Handicapping the New Media Candidates: John McCain's YouTube Channel
Fri, 06/29/2007 - 12:15pm
I will admit it — I look at campaign websites all the time, and I am honestly interested in how they use new media, such as YouTube or blogs. The campaigns, likewise, all seem very interested in blazing some trails, but the results are sometimes uneven.
My first example of this is John McCain's YouTube page. As I write this piece, the very first default video to load as a feature on McCain's page is this:
There are three distinct problems with this video:
1) John McCain is not metal. The music would have you believe that he is, but he is not. NASCAR could probably lay claim to "rocking," but I would insert the caveat that it is "bayou-rocking" at best. That's also a whole other topic.
2) John McCain wants you to believe he loves NASCAR. Which is fine, I suppose; smarter men than me have talked ably and seriously about the NASCAR Dads demographic, and they can probably back up their significance with empirical evidence. However, the way this video is built sort of feels like John McCain is NASCAR, that he was once a road warrior himself who only left the burned rubber and traded paint behind to serve his country at war and then in Washington. It just seems contrived.
3) As McCain speaks to veterans and soldiers in uniform in the last part of the video, he falls into the predictable Republican talking points on Iraq and Afghanistan, which I derive from his mentioning the legislative battle over war funds. Specifically, he uses the intentionally broad generalization that everyone we are currently fighting is Al-Qaeda, which is not true. Salon's Glen Greenwald discusses here.
There are other videos to watch on his page, and some of them are similarly weird. John McCain: He takes New Media seriously! Kind of.
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Are elections going down 'tube'?
By Robin Orlowski
Sat, 06/30/2007 - 6:54pm
I have a problem with these (and 'myspace') when talking about campaigns and celebrities. Great for video clip archival and retrieval, You Tube's profile page does not do anything for me.
Did the candidate themselves, the candidate organization, or a devoted fan with great HTML skills create the page? It's not always easy to tell. I am skeptical that a public figure actually would set up a profile page like we and other surfers are doing because of the obvious time and security constraints with their particular identities.
Then as the NASCAR elaboration demonstrates, some included statements on these mediums come off sounding manufactured. What is the point of putting up profile pages if comes off as the web equivalent of empty calories?
I definitely think the Internet has great potential for and should be used in campaigns. During the 2004 campaign, I ran the unofficial John Kerry for president webring. I hope any site promoting a candidate is not falsely claiming they are the candidate or campaign organization. Because I had claimed that my ring was not endorsed by or affiliated with the Kerry campaign, it ironically ended up getting plugged in a mention on their site.