• by Kathleen Burge , May 29, 2007

The candidates take their campaigns where few have gone before

Anybody who dropped by Sen. John McCain's MySpace page the morning of March 27 might have been startled to find a terse announcement beneath a portrait of the man who hopes to become president. "Dear Supporters," began the message, which proclaimed that McCain had reversed his position to fully support gay marriage "particularly marriage between passionate females."

The four-term Republican senator who famously survived five torturous years as a POW in Vietnam could not keep his own MySpace page secure. The candidate's page had been "enhanced" by a disgruntled Internet publisher retaliating because McCain's page was lifting design code without crediting him and using his bandwidth to pull photos to the McCain page. McCain's enthusiastic "announcement" about gay marriage stayed up on his MySpace page for about an hour, until his campaign workers yanked it off - and also changed the page's design format.

Wild West of the Web

This is the new terrain of the men and women who hope their next business address will contain the words "West Wing": MySpace and Twitter, YouTube and Second Life. None of these sites played a role in the last campaign, even as small-state governor Howard Dean commandeered the Internet to turn himself into a serious candidate. Now, in the still early days of the first presidential campaign in the Web 2.0 world, the candidates are lurching uncertainly through cyberspace. "What's going on for the 2008 presidential campaign is light years different than what's occurred online in prior campaigns," says Howard Mortman, the public affairs practice director of New Media Strategies, an online marketing company. " You're going to have candidates who are going to stumble. That's part of the excitement of this Wild West of the Web - when they go for broke and go after these new tools and toys."

Although candidates have raised serious money online, there has also been an embarrassment of riches for bloggers and late-night talk shows. Sen. John Edwards primped and fluffed his bounteous hair before more than 400,000 YouTube viewers to the tune of Julie Andrews trilling, "I feel pretty, Oh, so pretty, I feel pretty and witty and bright." His campaign also drew criticism for hiring two bloggers, who later resigned, with a history of making inflammatory comments about religion and sex.

Rudy Giuliani's Web site contained flaws, eventually fixed, that could have allowed the private information of volunteers to be exposed. And lesser-known Democratic candidate Mike Gravel's Web site was so feeble that it couldn't withstand the rush of hits after the late April Democratic candidates' debate, frustrating bloggers who wanted to donate money.

Although candidates are taking the Internet far more seriously than ever before, there is no well-trod (or even lightly walked) path to harnessing its power - or even, a guide on how not to humiliate yourself before a few hundred thousand potential voters.

"There's just incident after incident after incident," says Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, and head of Howard Dean's technology council in the 2004 campaign. "I believe the political establishment's inability to understand how the rules have changed is why they're almost all in denial. What's surprising is, after all the examples, that the political organizations and candidates are still unwilling to really invest in understanding how to use the technology to their advantage."

Tactical Errors

But even more than the weekly candidate embarrassments, Internet strategists fault campaigns for not taking far greater advantage of the Web's many opportunities to raise support. One small but telling example: the MySpace profile of Giuliani was initially not public, meaning it could only be seen by people approved by the candidate. As many strategists asked: Why would you want to keep potential voters from learning more about you?

"Politicians still don't know the difference between a server and a waiter," Rasiej says. "Their staffers and consultants and most trusted aides are still learning how to adjust." 

Although every candidate has a Web site, and some announced their candidacy online, most see the Internet as their own private television station, Rasiej says - a way to drill their position points into the brains of potential voters - rather than as a way to allow support to bubble from the ground up. Many Web sites, for instance, do not let supporters network with one another, passing on their enthusiasm for the candidate or planning events.

No matter their technical expertise, though, the candidates are finding that the Web can be a treacherous place to tread. Consultants once warned their candidates to beware open microphones - now they must remember that any cell-phone camera can be a conduit to a YouTube video that reaches more people than your Web site on a good month. Just ask Edwards.

"I think the Internet and the blogs are a very hard media to control and it's sort of like playing with fire," says Democratic strategist Jenny Backus. "You can [ignite] your campaign in a month or you can get singed very fast."

A single damning online video isn't likely to end a campaign, but dozens might, a threat that Republican Internet strategist David All calls "death by 1,000 YouTube videos." All believes Mitt Romney, for example, has been battered by a series of videos on YouTube contrasting his change in position on issues, including abortion and gay rights. The permanence, popularity and easy access of YouTube makes it especially frightening to candidates caught in a bad place.

"A taped YouTube video can do a lot more damage early on than a taped CNN press conference," Backus says. And add the attention of the mainstream media, which has been reporting vociferously on online activity, and the danger is magnified.

Friends, Funds and Voters?

Edwards' campaign has committed its share of Web gaffes. But Edwards, who recently hired Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, also wins praise from Internet strategists for his openness to Web experimentation. "He's willing to try anything," All said. "He's using what I like to call the spaghetti tactic - he'll throw anything against the wall and see what sticks."

Barack Obama, the Democratic senator, is often cited as the most tech-savvy of the candidates. With Edwards, he was among the first to Twitter, and his Web site encourages users to create profiles, blog and form on-site networks of friends. He is also the prom king of Facebook, with 71,000 friends and counting. Obama, however, recently suffered a setback on MySpace, when his campaign got into a dispute with Joe Anthony, the paralegal who had created a page on the social networking site for the candidate. Anthony had amassed more than 160,000 friends for Obama, but MySpace in early May gave the campaign control over the page and removed the "friends" that Anthony had collected for the candidate. As of mid-May, Obama's MySpace page had only recouped around 72,000 friends.

These friends could very well become contributors before the election. The Web, making it easier and cheaper to collect donations - think fewer costly fund-raisers around the nation - has already helped candidates raise more cash. And two professors at Bentley College studied the candidates' Web sites and concluded last month that the "most creative" Web sites raised the most money. In fact, Obama had early success with fund-raising (which many think is tied to his smart use of the Web) - coming within $1 million of Hillary Rodham Clinton ($26 million to $25 million) in the first quarter of 2007, with $6.9 million coming directly from the Web.

So the question will be, gaffes aside, whether candidates can use the Internet to get to the White House. Oddly, as Internet strategists have pointed out, few candidates' Web sites show voters how to register. Political analysts like to point out that for all of Howard Dean's much vaunted mastery of the Internet, he only won a single primary last time around, in his home state of Vermont.

"Can they use these armies of people that they're collecting on the Internet," Backus asks, "to actually convert them into voters?"