The presidential epic is poised to become a quaint relic, like the concept album and the comic operetta. Those who love words and lots of them will miss its dramatic heaves and reverses, mourn the loss of its grandiose scale. The presidential epic dramatizes the race for the White House as a cattle drive, with all the cunning intrigue, betrayal, coloratura, tainted ambition, and bluster of a Shakespearean saga. Consider the gargantuan gulp of What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer's thousand-plus-paged, tunnel-visioned account of the 1988 campaign, a rollicking Tom Wolfe–ish probe of the political right stuff with a cast of characters (Richard Gephardt, Joe Biden, Michael Dukakis, Robert Dole) that in lesser hands might have come across as painted dummies; the spewing, drug-lashed delirium of Hunter S. Thompson's influential Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72; Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, with its high-definition portraits of Richard Nixon as a jerky robot out of rhythm with himself, Eugene McCarthy's Jesuitical face ("hard as the cold stone floor of a monastery at five in the morning"), and the brute force of Mayor Richard Daley's jowly constituency; and the one that started it all, the granddaddy of the tarmac chronicles, Theodore H. White's The Making of the President: 1960. Consider, too, those classic tributaries to the presidential epic, instructive treats such as Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus, Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President: 1968, and Joe Klein's bacon-flavored roman à clef, Primary Colors. If the old-fashioned, bookish presidential epic depended upon intimate access or hovering proximity to the candidates as they work an endless series of rooms and stages, the newfangled campaign narrative is a peep-show collage—a weedy pastiche of slick ads, outtakes, bloopers, prankster spoofs, unguarded moments captured on amateur video, C-span excerpts, grainy flashbacks retrieved from the vaults, and choice baroque passages of Chris Matthews venting. YouTube, the free video-sharing bulletin board founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees, is where it all happens. Mouse clicks and video clips, they go together like a nervous twitch. Where the presidential epic entails reams of psychological interpretation, novelistic scene setting, and historical placement, YouTube puts politics literally at one's fingertips in the active present, making it a narrative any mutant can join.
The 2008 presidential campaign had barely cracked its first yawn when a mischievous imp created a sensation with an update of the famous 1984 Apple TV commercial showing a buff, blonde Über-babe shattering a giant screen with a sledgehammer, liberating the slave drones from their indoctrinated trance. Only, in this revised version it was Hillary Clinton hobgoblinized as the looming commandant in the Orwellian nightmare, her bossy specter hectoring the flour faces of the bedraggled inmates. I didn't find the "Vote Different" ad particularly inspired or persuasive as anti-propaganda in its invocation of Fascism, but the whoosh it caused in the media fed off the Hillary fatigue felt by many, that calcified, sanctified aura of lockstep inevitability. After a speculative tizzy in the political chatsphere as to the secret identity of the "Vote Different" auteur, Phil de Vellis surfaced at the Huffington Post to take credit and have his personal say. A supporter of Barack Obama's and a staffer at Blue State Digital (a pro-Democratic technology firm, from which he departed after the ad was sprung), de Vellis laid out his rationale for the mashup, insisting that he intended Hillary Clinton no disrespect. With a Nixonian clearing of the throat, he wrote, "Let me be clear: I am a proud Democrat, and I always have been. I support Senator Obama. I hope he wins the primary. (I recognize that this ad is not his style of politics.) I also believe that Senator Clinton is a great public servant, and if she should win the nomination, I would support her and wish her all the best." What's less clear is how you can portray Clinton as totalitarianism's dour answer to Miss Jean Brodie, plugging into the right wing's witchiest caricature of her, and insist there's no ill will. It'd be like depicting Rudy Giuliani as Mussolini on the balcony, a malevolent bullfrog exhorting the masses, then disavowing it by saying, "Hey, don't get me wrong, I dig the guy." The most salient point in de Vellis's fess-up was not why he did what he did but how easily it was done: "I made the ad on a Sunday afternoon in my apartment using my personal equipment (a Mac and some software), uploaded it to YouTube, and sent links around to blogs." No muss, no fuss, no brainstorming sessions with the creative team, no sending out for coffee and Danish, just a little quality time on the computer and voilà. Given the editing tools available to even a modest laptop and the ultra-low point of entry into the YouTube marina, de Vellis is no doubt correct when he signs off, "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed."
