Mike Turk, mentioned in the previous post as Fred Thompson's new online guru, writes the always interesting blog Kung Fu Quip, and the other day had a very interesting post refuting the claim that "nobody has ever won" an election because of the Internet.
Turk writes...
If you ask George Allen or Conrad Burns whether the Internet was responsible for their loss, they would likely reply in the affirmative. The macaca incident is certainly legendary for it’s role in costing Allen a 16-point lead. Burns napping certainly didn’t help convince voters the septuagenarian was up for 6 more years.
If those two races were lost because of the Internet, it stands to reason that two candidates won because of it. Unfortunately, they weren’t Republicans, so they don’t count, I guess.
That was Danny Glover’s point in the [WaPo] article and in his post on the Beltway Blogroll.
But look at the short history of online politics,” Glover said. “For Republicans, the Internet is where bad things happen. Take [former U.S. senator] George Allen and his ‘macaca’ moment. . . . You can kind of understand why Republicans have this almost instinctive fear of the Internet, where the mob rules.
It would be comical if it weren’t so tragic. At the same time we complain about the savagery our candidates are experiencing online (Allen, Burns) we’re trying to trivialize the Internet’s importance (’nobody has won because of it’).
We can’t have it both ways. We can’t claim it doesn’t matter, and then act shocked when it makes the difference in one of our candidates getting trounced.
Turk points out that when TV and direct mail were new, they had their naysayers too. Read the whole thing.
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