Neomeme

John McCain has a MySpace page. John McCain’s staffers hotlinked some images, and John McCain’s blog got sort-of-hacked. Then it got fixed, except with a little misspelling. McCain isn’t the only one to jump into social networking- the Obama campaign actually created a social network to organize supporters. And Obama has an extremely fast-growing Facebook group. Undoubtedly, all candidates are realizing the power of social networks to mobilize and organize a new voter base, based on the personal connections only a social network like MySpace can provide. Unfortunately, these efforts to reach out to those hip kids on the internets are as hollow and contrived as many politicians themselves. When you add John McCain as a friend on MySpace, do you think you are in any way interacting with the politician himself? I highly doubt McCain himself is constantly checking what his top 8 are up to. By adding McCain or Obama as your friend, you are showing your support for a highly sanitized, dare I say sparse image of that candidate. Nothing exciting or personal except the usual urges for support and donations. Isn’t MySpace supposed to be where your personal life is exposed to the world? Why can’t more politicians be like President George W. Bush’s nephew, Pierce Bush, who proudly posts party pics of Facebook?

Just once, I’d like to see a webcam video of a disheveled John McCain whispering about how his family just doesn’t understand him, or John Edwards blogging about how that fucker Kerry cost him the vice presidency, or maybe Hillary Clinton confessing her love for gangsta rap.

Instead, all we see is a McCain who and a John Edwards who despises all music except for the politically correct Bruce Springsteen and has incredibly cheesy heroes like “The American People”. The MySpace profiles are as fake and robotic-looking as the carefully crafted biographies posted on campaign websites, except the biographies have more truth. Does McCain really watch 24, particularly enjoying the torture scenes, or did an intern make that up because he thought it sounded good? We’ll never know, and it doesn’t really matter.

BWC has a good writeup of the MySpaces and Facebooks of several candidates, and the results are similarly sanitized, blank, and nondescript.

Besides, their efforts are not exactly highly targeted. This comment left on McCain’s undoubtedly heavily censored MySpace page sums it all up:

If i was old enough to vote in the 2008 election you’d soo have my vote!