Humor websites prove valuable in partisan warfare

WASHINGTON -- Humor is fast becoming the weapon of choice for political partisans trying to woo Internet surfers. While johnkerry.com and georgewbush.com offer official biographies and policy positions, scores of independent websites parodying the two presidential candidates are drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors each day.

With a slightly different spin and a lot more edge than official campaign zones, sites such as kerrycore.com and regimechangeguide.com are weighing in on the campaigns -- and their influence could extend beyond the party faithful, specialists say.

"You can get a lot further with an attack if it is one that has humor," said Ron Gunzburger, founder of political information site politics1.com. "If you get people laughing, you may change their minds."

Gunzburger, who tracks such sites, estimates that to date there are more than 100 Web pages poking fun at the candidates, at least 50 percent more than in 2000. Some are designed to draw laughs, not votes. Most are attempts to persuade visitors, even if their audiences do not realize it, he said.

"Almost all of them want to persuade to some extent, [though] not all with a baseball bat approach," he said.

Daniel Jordan, webmaster for kerrycore.com and several other sites parodying the Democrats, said his site is designed "just for fun," although it may sway a few voters as well. "This can be an effective way to convince people and define your opponent," he said.

The site, which receives 20,000 unique visitors a day, features comical ads and cartoons, the nominee's fake campaign schedule (11:30 a.m.: eat tofu/ carrot pizza; 3 p.m.: watch motivational tapes) as well as articles in which Kerry unveils his nude self-portrait and tries to defeat bioterrorism by fixing toilets. The site also pokes fun at the senator's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, saying she likes to eat rabbits and squirrels and is upset about "playing second fiddle to some man."

Jordan said kerrycore.com, which popped up last January, was one of the first anti-Kerry satirical sites to hit the Web. But now, he said, he hears of three or four new sites a week, such as hanoikerry.com, which calls Kerry a "wannabe presidential nominee" from "Taxachusetts." Another site, kerrywaffles.com, displays stacks of waffles next to such questions as "Is he Irish or not?" and "Get Saddam or not?" and presents an animated picture of Kerry moving his head from side to side.

President Bush has not escaped his share of barbs.

Georgewbush.org uses a design and color scheme similar to the president's official reelection site, georgewbush.com, as well as its links to pages on the economy, health care, and a variety of other issues. Clicking "economy" on the official site links the visitor to pictures of workers in hard hats and statistics about job growth. But the same button on georgewbush.org presents a series of graphs on skyrocketing sales of yachts, luxury cars, and golf club memberships.

The site says Vice President Dick Cheney "has a long and distinguished career erasing the inconvenient lines separating business and government" and displays pictures of Cheney smirking and scowling. A related site, whitehouse.org, features a link to the president's "Department of Faith" and the "Presidential Prayer Squad," in addition to providing "kinder, gentler guidelines for torturing maybe-terrorist trash."

Michael Cornfield, a senior research consultant at the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington, D.C., said part of the appeal of these sites is how they spread. Most of the pages have links to other satirical sites as well as e-mail update lists, making it easier to laugh at your favorite, or least favorite, candidate.

"Humor travels virtually more than anything," he said. "Political consultants hope that people pass them along to their friends and strangers."

Cornfield says the parody sites are sometimes used in a campaign's own political strategy. As part of their rapid-response initiative at the Democratic National Convention last week, the Republicans launched demsextrememakeover.com.

Lindsay Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said the site was not designed to be funny, but she understood how it might seem so.

"People have their own ways of interpreting things, and it always helps to use tacky phrases and things that catch people's eyes," she said. "But at the end of the day, we are in the business of interpreting facts."

The humor, if unintentional, seemed to pay off. While the RNC main page draws about 25,000 hits a day, Taylor said demsextrememakeover.com got more than 600,000 within the last two days of the convention, causing the server to crash.

Although visitors may respond better to humor, Cornfield said he thinks such sites should not be taken seriously.

"You look at the Internet while you are at work on a break," he said. "These are mostly for entertainment or enforcement."

But Deanna Zandt, co-editor of the anti-Bush site regimechangeguide.com, said the humor isn't just for fun. She said the site, which has a "regime change readiness checklist" of how to defeat Bush, is not designed to woo voters, but to engage them.

"Humor catches people off guard, and it doesn't automatically make the defenses go up," she said. The site "is for people who have already made up their minds, but we want to engage people, and not just with the usual rhetoric."

As such sites to continue to spread via word-of-mouth or in-box, Gunzburger predicted that many more would crop up in future, but added that political satire is nothing new in America.

"It's a tradition that goes back to the Founding Fathers," he said.

Jessica E. Vascellaro can be reached at jvascellaro@globe.com.