Mud In The Digital Age

On Tuesday, March 27, about nine months before anyone would cast a vote in anger in the 2008 presidential campaign, there was some surprisingly straight talk on the MySpace page of one John McCain, who, according to that very same page, is a 70-year-old man from Phoenix, Arizona. Beneath his picture, there was a message to the people who were supporting his bid to become president of the United States.

“Dear Supporters,” it read. “Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage – particularly marriage between passionate females.”

Tiny shock waves radiated. McCain heretofore had been an opponent of gay marriage. (In truth, it must be said that McCain may well have been consistently in favor of passionate females. The man was a sailor, after all.) It shook things up for the better part of the morning, a lifetime now in any campaign. However, as the day went along, it became clear that McCain’s position had not shifted at all. It had been shifted for him, from outside his campaign, in an instant, and for the oldest and most honored of political motives.

Revenge.

It seems that the McCain campaign had “borrowed” the design of its MySpace page from a fellow named Mike Davidson, a former employee of the Disney Corp. who became angered at what he considered to be an artless bit of Mickey Mouse pilfering. Now CEO of Newsvine.com, a Web-based news content provider, Davidson had made his design available to the public, but with the understanding that he was to be credited whenever his design was used. Moreover, the McCain people were pulling their images directly from Davidson’s Web server, thereby slowing Davidson’s system to a crawl. Once, this might have prompted a stern letter from Davidson to the campaign, which would have dropped the letter into a pile of news releases on the floor of the headquarters. Now, though, Davidson possessed the skill and the technology to exact immediate and public vengeance. So, for a short time, he changed John McCain’s position on gay marriage.

“[McCain] didn’t design his MySpace page,” Davidson says. “But if you’re going to get involved in social networking, Jesus, know the rules. It’s not just enough to put up a space on MySpace and hope it will win you the election.

“What surprised me,” he goes on to say, “is that everyone took it the right way – they thought it was pretty funny. It’s early enough in the campaign, so it’s best to learn lessons like this.”

For its part, the McCain campaign looks back on the whole affair with a kind of rueful grumble. “The gentleman did not contact us before making the change. Had he brought the error to our attention, we would have quickly remedied it,” says Christian Ferry, national eCampaign director for the McCain team.

The game is even less for gentlemen now than it ever was. Everything about politics is in a state of permanent hyper acceleration. The schedule seems simultaneously endless and ludicrously velocious. No longer either truly a marathon or a sprint, a campaign now seems to be a marathon made up of hundreds of individual, frenzied sprints. No coasting. No husbanding your strength to climb the hills to come. Just flat-out speed. Straw poll after state party dinner. One debate after another. South Carolina on top of Florida on top of New Hampshire on top of Iowa. And that’s only the traditional elements of the campaign.

“We’ve lost control of the nominating process, and this technology is only a piece of that – an important piece, but just a piece,” says Mickey Edwards, a former eight-term Republican congressman from Oklahoma who now teaches at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. “If you combine this technology with everything else, like the way the primary calendar has changed from small states first to big states, which means primarily television spots, you’re talking big-scale democracy in terms of how you run the candidates, but without any meaningful exchange.”

At the same time, with the rise of what is called, generally, New Media, came another campaign, a kind of shadow world, moving even faster, and existing in the same space as the traditional one did. There were still the stump speeches and the TV ads and poor reporters filing from every diner in New Hampshire. But there was also this new world of websites and money seemingly appearing from the ether. Once, these were worlds that never touched. Now, the barrier between the actual campaign and the virtual one has disappeared. “It’s just part of everything we do now,” says Ferry. “Its tentacles are in every part of the campaign – from fund-raising to communication to policy. That’s what the Internet has done.”

The virtual campaign has pulled the actual campaign up to its own speed, accelerating it even further. And, the American political animal being a crafty beast, the potential for mischief always has grown in proportion to innovation. Consider the difference only in the past 35 years: In 1972, when Donald Segretti was running his scams on the Democrats on behalf of Richard Nixon, Segretti actually had to steal a Democratic candidate’s stationery. He had to type up a fake news release and then distribute it himself widely enough so that the dirty trick would have its desired effect. Among other things, this required Segretti to get up out of his chair. Now, this mischief can occur with the click of a mouse, and it can spread so fast that a campaign cannot contain the damage.

“Anybody with a reasonably up-to-date laptop can produce a video commercial as good as one produced by a professional and can see that it spreads virally on the Web,” explains Andrew Rasiej, the cofounder of techPresident.com, a website that covers the Internet side of the campaign. “That means good stuff as well as bad stuff.”

