YouTube

Alright, so I know I have ranted on this before, but the video I just saw on Politicker has me riled up again. Here is the video:

Notice a few things here. First, the poster the guy is holding in the video spells YouTube wrong. Bad sign. Second, McCotter has only had the account for 3 days, after the whole Twittergate scandel broke.

Now this isn't just some tech geek having a gotcha moment with a screen shot (it is that, but not just that). The point I made in my earlier post is that bringing the franking rules up-to-date was something that both Republicans and Democrats could have both supported and worked together to do in a timely and cooperative fashion. Unfortunately, the Republicans don't want to let that happen.

I'm a true believer in the concept of Congress 2.0 and using the new tools the internet has provided us to enable our elected officials to communicate more effectively. As a matter of fact, most of the Democrats and young voters I have spoken to agree. The idea that the Republicans have turned this into a partisan battle sickens me, especially since there isn't really any disagreement to be fighting about. They have created a straw man argument in order to call the Democrats Stalinists and use all those Russian sounding Communist words they remember using back in the Cold War.

Progressive organizations have been leading the way in the use of the internet and social networking tools in the political sphere. The Republican Party is not the great defender of the freedom of the internet (just look at their stances on net neutrality).

So how about we stop with the rhetoric and name-calling, put our Russian-to-English dictionaries away, and actually work to get these rules updated since it's something almost all of us agree on. And please try to spell the name of the website right in a video that you are posting to that website.

So that's my rant. If you were expecting a useful internet tip or something I actually wrote one on my personal blog. Ironically, it is about the self-populating Twitter links used by the Let Our Congress Tweet site.

So, what are your thoughts on this whole thing? Let us know in the comments.

Three items, all having to do with online video and politics.

First, MoveOn has announced the 15 finalists in its Obama in 30 Seconds contest. You can vote here. The winner will be aired on national television. This one is my favorite:

Second, I've just found out through the blog grapevine that Joe Felice, one of my old MFA colleagues, has an awesome YouTube Show in which he covers politics, among other things. It's amazing.

Joe is currently involved in an online video contest the prize of which is a free ride to the Democratic Convention. He's been selected as a finalist in the Project Breakout Political Pundit competition and here is his final submission:

Joe is smart as a whip and just as witty. His coverage of the convention will be top notch. He deserves to be there. Go vote for him.

In the meantime, I'll be adding Joe's show to the Breaking Video sidebar. Watch for that crazy afro he's got going.

Finally, Google and YouTube have announced a partnership to produce a political forum in New Orleans during the general election. Here's hoping they adopt something like the MTV/MySpace Dialogue format.

Here's the announcement:

File this one under "I don't think that word means what you think it means."

The College Republicans have put out a video to promote John McCain as a youth candidate.

What a downer. Watching that, I get the feeling that America is a nation in decline, my generation can't accomplish anything (too few heroes), and the best I can hope for is to "sacrifice" by voting for John McCain. But the video doesn't even leave me with the impression that he can do anything. He may be channeling Winston Churchill in that sound bite, but I get the overwhelming impression, thanks largely to the music, that even though John McCain may not ever give up, he probably won't win either and the best we can hope for is a draw.

I also found the imagery of 9/11 a little offensive. I understand that it wasn't quite being used to fear monger as Republicans have done in the past - it was meant more to invoke the events which inspired a generation to action - but still that's really lacking in good taste.

If this is the best support the College Republicans can offer McCain, we're in great shape.

Everyone's been talking or months about how this could be the "YouTube election." In 2006, YouTube had an impact as campaigns and regular folks used it to record and distribute "gotacha" messages (think George Allen and "Macaca"). But in 2007, the campaigns took an active role in shaping their image on YouTube and using the platform to speak directly to voters. It's been over a year since the Democrats first launched their campaigns, and a lot of video has come and gone.

Here's a great run-down of what each campaign tried:

Hillary Clinton has posted a new set of responses to the questions of young voters. This is part II of the "Ask Hillary" series, an attempt by the Clinton campaign to reach out to younger voters after their dramatic loss in Iowa. As Josh Levy points out at Tech President, it's got a pretty top-down, and wooden feel to it, like many of Hillary's "spontaneous" events:

I applaud the effort, but would offer this advice: if programs like this are going to succeed, they need to feel much more authentic, and the campaign needs to have way less control. It would be much more exciting if this was a live web chat with viewers submitting rapid fire questions, or if the questions were determined via some sort of vote on the HillBlazers home page or Hillary FaceBook page.

I'm really interested to see how Clinton does in that kind of environment. We'll find out on Saturday when she and Huckabee appear on the MTV/MySpace Candidate Dialogues.

So last week I was on the teevee talking about the Republican YouTube debates. It was a surreal experience, but people tell me I did ok, so I thought I'd post it. It was for the news show of G4, the video game/technology channel.

Pete Leyden at the New Politics Institute was at the debate and has two really good observations:

Another striking thing was how all the video submissions, with one or two exceptions, came from Millennials, those under age 30. And almost everyone in the audience was much older. In fact, before the show began, CNN host Anderson Cooper asked for questions on the format from the audience. One young guy from the balcony asked why so few tickets had been given to young people. Cooper shot back – the Republican Party gave out the tickets, not us. It’s another sign that the Republicans are having a hard time connecting with this massive generation of young people, as well as coming to terms with the new demands of the new online media.

Hat tip to Micah Sifry over at Tech President for finding out that apparently there is zero coordination between YouTube and CNN when it comes to selecting questions and arranging for audience participation. YouTube has no input into which questions are selected, and no knowledge of which questions will be aired until they appear on the screen. That's why there's so little participation and follow up from the crowd. It's a total crap shoot as to whether or not YouTube invites the correct people to ask follow-up questions.

Totally ridiculous. People's debate my ass. This is a CNN production through and through with a little Web Two-Point-Oh window dressing from YouTube. Here's David Bohrman of CNN explaining the whole question selection process.

Update: Frank Chi, Communications Director of the College Democrats, contacted me about this post to let me know that this video was shot not for public dissemination, but rather as an introduction to Rep. Allen's address to the Maine College Democrats Convention this week, making both my critique somewhat off the mark. Chi also notes that the students in the video are in fact Bowdoin students doing phone banking. He did not clarify whether or not they were targeting students or helping with more general state party outreach.
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This video by the Maine College Democrats has been making the rounds this week, getting some well-deserved linkage on MyDD, Senate2008 Guru, and America Blog. I just wanted to give my 2 cents on it:

The production values are great. This is about 10 steps up from any video I've seen the College Democrats produce thus far. I don't know who produced it (someone in the org, friend of a friend, etc.), but this is sort of what I'm talking about when I say that College Dems and YDA should find ways to tap into creative class students/young professionals; people who might never work a canvass but are capable of producing something like this for a campaign. My hat is off to the Maine College Dems for putting together such a professional ad.

Now for the critique. The ad is slightly confusing, and requires that the viewer already be well-versed in the campaign. It's right on in its critique of Right Wing government, but it's tough to know more immediate details like who is being critiqued and or the identity of the mysterious white guy that's supposed to make everything better. Outsiders or political newbies might not know that Senator Susan Collins is the woman next to Bush and Santorum in a number of photographs. Representative Tom Allen (aka the white dude at the end), as a congressman and not a Senator, is likely even more obscure.

The ad also is an extremely soft ask. It's promoting the Maine College Democrats new website (which is pretty decent, btw, though I can't speak for it's back-end capabilities), and not necessarily plugging people into a useful action. The Maine College Democrats have a presser up on their site stating their intention to do peer to peer organizing in the lead up to '08, but images of such an operation aren't anywhere to be found in the ad. Instead, what we see is students working in a campaign office - likely working to GOTV the Gen X and Baby Boomer vote using state party lists that are out of date and highly innaccurate when it comes to young voters (ostensibly the target of the ad).

This sort of gets to a third, and more meta point about coverage of this video in the blogosphere. It is great that MyDD, America Blog, and Senate Guru all linked to some progressive (and partisan Democratic) youth activism, but this is hardly the best representation of youth activism in the country (indeed, it's not even the most exciting thing happening in the last four days). As I've noted before, there are structural problems with CDA at the national level - and frequently at the state level, though I can't speak directly to the situation on the ground in Maine - that make CDA a less than ideal vehicle for youth GOTV. College Democrats may well be the weakest link in progressive youth infrastructure. So my feelings are mixed. I'm elated to see the blogosphere taking note of things that young people are doing for the Party and the movement, but still think that there's a lot of education and critical evaluation of just what is working and what isn't in youth organizing on the part of everyone.