October 8, 2003

Enter The Cybercandidates

Continued from page 1

By Henry Jenkins

The Dean campaign, on the other hand, has discovered how to use the Web to build a community of support around the candidate, allowing voters not only to feel more connected to the campaign but also to each other. One could argue that Dean's approach builds on earlier experiments conducted by Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot in 1996, Jesse Ventura in 1998, and John McCain and Ralph Nader in 2000.

Every new medium has helped to transform American politics. In the 1930s, FDR discovered that radio required a different kind of rhetoric-less bombastic, more intimate-than the whistle stop oratory of the 19th century. In the early television era, Kennedy taught Nixon that the candidate's personality was as important as what he said. And the first President Bush-a mediocre speaker serving in the wake of Ronald Reagan-rewrote the books on presidential television. In 1988, the Bush campaign adopted a "message of the day" approach designed to provide the images to support his key campaign themes-as when he spoke about patriotism in a flag factory or denounced Michael Dukakis's environmental record from a boat on the polluted Boston harbor. Four years later, Bill Clinton demonstrated the power of cable narrowcasting to target messages at specific constituencies when he spent an hour talking informally with college kids on MTV and used the Arsenio Hall Show to address the African-American community about his views on the Los Angeles riots. Newt Gingrich rose to national prominence by helping to build up a network of right-wing talk radio stations and by using C-Span to get free television airtime. Each of these men found the right style of speaking to best suit the key media system of his era.

To be clear, the medium doesn't totally create the candidate. Most of these candidates had successfully political careers in the old media environments. Yet, two things took place: first, either the candidates or their handlers discovered something important about these new media that others had previously not realized and second, the candidate's positions and personalities were effectively expressed through their chosen medium.

So what will the cybercandidates look like?

Over the past decade, Wired magazine has conducted a series of surveys that have found that the most wired segment of the public share some core political assumptions. These "netizens" are fiscally conservative and socially libertarian and tend to label themselves as independents. The candidates who have most fully exploited the new medium (Ventura, McCain, and Dean, most notably) are those who stress their independent thinking, their hybrid ideologies, and their straight talk. So far, none of these candidates has been able to get the nomination of a major party, even though they attract voters from across the political spectrum. The Internet didn't create the outsider candidate, but it is particularly hospitable to them. So far, it is hard to find an inside-the-beltway candidate who has thrived on the Internet or who has felt the need to tap this potential base of support.

Cybercandidates tend to be underdogs who are written off by traditional media. Third-party candidates, for example, are much more visible on the Web than on television. Part of what's fueling the Dean surge in the polls is the sense of cultish discovery that many of his early supporters feel toward a candidate they found online before the rest of the country had even heard of him. Ventura attracted a significant number of young and working class voters who had never registered previously; many of these first-timers said that they would not have voted if they had not found someone who so perfectly expressed their dissatisfaction with mainstream politicians. These candidates don't just have supporters; they have fans.