Macaca Terror and the Always-On Campaign

There's been a lot of talklately of the always-on 2008 presidential election campaign, and its implications for the candidates. On Sunday, New York Times columnist Frank Rich opined in a column about Karl Rove's departure:

... Finally, the "macaca" incident was a media touchstone. It became a national phenomenon when the video landed on YouTube, the rollicking Web site whose reach now threatens mainstream news outlets. A year later, leading Republicans are still clueless and panicked about this new medium, which is why they, unlike their
Democratic counterparts, pulled out of even a tightly controlled CNN-YouTube debate. It took smart young conservative bloggers like a former Republican National Committee operative, Patrick Ruffini, to shame them into reinstating the debate for November, lest the entire G.O.P. field look as pathetically out of touch as it is.

The rise of YouTube certifies the passing of Mr. Rove's era, a cultural changing of the guard in the digital age. Mr. Rove made his name in direct-mail fund-raising and with fierce top-down message management.
As the Internet erodes snail mail, so it upends direct mail. As YouTube threatens a politician's ability to rigidly control a message, so it threatens the Rove ethos that led Mr. Bush to campaign at "town hall"
meetings attended only by hand-picked supporters.

Patrick Ruffini, unsurprisingly, disagrees with Rich's analysis. And I have to say that I don't see the facts squaring with Rich's analysis either. Rove collaborator and former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman is known among the politerati to be smart political marketer and extremely tech-savvy -- a fact that the New York Times has done at least one story on in the past. In addition, Rove himself pioneered the concept of successfully using social networking to get out the vote in the off-line world before a lot of it went online.

So maybe the current crop of candidates aren't thrilled with their awkward YouTube moments, but Republicans as a whole aren't completely clueless about using new media and databases to their advantage. Both former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani have clips on YouTube that I'm sure they rather wished were not there, but Romney's also used the medium extensively to get his campaign's message out.

See Also:

• Google's Schmidt on new media and politics