TechPresident’s Joshua Levy does an excellent job showing that Barack Obama’s huge numbers on YouTube are likely gamed and inflated. And this makes me wonder whether his MySpace numbers are similarly manufactured. Add this to the anonymous anti-Hillary video made by a political operative and you get a disturbing, or at least unflattering, picture of some of Obama’s supporters. Some are trying to hack his campaign for him.
No one is saying that Obama’s staff is doing this. But it could hurt him nonetheless. That anti-Hillary commercial, coming from a hidden source, smelled of a dirty trick. Somebody’s engineering lies about at least his YouTube viewership. People will wonder how much of his buzz is elusive, the effort to goose it even desperate. See Peter Hauck’s post below asking whether the honeymoon is waning. Remember, too, the unwelcome attitude many in Iowa had to the invasion by hordes of Deaniacs with accents from elsewhere. It may be easy to hack a campaign, but I doubt whether it will be effective.
Last week in California, I was talking with some people who know about these things and they thought the Obama’s numbers were bogus but didn’t yet know how to prove it. TechPresident’s Levy shows how the number of visitors and views just don’t match up. The clearest evidence of fishiness is all this is TechPresident’s own YouTube chart, which they acknowledge looks darned suspicious:
But there’s a problem with all these numbers even if they aren’t bald-faced lies. We are so accustomed to the horse-race story in politics, the narrative media loves to push, that we are in a constant hunt for new numbers and new charts that tell that tale. Beware internet numbers, though. This is not a mass medium. It is a mass of niches. And even the biggest numbers are necessarily small. It’s the sum of all those small numbers that is huge. In other words, this is not a medium of winners and losers but of coalitions. Last week, amidst the Hillary 1984 commercial kefuffle, a half-dozen reporters called me working on the exact same story (which indicates a problem with reporting, but that’s a subject for another blog), and one of them asked whether the number of negative Hillary videos on YouTube indicated a loss of momentum for her (Mo is their favorite angle in the horse-race story). I laughed, which was more polite than scoffing with scorn. One person can make 10 anti-anybody videos. A hundred can make a thousand. And all that indicates is the thinking of 100 people, not the mood and mo of the nation. The numbers of views is similarly misleading, if you let them be: I watched the Hillary commercial because it was entertaining and being talked about, not because I agreed with it. No, the press hates this, but there’s only one number that matters — the election-day tally, of course — and that’s the one scoop they can’t have; it’s ours. So whether they’re gamed or not, view all these internet tallies with suspicion. They are for entertainment only, no wagering or governing with them allowed.
The YouTube election is by no means a strictly American phenomenon, though we tend to assume everything is. In fact, other political scenes are ahead of ours and our candidates have a lot to learn from them about how to run YouTube campaigns. I did an interview for Japanese TV yesterday about PrezVid and pointed to what’s happening in France (an interview about that here) with candidates showing their more candid moments and creating a platform for the voters to speak as well. And then I made my hourly visit to the invaluable TechPresident, where Micah Sifry pointed to the amazing video effort of British Tory leader David Cameron.
Says Micah, from column he and Andrew Rasiej wrote for Politico:
Picture this: Every day, a major candidate for the highest office in the land spends a few minutes talking into a video camera held by an aide. Then the recordings are posted, with very minor editing, to the his Web site. On some days, they show him on the street, talking casually about the visit he’s making to a local business or a day care center. On other days, he’s sitting in his office, giving candid responses to the top five questions that have been posted to his blog, as chosen by visitors to his site.
The videos are all generally unscripted; the settings are unencumbered by props; and the camera work is about as good as any tourist’s visiting the zoo.
If you think this is a fantasy, don’t. This, in a nutshell, is how David Cameron, the youthful leader of Britain’s opposition Conservative Party, has been taking advantage of online video since he launched his “Webcameron” site last fall. . . .
For all the talk of this being the “YouTube Election,” however, none of the current candidates for president of the United States is doing anything close to what Cameron is doing. Yes, they know they can use their Web sites to broadcast video to potential supporters. But so far, not one presidential campaign has demonstrated that it understands the difference between video online and video on TV. That’s because they all apparently think video online is just television on a smaller screen.
In the old world of televised politicking, broadcast time is expensive and scarce. Because of that, politicians learned to speak in sound bites to get their message across quickly. On-camera “gaffes” are feared for what they might reveal. Campaign commercials are rehearsed and scripted as much as possible. The voter gets a carefully packaged view of the candidate. Spin rules, and media consultants get rich from their commissions on buying TV time.
But this approach deprives voters of a real “unscripted” view of the candidate. We pounce on gaffes, believing, as Michael Kinsley memorably said, that a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — “or more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head.”
In the new world of online video, broadband is cheap and plentiful. Instead of sound bites, a candidate can speak in full paragraphs. He or she can do a daily video blog, or even several, because digital storage is practically unlimited and bandwidth costs are minimal. Like Cameron, he or she can talk to us in the context of their actual lives in relation to the issues at hand. . . .
Micah wonders whether we agree. We do. However, I do think that American candidates are beginning to break away from their big-TV roots. McCain didn’t, with his overproduced, overlong commercials. Obama is spending too much time showing himself in front of big crowds and too little time just talking to us (I’ll have a vlog on that a bit later). Hillary is more casual but not candid. Yet they are all reveling in their ablity to make their own soundbites instead of being subject to the clipping whims of some network TV news editor.
So Micah’s right, none of them has the casual humanity that Sarkozy in France and Cameron in the UK try to present — and our candidates would be smart to follow their lead. (And isn’t it fascinating, by the way, that in the U.S., the liberals are leading on YouTube but in Europe its’ the conservatives who are ahead?)
Micah says it comes down to the question of how much our candidates are willing to risk being human. Yes, but as I said below, that horse is over the horizon. The more these candidates get out on the stump, the more vlogging voters will be taping their every syllable and the more they’ll have to get comfortable with showing a less shrink-wrapped version of themselves. But we, the voters (and pundits) will also need to learn that every gaffe and slip of the tongue isn’t a gotcha moment and a news story. It’s just a moment of being human. If we want to see the more human side of our candidates, then we will have to accept their goofs.
So Micah and I agree that the more we are able to see of the candidates and the more candid they are, the better we will be able to judge them. In an exchange in the comments on his post, he said to me:
I would love a stream of videos from those living rooms and coffee klatches (assuming they are still happening; some of the stories out of IA and NH suggest that there’s such demand to meet the top candidates that they can’t schedule such intimate events). It used to be that only the lucky voters of those two states got a chance to meet the candidates face-to-face in a personal enough setting to take their measure and perhaps ask them a tough question and get a real answer. But someone with a video could now capture that moment and instead of giving us another “macaca” we might get a revelation about a candidate’s character or vision that is positive and affirming. Recall the photo of Bush hugging that girl whose father died on 9/11. It was taken spontaneously by an onlooker and showed up real emotion; arguably it was Bush at his best. I just wish the current candidates would allow themselves the possibility of a similar moment…
To Micah’s point, here’s a video of Hillary Clinton visiting a home in Nashua, New Hampshire, and another of Barack Obama in a house across town. But when you have boom mics and press caravan’s it’s hardly casual:
