The YouTube Election: On The Web: vanityfair.com

The YouTube Election

The "Vote Different" anti-Hillary ad, Newt Gingrich's Spanish apology, Mitt Romney's trail of flip-flops—this is the mouse-click mayhem of the 2008 campaign, in which anyone can join. It's the end of the old-fashioned, literary presidential epic, and the dawn of YouTube politics.

The presidential epic is poised to become a quaint relic, like the concept album and the comic operetta. Those who love words and lots of them will miss its dramatic heaves and reverses, mourn the loss of its grandiose scale. The presidential epic dramatizes the race for the White House as a cattle drive, with all the cunning intrigue, betrayal, coloratura, tainted ambition, and bluster of a Shakespearean saga.

Consider the gargantuan gulp of What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer's thousand-plus-paged, tunnel-visioned account of the 1988 campaign, a rollicking Tom Wolfe–ish probe of the political right stuff with a cast of characters (Richard Gephardt, Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Robert Dole) that in lesser hands might have come across as painted dummies; the spewing, drug-lashed delirium of Hunter S. Thompson's influential Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72; Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, with its high-definition portraits of Richard Nixon as a jerky robot out of rhythm with himself, Eugene McCarthy's Jesuitical face ("hard as the cold stone floor of a monastery at five in the morning"), and the brute force of Mayor Richard Daley's jowly constituency; and the one that started it all, the granddaddy of the tarmac chronicles, Theodore H. White's The Making of the President: 1960.

Consider, too, those classic tributaries to the presidential epic, instructive treats such as Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus, Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President: 1968, and Joe Klein's bacon-flavored roman à clef, Primary Colors. If the old-fashioned, bookish presidential epic depended upon intimate access or hovering proximity to the candidates as they work an endless series of rooms and stages, the newfangled campaign narrative is a peep-show collage—a weedy pastiche of slick ads, outtakes, bloopers, prankster spoofs, unguarded moments captured on amateur video, C-span excerpts, grainy flashbacks retrieved from the vaults, and choice baroque passages of Chris Matthews venting. YouTube, the free video-sharing bulletin board founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees, is where it all happens. Mouse clicks and video clips, they go together like a nervous twitch. Where the presidential epic entails reams of psychological interpretation, novelistic scene setting, and historical placement, YouTube puts politics literally at one's fingertips in the active present, making it a narrative any mutant can join.

The 2008 presidential campaign had barely cracked its first yawn when a mischievous imp created a sensation with an update of the famous 1984 Apple TV commercial showing a buff, blonde Über-babe shattering a giant screen with a sledgehammer, liberating the slave drones from their indoctrinated trance. Only, in this revised version it was Hillary Clinton hobgoblinized as the looming commandant in the Orwellian nightmare, her bossy specter hectoring the flour faces of the bedraggled inmates. I didn't find the "Vote Different" ad particularly inspired or persuasive as anti-propaganda in its invocation of Fascism, but the whoosh it caused in the media fed off the Hillary fatigue felt by many, that calcified, sanctified aura of lockstep inevitability.

After a speculative tizzy in the political chatsphere as to the secret identity of the "Vote Different" auteur, Phil de Vellis surfaced at the Huffington Post to take credit and have his personal say. A supporter of Barack Obama's and a staffer at Blue State Digital (a pro-Democratic technology firm, from which he departed after the ad was sprung), de Vellis laid out his rationale for the mashup, insisting that he intended Hillary Clinton no disrespect. With a Nixonian clearing of the throat, he wrote, "Let me be clear: I am a proud Democrat, and I always have been. I support Senator Obama. I hope he wins the primary. (I recognize that this ad is not his style of politics.) I also believe that Senator Clinton is a great public servant, and if she should win the nomination, I would support her and wish her all the best."

What's less clear is how you can portray Clinton as totalitarianism's dour answer to Miss Jean Brodie, plugging into the right wing's witchiest caricature of her, and insist there's no ill will. It'd be like depicting Rudy Giuliani as Mussolini on the balcony, a malevolent bullfrog exhorting the masses, then disavowing it by saying, "Hey, don't get me wrong, I dig the guy." The most salient point in de Vellis's fess-up was not why he did what he did but how easily it was done: "I made the ad on a Sunday afternoon in my apartment using my personal equipment (a Mac and some software), uploaded it to YouTube, and sent links around to blogs." No muss, no fuss, no brainstorming sessions with the creative team, no sending out for coffee and Danish, just a little quality time on the computer and voilà. Given the editing tools available to even a modest laptop and the ultra-low point of entry into the YouTube marina, de Vellis is no doubt correct when he signs off, "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed."
I have just been sent a link to an Internet site that shows me delivering a speech some years ago. This is my quite unsolicited introduction to the now-inescapable phenomenon of YouTube. It comes with another link, enabling me to see other movies of myself all over the place. What's "You" about this? It's a MeTube, for me. —Christopher Hitchens, Slate, April 9, 2007.

More creative involvement in the democratic process—how can this not be healthy? "Citizen journalists" and "citizen ad-makers," united in idealistic purpose—what's not to like? Yet inwardly I groan. Speaking for Me-self, the last thing I need is more crap to watch, no matter how ingenious or buzz-worthy it may be. I spend enough zombie time staring at screens without access to a supplemental pair of eyeballs. Between cable-news chat shows, regular news shows, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent reruns, I already clock so many hours watching TV on my TV that watching even more TV on my laptop is like giving myself extra homework. We're reaching the saturation point of what the social critic Paul Goodman called "spectatoritis."

Not only do we (especially Me) face the dismal prospect of being bombarded by professional spot ads every time we turn on the radio or TV until the '08 election, but now, for fear of not being in the loop, we're compelled to keep up with an inundation of personal commentaries, fake ads, newsclips set to music, and homemade amateur guerrilla sorties from the Tarantinos of tomorrow.

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The YouTube Election: On The Web: vanityfair.com