John McCain Gets In the Game

As we gear up for the final stretch of the U.S. presidential election cycle, the John McCain camp has decided to tackle Senator Obama on what is undeniably the man from Illinois’s true home turf. Senator McCain’s daughter Meghan has been filming her father on the campaign trail for six months now, but the campaign itself has finally buckled down to produce good original content. Which would be less surprising, quite honestly, if McCain weren’t a Republican.

My biggest problem with conservatives lately has had little to do with their policies or beliefs — instead, I find myself frustrated by the quality of their online video. See, I’m genuinely interested in discovering well-crafted red-state perspectives (to paraphrase Aaron Sorkin, I’d like to surround myself with smart people who disagree with me). But aside from the regular assault of Ron Paul clips on YouTube, there simply hasn’t been a Republican phenomenon on the level of, say, Yes We Can or Obama Girl. In theory, just because someone knows how to use Final Cut Pro or can set a speech to phat beats doesn’t mean they’re legally required to vote Democrat. But quality conservative contributions to the online video zeitgeist remain hard to find, and until recently, that was reflected in the online presence of their candidates.

Perhaps, though, that’s coming to an end. While, McCain has a lot of catching up to do — Obama has nearly 1,200 videos — the McCain videographers aren’t just uploading clips of their candidate planting trees or kissing babies; they’re making campaign-focused original pieces — and surprisingly effective ones, at that.

The latest example is Obama Love, a compilation of clips that, edited together, call shenanigans on the media’s fascination with Obama. I’d normally think a three-minute-long video of news figures expressing their adoration for an opposing candidate would be a bad move. But the video truly manages to make its point — that Obama’s charisma may have caused some media figures to lose their objectivity. Of course, using a “the press likes Obama more than me!” strategy didn’t work for Hillary Clinton, and I doubt it’s going to work this time. But with this short, the ironic use of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” and some slick editing and graphics work is a clear sign that the McCain campaign understands what it’s doing.

It’s hard to figure out exactly how many minds McCain will be able to change with these clips, and it’s a little hard to take a candidate seriously for “straight talk” when his campaign puts up a clip of Bill Clinton praising McCain’s electability — a clip which lasts 16 seconds, never specifies the date it was recorded, and fades to black a second before Clinton is about to say “but…” But it’s satisfying to see both sides of the political spectrum take online video seriously.