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Netroots Campaigning, Barack Versus McCain

Pimply adolescents aren’t the only faces on Facebook.

The 2008 presidential election marks a new frontier in electoral politics, as both the John McCain and Barack Obama campaigns have created profiles on popular social networking Web sites. If the race for the White House were being staged on Facebook or MySpace, John McCain would lose by a landslide. Barack Obama has over 1.9 million supporters on Facebook, compared to McCain’s 500,000. On MySpace, the other major social networking site, the race is nearly identical. Obama has approximately 600,000 friends, compared to McCain’s 117,000. Even on the video-sharing site YouTube, Obama’s videos have been viewed over 14 million times, compared to a paltry 800,000 views for McCain’s content.

What is wrong with John McCain? Why don’t more people like him online? Both candidates have made strong efforts to engage voters over the Internet. Both candidates have extensive, media-rich Web sites complete with blogs, videos, and stores selling t-shirts, buttons, yard signs, books and DVDs. The answer, then, is that Obama’s campaign is consistently more effective, and more adroit at using new communication vehicles.

Online, Obama is just more fun to be around. McCain’s Web presence has a stodgy, corporate, box-laden design with horsey graphics where every page loudly exhorts you to “RECRUIT 5 FRIENDS.” McCain’s site also sports a clumsy derivative of the 1978 video game Space Invaders, renamed “Pork Invaders,” where players shoot vetoes at invading pigs. When players successfully clear a level, they are rewarded with a screen of text discussing McCain’s senatorial record on earmarks. By contrast, Obama’s Web site is clean, elegant, glowing with hope, transparency, and the tasteful use of PhotoShop filters. Obama offers content technophiles might actually want: cell phone ring tones, background images for your PC desktop and buddy icons for your Web chat program.

Both campaigns have created sites that allow you to sign up for a personal Web page on the candidates’ sites. You can choose to dwell in McCainSpace, or have a part of my.barackobama.com. In mid-July, as the conventions were rapidly approaching, I signed up for membership on both of the candidate’s Web sites. I was able to complete the process in less than 15 minutes on Obama’s site, and had my very own part of Obama’s Web world. By contrast, it took four days for McCain to approve my entry into McCainSpace. While Obama only asked me to add a post to get my personal page started, McCain wanted me to commit to a fundraising goal of $200 and a recruitment goal of five friends. Both experiences have good and bad points, but it was rather off-putting that McCain treated me (and my five friends) as merely a source of funding.

I also attempted to befriend both Obama and McCain on MySpace. Obama reciprocated within 10 hours. It took McCain three days to return my offer of friendship.

Part of the credit for Obama’s online success goes to Chris Hughes, the 24-year-old cofounder of Facebook, who left the company to join the Obama campaign in early 2007. But the real credit for Obama’s online success goes to his ability to appeal to the online culture of visualati that produces the media that is propagated on the many content-sharing Web sites.

For example, YouTube has been crowded with citizen-created videos supporting the Obama camp. Various iterations of will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video have been viewed more than 10 million times. The MadTV parody of Rihanna’s steamy Umbrella music video, the slightly less risqué “I’ve got a Crush on Obama,” and the bizarre Barack OBollywood video – a video remix of Udit Narayan’s song Chori Chori Hum Gori – together have been watched over 18 million times, raising Obama’s visibility.

While the candidates continue to spend time and campaign dollars to engage voters through Web-based media, I am left wondering what will happen to the candidates’ Facebook and MySpace profiles after the election season is over. Will the profiles become new venues for political outreach? Or, will these sites, in the tradition of most campaign promises, be quietly left behind?