California politics enters
MySpace age
Hank
Shaw
Capitol Bureau Chief
Published
Saturday, Jul 15, 2006
SACRAMENTO - Politics is seeping into the
social networking Web site MySpace.
Since
it boasts more than 93 million users - 80 percent
of them of voting age - candidates are beginning
to see the network as a way to communicate with a
young adult population that has begun voting more
regularly than it did in the 1980s and
1990s.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate
Phil Angelides has a site, as do Democratic
lieutenant gubernatorial candidate John Garamendi
of Mokelumne Hill and congressional candidate
Jerry McNerney, who wants to unseat Rep. Richard
Pombo of Tracy in the 11th District.
But MySpace is far
more than just another spot to post a standard
candidate profile: MySpace is also home to scores
of sites run by twentysomething political
staffers, dozens of political parody sites - there
are 273 just about Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -
and a seemingly endless number maintained by
candidates' children.
All are becoming fair
game in this new realm of digital
politics.
Take Briana Bilbray, the
19-year-old daughter of recently elected Rep.
Brian Bilbray, R-San Diego. On her site, Briana
posted pictures of herself holding a Corona beer
among friends, one flashing a faux gang sign while
another clutched a bottle of Jack
Daniels.
Bilbray's 21-year-old son was in
several other photos, including one in which he
wore a hat labeled "TOWN DRUNK."
After the
blogger Wonkette posted the pictures on
wonkette.com, the congressman said: "Their mother
is not real happy."
Then there's the former
field director for the failed congressional
campaign of airline pilot Steve Filson, who lost
to McNerney in June.
The field director
decided to pour her heart out - as well as tear
into Filson and her co-workers - on her MySpace
blog. Although she urges viewers not to re-post
her musings, she did not switch her blog into a
"private" mode accessible only to invited guests,
which means her writings are out there for all to
see.
"The candidate doesn't know what the
hell he is doing and, thus, has made some
missteps," she wrote on May 8. Two weeks later,
she wrote: "This campaign is a sinking ship, and I
can't wait to get off."
McNerney's campaign
manager, A.J. Carrillo, also maintains a site but
switched it to "private" mode soon after being
contacted about it by The Record. He and Jeff
Hale, a senior staffer for Lodi Assemblyman Alan
Nakanishi, say they use MySpace mostly to keep up
with friends and old schoolmates.
"I don't
put anything on there I wouldn't want my mother to
see," Hale said.
Angelides spokesman Brian
Brokaw, who also hosts a site, says his boss views
the campaign's semiofficial presence on MySpace -
the Angelides site is maintained by a volunteer -
as a way to tap the youth vote. As of Thursday,
Angelides had 3,229 "friends," people who have
been invited to the candidate's site or who asked
to be added.
"It can reach out to voters
who might not otherwise hear our campaign
message," Brokaw said. "Not every 20-year-old
watches the evening news."
Phil Noble of
PoliticsOnline.com, one of the nation's premier
experts in digital politics, says MySpace and
other social networking sites such as
Friendster.com will be the "hot thing" of the 2006
elections.
"It's radically changing
politics as it is changing other parts of
society," Noble said.
MySpace users can
join groups of like-minded people, and the numbers
can get huge: MySpace Democrats and MySpace
Republicans each have nearly 50,000
members.
Noble says incidents such as the
Bilbray pictures or the Filson staffer's blog
aren't so much different from missteps in the past
and aren't likely to stop candidates from seeking
out the site.
"Campaigns do stupid things
on the street, in debates and now online," he
said. "The difference is, online you can't control
it."
This could be a problem. Most modern campaigns
are deeply concerned with controlling their own
message; President Bush's campaign team is
legendary for this, and many of that team are now
running Schwarzenegger's re-election
effort.
Schwarzenegger does not have an
official MySpace site.
If he did, he'd have
to open himself up to comments such as the one
written beneath a picture Angelides posted with
his family: "Look at the ears! so
funny."
And that's on Angelides' official
site. Many of Schwarzenegger's parody sites refer
to his randy days in the bodybuilding world -
"Gropinator" is a common epithet.
Noble
says it's all part of the Wild West world of
bottom-up campaigning on the Internet, which he
says is becoming increasingly potent in
campaigns.
Indeed, MySpace is actively
considering adding a politics section to the site,
according to a recent article in Roll Call, a
newspaper covering Capitol Hill in Washington,
D.C.
Will it make a difference come
Election Day?
"In one sense, we don't
know," Noble said. "We're at the beginning of the
beginning of the beginning of digital politics.
Having said that, any candidate who ignores any
new technology - in any age - is
dumb.
"Politics is about
communicating."
Contact Capitol Bureau
Chief Hank Shaw at (916) 441-4078 or
sacto@recordnet.com. Visit his blog at
http://online.recordnet.com/blogs/blogs.php
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