And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [75]
For $60,000, the campaign produced a minute-long online ad that within a few weeks amassed over 1,500,000 views on YouTube. Arguably the ad was responsible for catapulting Mike Huckabee from the second tier of Republican candidates into the first, as Americans were for the first time encouraged to look past the governor’s overwhelmingly right-wing policies to witness his not inconsiderable comedic gifts. Despite the success of “Vote Different,” I would argue that “Chuck Norris Approved” (as the video was officially called) served as the opening salvo of an online 2008 campaign that really was defined by YouTube more than by blogs. The difference was clear not just in how the ad employed a universal comedy instead of a politically charged critique. It was that Huckabee’s ad used Chuck Norris more for his microcelebrity than for his celebrity—i.e., by using Chuck Norris Facts, it presented the actor not as a mere celebrity endorser but as an online touchstone, and so his ad immediately became an eager, self-aware contribution to the Internet it-child scrum.
In 2004, online politics had felt almost like a throwback to the attack politics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the availability of inexpensive printing technology allowed small publishers, and their often scurrilous political attacks, to thrive. Blogs were like this old anarchic print culture, fostering ideology, argument, and a sort of team cohesion based on enmity. With YouTube in 2008, it suddenly seemed as if nearly two centuries had sped by and we were in the early decades of television, when ideological lines were massaged over by the overwhelming force of personality. Seen through a 2004 prism, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy looked inevitable, because her entire political profile was calculated to win a hyperpartisan war of ideology and argument, smears and countersmears: hated by her enemies, defended to the teeth by her allies, funded and staffed to the hilt by battle-tested meme warriors, no other candidate was better equipped to handle what the right-wing Luftwaffe would inevitably drop on her. But by 2008, Clinton looked like Richard Nixon in 1960, a hard political creature in a time of telegenic youth and charisma. Online video was tilting the conversation toward the likeable candidates (Obama, Huckabee, and to a certain extent McCain), toward their famous endorsers (such as Norris, or the pop star will.i.am who made the season’s most successful YouTube ad, the celebrity-studded “Yes We Can” music video)—and, moreover, toward any upbeat fan who made his or her own videos, winning over audiences with sheer enthusiasm.
Obama, in particular, was the sort of candidate whom people wanted to be seen performing for. One especially pleasing example: in a Democratic primary dominated by a high-profile fight for the Latino vote, perhaps the most strategically brilliant YouTube video was devised by Miguel Orozco, a Mexican-American media consultant in Los Angeles. Orozco had created (on his own, not on the campaign’s behalf) a site called “Amigos de Obama,” attempting to reach out to Spanish-speaking voters. The site’s first offering was an MP3 of a pro-Obama song in the “reggaeton” style (a blend of reggae and Latin dance music). But later, as the decisive Texas primary was approaching, Orozco hit upon an even better idea. He decided to write a pro-Obama