August 13, second day on the job. The 12th I spent in Barack Obama’s Iowa City office, blasting his Facebook supporters with mass emails. The promotion du jour: the senator’s “Be the first to know!” text-message program, a nifty campaign to buzz cell phones “the moment Barack makes his decision” for a vice-presidential candidate.
I summoned the Facebook group “Iowa Wesleyan Students for Obama,” copy-and-pasted the supplied text, and hit send.
“Warning!” Facebook shot back. “Your account could be disabled. You are using this feature to spam other users. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features will result in your account being disabled.”
My second day as a new media intern in the Iowa Campaign for Change, and I already felt dirty. Dirty enough to reconsider the decency of my job. Dirty enough to judge “Be the first to know!” as a cheap gimmick to snatch phone numbers. Dirty enough to question the prospect of spamming Facebook and MySpace walls for the next 12 weeks.
Dirty, sure, but not enough to stop. For no matter my reservations, saying no to the internet is no longer an option — not in this century. As newspaper circulation numbers plunge, cable news delves further into self-parody, and media consumers flock toward online alternatives, new media’s influence over American politics grows at an exponential rate with each election cycle. For better or for worse.
Obama’s presidential campaign, by most accounts, boasted the most expansive new media effort in the United States’ political history. I was just one cog in the ultra-oiled machine, producing web videos and soliciting potential volunteers in Iowa. By November 5, Obama’s YouTube channel had uploaded 1,821 clips to John McCain’s 330. Obama had 2,699,037 Facebook friends to McCain’s 622,269; 866,887 Myspace friends to McCain’s 224,633; and 124,610 Twitter followers to McCain’s 5,258. Those numbers didn’t necessarily translate into votes, but they did translate into an unprecedented campaign listserv of over 10 million email addresses. In mid-December, an “Obama + Iowa” search yielded 31 groups on Facebook and 93 groups on My.BarackObama.com.
“The overwhelming story is that Obama dominated,” said David Burch, marketing manager for TubeMogul, a California-based company that offers Internet video data. TubeMogul tracked viewership on each candidate’s YouTube channel from January 1 to Election Day — a total of 309 days — and determined that Obama’s channel received more views 92 percent of the time. On November 3rd, for example, Obama’s channel attracted nearly 1.5 million views to McCain’s 163,940.
Along with its saturation presence on sites like Myspace, the campaign created My.BarackObama.com (or MyBo), a social networking tool with over one million users. MyBo, like much of Obama’s web presence, was a conduit to spark more traditional forms of political activism — making phone calls, hosting and promoting events, donating money. In a shrewd move, the campaign tapped Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to manage the site.
Jennifer Stromer-Galley, assistant professor of communication at the University of Albany, attributed Obama’s online success to MyBo’s high level of interactivity. Rather than foster internet insularity, she argued, the site channeled online enthusiasm into actual offline engagement. In her study of the 1996 presidential and 1998 mid-term elections, Stromer-Galley found that political candidates tended to avoid interactivity on their websites, fearing that supporters would steer candidates off message.
“The Obama campaign has finally figured out how to use the internet and its capabilities to organize and to mobilize,” Stromer-Galley said. “The features and functions on a candidate’s website act as a symbol of the candidate […] so [MyBo] squared very strongly with his message that he was open to and encouraging of average people getting back into the political process.”
In Iowa and across the country, campaign staffers and volunteers used the internet to organize debate watching parties, recruit volunteers for canvassing and phone-banking efforts, and alert supporters about upcoming events and surrogate appearances. Along with these organizational efforts, the campaign also launched VoteForChange.com, a website that helped individual voters find their polling location.
Obama’s campaign, unlike Howard Dean and Wesley Clark’s presidential efforts in 2003, harnessed the internet’s grassroots capacity with a strong emphasis on traditional field organizing. Obama’s communication and outreach efforts were ubiquitous online, certainly, but the campaign also incorporated new media technologies into its daily outfit like Google Maps, which drastically shortened the time reserved for “cutting turf,” or mapping canvass routes. This meant canvassers could receive the tightest cluster of doors possible — thus increasing their overall efficiency — with just minutes or even seconds behind a computer.
Google Maps and other simple new media tools helped spawn a different sort of political campaign, one in which volunteers held greater responsibility than ever before. Nate Wilcox, political consultant and co-author of Netroots Rising, cited this as the major new media “paradigm shift” of the 2008 election season.
“If you were a volunteer coordinator in your area, you picked who your deputies were; you decided which blocks you were going to walk today,” Wilcox said. “That’s not technically on the new media side, but it wouldn’t have happened without the technology. The technology made it cost effective.”
Wilcox, who worked as online communications director for Mark Warner’s presidential PAC in 2006, defended America’s turn toward new media by citing its democratizing traits, particularly in comparison to television. Where the internet supports an active-user model with “a heartbeat behind every keyboard,” Wilcox said, television provides a “more disembodied” mediated experience, one in which users remain largely passive.