The campaigns are quick to point out the value and sophistication of their Web operations, and they often sound as messianic about the potential of the Internet as any New Media guru, but there’s also a sense about them that they’re whistling past the Watergate. They know that the technology is growing faster than they can possibly keep up with and that the more new technology there is, the more people will become fluent in its use, and not all of those people will have the best interests of a particular candidate at heart. Some day, very soon, a campaign will be hacked to death, and the campaigns know it. In his own merry fashion, Mike Davidson pointed the way.

“How easy would it be to cause lasting damage?” Davidson muses. “It depends how smart the people doing it are, and there are some very smart, very evil people out there. That’s going to happen. Half the battle is making it look like the other candidate’s behind it.”

Davidson did what he did for fun, and everyone had a good laugh about it, even the McCain people. But there’s a nervousness beneath the laughter. Politicians and strategists – and, yes, even political reporters – who once complained about how homogenized television had made American politics may well face the business end of that warning about being careful what you wish for. Because the newest era of politics is as unpredictable and as uncontrollable as the human imagination, which hasn’t been seen in bulk in the American political process in quite some time.

“How long did it take me to do what I did?” Davidson asks, chuckling. “I think, in terms of actual labor, it might have taken me three minutes.”

The politician wanted to eviscerate his rival, but the politician was too famous to do the deed himself, so he enlisted a friend to do it for him. “For god’s sake, my dear Sir,” he wrote, “Take up your pen, select the most striking heresies and cut him to peices (sic) in the face of the public.”

It was 1793. The politician was Thomas Jefferson. His target was Alexander Hamilton. His designated journalistic hit man was James Madison. His weapon of choice was the newly devised technology that allowed the mass creation and circulation of political pamphlets in what seemed, in those days, to be astonishing speed: the printing press. More and more ordinary citizens were getting involved in the political life of the country, loudly and raucously. Nobody was really sure what would become of the country and its politics, and, terrified of losing control, the established political class tried alternately to suppress the newfound fervor or to channel it to the establishment’s own purposes. For his part, Hamilton hated the print-empowered mob, but he loved the new media of the time so much that he wound up writing one too many unkind things about Aaron Burr and caught a bullet for his trouble.

This is the period of history back to which hearkens almost everyone working on the Internet side of modern political campaigns. “Everything’s wide open and really goes back in time to when our country was founded on the principle of a really open forum and people having a voice in that process,” explains Mindy Finn, the director of eStrategy for Mitt Romney’s campaign. And the problems that Hamilton had with the pamphleteers are the same ones modern campaigns have with the new technologies of the Internet – to try and suppress them or control them, full in the knowledge that you probably can’t do either one.

“The truth is that a lot of the trepidation is about ‘Can you control this?’ ” says Peter Daou, Hillary Clinton’s e-strategist. Daou spent time as a blogger before joining the Clinton campaign. “In general, what in the hell do you do? I think there’s less fear now that it’s part of how we do politics. It can really be good.” Or not.

The Internet, and the exploding technologies it has produced, has transformed everything about American politics in two ways: It’s accelerated the process, and it’s brought in vast and innovative new levels of citizen involvement. Those changes have been enough to break down the barriers between the actual campaign and the virtual campaign in every area, whether it’s the elite political press coping with bloggers, or in the structure of the campaigns themselves. The campaigns are lost in a new and strange landscape, trying to harness the raw materials there for conventional political advantage.

The question of how much citizen involvement is good for the country is one that bedeviled even the Founders. But this new influx of people and technology has been so sudden, and so overwhelming, that nobody’s had time to ponder fully its benefits and its drawbacks. A good case in point is former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, of whom, it can be safely said, there is more footage of his wearing a dress than any other candidate for president in history, possibly including Hillary Clinton. He can no more rid himself of those videos than he can grow back his hair.

“What can you do? That stuff’s in the public domain. You can’t stop it,” says Maria Comella, a spokesperson for the campaign. “All you can do is put your message out there as strongly as you can.”

Cyber mischief is not entirely new, either. There were isolated episodes in the 2000 and the 2004 campaigns, but nothing then, or before then, compares with what’s going on now.

“Back in the day, if a guy wrote letters or distributed fliers, there was no way he could affect the campaign the way people can today, to such a huge audience, and without identifying who you are,” says Mickey Edwards.

By all accounts, the benchmark moment for these new forces was the ultimately unsuccessful primary campaign of Democrat Howard Dean in 2004. The Dean staff revolutionized both campaign fund-raising and campaign organization. It raised millions of dollars online, and it pioneered the notion of “meet-ups,” in which communities of Dean supporters formed online – a ward and precinct meeting of the keyboard.