I have just been sent a link to an Internet site that shows me delivering a speech some years ago. This is my quite unsolicited introduction to the now-inescapable phenomenon of YouTube. It comes with another link, enabling me to see other movies of myself all over the place. What's "You" about this? It's a MeTube, for me. —Christopher Hitchens, Slate, April 9, 2007.
More creative involvement in the democratic process—how can this not be healthy? "Citizen journalists" and "citizen ad-makers," united in idealistic purpose—what's not to like? Yet inwardly I groan. Speaking for Me-self, the last thing I need is more crap to watch, no matter how ingenious or buzz-worthy it may be. I spend enough zombie time staring at screens without access to a supplemental pair of eyeballs. Between cable-news chat shows, regular news shows, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent reruns, I already clock so many hours watching TV on my TV that watching even more TV on my laptop is like giving myself extra homework. We're reaching the saturation point of what the social critic Paul Goodman called "spectatoritis." Not only do we (especially Me) face the dismal prospect of being bombarded by professional spot ads every time we turn on the radio or TV until the '08 election, but now, for fear of not being in the loop, we're compelled to keep up with an inundation of personal commentaries, fake ads, newsclips set to music, and homemade amateur guerrilla sorties from the Tarantinos of tomorrow.
To avoid brain-logged fatigue, I limit my intake to a single Web depot, tuning in daily to YouTube's You Choose '08 channel, where each presidential candidate has his or her own peep-show booth. Click on GoHunterGo, for example, the official page for congressman and presidential aspirant Duncan Hunter (a choleric Republican who looks as if he could moonlight as a billy-clubbing guard in The Shawshank Redemption). Then select the clip of Dunc fondling a football in a wholesome, manly way as he draws an analogy between China's trade policy and the gridiron: "Americans start a football game with a clean scoreboard. But China starts a game against our businesses with a 74-point advantage." Those scheming Chinese bastards! We might as well not even show up for the coin toss. As this is being written, Duncan Hunter has a measly six videos up. Mitt Romney has 81. That may be more Mitt than anyone needs, even if his videos carry racy titles such as "I Like Vetoes" and "Romney on the Need to Restrain Spending." Instead, my ever curious cursor moseys over to Democrat Dennis Kucinich's booth, where his lustrous, British-accented wife, Elizabeth, is discussing Iraq-war appropriations, the fiscal numbers she rattles off from a cue card upstaged by the silken wonder of her windswept hair. In another video, the Kuciniches unite to wish viewers a happy Easter, the infectious couple grinning as if about to break into giggles. His presidential candidacy may be a distant long shot, but I look forward to each video from this populist scamp.
Though not yet officially a candidate (he intends to parade himself up and down the boardwalk until he drives uncommitted voters mad with desire), former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has set up his own YouTube channel. It's a repository—a living library—for his reflections on the daunting challenges facing the Republic, and what he proposes to do to make things worse. Advocating the abolition of "bi-lingual education," Gingrich argued that such programs perpetuated "the language of living in a ghetto." In any debate over bi-lingual ed, it's implicit that Spanish is considered the chief culprit, and Hispanics were understandably peeved over their mother tongue's being denigrated as ghetto dialect. Nobody bought Gingrich's subsequent jive explanation on Fox News's Hannity & Colmes that he was actually alluding to the shtetls of the Old World. None too coherently, he tried to explain, "Now, I'll let you pick—frankly, 'ghetto' historically had referred as a Jewish reference originally." (Veteran Gingrich observers know that whenever he prefaces a statement with the word "frankly," it signals a big fat lie coming down the pike.) Unable to contain the furor over his remarks and recognizing that alienating millions of Hispanic voters wouldn't be the wisest move should he declare his candidacy, Gingrich taped an apology in Spanish that became must viewing on YouTube; the marriage of his stilted delivery—he didn't exactly caress the consonants or make sweet music with the vowels—and the English subtitles ("I have never believed that Spanish is a language of people of low income") made for one irresistible mea culpa.
