Campaign tastes like Champagne ... When you Win

This week we are discussing campaigns, in particular the 2008 election. We will answer and discuss such intriguing questions as:

• Did the candidates of the 2008 presidential elections seem like agents of their parties?
• Were they constrained by their netroots (and was this different than being constrained by the electorate)?
• how has the balance between candidate centeredness and party-centric campaigns been affected by recent technological innovations and advances in communication?
• with so much attention focused on the recent string of close presidential contests in the readings, where do congressional candidates stand with respect to vulnerability posed by the internet

So I'm sure most of you readers (all 2 ... maybe 3 of you ... maybe I'm having delusions of grandeur at this point) are probably getting kind of sick of my rigid structuring of these insufferably boring posts around these questions, but hey I'm not here to make you happy, or to be consistently gramatically correct. I'm getting graded on this crap so it ends up being closer to a paper and i am sorry. I will try and keep this somewhat interesting but in case i don't, well ... it kind of sucks to be you ...

anyhoo ... on to this week's assignment

Did the candidates of the 2008 presidential election seem like agents of their parties? well, what does it mean to be a agent of a party? furthermore what would we call a candidate who is not an agent of the party?
I think that we can define a candidate who is an agent of a party as a candidate who centers the party line in their campaign. A candidate who does not do this, is said to run a candidate centric campaign. I think if we examine both nominated candidates as well as the non-nominated ones, we can see that they all play to the party line before the party primary in order to win the nomination. because of this, I would contend we should throw this part of the campaign out from our examination of party agency amongst candidates, because all of the candidates act like party agents to win the nomination, including this would make us guilty of a sampling bias were we to try and draw any graphs on this data. ( in addition ... i know i cutting out a lot of the candidates, but that's the point ... i'm being lazy and this is a BLOG!!!!!)

In one corner of the ring we have junior Sentator from Illinois, the democratic party nominee ... Barack Obama! His post nomination campaign is regarded pretty middle of the road his stances on issues such as socialized health care withdrawing from the war in Iraq, and economic reform are pretty close to the democratic party line stance on these issues.

Annnnnd in the other corner we have Senator John McCain from Arizona. Weighing in with 19 years of expierence as of 2006, the Republican heavyweight ran a campaign where he called himself a "maverick". McCain provides us with what is quite possibly the greatest example of what a candidate centered campaign looks like.

DING! DING!

Round 1: Campaign Slogans
Campaign slogans in my opinion are really the simplest way to figure out what the campaigns are really all about because they by their nature take what a candidate is all about and distill it down to a modicum of words. perhaps from thi we can gain some insight into the nature of the campaigns. Let us examine:

• Obama: "Hope" or "Change" or "Change we can believe in"
• McCain: "Country first" or "A Leader we can believe in" (suprisingly hard to find!!!! damn you interwebs!)

Ok, so we can pretty clearly see that McCain and Obama's slogans are somewhat similar, but also pretty different. McCain's slogans clearly emphasize himself more than Obama's do. From this early step, we can see already a big difference between between the types of campaign. McCain's campaign message is more focused on him than Obama's. Im calling it for this round: McCain is the more candidate centered of the two.

DING!

Round 2: Technology

This is where things start to get a little bloody ... we are going to compare the use of technology and the impact of technology on both of our competitiors.
I found an article in the British tabloid the telegraph that looks at the way technology impacted both of the candidates. You can see it here.

• Obama: technological impacts aside, Obama is definitely the contender with the greater understanding of technology. He was seen all over his campaign touting his handy-dandy crack, err blackberry.
• McCain: Definitely had a weak spot here ... he kind of proverbiably shot himself in the foot when he said he doesn't use the internet.

DING! Match over. short, i know, but well im running out of time, and lets face it, as if Feb. 25th 2009 we all know who won the campaign.

Some Final Thoughts

One Impact we can examine is how the internet affected the campaigns with regard to their candidate centeredness or party centricity. I think that the internet has definitely made campaigns more about the candidates because it provides a greater access to individual voters about the candidates. in addition to that, i think that an individual is much easier to sell to the average person than a party is, which further impacts the effects of the internet.

Beyond this I think that Obama definitely had the upper hand with technology - his campaign hit the internet early and hard with a "grassroots" style of fundraising, much of it done over the internet. McCain did not do so so much. as far as the impact of the internet on both campaigns and candidates, it's hard to honestly say how much it helped or hurt either candidate because anyone can put whatever they like on the web, regardless of it's credibility or certifiablilty.

Lastly I think that the advent of communications technology has really affected candidates in the area of vulnerability - on the web anyone can smear a candidate and more people that see the smear and it can cause more damage. as a result the internet has made candidates more vulnerable.