Media scholars have, for decades, viewed the internet as a potentially democratic force, one in opposition to television’s hegemonic corporatism. As connection speeds have grown faster and technology has evolved, however, the internet has begun to assume television’s penchant for visual spectacle through streaming video. Net advocates like Wilcox see a fundamental difference between the ad-based fodder on television and the content offered online. For him, Obama’s March 2008 speech “A More Perfect Union” was a striking example of what internet video can provide. In an era of sound bites, Obama’s speech was a long-player, a 37-minute treatise on race relations that has attracted over five million views on Obama’s YouTube channel as of December 2008. Contrast that, Wilcox suggested, with Bill Clinton’s 1996 Democratic National Convention address, in which the President used a variation of the phrase “Bridge to the 21st century” over 20 times to hammer his central message and craft as many sound bites as possible.
“[Internet video] gives a politician the opportunity to say something nuanced and in context,” Wilcox said. “We never would have had Abraham Lincoln if the networks were there cutting down his speeches to two or three lines.”
If “A More Perfect Union” represents one extreme in internet video politics, former Senator George Allen’s “Macaca moment” surely embodies the other. The infamous Macaca clip—in which the Virginia senator calls an Indian American man “Macaca” and ominously welcomes him “to the real world of Virginia”—sparked such a hyped-up frenzy on progressive blogs that mainstream media outlets eventually picked up the story. The video forced Allen into damage-control mode, and he went on to lose his senate seat by less than 10,000 votes to Democrat Jim Webb in 2006.
Lowell Feld, co-author of Netroots Rising, served as Webb’s netroots coordinator during the battle against Allen. According to him, the future of political journalism lies no longer in the hands of a few trained professionals, but in the hands of countless bloggers armed with video cameras and laptops. Politicians, in this new era of citizen surveillance, must learn to perform in a state of hyper-alert.
“If you’re a politician at an event—hell, if you’re out in public—you have to watch every word you say and you have to make sure it’s not different from something you said the day before,” Feld said. “This is good and bad. It hurts the spontaneity of someone like John McCain, but it allows the public to see these people who’re running for office, to see what they’re saying and doing.”
Allen’s YouTube meltdown, we’d soon learn, signaled a new direction in Internet politics. Since then, politicians have appeared in perpetual fear of “Macaca moments,” and they’ve responded with stricter message-control. Throughout my new media tenure with Obama’s campaign, my boss routinely praised videos as “on message,” to the point where “good” and “on message” became synonymous. During a September 16 surrogate speech at the Iowa City Public Library, for example, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius made an “off message” aside about Obama’s race, which The Drudge Report developed as a race-card move from Camp Obama. The next day, amid the editing process for a YouTube short on Sebelius, my boss advised me to use only “on message” comments, and explicitly warned me against using or sharing the mini-gaffe on race. I sat on the clip—the only known video of Sebelius’s divisive remark—and the story went nowhere.
With the online and cable news Gaffe Patrols dictating news cycles, it’s perhaps no wonder that a reserved, media-savvy candidate like Obama out-shined a self-proclaimed team of mavericks.
According to Douglas Kellner, chair of the Philosophy of Education department at UCLA and author of Media Spectacle and The Postmodern Adventure, Obama’s message/image control talents stem from his skills as a television performer. Kellner likened Obama to John F. Kennedy, another visual artist who could out-cool and out-youth his rivals on the TV screen. What Kennedy didn’t have, however, was the internet, itself a cultural signifier of youth, change and the new.
“I see the campaign as having a very strong internet component, but I would say equally, if not more so with Obama himself, it was a television campaign,” Kellner said. “Everyday he looked great on TV He looked great in the debates. He was cool, calm and collected during all the fights with Hillary, and then during the campaign with McCain and the global economic crisis […] He’s clearly a TV guy.”
Kellner’s emphasis on image triggers a visceral unease in the gut. His words recall historian Daniel Boorstin and his writings on pseudo-events in American culture. According to Boorstin’s 1961 book The Image, news and political coverage in the United States has devolved into PR, image-making and superficiality. Boorstin singled out the 1960 presidential debate between Kennedy and Richard Nixon as a penultimate pseudo-event. Troubled by the praise Kennedy received for his cool, camera-friendly presence, Boorstin wrote “Pseudo-events thus lead to emphasis on pseudo-qualifications. Again the self-fulfilling prophecy. If we test presidential candidates by their talents on TV quiz performances, we will, of course, choose presidents for precisely these qualifications.”
Boorstin suggested Kennedy won the 1960 election by a televised image, by exploiting a new medium to his advantage. In other words, not on the issues. One can’t help but think maybe Obama bested a wrinkly John McCain on the same principles—only this time on computer monitors and television screens.
Mindlessly spamming MySpace walls, one has a lot of time to think.
