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Voteforme.com: electoral politics and Web 2.0

Once upon a time, Facebook was for Ivy Leaguers, iPods were for tech geeks, and CNN was for the politicos.
Nowadays, Oxford tutors are on Facebook and grandmothers carry iPods. Politicians are getting on YouTube! to reach the young reluctant voters they need to secure if they want to survive into the next decade.
Tony Blair thinks new media is a feral beast, but he’s smart enough to use it himself. When Nicholas Sarkozy was elected President of France a month ago, Blair gave out he usual “welcome to the club” message statesmen send one another, but he did it over viral video. After chuckling at his school boy French, I have to give Blair credit. Like it or not, he knows there is no going back to the old-media days.
Back on my side of the pond, Hillary Clinton is doing her part to run a new-media campaign. This month, she asked voters to help pick her campaign song in a series of kitschy viral video spots, the last of which offered a decent parody of the last Soprano episode.
Do young Americans have really poor taste, because they picked Celine Dion’s “You and I”? More likely is that Hillary’s video campaign never reached the hip young things she was after. As Jessi Hempel of Businessweek explains on her blog, Hillary’s schtick comes across as decidedly old school, meant for TV networks. Internet video is its own beast, and the style needs to feel authentic. To come across as young and cool, you have to be young and cool.
For Barack Obama, a political novice, this is good news. And the Obama campaign has the chance to reap big benefits from YouTube video, namely the I’ve Got a Crush on Obama video recently launched by the comedy site BarelyPolitical.com. A sultry young woman in short shorts and a shorter t-shirt grinds up against posters of Barack and croons, “I can’t wait for 2008/Baby you’re the best candidate.”
A smart candidate would capitalize now to tap the population of young voters that no one’s been able to bring to the polls, despite all the chatter about youth activism each election year. A smart Obama would buy the rights to that video and post links to it on official campaign sites. A smart Obama would offer the 5 teens at BarelyPolitical a day shadowing him on Capital Hill, where they could video tape him at work, and YouTube! the footage.

A stodgy candidate would take offense at a video that highlights just how young and inexperienced Obama is. The video signals that Obama is young enough to attract a woman young enough to be the daughter or niece of most middle-aged voters.

I’m an Obama-skeptic, and so far, I can’t tell which camp he’s fallen into. And importantly, it’s not Obama’s own charisma that makes the video so powerful—it’s the fact that teens, not campaign staff, came up with it, that it rose to fame as part of the ideas MoshPit online, and was never planted into prominence by Obama2008.

Even Obama can’t force his way into social media—his application on Facebook has gotten eye rolls from most of my friends as “trying too hard.” David Cameron, who has one of the better political blogs, can’t force it either—Cameron’s site has few comments, and as far as I can tell, most Britons aren’t reading it.


That’s the problem for politicians in the new media age—success is about knowing how to ride the waves created by viewers and voters, not about making your own waves. What do you think—which political leaders “get” the Internet, and how much difference does it make to you if they do?
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