Obama, you(tube) and I
Benjamin GayedWell, it is the beginning of a new election cycle, and with the changing of the Presidency, we are seeing the information revolution beginning to affect politics directly. President-elect Obama has already begun his ‘youtube-side chats’, where he addresses the nation via short recorded videos published on youtube as well as on his official transition website, change.gov. In the first installment of this remarkable and exciting use of the internet to shrink the effective distance between you and I and the President of the United States, the topic of conversation is Mr. Obama’s plan to address climate change and clean energy development. This method of communication is a continuation of the theme Mr. Obama’s started by harnessing the social networking site, Facebook, as a mass-communication outlet to raise support for his presidential campaign. We are seeing the power of the internet to revitalize democracy by allowing us to have more direct communications with elected officials and to be heard more easily. In light of this, I was hoping to discuss the effect the internet itself will have on future election cycles, and specifically the possible rebirth of a truly democratic election using this technology.
I would like to propose an election system where public officials are hired through internet-communities with progressive elections. Specifically, I am imagining every registered voter has the opportunity to sign-up to be considered a candidate in a race for any public office. Each person would be offered the ability to sign-up for a public office race if he/she met age criteria, citizenship and jurisdiction for the position of interest. There would be an online public forum where each candidate would post arguments regarding the issues pertaining to the position of interest. A forum might be accessible to a range of people (possibly anywhere from 20-1000 people or so depending on the jurisdiction of the position). In any one forum, all interested parties would be represented by some non-identifying label (candidate A, or something bland like that), and other members of that forum (again, based on voting precincts as appropriate for the jurisdiction of the post) could read candidate discussions and arguments and vote for a forum-winner. Forum-winners would then have the chance to run against other forum-winners in successive competitions. This might look a little different depending on the particular race, but some races might be decided entirely in this fashion (perhaps, county treasurer or a similar scope of position), or in the case of something more high-profile like the race for Governor, Senator or President, etc, the final four or so campaigners as selected through this progressive voting scheme might be able to face-off in a more formal, televised debate-type format (preferably with equivalent government-disbursed stipends) so that we can get a sense of how each candidate looks and sounds.
Advantages to this method include a preliminary selection of candidates based on the coherence of policy proposals, elimination of funding battles, elimination of discrimination based on race or gender, and the implementation of a system whereby any and everyone who can use a computer could well run for any office in the country if he or she has the will and capacity needed for the job. Another advantage of this format would be the ability of a webpage to bring attention to local races, which are certainly undervalued currently, by bringing the information to the voter in the same location and format as the more exciting races. Weaknesses of this idea include the fact that this progressive scheme could take a long time for national races. It might be very difficult to figure out when different voting precincts should vote, and how many people should be included in different precincts, and how many precincts should be lumped together for larger races. There are probably possibilities of voter fraud, but the voter fraud would not be a new problem, and it seems if we can successfully i-bank, we should be able to ensure the integrity of an online voting system. There is also the concern that this would be an excessive de-personalization of the system and that we might want more exposure of candidates to avoid electing leaders who write well and persuasively, but do not inspire confidence to see or hear.
Continuing to consider the recent election, there are several inequalities which might have been effectively negated with use of the internet for campaigning. For example, Mr. Obama’s finances exceeded Mr. McCain’s by a ratio of over 2:1. Mr. Obama was able to focus his resources in the recent election to help win traditional Republican strongholds such as Virginia as well as swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. Also, Mr. Obama is handsome, well-spoken and charismatic. It is easy to imagine that many may have been persuaded to vote for him based on these factors more than they might have base on the merits of his arguments and policy propositions. The converse is of course true as well — that people may have voted against him, as well as for or against Mr. McCain for any superficial reason. I do not mean to pick on Mr. Obama, only to point out ways in which voters may be unduly distracted from relevant issues that the anonymity of the internet might diminish.
I applaud Mr. Obama for his aggressive and innovative use of the internet to try to form a more perfect union. I think we could use this type of thinking and technology to improve the process of electing officials as well. The internet is certainly a powerful tool, and using it to implement a progressive voting scheme like this might see the development of the closest thing to democracy the Earth has ever known. The candidates could make the same arguments, but without all the hand-waving and prohibitive factors such as finances, we might be better able to find the best candidate for the job.
