The Revolution Will Be Webcast

A Brave New World of Political Skulduggery? - washingtonpost.com

Finally, politics has embraced our post-modern condition with thr massive dissemination of the Hillary-Obama 1984 ad via (print, tv and web) media in addition to blog and email forwards. The ad is everything good about post-modernism - the mixing of media (video and text), the use of sampling (the reuse of the 1984 Macintosh commercial - aired during that year's superbowl incidentally), superbly crafted subtext(s) (which I go into here using only the video and not the audio) and the ability to spread itself virally. Oh Joy!

Gil Scott Heron was right in that the Revolution will not be televised. It will be brought about by thousands of free spirits creatively using the tools at their disposal to effect massive change. James Carville once made the point that the entire Renaissance was only 1500 people but they changed the world. This ad could herald something similar. I hope it really is the beginning of "citizen political ads" as the MSM has stated. And this WaPo article makes the point that the commercial was made very easily. While it "only" reached a few million of our 300 million citizens, those are the people paying attention early and who will be opinion and grassroots leaders in their communities.

This brings me to a point I haven't made on this blog yet. Namely, that political campaigns belong to the people, not the politicians. Abominations like McCain-Feingold give politicians too much control over the direction of political debate and cultural discourse by limiting who may participate and when they may participate. This is simply the political class's unique version of rent-seeking.

Ads like this show that the barrier to entry for political ads (now that YouTube and its rivals exist) is extremely low and relatively inexpensive. Normal citizens can now make their own advertisements (assuming the FEC doesn't freak out and ban them all) very cheaply and still have impact. What happens now is the question.