And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [74]
The ad had been made by Phil de Vellis, who—as I had expected—was hardly the portrait of a starry-eyed amateur: a technology consultant at Blue State Digital, a prominent Democratic web-strategy firm, de Vellis had previously served as the Internet communications director for the successful 2006 Senate bid of Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). To those who followed that race closely, de Vellis was notorious as a classic Internet-era political operative. He had been widely suspected of planting abusive pro-Brown propaganda in the comments boards of sites supporting Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran and netroots favorite who was Brown’s main competitor in the Democratic primary. (Comments from the sites were traced back to the same Internet address as de Vellis’s, though he denied involvement.) He had been caught e-mailing anti-Hackett talking points to right-wing bloggers—normal bare-knuckle politics, to be sure, but a clear breach of Democratic loyalty. Given a chance to explain his anti-Hillary ad by the Huffington Post, de Vellis tried to wrap his actions in just the sort of gauzy populist sentiment that the mainstream media wanted. “I made the ‘Vote Different’ ad,” he wrote,
because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it—by people of all political persuasions—will follow. This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens.
But such bromides did nothing to deter the backlash. Blue State Digital was doing consulting work for Obama, and even though de Vellis protested (plausibly, given that his firm was working for two of the other candidates as well) that his work on the ad had been kept secret from both his colleagues and the campaign, the media pounced. Obama was forced into denials that he had known anything about it. De Vellis resigned from his firm. It all felt very much like 2004 politics, except in video instead of in print. It was OppoDepot with better production values.
“Everyone is so hyped about YouTube,” Jonah told me, in trying to explain why the ad had been a big story. “There is this idea that YouTube will be the way blogs were the last election.” But based on the “Vote Different” ad, I couldn’t see how it was any different at all.
SONGS OF THEMSELVES
It was nearly eight more months before YouTube offered up a video that proved to me how wrong I was. In late October 2007, after the film star Chuck Norris wrote an online column (on the Christian site WorldNet Daily) endorsing the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee for president, the campaign met with Norris and tried to brainstorm ways to get the two men together in some sort of advertisement. Through his young son, Huckabee media consultant Bob Wickers had heard about ChuckNorrisFacts.com, a widely contagious website that, in keeping with Norris’s tough-guy persona, ascribes to him surprising powers, e.g.: “When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down.” Or: “There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.” Or: “There is no chin behind Chuck Norris’ beard. There is only another fist.” Given that Norris’s film career had peaked in roughly 1986, it is barely an exaggeration to say that an entire generation of Internet users had come to know the martial-arts star just through the Chuck Norris Facts website.
Out of the memetic convergence between Norris and Huckabee