caused a nationwide furore, costing him the election. 

That single seat gave the Democrats the majority they desperately needed in Congress, putting the Bush administration onto the backseat and the upper hand in the decision making on Iraq. With Congress now pushing Bush to bring the troops back home and threatening to defund the war, Sidharth, with YouTube had changed American politics forever. 

Not inappropriately, the respected online magazine Salon named Sidharth as its Person of the Year for 2006 while Time magazine put the “You” in YouTube as its Person of the Year.

Since then, YouTube is no longer just a site where you upload videos; starting late February it also became the common battleground for all the presidential candidates when it launched YouChoose, a channel dedicated to the 2008 elections and featuring scores of videos of all the nine confirmed candidates — from Arizona senator John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to Democratic senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. While these four are the frontrunners, five others have also joined the battle for the eyeballs.

“I believe that the Web is not only creating new forms of political dialogue but offering a new wave of opportunity for all Americans,” says Hillary, one of the first to put up her videos on the site, even though YouTube’s viewers seem to favour Obama, whose videos have generated nearly 82,000 views to Hillary’s 30,405. Among the Republicans, Giuliani is ahead of McCain on YouTube.

“Online video has quickly become an essential way for the general public to become politically informed and empowered,” says YouTube CEO Chad Hurley. “At its core, YouTube is about democracy and self-expression, and we’re proud to be providing politicians with an environment where they can share information with voters.”

If the 2004 campaign created history with several bloggers being given media credentials, the 2008 campaign will be a first one where the Web is not just a reporting platform, but one where candidates would make or break their causes. Zdnet.com blogger Donna Bogatin calls it ‘User Generated Politics.’ “What already has a life of its own at YouTube is YouTuber uploads of “User Generated Politics” videos, rather than professionally produced and scripted campaign vehicles,” she says.

American User Generated Politics has also resulted in another website — Congresspedia, a Wikipedia-like site that relies on citizens to gather information on members of Congress. Congresspedia recently asked citizens to call 96 senators to find out which of them had kept out a congressional transparency bill on hold. Since senators were embarrassed to own up, the campaign resulted in the bill being passed into law.

Says political commentator Mark Tapscott in the Washington DC Examiner, “Despite their many differences on other issues, groups on the left and right of the political spectrum are moving in the same direction in using the Internet to open up government.”

Not all of them are completely savvy, though. John Edwards, another presidential hopeful, promotes his campaign on an impressive 24 different social networking websites where he asks people to connect with him. Bogatin, however, feels that Edwards has shown only flashes of interest in all of those 24 sites. She says, “Edwards has posted campaign videos at YouTube. At Revver and Meatcafe, however, he has merely set-up empty profile pages and left them empty.”

She adds that Edwards’ “friendless” status at several of these networking sites elicited pity from some users. One user, Joshua on Hi5 added him as a friend not because he liked Edwards’ ideology, but because “you got only two friends.”

While the primaries to decide the final candidates for each of the political parties will be held only at the end of this year, the Richmond Times Dispatch is already calling this Web battle the MySpace Primary, an allusion to MySpace, the world’s most-visited social network and video website. 

Micah Sifry, editor of Techpresident.com, a new website that tracks the online campaign, to the same newspaper says, “All this voter-generated content will play a huge role in the election. The smart campaigns are trying to figure out how to productively collaborate and embrace that energy.”

One such smart campaign is Obama’s whose site allows people to customise their preferences and lets people write their own blogs on his site. Hillary Clinton addresses voters directly with a new video every week, thus giving her a platform no television channel would.

In a way, it would then seem, American presidential races have taken the 180-degree turn just as they did in 1960, when the John F Kennedy-Richard Nixon presidential debate was the first to be televised. The year 2008 could well be when Web presence could define the choice for President.