Even the most famous part of the end of Dean’s campaign foreshadowed the more dramatic changes that have come along since. As badly as Dean was hurt by the constant – and, truth be told, silly – replay of his scream the night of the 2004 Iowa caucuses, it was nothing compared to what happened to former Virginia senator George Allen in his re-election campaign last year, when he was caught on video calling an Asian man “macaca,” a word used in north Africa, where Allen’s mother grew up, as a racial slur. It took the Dean Scream a couple of days of media reiteration before it did any real damage. The video of Allen went “viral” almost immediately and penetrated the political consciousness so deeply that Allen couldn’t recover.

That incident presaged the utility in this current campaign of new tools like YouTube and Facebook, and the risks attendant in them as well. Seeking to control their messages, each campaign has developed its own approach to channeling the new elements of the New Media to its advantage. Nothing has become more vital this time around than YouTube, the video-hosting site that didn’t even exist the last time people ran for president. In 2006, very quietly, the Federal Election Commission ruled that posting a video on a community website did not fall under the scope of its regulations. This dropped the last possible regulatory barrier to the use of viral videos and essentially created the Wild West in cyberspace.

Now, in the first election cycle to which it’s relevant, YouTube already has been central to the now-famous video that borrowed Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl ad in which Hillary Clinton was portrayed as the Big Brother figure. John Edwards has been the target of a video that shows him primping for a TV appearance to the strains of “I Feel Pretty.” John McCain’s strange rendition of “Bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” has become a YouTube hit. Campaigns have used YouTube to preview – and, essentially, test-market – new advertising.

“I think 2006 showed that YouTube could be a critical organizing tool,” says Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics. “We realized that it’s a fantastic platform for self-expression, because there are a thousand things you can do. Candidates just have to figure out the best way to call for a community.” For its part, YouTube has opened a site called You Choose, in which campaigns are free to post (and control) their own content. Within the You Choose site, Grove and his team have created the Spotlight Program, which highlights a different candidate every week. At the same time, however, the Wild West aspects still exist. Both YouTube and Facebook are Deadwood and Tombstone, respectively – wide-open cities full of independent operators with deadly aim.

“The Internet is starting to do to politics what it’s been doing to music for 10 years, decentralizing power and shifting a lot of energy over to the voters,” explains techPresident.com's Rasiej. “Politicians, who have BlackBerrys but no vision, realize there’s a chance for a more robust and participatory democracy, with citizens experiencing politics as relevant to their lives, as opposed to an abstraction.” The prospect of which has scared politicians to death all the way back to Alexander Hamilton.

The place from which Mitt Romney is running for president is just up the street from where the Celtics and Bruins play. There’s no evidence of the campaign until you step off the elevator and seem to be surrounded by the Brigham Young University glee club. Walking across the lobby is like walking face-first into a loaf of Wonder Bread. The one exception is Mindy Finn, who zips through the place like a burst of energy in a leather jacket. Finn is completely a product of the new political age – a member of the new class of political consultants formed to take advantage of the explosion in Web-based communications.

“When I came here,” she says, laughing, “there were blogs that wrote about my taking the job and calling me a ‘veteran online strategist.’ I guess three years makes you a veteran.”

Today, people like Finn are vital to any campaign, because they were formed within the culture of the new technologies. She worked for the Bush campaign’s Internet team in 2004 and then at the Republican National Committee and for the unsuccessful 2006 re-election campaign of Senator Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania. She is a conservative activist to her bones, but she can talk about the Internet with the same kind of fervor you heard from Dean’s people three years ago. Moreover, at this point, a competent, professional Web campaign, capable of playing offense and defense with equal skill, is now considered as reliable a metric for measuring the viability of a campaign as fund-raising and TV advertising are.

Earlier this year, someone posted a video on YouTube of Romney debating Ted Kennedy in the senatorial campaign of 1994, in which Romney professes views on certain social issues that likely would bury him in the GOP primaries today. In response, the Romney campaign didn’t put out a press release or beg for time on a network news show. It posted its own video on YouTube, with Romney explaining how his views on those issues have evolved. That tamped down the controversy, at least as regards to that particular piece of footage, and the campaign got credit in the world of Web-based politics for its swift and sure response.

And, despite the fact that he already had been roughed up on YouTube – beyond the Kennedy debate videos, his odd-duck comments about hunting “varmints” had fairly flown around the Web – Romney was the first candidate to use the Spotlight Program. He posed a question to viewers, asking for opinions on what America’s greatest challenge is, and 60 people posted video responses. Not only did it gain him visibility, it presented him as far less stiff than his public image had made him out to be.

