Will Obama put on the makeup?<\/a> full of unsolicited advice for one presidential candidate, but the advice is meant to be generalizable to all candidates for all offices. He says that he’s “had a chance to make this pitch to many candidates and politicians over the last several years”, and evidently took that chance. So Mr. Exley isn’t talking about Sen. Obama; he’s talking about the Way the World Is Now. And he’s wrong.\nHis main point is an analogy between the Internet now and television in 1960. If y’all don’t know the story, it’s a fundamental how-the-world-works story for modern politics, so it’s helpful to know it. In 1960, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy had a television debate, and because then Vice-President Nixon refused to wear makeup, he came off very badly. People who listened over the radio thought that the veep had won the debate (vaddevah dat means), but the larger television audience thought that the young Senator won it (again, vaddevah dat means), and that was the difference in the election. This story is no less powerful for being essentially false; Senator Kennedy squeaked through in a very close election for more reasons than his comfort with television, and besides, it was certainly close enough that the less television-friendly candidate might well have been elected.\n
Mr. Exley insists that “For the Internet in politics, it’s 1960 again.” Or, of course, it’s 1956. Or 1952. You know, years where television existed, but failed to make any significant difference in the election. How does he know that it’s 1960, rather than 1952? He’s very experienced with the internet, true, but that’s exactly why he is in the worst<\/I> position to judge. I’m sure that loads of television people, including Adlai Stevenson’s (and Richard Nixon’s) teevee advisers in 1952, told him that this was like FDR and radio, that the first candidate to “get it” would win in a landslide. And, of course, Mr. Exley himself was telling people that the Internet was It in 2004, and quite likely in 2000, as well. He was wrong.\n
By the way, in 1952, Richard Nixon went on television to tell the country that he wasn’t a crook, and that Pat Nixon wore a respectable Republican cloth coat, and that his family was going to keep Checkers, the dog. People who watched on television thought he was a crook, but the far larger audience who listened over the radio supported him. That, too, is a story with layers of falsehood, but it’s just as instructive as the 1960 one, I think.\n
Gentle Readers, it’s possible—just—that 2008 will be The Year That The Internet Was More Important Than Previously, that we have reached some sort of tipping point where most voters will use the internet to make up their minds about the candidates. I doubt it, myself. I could be wrong. My point is that we won’t know until we are<\/I> wrong. We will know that the internet is king when someone who ought to have won if it weren’t for the internet loses. Nobody wants to be that candidate, but nobody wants to be Gov. Dean, either.\n
Remember Gov. Dean, when he was a candidate? He was the proof that Everything had Changed. Unlike all the other times when non-voters were going to realio trulio vote, his non-voters were going to realio trulio vote. Except they didn’t. Because everything hadn’t<\/I> changed, and even though he ran a very nice campaign on the internet, he didn’t do so hot when it came to all that old-fashioned stuff, like convincing people who actually vote to vote for him, rather than a different guy. Yes, there were lots of other reasons for that. My point is that Gov. Dean was always<\/I> a longshot, and the claim was that his campaign would overcome<\/I> that because of the power of the internet, and it just wasn’t powerful enough. Sure, and this year, it’s more powerful than it was. That doesn’t mean it’s powerful enough.\n
Finally, I’ll point out that Mr. Exley seems to want Sen. Obama to run a campaign focused almost entirely on the Internet as a medium. I know, he doesn’t say<\/I> that he needs to stop doing the old-fashioned retail politics and going to potlucks with union guys and street-corner rallies. He just wants Sen. Obama to take the time and energy he had put into campaigning the old way and put it into campaigning the new way. Yes, Mr. Exley seems to think it would just be the fund-raising t&e, but he’s also suggesting a public-relations ploy that would take all the focus off every other issue, style or coalition, and put it plumb spang on the Internet. Maybe that is a good idea. But it certainly isn’t what John F. Kennedy did with television in 1960, and thank the Lord for that.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Having said nice things about the Internet recently, Your Humble Blogger feels compelled to take the old hatchet to it today. Actually, it\u2019s not the Internet, as such, that is the focus of my ire. It\u2019s the people who believe…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hatchet-job"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10431"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17956,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10431\/revisions\/17956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}