POLITICS
The Campaign No One Is Watching
By Stump Connolly
I’ve often wondered how politicians can waste so much money running for office, but the advent of political videos on YouTube has given me new insight on the question.
To date, the Republican and Democratic candidates for president have produced a combined 2,434 Internet videos on YouTube – and it's still 60 days before the first voters go to the polls.
I’d like to say I watched them so you don’t have to, but even I’m not that much of a political masochist. The best I can do is count them. So here’s the leaderboard in Internet videos:
Republicans:
Mitt Romney 436
Rudy Giuliani 226
Tom Tancredo 148
Mike Huckabee 92
John McCain 86
Ron Paul 62
Fred Thompson 34
Duncan Hunter 20
Democrats:
Barack Obama 247
John Edwards 230
Chris Dodd 205
Joe Biden 191
Bill Richardson 183
Dennis Kucinich 112
Hillary Clinton 88
Mike Gravel 74
Only nine months ago, Internet videos were viewed as the hot new commodity in politics. Barack Obama announced his candidacy in a video release. Hillary Clinton launched hers with a series of fireside chats dubbed “Conversations.” Candidates rushed to set up YouTube accounts, MySpace friend networks, and an attendant staff of videographers, editors and compressionists to follow their every move and post up snippets of their campaign appearances.
But the evidence so far is that nobody is watching. Except for the occasional anchor spot -- a slick commercial sure to make its way onto broadcast television in the early primary states – most videos are being seen by only a couple thousand viewers. Over a two month period, a viewership of less than 1,000 people is often the norm –– and most of those are political junkies, usually rabid fans.
Mitt Romney, for instance, leads the pack with 436 posted videos on YouTube, some 219 of which are repeated on MySpace TV. His MySpace video plugs have been seen 72,000 times, which translates to an average audience of 329 people for every video post.
You want to know how flawed this Internet video strategy is? I went to the YouTube page for political videos called “You Choose” last Sunday and found, under the Republican column, that the buttons linking to each candidate’s introduction were misdirecting viewers to the next candidate’s site. It was a minor programming glitch, easily corrected. But it wasn’t fixed for three days. Did anyone complain? Not hardly. Because no one is watching.
There have been a few notable exceptions, but they are usually in a humorous vein. The original “Obama Girl” and the inspired mash-up of an Apple “1984” commercial with Clinton footage have each been seen four million times. But Clinton’s own highest-rated spot –– “I Need Your Advice” –– has garnered only 633,000 views. And what advice was she seeking? She was asking people to suggest a campaign theme song and promising she would not attempt to sing it.
Obama’s initial foray onto YouTube to announce his candidacy nine months ago remains his highest-rated self-produced video with 398,000 views. But a quick clip of his appearance in a Halloween spoof on Saturday Night Live five days ago already has been seen 580,000 times and is likely to soar past a million.
The Internet has once again confounded our politicians, just as it has the rest of us. They know they must have a presence there, but they don’t know what it should be. That’s why Barack Obama hired Joe Rospars, the founder of Blue States Digital, to run his Internet operation. That’s why John Edwards has Joe Trippi, the Internet guru behind Howard Dean’s campaign, as his chief political advisor. That’s why Tom Tancredo, a little known Colorado Congressman running on the single issue of building a fence around Mexico to stop illegal immigrants, has found a way to say the same thing in 184 different videos, as if anyone cares.
What are they getting for their Internet video efforts? They don’t know and neither do the rest of us. What we’ve learned from the YouTube Election so far is that the cutting edge of technology is a dangerous place for a candidate to be. (Just ask Howard Dean.) The cache that attaches to a candidate who rides the latest technological wave impresses some, but leaves the rest of the country –– older, stodgier, and more likely to vote –– in its wake.
Judging from the campaign so far, the driving force behind the 2008 race are the political polls –– and, once again, how mainstream media like the New York Times and Washington Post interpret them.
The pundits of the blogosphere –– Matt Drudge, The DailyKos, Josh Marshall, Taegan Goddard and others –– have influence precisely because they are read by the mainstream media; and now that mainstream reporters themselves are shifting over to sites like Politico.com or writing more for the online extensions of their own publications, traditional campaign reporting is more important than ever. The game this year is managing media expectations and perceptions.
Our next president will come out of a process that is tried and true. Iowa voters will leave the comfort of their homes on a cold night in January to stand in a local gymnasium or VFW hall and say who they like, and why. New Hampshire voters will cast ballots in their first-in-the-nation primary and the winner in either party is not likely get more than 80,000 votes. The rest of us will march along to the drumbeat of succeeding primaries led by a fife corps of political reporters who have trudged from one tarmac to another accumulating little insights on the candidates. How they report these will shape a race that most of us will just watch on TV.
Every day, every week, someone will call us on the telephone to ask who we now favor, and the news media will report him or her to be the frontrunner, regardless of how many delegates they have collected. But none of us, I guarantee you, will say I like Candidate X because he had a really great video on YouTube.
