Clever that Hillary Clinton has gone to Yahoo Answers to ask us our experience with health insurance. More than 37,000 answers at last count. Of course, she could have done this on her own site. But by going elsewhere — by being a distributed candidate — she gets more people, more attention. [Hat tip, Janice]
My Media Guardian column this week is about the YouTube campaign: the Presidential candidates (and their foes) using YouTube to fight for the White House. (Registration-free version here.) When I met YouTube founder Chad Hurley at Davos, I thanked him for changing the world — for putting the final piece into place to allow everyone to have a voice, bottom-up. I didn’t anticipate how quickly the powerful would also recognize the power of this medium, as they try to stop talking to-down and instead talk — and listen — eye-to-eye. I wrote about this on Buzzmachine about a week ago but because I’m cross-posting this on the Davos Conversation blog, I’m including the column here:
The revolution will not be televised. It will be YouTubed. The open TV of the people is already turning into a powerful instrument of politics – of communication, message, and image – in the next US presidential election. Witness: Democrats Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards; Republican Sam Brownback; and more candidates just announced their runs for the White House not in network-news interviews, nor in big, public events, but instead in their own online videos.
The advantages are many: the candidates may pick their settings – Edwards in front of a house being rebuilt in New Orleans; Clinton in a room that reminds one of the Oval Office. They control their message without pesky reporters’ questions – Edwards brought in the video-bloggers from Rocketboom.com to chat with him; Brownback, a religious conservative, invoked God and prayer often enough for a sermon; Clinton was able to say she wants to get out of Iraq the right way without having to define that way. They are made instantly cybercool – I’m told by the Huffington Post that liberal hopeful Rep. Dennis Kucinich is carrying around a tiny video camera so he can record messages in the halls of congress; and Democrat Christopher Dodd has links on his homepage to his MySpace, Facebook and Flickr sites, making him come off more like a college kid than a white-haired candidate. But most important, these politicians get to speak eye-to-eye with the voters.
Internet video is a medium of choice – you have to click to watch – and it is an intimate medium. That is how these candidates are trying to use it: to talk straight at voters, one at a time.
Clinton said she was launching a conversation as much as a campaign and wished she could visit all our living rooms, so she is using technology to do the next best thing, holding live video chats last week. Beats kissing babies.
Of course, this can also be the medium of your opposition. When former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney joined the race for the Republican nomination, conservative detractors dredged up video from a debate with Senator Ted Kennedy in which Romney espoused downright liberal stands on abortion and gay rights. They used YouTube as a powerful weapon. So Romney used YouTube to respond. He appeared on a podcast made by the powerful blog Instapundit and the campaign videotaped the exchange and put it up online, a story that was then picked up by major media.
But beware making a fool of yourself. This is also a medium ripe for ridicule. There is a hilarious viral video of John Edwards preparing for a TV appearance and primping like Paris Hilton, set to the tune of “I Feel Pretty”. Every campaign nervously awaits the embarrassing moment that will be captured and broadcast via some voter’s mobile phone; it was just such a moment that lost one senator his election and with it the Republican majority in 2006. Hours after Clinton YouTubed her video announcement, there were parody versions trying to remind us of the scandals of her husband’s administration. I, too, fired up my Mac and made a mashup comparing and contrasting Clinton’s and Brownback’s videos, counting her issues and his references to culture (read: religion), life (read: abortion), and family (read: gay marriage).
And there lies the real power of the YouTube election: candidates won’t be the only ones making use of this revolutionary new medium. Citizens will too. The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a survey revealing that much of the electorate is not just watching but is using the internet to influence politics: in the 2006 US election, 60 million Americans – almost half of internet users – were online gathering information and exchanging views, Pew said.
More than a third of voters under the age of 36 say the internet is their main source of political news – twice the score for newspapers.
More significantly, about 14 million Americans use the “read-write web,” in Pew’s words, to “contribute to political discussion and activity”, posting their opinions online, forwarding or posting others’ commentary, even creating and forwarding audio and video. They aren’t just consuming information, they are taking political action. And now that almost half of America is wired with broadband, they increasingly consider watching internet video to be watching TV. So the influence of YouTube will only grow.
We should only wish that this will diminish the negative influence of old TV with its battle and sports narratives of frontrunners and underdogs, with its simplistic soundbites (though there’ll be plenty of that on YouTube, too), and its nasty campaign commercials (though YouTube will have its dirt as well). But, hey, revolutions take time. And we are watching the seeds of one sprout right before our very eyes.
On the ride up to Davos, as I mentioned the other day, Loic LeMeur dragged me up to the front of the bus and we vlogged each other. Here’s his video. I guarantee you’ll be sick of me, if you’re not already. I spoke with Loic about video and the French elections; I’ll put that up when I get back home.
I got to see only the end of Hillary Clinton’s first web conversation but what struck me immediately was that she was having a press conference with the people: We get to ask the questions. Oh, of course, it’s controlled; they get to pick the questions. But I still like that her campaign is a conversation.
On the same day, polar political opposites Hillary Clinton and Sam Brownback announced their campaigns for the White House on internet video. Compare and contrast.
: LATER: The Times of London says Hillary is “the new Thatcher.”
Hillary Clinton is to be presented as America’s Margaret Thatcher as she tries to become the first woman to win the White House. As she entered the 2008 presidential race yesterday, a senior adviser said that her campaign would emphasise security, defence and personal strengths reminiscent of the Iron Lady.
“Their policies are totally different but they are both perceived as very tough,” said Terry McAuliffe, Clinton’s campaign chairman. “She is strong on foreign policy. People have got to know you are going to keep them safe.”
: The Bivings Report finds significance in Hillary’s call for conversation-as-campaign: The campaign bus becomes the cluetrain.
