Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

Mark Glaser at MediaShift looks at how the various presidential candidates are using online video as part of their campaigns.

Candidates running for the U.S. presidency in 2008 have made use of online resources more than ever. With the rise of online video and YouTube, candidates have started to upload formal and informal videos online, and potential voters have tried to engage them in video dialogues.

So far, the candidate videos have ranged from full speeches to short addresses straight to viewers. For instance, Republican candidate Mitt Romney has a special site called Mitt TV that has carefully crafted campaign videos, while his son, Tagg Romney, recorded a more relaxed video explaining why he and his brothers have launched a blog about their dad’s run for the presidency.

What’s probably most interesting about the trend toward online videos for presidential candidates is that they are being used for more than just one-way communication. Candidates are starting to solicit video questions from voters, and then answering them with videos of their own 

Glaser also looks at the use of online video by campaigns in Europe, and at the phenomenon of homemade "ads" made by supporters - or detractors - of various candidates, though his ending example omits a couple of important facts...

There are many precedents for user-generated political ads, with MoveOn's Bush in 30 Seconds contest proving to be the most popular. The progressive group asked people to submit political ads about Bush in December 2003, having people vote on the winning ad, which aired in January 2004. People submitted more than 1,000 ads, which were rated 2.9 million times.

Glaser didn't mention it, but of the more than 1,500 grassroots ads submitted to the contest, MoveOn.org generated a big controversy by briefly promoting two that compared President George W. Bush to Hitler. MoveOn later removed the videos from the Bush in 30 Seconds site and declaimed supporting them, but the damage was done: MoveOn had provided Bush supporters a convenient way to portray MoveOn as extremist.

And the most important fact that Glaser forgot to mention: For all the "success" of the Bush in 30 Seconds project, it didn't help MoveOn didn't achieve its goal: helping defeat the re-election of President Bush.

For all the media hype about user-generated ads - the anti-Hillary Clinton ad launched online by a talented Barack Obama supporter who combined Hillary images and audio with Apple Computer's famed 1984 ad dominated the news cycle for a day or two a few weeks ago - there's another kind of online video that has, so far, proven more influential in major campaigns: the self-inflicted wound caught on tape and uploaded to YouTube.

The best example: The "macaca" moment that helped bring down Sen. George Allen.

For all the media noise about how YouTube played a role in Sen. Allen's defeat, the bottom line is if Allen hadn't uttered the words, there would have been no video for the James Webb campaign to upload to YouTube and distribute to the Washington Post reporters and to Webb-friendly bloggers.

If I was a campaign adviser I'd be more worried about my candidate doing something that the opposition sees as YouTube fodder than I would be worried about the grassroots ads made about my candidate by supporters of rival candidates. As the MoveOn/Hitler episode and the Hillary/1984/Obama episdoes showed, grassroots-generated attack ads are prone to generating blowback for the candidate the creator supports.