“There are a lot of tactics that are improving now,” says Finn. “Your Web strategy can’t be one-size-fits-all. You really do have to tailor it, the way you would any strategy, to the candidate.” That’s the offense. The defense is simply to be aware of the expanded contexts within which the damage can be done. There’s not much a campaign can do about a candidate’s “varmint” moment, but Finn has to keep a close watch for any uncontrolled Web-based chicanery that might be aimed at the candidate. At the same time, like any Internet enthusiast, she believes the mechanism for self-correction exists within the medium itself. And that a rapid response can turn the attack back on the attacker.

“One thing I would say about that,” Finn says, “is that the Web gives you a vehicle – and not just you in the campaign, but citizens in general – to get their outrage out, if something like that happens, or to investigate how it happened and who did it. That happens right away, and it can explode.”

The “1984” Hillary-Clinton-as-Big-Brother video that was posted on YouTube and exploded into the general campaign was a watershed moment. It blew to pieces the notion that the work of independent Web operators would inevitably be inferior to that of the big political ad shops. The spot was clean, elegant, and brilliantly conceived. Ultimately, the creator revealed himself, not on the CBS Evening News or even on CNN, but in The Huffington Post, the blog hosted by political maven Arianna Huffington. He was Philip de Vellis, a senior strategist at Blue State Digital, a company with ties to the campaign of Barack Obama, but which was created by people who’d cut their cyberteeth in Dean’s campaign in 2004. Thus was the entire recent history of Web-based campaigning included in a single controversy. De Vellis no longer works for Blue State Digital because of the video, but it was noted that, while the Obama campaign distanced itself from the creation of “1984,” it didn’t distance itself from the video’s message.

No campaign has tied its identity so firmly to its Web side as has the Obama campaign, headquartered at the top of an office building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. It is a place in which every wall and desktop is aglow with monitors. It is a place startlingly free of paper, at least by the traditional standards of a campaign headquarters, which have generally looked like a cross between a ticker-tape parade and the $2 betting window at Arlington Park. The campaign has signed aboard Chris Hughes, who was one of the founders of Facebook, and its new media strategy is directed by Joe Rospars, who came to the campaign from Blue State Digital, the company that once employed de Vellis. Some of Rospars’s team are political operatives learning to use the Web, and others are Web specialists learning to be political.

That the Obama campaign is so Web-intense is perfectly consonant with the campaign’s idea of itself – a young, fresh candidate seeking to develop a new American community. There is not a single innovation that has eluded the campaign. At one point, Obama’s MySpace page soared easily past 160,000 “friends,” and, at the end of March, the campaign claimed that its YouTube channel had recorded nearly 2.7 million views. Obama’s campaign also created a profile recently on Twitter, a Web community based on people telling one another what they’re doing right at the moment.

“We see the new media team and what they do as a constantly evolving part of the campaign,” says Jen Psaki, an Obama campaign spokesperson. “The tools we have now are not the tools we’ll have six weeks from now.”

Obama’s campaign has immersed itself so thoroughly in the new technology that it has drawn the attention of the new media outlets that monitor, well, the new media. Joshua Levy of techPresident.com wrote an extensive examination of Obama’s whopping YouTube numbers that raised serious questions about whether Obama’s supporters had finagled with the You Choose system. And the campaign is in an extended wrangle with a California man who created an Obama MySpace page in 2004 only to lose control of it to the Obama campaign amid accusations of bullying and bad faith so loud that even the mainstream media heard it.

“Nobody was analyzing the technology itself,” says Rasiej. “What happened with Barack Obama’s YouTube numbers is a good example. The actual number of viewers was around 600,000, but somebody created a program that gamed the system to boost Obama’s numbers online.

“It’s another example of voter-generated content being the wild card of the 2008 presidential election. It’s a very risky environment for campaigns when they no longer control the message.” In other words, the campaigns do the best they can fashioning the new media to their candidates’ benefit, and all they can do about the rest of the Internet is hope for the best.

“It’s uncharted territory,” admits Psaki. “That has benefits and that has risks. We rely on community monitors. We’re not in the scenario where we’re censoring what people say.”

Sooner or later – and everyone believes it will be sooner – somewhere, somebody will push a button and a video will emerge that changes the entire nature of campaigning, for good or ill. Campaigns know that, and they also know they can’t stop it. They can only hope that someone skilled in the same technology, inside their campaigns or outside, will push back. They’re learning, almost on the fly, that the rules have changed and that the biggest change is that there are fewer rules. This is the terrain of the imagination. Like all unmapped frontiers, it’s lawless at its heart, where everyone’s an outlaw – but everyone’s a sheriff, too.