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Saturday, January 13, 2007
You and the Tube
By Patrick Hynes
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Will Hillary Clinton fight for the nomination past June 1st?


YouTube is the hottest thing in American politics today. Just ask former Virginia Senator George Allen (emphasis on former). On the morning of August 15th, 2006 very few Americans had ever heard the quasi-word “macaca” before. By the end of the week, the word had come to encapsulate George Allen’s putative view of race relations in America, in an unflattering light, to be sure. All because Allen referred to one of his opponent’s staff members as “Macaca or whatever his name is,” and “Macaca” in turn uploaded the damning video onto YouTube. Allen’s campaign never recovered.

“Whether Republicans are ready for it or not, the website which will have the biggest impact on a candidate’s political life is YouTube,” says David All, a Republican modern media strategist in Washington, DC. “Candidates throughout the country are no longer squaring off against their opponents’ media firm, they also face their opponents’ tech-savvy, modern volunteer operation which is armed with cost-effective camcorders, free video editing software, high-speed internet connections, and a gnarly laptop to make the magic happen.”

But YouTube isn’t just a tool to play gotcha politics. Two presidential aspirants have recently used YouTube to say “I was wrong” to prospective supporters in the blogosphere.

Former Sen. John Edwards wants to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008. The only problem in that Edwards voted to authorize President Bush to invade Iraq. And that’s a no-no in Democratic politics. Just ask Sen. Joe Lieberman, another frequent guest star on YouTube’s political showcase.

So Team Edwards is only too happy to direct prospective supporters to this video on YouTube in which the former North Carolina Senator says, “I want to say something personal to all of you. … I voted for this war. I was wrong. I should not have voted for this war. I take responsibility for that.”

The liberal crowd (Edwards said this at a Ned Lamont rally) erupted in cheers at Edwards’s mea culpa and Edwards is today the early frontrunner among Iowa caucus-goers.

Perhaps hoping to emulate Edwards’s successful turnaround, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney this week took to the YouTube airwaves to admit he was wrong for espousing liberal positions on social issues in his 1994 campaign for U.S. Senate against Sen. Ted Kennedy.

With impressive rapid response timing, the Romney camp YouTubed a video of Romney taking part in an interview on the popular Glenn and Helen Show Podcast saying, “Of course, I was wrong on some issues back then. I’m not embarrassed to admit that.”

The Romney mea culpa was itself a response to a video that appeared on YouTube just one day prior showing clips of Mitt Romney trumpeting, with apparent conviction, political positions that are not at all in line with those of typical Republican primary voters. Continued...
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About The Author
Patrick Hynes is the president of New Media Strategics, a blog relations consultancy. He is the proprietor of Ankle Biting Pundits and the author of In Defense of the Religious Right (Nelson Current).

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Reply # 1
Date: Jan 13, 2007 - 4:27 AM EST
Subject: Senate majority
I know he didn't mean it as an insult, but if he had just not said it, Harry Reid would not be the senate majority leader.





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Reply # 2
Date: Jan 13, 2007 - 9:22 AM EST
God gave us two ears and one mouth
so we'll talk half as much as we listen. If more people would learn that -- and they are likely to, now that somebody with a camera phone and access to YouTube is standing by -- the world would go back to the more decent and rational place it used to be.

If the people in college and high school come to understand that the stuff they are doing now to prove to The Man that "You're not the boss of me" is going to come back when they want The Man to hire them, and bite them hard, perhaps this discipline will work to improve the overall level of the courtesy and good behaviour than we have had for the past thirty years.

I had a three month course with a nutritionist and one of the things that helped me get some discipline into my diet was the knowledge that "if I eat this I'll have to write it down and Jean will see it, and what will she think?" I've heard my Catholic friends say that the looming Confessional also keeps them from doing and saying some of the things they are thinking.

There's a lot to be said for pervasive media in the hands of amateurs. Hey, it might even stop the shrieking and bawling about public security cameras some day!
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