Politicians: MySpace or yours?
Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/167558/
Television news cameras weren’t allowed anywhere near President Bush when he bragged on Asa Hutchinson at a private fundraiser last month, but a donor wielding an amateur camcorder provided bootleg coverage on the video-sharing Web site YouTube.
On the same Web site, viewers can catch Mike Beebe chatting informally about the values he learned from his mother or can check out Rod Bryan, the independent in the governor’s race, refusing his Democratic rival Beebe’s handshake in protest of his exclusion from debates. Welcome to Arkansas’ rapidly expanding political gabfest on the Internet, where U. S. Rep. Marion Berry grins on his own MySpace page and an anonymous blogger can edit a Gunner DeLay speech to depict the attorney general candidate as a citified latte sipper.
If 2004 was the year that Arkansas campaigns learned to reach out to volunteers and donors on the Web, then 2006 is the year those same supporters have learned to take matters into their own laptops.
They’re people like Valerie Biendara of Fayetteville, who posted several Bush videos from the Hutchinson fundraiser, complete with shaky camera action and a man’s head covering half the screen.
“It’s kind of like, ‘Look here to see my vacation videos. I was there, ’” she said of posting what she witnessed. After she provided the videos to the masses, the Hutchinson campaign called her.
“I thought, ‘ Oh, I’m in trouble. I wasn’t supposed to do that, ’” Biendara said.
But they weren’t mad. David Kinkade, Hutchinson’s gubernatorial campaign spokesman, wanted to provide a link from the campaign Web page to Biendara’s.
She said candidates should be aware that folks like her may be taping them and using the content however they want. “They need to be careful what they’re saying.”
U. S. Sen. George Allen learned that this summer after the Virginia Republican uttered the comment heard ’round the Internet: his identification of a volunteer from the opposing campaign team as “macaca, or whatever his name is.” Allen’s comment, which has been interpreted by some as an ethnic slur, played and replayed on You-Tube, and then attracted blanket coverage in the national media. Allen apologized.
Jay Barth, a politics professor at Hendrix College, said that so far in Arkansas the content shared on such Web sites represents duplications or creative twists on issues already reported in the news.
“What these are at this point are conversations among activists... battles among activists,” said Barth, who also was chairman of the state Democratic Party platform committee this year.
The state’s increasingly popular blogs are more useful in political communication, he said. Blogs vary widely, but generally in their political incarnation they are Web sites that impart bits of news peppered with opinion.
Barth said Arkansas blogs tend to include more legitimate and thoughtful conversation about political events than social-networking sites such as MySpace or the video-sharing sites such as YouTube.
He speculated that if Bill Clinton had been Arkansas governor in the age of blogs, rumors of philandering would have been widely disseminated on the Internet.
“It would have made it very difficult, if he continued to engage in that kind of behavior, for him to ever become president,” Barth said.
The Washington-based Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet is studying the way the Internet is used in political communication. Julie Barko Germany, the deputy director, said successful campaigns are using the Internet as a powerful wordof-mouth marketing tool.
She said that in 2004, John Kerry’s Democratic presidential campaign mastered fundraising on the Internet, but the Bush campaign realized the potential of organizing campaign volunteers online.
In 2006, the most innovative campaigns are doing the same thing: identifying leaders and giving them the tools to spread the word themselves, she said.
That’s why Berry, who represents Arkansas’ 1 st Congressional District, has his own MySpace page, said Gabe Holmstrom, Berry’s campaign manager. He said it wasn’t Berry’s idea but that the congressman is well aware of the page and how it works.
The profile lays out Berry’s political life story but also information one is not likely to see in a campaign brochure, such as the fact that his zodiac sign is Virgo. As of late last week, 74 other MySpace users had signed up as Berry’s “friends.”
Holmstrom said those twentysomethings and teenagers obviously already care about the political process or they wouldn’t have come across Berry’s page to begin with. But they’re still worth reaching out to, he said.
“This will further their participation, to see there are public officials out there who want to reach out to them the way they communicate with friends,” Holmstrom said.
