Commentary - Eve Fairbanks: Online pop culture politics: Dean’s lasting impression?

Bleary-eyed, you stagger back into your bedroom, where you sign onto America Online. An MTV ad featuring Barack Obama wagging his hips to Avril Lavigne whistles across the screen. Once inside your favorite chat room, you see that “Hillary08” is already signed in and nattering away with the other Web denizens. “ROFL!”, she says.

Think this pop political dystopia is impossibly fanciful? Think again: Presidential candidates are hiring special coordinators to handle their campaigns on online social networking Web sites. Facebook groups for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton vie to see which can get the most friends. From their MySpace pages, we can learn that presidential candidate Tom Vilsack likes cooking, reading and hunting; that John Edwards’ favorite movie is “Shawshank Redemption.” Just last week, Edwards was flayed for hiring two campaign “blogmasters” who specialize in the Internet’s particular argot of f-words and vitriol.

The thinking in these campaigns is that developing a candidate’s pop presence in forums like MySpace attracts young voters and contributes to the impression the candidate is not square, but cool: Political hopefuls often add hip or ironic trivia to their profiles to achieve this goal, like now-Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland’s admission in his ’06 campaign MySpace profile that his vice is Twinkies.

Well, I’m of the online social networking generation. No MySpace page, but I’ll admit I have a Facebook profile I update regularly. But I don’t think these politicos’ desperate plunge into hot youth culture is very cool.

This is all Howard Dean’s fault. Though Dean’s infamous post-Iowa scream doomed him in the ’04 Democratic presidential primaries, the legacy he left political campaigns might be as big as if he had actually won them. Political consultants and aspiring candidates were wowed by the way Dean used the Internet to create energy and momentum behind his upstart campaign. They envied the way young people, inspired by the concept of the Web as “people power,” were transformed into Deaniacs in droves. Even non-progressives came to worship Dean’s Svengali, Joe Trippi: When interviewing ultra-conservative longshot House candidate Vernon Robinson this fall, I was surprised to hear him tout — as inspiration for his own campaign’s Internet strategy — Trippi’s flagship book, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

“Are you talking about Joe Trippi again?” Robinson’s spokesman, Jeff Mixon, asked Robinson with a sigh, overhearing our conversation.

“Yeah,” Robinson replied.

“Aw, Vernon,” Mixon said, shaking his head.

Aw, Vernon, indeed. It’s one thing to use online networking instead of the old-school (and hopelessly out-of-date) mailing lists to scare up donations, or campaign blogs to post speeches. Freshman Pennsylvania Rep. Patrick Murphy did this in his ’06 campaign, sporting a fabulous Web site with a campaign blog, a video feed for ads and endorsements, and an easy online contribution feature. But assimilating Internet tactics doesn’t mean you have to assimilate Internet culture, too: the unhinged language, the fake intimacy, the studied hipness.

It jars because it doesn’t seem genuine: None of these candidates would ever join MySpace on their own, but they feel compelled to put up a whole profile, sometimes even specifying, as prompted by the sites’ fill-in-the-blanks, to fill in their “body type.” If it did seem genuine, we wouldn’t like it. A good candidate should reflect our better impulses, not our silliest ones. Would you look forward to electing a head of state more comfortable in the chat room than behind the podium in the Rose Garden?

Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.