Feb 3, 2007

YouTube & The American President

by Cliopatria

A friend just emailed me a John Edwards youTube video - this one poking some fun at him. After watching it, I searched in my email and found that in the past month, I received a youTube clip for Clinton, for Romney, 10 for Obama and one starring Chris Dodd [who I did not know was running]. None of these include were the"official" video-messages sent by the Clinton and Obama.

Obviously the youTube moment of note in the past year [or political cycle] was the 'macaca'/Allen moment. And Joe Biden has already matched it the _day_ he announced his campaign. It appears that the next two years will have every mis-step, every mis-speak by every candidate, set to music and uploaded to the internets for distribution. I am no Presidential historian, so I am really keen to hear from others on how this compares to the ways in which campaigns managed the message from/about their candidates?

Will candidates have to embrace the 'we are all fallible humans' and start releasing their own 'blooper tapes'?

oh. Here is that John Edwards.

More Comments:

HNN - 2/5/2007

Every generation or so new media have upended presidential politics. The candidate who masters the new media first typically has a vast advantage over others.

Think: FDR on the radio; Nixon and JFK on television.

But of course for every success there's bound to be a failure. Think: Howard Dean and meetup.org.

So there aren't any hard and fast rules here.

What can be counted on is this: politics is a school that all successful pols attend diligently. They all learn eventually to adapt or they lose.

Even an Adlai Stevenson who hated the contraption known as television and refused to run spots in the 1952 campaign reversed course 4 years later and ran spots--and then went one better than Ike had in 52 by running the first negative spots in history ("Nixon. President Nixon," ran one spot, as I recall.)