| | Issue #19.19 :: 12/05/2007 - 12/11/2007 | Nasty politics get even nastier in the age of YouTube
| BY METRO SPIRIT
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By GREGORY RUELHMANN spirit@metrospirit.com
AIKEN, S.C. - I couldn’t make it out to catch Hillary Clinton’s appearance in Aiken last week, but thanks to The Augusta Chronicle’s Web site, I was able to watch some clips online. Most of it was standard stump speech fare. Clinton begged for the audience’s support in the upcoming South Carolina primary. She waved against the backdrop of a giant American flag. She sternly promised that the era of (insert caricature of incumbent) was “over.”
The only novelty I felt was the fact that I was viewing it on my computer. Three years ago, as Bush battled Kerry, pundits began predicting that the political center stage would gradually shift from TV to the Internet. One presidential election later, the politicos have migrated to cyberspace, and we’ve tagged along.
Each presidential candidate boasts a MySpace page and a Facebook group to his — or her — name. YouTube videos of the candidates, both official and unofficial, are more ubiquitous these days than those 20 percent off coupons from Bed, Bath & Beyond. Campaigns are soliciting voters’ e-mail addresses, running sophisticated, interactive Web sites and exhorting media outlets to post all sorts of online content, such as Clinton’s stop in Aiken.
This is both blessing and curse. The free cost of airing ads on video-sharing sites suggests that someday candidates might not need a $40 million war chest to run for president. And downloadable campaign platforms make information available with a few simple clicks for those infamously lazy American voters, who hate traveling more than 100 yards to a polling station on Election Day.
But even though this is an age of greater civic accessibility, it’s also an age of less civility. The Internet is a nasty place for the politically engaged to tread. Take, for example, Clinton’s Aiken speech. Below the video on The Chronicle’s Web page, there’s a comment section where registered users can level anonymous, unsubstantiated and largely vituperative criticism. Users suggest Clinton should drop her skirt. They call her and her supporters “liberal idiots.” And her defenders, in predictably childish fashion, return the favor.
If this were an isolated occurrence, there would be less to lament. But the Internet’s instant soapbox and shield of anonymity have produced venomous partisanship we’ve never seen in Washington, D.C.
Last week’s CNN Republican debate (broadcast in conjunction with YouTube) should have about been the candidates’ positions on immigration and national security. Or the convergence of two media giants — one established, the other a new kid on the block. Or elderly candidates’ hilarious, bewildered expressions every time a 20-something with a Web cam magically appeared on the screen to ask them questions.
Instead, the air is filled with white noise from the blogosphere, where mean-spirited writers poke fun at John McCain’s makeup job, or sneer at the gay guy who asked a question about Log Cabin Republicans.
Over at the Web site for The State, South Carolina’s leading daily paper, a news blurb announces that Rudy Giuliani will make his 21st visit to the Palmetto State. Underneath, “commentators” accuse Mayor Giuliani of taking his mistress to the Hamptons on “taxpayers’ dollars” while still married to his second wife.
Poor Rudy — in the pre-Information Age, his biggest concern would have been competitors like Mitt Romney, or Clinton, herself. But in the modern age he has to worry about such political sages as GamecockFan42 and WhosYourDaddy69.
The hostility seems to be contagious. It’s spreading like an epidemic, beyond the uninformed cowards hiding behind their screen names, out into the political parties themselves.
The national committees seem to have taken their cues from the people who trash Barack Obama’s YouTube clips, and from the ones who post verbal abuse on Tom Tancredo’s MySpace profile. At Democrats.org, the official site of the DNC, there are more than 20 posted headlines about “national” and “local” news items. The gross majority focus on the failures of prominent Republicans. The names Clinton, Obama or Edwards appear exactly zero times on the homepage.
But the most striking component of Democrats.org is also the most thoroughly modern one. It’s called FlipperTV, and it’s a place where the DNC stores extensive raw video footage of all the leading GOP candidates’ campaign appearances. Average Democrats are asked to download the clips, edit them and create commercials “as they wish.” The party essentially is outsourcing its attack ads to the rest of us.
And there you have it: the surest sign that we’ve made the shift, from TV to cyberspace and from courtesy to base discourtesy. The pundits who anticipated this shift proclaimed that technology would make the presidential race more accessible to us, the voters. They said we would have a bigger say, and they certainly seem to be right. We’re doing a lot of the politicians’ dirty work now from our own laptops.
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