Bryan, the independent candidate for governor, appears to be pretty popular on MySpace. His 703 “friends” leave messages that range from the general, such as “you are a good man,” to the very specific: “i will see you at the edge coffee house today in roughly 6 hours. and i will be riding my bike.”
Germany said campaigns should try to identify volunteers among those users.
“The strategy isn’t to get as many buddies as you can,” she said. “It’s getting people who link to your profile to take action for you. It’s quality, not quantity.”
But the anonymous nature of online discussion opens the door for discussion that is nastier than many campaigns would participate in openly, Germany conceded. The most popular hits on a Web site tend to be the meanest, she said.
A recent Arkansas-related posting on YouTube, disavowed by the Republican Party and the Hutchinson campaign, includes ominous music and depictions of gay couples almost kissing with the question, “Do Mike Beebe and the Democrats... share the values of Arkansas ?”
No one has acknowledged posting it.
A parody of the video has been posted by a blogger whose real identity also is not revealed. In the satirical version, the blogger uses the same ominous music but questions whether Hutchinson and the Republican Party share the values of Arkansans because several prominent members of the party have many children.
Biendara was surprised to learn that the same blogger had edited a DeLay speech she posted on YouTube. Biendara captured video of DeLay, the Republican candidate for attorney general, telling the Washington County Republican Women that he supports rural Arkansas.
At one point in the 2-minute, 24-second part of the speech included on Biendara’s YouTube version, DeLay, who lives in Fort Smith, says, “Now, I’m not a rural guy. I’m not [pretending ] to be Mr. Country. I like the urban lifestyle. I like going to Starbucks and reading the paper, and that’s my choice.”
The 27-second version edited by the blogger, which has been viewed more than twice as many times as the original speech, includes only that quotation and runs with the headline, “Tom DeLay’s cousin will have a decaf soy latte.” Gunner DeLay is a cousin of U. S. Rep. Tom De-Lay, the former House majority leader who is under indictment in Texas.
Biendara was none too pleased.
“That takes it totally out of context,” she said. “That’s one of the no-nos.”
Biendara said she would request that the edited version be taken off YouTube because she, who made the video to begin with, did not authorize it. As of late last week, the edited version was still there.
YouTube users agree to an extensive list of rules, including prohibitions against unlawful, obscene or racially offensive material. Users can flag videos as “inappropriate” or complain to YouTube to accuse other users of violations of the terms of use.
The Arkansas political videos rate relatively few views — ranging from a few dozen to more than 1, 000 — compared with the millions of times the most popular videos have been watched.
Kinkade, the spokesman for Hutchinson, has put new campaign commercials on YouTube before they premiere on broadcast TV. It’s free to post a video on YouTube, so Kinkade considers it a bonus to have commercials there, no matter how many are watching.
“It’s just another communication tool that empowers people to put out different types of messages to communicate in the way they want to communicate,” Kinkade said.
He said the Hutchinson campaign’s attitude has been to encourage the development of blogs on the left and the right. It’s a great way to clarify something reported in the media or to respond to attacks, he said.
The Beebe campaign hasn’t itself employed YouTube or sites like MySpace. Zac Wright, the campaign spokesman, said he’s not ruling it out but that they’ve concentrated on making the campaign Web site state-ofthe-art. If a swing voter is curious about Beebe, he’ll go to the campaign site to learn more, not search around YouTube, Wright said.
Nevertheless, Beebe’s image was on YouTube before Hutchinson’s. That’s because the Heartland PAC, a political action committee founded by Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, interviewed Beebe and other candidates in an informal setting and loaded those videos onto YouTube.
“I was envious that they got to it before we did,” Kinkade said. “Since you sort of had those initial people dipping their toes in the water over the next few weeks it blew up.”
Bryan called Internet campaign activity a beautiful form of democracy. He said when he unveils a campaign initiative, “I might as well make a paper airplane out of it and send it off a building” for all the media coverage it gets.
Not so on the Internet, he said, where “I am the media.”