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Magazine
MEDIA MATTERS
Digital candidate
SEVANTI NINAN
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Barack Obama’s campaign has made a more astute use of the possibilities offered by the Internet. Will it take him to the White House?
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These days America lives and breathes the Clinton-Obama contest. And to watch politics on television is to understand why Barack Obama turns to the Internet. Only on television’s wall-to-wall election coverage can you get the spectacle of a can
didate getting shut out by anchors the moment he begins to speak. If you were watching the John Edwards endorsement of the younger democratic party candidate, you first waited for more than an hour for the “any moment” moment to come. When it came, you were allowed to listen to Edwards. When it was Obama’s turn to speak, the anchors decided that it was time to talk to each other about him rather than let any hapless viewer hear him. Beginning with CNN’s Situation Room and across the channel spectrum — ABC, NBC, CBS — there was uncanny unanimity that people could sort of watch Obama in the background while TV anchors debated in the forefront of the studio space.
Again, to watch TV at all in the U.S. is to understand why Obama turns to the Internet. The medium is grey. TV audiences here are primarily sixty plus. The dominant advertising is medical — pharmaceutical companies seem to keep the networks in business. And if TV news anchors in India are getting younger, over here the star anchors are getting greyer, which could be a relief for those who want more gravity but it’s possibly just a turn off for much of America which stopped reading newspapers some time ago and is now tuning in to network TV less and less. Also the fact that anchors like to hear themselves talk is likely to drive you to a less mediated medium like the Internet.
Different approaches
There is a one-line description in currency here for what distinguishes Barack Obama from Hillary Clinton. He is a digital candidate, she is an analog candidate. If you use traditional media as she does, you could get TV coverage but you would be unlikely to reach the millions logged into Facebook. The notion of which medium you use to reach millions is changing. In an interview with Fortune Magazine, Indian media buyer Rishad Tobaccowala pointed out recently that if you used a town meeting on the Hallmark Channel as Clinton did, you could get 2,50,000 viewers. But when a group like Black yed Peas makes a music video about Obama and posts it online, it gets almost a million views a day. And, one might add, is there to be viewed any time, unlike a TV programme which cannot be recalled.
According to one report, Obama has “7,90,000 Facebook friends (minus one: Jeremiah Wright was recently “de-friended”) compared with 1,50,000 for Clinton and a mere 1,17,000 for McCain.” Obama not only uses social networking sites, his campaign has its own social networking site as well.
An imaginative digital candidate would use the Internet in many ways. The Obama campaign has used it to create financial viability for itself. Obama is not the first U.S. presidential candidate to raise money online, Howard Dean did that in an earlier election. But he is the most successful. He is never tired of pointing out how his superior financial strength in this long drawn out primary race comes from large numbers of small contributors who give online.
Others point out that endearing as this sounds — hundreds of thousands of little people voting for Obama with small cheques — it also has hard-headed backroom uses. Obama’s financial contributor database is useful not just for his own candidature but also that of numbers of super delegates to whom he has been able to give money for their own elections. Because, when you contribute to him you become part of a database that can be tapped by his party. His website is quoted by one columnist as saying that it “reserves the right to make personal information available to organisations with similar political viewpoints and objectives, in furtherance of its own political objectives”.
Financial clout
Since 2005, Barack Obama has apparently donated three times as much as Senator Clinton to Democratic super delegates. A study by the Center for Responsive Politics found that the presidential candidate who gave more money to super delegates received the endorsements 82 per cent of the time. Now that is a relatively little-known take on why super delegates in his party have given him an edge so far.
Obama’s website (mybarackobama.com) is well laid out, focused and practical. Every time there is a verbal attack on him from some quarter, it puts out ammunition to fight back with. There are point by point briefings online, for instance: “Barack Obama and patriotism”. After a series of talking points on the subject there will be a line which says, “If you encounter an attack on Barack’s patriotism:TAKE ACTION.”
The Internet as a medium delivers on many fronts. But if it can help deliver an election before the year is out for a black candidate with a Muslim middle name in the United States of America, it will be a spectacular achievement.
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