Full disclosure: I’m an urban, 20-something liberal, and so semi-inevitably I’m a fan of Barack Obama — admittedly one that has a hard time truly believing that he might actually be able to win the presidency in November. But while the candidate’s polling numbers still show that he’s having a hard time connecting with the American heartland, there is no doubt that he has managed to win over that most fickle of audiences — the Internet.
What’s interesting is that the Obama campaign has never endorsed the majority of viral videos made in his honor. In fact, Obama’s statements about the Obama Girl series indicated that the campaign was pretty concerned with maintaining control over its candidate’s public face.
But the campaign’s efforts are hardly passive; there are over a thousand videos in the official Barack Obama YouTube channel, mostly news clips and speeches going all the way back to the very beginning of the campaign. Few replicate the goofy charm of Obama’s 2007 Monday Night Football announcement, though; the campaign’s message has become increasingly focused on promoting the senator as a man of gravitas.
Online video isn’t exclusively the territory of Obama supporters — Texas congressman Ron Paul has a passionate following that still occasionally clutters up the YouTube Most Viewed page. But what the Obama campaign has done is make politics an interactive experience, using social networks, video and other tools to make online liberals feel involved. In the same way that George W. Bush rocked the Christian evangelical base in 2000, Obama has tapped into the energy of a community that has spent the past eight years feeling unrepresented in American politics. Media studies god Henry Jenkins traces this to Obama’s “Yes We Can” campaign slogan — the language of “we” being one of groups and social networking, making Obama the ideal candidate for the Facebook generation.
And so it’s fitting that the video released by the campaign to celebrate the conclusion to the Democratic primary wasn’t a formal speech — but rather a sedate, 13-minute talk by the candidate, in which he speaks candidly from his campaign headquarters to those who to those who helped him achieve something few (including myself) imagined possible. And he also encourages his entire corps of volunteers — online and off — to continue the fight.
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