Get Herald RSSOn Wednesday evening, I cozied up to my television to watch the CNN/YouTube Republican debate. I'm not a Republican, so mostly, I was watching to evaluate this newfangled form.
Would the conduct of politics, as many observers have predicted, be radically altered by the encounter with new media? Would the content of political debate be different if topics came from voters, rather than from the pundits or the campaign chiefs? As a voter who's been pretty unimpressed by leadership in the last few years, I sure hoped something would change.
Unfortunately, aside from the fact that the questions came from voters eating corn on the cob as they talked, the candidate discussion was more or less the same as what I've heard before. These were the typical issues of a Republican primary - gays in the military, abortion, the Second Amendment, the Confederate flag, candidates' interpretation of the Bible and of course, below-the-belt attacks on personal morality.
I scratched my head. I was surprised to find that many of the videos focused on these gut values, prompting the candidates to indulge in character attacks and moral platitudes. In poll after poll, after all, we learn that Americans are voting less because they feel politicians are too busy with value wars to address the real policy problems that matter to them. If that's true, how come, when given the chance, these Republicans didn't ask about policy?
The Democratic debate I saw over the summer was only marginally better. Sure, there were questions about real issues, like Iraq and gay marriage, but they are the usual issues among Democrats. And the questions were framed in a "yes or no" format - "Will you withdraw from Iraq?" or "Do you support gay marriage" - that allowed candidates to regurgitate the same arguments they've made to the pundits before.
Despondently, I wondered, is our sound-byte politics just what American voters are asking for? If we have a leadership vacuum, is that just getting us what we deserve? All the years spent complaining about how Washington insiders ignore us, was the problem really on our end?
Actually, I think the answer has something to do with the YouTube debate format CNN cooked up. In theory, user-generated forms like YouTube should be drawing swing voters concerned with real issues into the picture, connecting with them in a grassroots space outside the mainstream political arena they so distrust.
But in practice, setting up a debate in which voters have to take out their cameras, make and post videos will only attract the die-hards - the people who already vote, the students who run College Democrats or College Republicans clubs or the soccer moms who run a lobby group on the side. The truly disenchanted voters, meanwhile, are too checked out of the system to even care a debate is going on.
The issues-driven voter who's fed up with value-rhetoric, the one we keep holding up as the image of potential change, lives in a middle ground between these poles. And with a slightly more intelligent format, this is the voter we might have seen get involved.
Because, when it comes to down to it, these have been old media debates dressed in new media clothes. Using YouTube to get videos from people who think like pundits, ignoring YouTube user votes and letting pundits select the videos, then putting the questions to candidates in a traditional setting is going to yield - surprise! - a traditional debate.
Much of the pre-debate hype on CNN and elsewhere seemed to suggest that simply the introduction of YouTube would necessitate radical changes in the political conversation. But the technology of YouTube alone does not a revolution make. Technology is not an instigator; it's an enabler and sometimes a catalyst. It has to be given the right conditions to run its course.
In the case of a debate, a real new media approach would have let some percentage of the questions be determined by user votes (still allowing CNN to nix anything that was X-rated). During the debate, viewers would have been able post follow-up comments and questions online, some of which would be asked to candidates in the final half-hour. The result would be an actual dialogue between politicians and the people, the getting-behind-the-taglines that new media is supposed to yield.
Most importantly, that dialogue would have featured the outside-the-box voters who, I believe, are the key to taking our politics in a new direction. Those voters, many of them young college students, care enough about policy to read newspapers, albeit online. They frequent blogs about innovation issues like solar technology. They probably watched the debates on TV or on YouTube reruns.
They aren't enthused enough about any party to volunteer for the national campaigns, and they k'vetch a lot to their friends about the current state of politics. But they also aren't incensed enough about the failures of leadership to make and post a video. Lowering the bar of effort to let them simply vote for questions or post a live comment might be just enough to get them involved.
These are small changes. But in the world of new media, small tweaks have the power to make far larger differences than the flashy lights and colors CNN used to mask what, it turns out, was just the same old charade.
Maha Atal '08 is under-whelmed.