Swiveling his attention to international affairs, Newt addressed the capture of British sailors by Iran in remarks made before a live audience. His solution for bringing home the hostages was bold and ballsy, appealing to the armchair commando in every arrested adolescent. "They have one refinery that produces gasoline in Iran," he said. "And I think our strategy should be very direct. There should be a covert operation to sabotage the one refinery. [Audience applause.] We should say to the Iranian dictatorship: 'We're prepared to withhold gasoline for as long as you're prepared to be stupid.'" I'm not sure how covert an operation can be if you announce it in advance, or why the U.S. should have risked escalating a crisis by dispatching a Mission: Impossible team while negotiations were ongoing between Iran and our plucky ally Great Britain, but the professorial Newt made it plain that the Iranians needed to be taught a harsh lesson—to have their privileges revoked. Without gas, they'd have to walk. "The morning they want to be reasonable, they get to drive a car again." Unfortunately for Newt (and veteran neoconservative agitators such as Michael Ledeen, who rhetorically targeted the gas refinery as well), Iran, unprepared to be stupid, pre-empted Newt's bold stratagem by freeing the captives shortly thereafter and sending the laddies and lass home with lovely parting gifts. It's hard to blow up the gas refinery of a country that doles out goody bags to its departing guests. Overtaken by events, that Newt clip was destined for the discard pile.
Yet nothing on the Internet is ever truly discarded. Everything's recyclable, dormant, ready to be summoned from the murky bottom of the fishbowl. Yesteryear's embarrassment is almost certain to resurface someday and bite one on the tender behind. One of the most valuable roles YouTube plays is as a preservation society for gaffes, flip-flops, surreal tableaux (such as the picture of Dick Cheney planted in the bushes like the world's scariest garden gnome during President Bush's press conference), acts of contrition, career-ending hara-kiri, and barefaced moments of burlesque. (A Belgian socialist budget minister—it doesn't get more beige than that—became a fluke YouTube celebrity after excerpts of him appearing merrily sloshed during a televised interview widely circulated.) A video on PoliticsTV's all-time Hall of Shame list is George Allen's "Macaca" outburst, a smirking, finger-pointing moment of intemperance on the campaign trail that dashed whatever presidential fantasies the senator from Virginia once had and set into motion his mortifying re-election defeat. Hubris has seldom been served so neatly on a plate. YouTube is also a pestilential nuisance for politicians attempting to talk out of both sides of their yap. It's one thing to leave a paper trail, but a video trail is even more incriminating, especially in the Digital Age. Brave New Films, the documentary house co-founded by documentarian Robert Greenwald (who directed Outfoxed and Uncovered), has posted a clip on YouTube devoted entirely to John McCain's "Double Talk Express," its catalogue of contradictory sound bites filed under titles such as "John McCain Flip Flops on Gay Marriage," "John McCain Flip Flops on the Religious Right," and "John McCain Flip Flops on the Confederate Flag." Couple these with the footage of McCain in a bulletproof vest making his way through a Baghdad market with a military escort and what you have is a composite portrait of a candidate crumbling.