November 22nd, 2008 at 1:24 pm
It wasn’t until after the election that I perused some of the youtube videos from the past year, including Obama’s being hosted on a variety of shows: Late Night w/ David Letterman (where he did a ‘top ten’ presidency priorities joke-list w/ Letterman), the Daily Show, Ellen Degeneres (where he danced around and played a cool, modern sophisticated dad for the female audience). Then it hit me, that McCain, like Bush, simply did not reach out to popular culture at all. Bush’s great fault has been that he almost seems scared to try to win over young liberals. You see him give talks and there’s a sort of implicit anxiety in his voice, which comes from an awareness of what young liberals think of his religion, his ideology, and his presidency (although this was, I think, a problem of his from the beginning.)
It’s going to be a challenge for the next generation of young conservatives who need to run for president, to not compromise on their views but still reach out to popular culture, and try to be cool, too, not the sort of reach-out-but-still-be-unintellectually-unapologetic that Sarah Palin tried to pull off. That obviously didn’t work. There’s got to be some young up and coming conservatives who are extremely literate and able to defend themselves in the public arena while still being able to be perceived as hip and ‘new’.
November 23rd, 2008 at 8:30 am
Well, Bush certainly hasn’t reached out to younger folks anywhere near as much as he could have. I’d call that small beer, however, compared with what I see as his real greatest fault (given that he was elected as an ostensibly conservative Republican): his effective renunciation of every conservative principle other than cutting taxes. That is a discussion for a different time, however.
Obama has tapped into popular culture to an extent not seen since JFK in 1960. While the meme that young people supported Obama in unprecedented numbers increasingly appears to be a myth (judging by their voting percentage, which doesn’t seem to differ much from previous elections), it can’t be denied that he created a great deal of enthusiasm through his deft use of the internet and new media. Howard Dean pioneered the use of the “netroots” in his failed 2004 run for the Democratic nomination, but Obama took it to a new level. We’ve only begun to comprehend the massive and fundamental changes the internet is causing in every sector of our society, however, so the Obama campaign’s masterful use of sites like Facebook and Youtube will certainly be improved upon.
I second Benjamin’s assertion that we’ve probably seen the end of traditional campaigning. I wouldn’t be surprised if 2008 proves to be as seminal and election (in terms of its effect on how candidates for the White House campaign) as 1912 was.
For over a century, candidates for the presidency didn’t actively campaign. It was seen as beneath them. They used proxies to campaign for them, but they themselves stayed at home and did their best to appear above the fray. The only major party candidate to actively campaign from 1800 (the first truly contested presidential election) to 1912 was William Jennings Bryan in 1896, and people thought he was literally insane for doing so. Only 16 years later, however, Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt (in his Bull Moose phase) were expected to travel around the country and actively solicit their fellow citizens’ votes — a truly unprecedented development. William Howard Taft, who had won comfortably in 1908 (and only ran in 1912 to deny Roosevelt the GOP nomination) campaigned from his front porch, as winning candidates had done for 28 previous elections. In 1896, William McKinley had campaigned in that exact fashion, and had easily defeated Jennings Bryan. In 1912, Taft — the incumbent — went down to a crushing defeat by following the same path, and presidential campaigning was never the same.
At this point I obviously can’t definitively say that Obama’s use of internet campaigning in 2008 will have a similarly massive effect on how presidential candidates campaign, but (were I a gambling man) I’d be willing to bet real money that it did. I honestly think that in 30 years, history teachers will point to Howard Dean and Barack Obama as the two candidates who pushed presidential campaigning irrevocably into the internet age.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:25 pm
There’s no question that we can and should use the internet to attain previously unattainable heights of voter awareness. There’s also no question that the internet should play a role larger than as a 3rd form of media for campaign ads.
I’m intrigued by your idea–using the internet to enfranchise candidates regardless of wealth or social connection. Your attrition runoff scheme is interesting also, but I think the real value of your idea is the concept that the internet can, for the first time, allow someone with no resources to compete in the same ballpark with someone with the power of a national party behind them, based on message alone.
Perhaps, in a traditional voting structure, each election could have its own website, in which the candidates are given equal amounts of memory and bandwidth to do with as they please for the duration of the election. A rule that candidates aren’t allowed to advertise outside of the website would probably squeak by First Amendment concerns, so long as not-formally-affiliated interest groups weren’t prohibited from putting on ads or other endorsements.