As a former prisoner of war who has comported himself with pained dignity and incurred his party's wrath in the past (if only he hadn't made the fatal mistake of suturing himself to the Bush doctrine), McCain retains a stoic residue of respect. Not so Mitt Romney, everyone's new figure of fun. For viral entertainment, even Rudy Giuliani's drag routines on YouTube can't compete. Romney's supple acrobatics on the issues could earn him a pair of spangled leotards in Cirque du Soleil; he's reversed himself on so many issues—abortion, stem-cell research, gay rights, tax cuts, illegal immigration—that he's like a butterfly trying to revert to the pupa stage. If drastic de-evolution is what it takes to appeal to the Republican base, Mitt's the right mannequin for the job. He might have slicked by with his policy do-overs if he hadn't made himself ridiculous by pandering to the gun lobby, claiming he was a lifelong hunter. "To hear Mitt Romney talk on the campaign trail, you might think the Republican presidential candidate had a gun rack in the back of his pickup truck," Glen Johnson reported for the Associated Press. "Yet the former Massachusetts governor's hunting experience is limited to two trips at the bookends of his 60 years: as a 15-year-old, when he hunted rabbits with his cousins on a ranch in Idaho, and last year, when he shot quail on a fenced game preserve in Georgia." Those rabbits are now haunting Romney as surely as Jimmy Carter's killer rabbit. Tune in to YouTube and there's Mitt Romney, clarifying his record as a noble backwoodsman with the shaky assertion "I've always been, if you will, a rodent- and rabbit-hunter, all right—small varmints, if you will. And I began when I was, oh, 15 or so, and have hunted those kinds of varmints since then." First Dick Cheney perforating a hunting-mate and now Mitt Romney chasing varmints—who knew Elmer Fudd would displace John Wayne as the Republican Party's masculine ideal?
It may appear that I am singling out Republicans as ripe specimens of YouTube boobery. It's true. I am. I wish them all heartwarming unsuccess. But I believe that an impartial observer would second my impression that so far this extended political season Republicans are several caveman steps behind Democrats in understanding and exploiting the outreach of YouTube and in avoiding its sand traps. When Rudy Giuliani is represented on YouTube by a five-minute video of the former mayor ringing the opening bell at nasdaq, it hardly seems like the most imaginative grasp of this new medium. Liberal blogs and blue-state challengers out-mobilized Republicans in online fund-raising and organizing in 2006 and have maintained their advantage, tapping into the bottom-up energy, and fine-tuning a potent, interlocking, activist-oriented machine; meanwhile, Republicans cling to their top-down, one-way-message, corporate model as once militant conservative bloggers retire their Jedi-warrior robes to take up their new hobby, whining. Those carefree days when they had Al Gore's bark to gnaw on are gone. The cheap fun has flown. Apart from a parody video of John Edwards being dolled up for a TV appearance to the mocking strains of "I Feel Pretty" (a spoof that exploits the rap on Edwards as just a pretty face—a Breck girl), leading Democrats haven't provided the comic fodder that has made Gingrich, Romney, and presidential adviser Karl Rove (doing his dorky white-guy "MC Rove" rap routine at the Radio & Television Correspondents' Association dinner) so downloadable. Even Democratic hopeful Joe Biden, whose mouth churns up huge yardage every time he answers a question the long way around, hasn't "beclowned" himself, to borrow a word much beloved in the conservative blogosphere. Someone with a worried mind might wonder if Democrats were in danger of being so resolutely on-message—so perpetually in-character, conscientiously tucked-in, mistake-averse, and overscripted—that the internal pressure of reining in every stray, errant impulse could produce an implosion later down the line, closer to the primaries, when it counts. Another worry would be if Fred Thompson lumbered into the race. After five seasons of ponderously digesting his dialogue as the southern-fried district attorney on Law & Order, this actor-politician knows what it's like to live his life before the camera and drop bits of nourishment down viewers' beaks. Being on the tube is second nature for him—this big lug couldn't be more tubular. But Thompson also behaves as if he's grumpily used to having his own way and isn't about to change, and with the rise of YouTube, nobody gets to have his own, exclusive way. When everyone in the audience is a potential auteurist, prepare to kiss your autonomy good-bye. So bring him on. Now pardon me while I log on to YouTube to see what those two crazy lovebirds Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich are up to.
James Wolcott is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
