What is advertising? There’s a Hey Whipple Squeeze This answer: controlled persuasion. And there’s a Don Draper answer: conspicuously compelled consumption. But another answer, one that spans Paul Lazarsfeld and Crispin Porter, is “influence.” Persuasion and influence are not the same thing. Macluhan would have distinguished the two as hot and cold—persuasion is hot and influence is cold. Advertising can be either, but our media, until recently, have favoured the hot over the cold. And not just the ads; persuasion has been beating influence up and down our mediascape since FDR’s fireside chats. So what changed? Advertising becomes persuasion when it tears down the fourth wall and loudly, audaciously, unsubtly calls itself advertising.

I listen to a technology podcast call This Week in Tech that’s produced by Leo Laporte. It’s a roundtable format featuring conversations between members of California’s tech-media axis. People like Jason Calicanis join in for kicks. Listeners number in the millions, but since many download episodes via bittorrent, it’s impossible to know their numbers with any certainty. Which is one of the two reasons its so surprising that the show has successfully attracted and retained advertisers. The other is that the members of the panel openly talk and about the advertising break when it happens. There’s even a running joke that when it’s time for the host to talk about the advertiser, one of the regular panelists, John Dvorak, leaves to “baste his meat.” There’s no subtext, no attempt at seamless integration with the content. The host periodically just says, “time for our ad; ok, here it is: we’d like to thank…”

In our media-saturated world, we’ve all become better at separating signals from noise and one of the trends that seems to accompany our collective tuning out of advertising is an increased emphasis on integrating content and distribution, message and medium, ad and ed. This trend is based on a smart premise: advertising needs to cool off; we need a little less persuasion and a little more influence. But what if the relationship between these two modes of advertising is less linear than we think? What if we can achieve the same shift from persuasion to influence unsubtly? Content producers are determined to preserve the separation of church and state that we hold so dear, so we’re suspicious of anything that looks like the blurring of this line. And we should be; just watch five minutes of Transformers if you’re wondering why. Michael Bay’s way isn’t good for content producers who want to preserve their integrity; wouldn’t it be great if there were another way?

The other way is exemplified by TWiT and by Gizmodo. Last week, when I arrived at Giz my eyes were assailed by a page awash in garish red. At first I thought it had been taken over by the Chinese, as my beloved Onion (hilariously) had been this summer. Worse, it turned out. It was Budweiser that had consumed my favourite gadget site. They sold everything; it was all Budweiser, with ads running amok all over the page. And I felt completely indifferent. Hey, everyone’s gotta make a buck, right? The thing we thought we’d have to sacrifice—the explicit identification of ads—is exactly what we should embrace, and to the extreme. Sell it all, every last pixel. Be unsubtle about it and, if you’re not selling your integrity,  your fans won’t fault you. They won’t be persuaded of anything, but they might be influenced.

The unfolding of the #iranelection protests over the weekend has been a coup for Twitter, mostly because the tweetosphere was the channel through which the best information about the election (theft) aftermath was emerging. The now-famous Saturday CNN fail further emphasized the advantage tweet-based news-gathering holds over the oh-so-80s stringers, reporters, cameras, and satellites paradigm: immediacy, agility, redundancy, and authenticity. So it’s settled then, Twitter was on fire while CNN was re-running an inane Larry King interview with some meathead from American Chopper. Twitter succeeds where old media fails.

Well, no. Here’s why: Twitter aggregates the observations and opinions of people who tweet. Sometimes people who tweet have something to say that isn’t getting heard, like when their government cracks down on old media. But all social media is subject to structural biases. Obama dominated Facebook last November because his campaign benefited from broad social and cultural – in other words, structural – affinities with the medium. Ahmadinejad supporters simply don’t tweet, so in a Western mediascape where Fareed Zakaria is  a day late and a source short, we hear from the reform-oriented, urban, iphone-wielding (SMS was blocked so most tweets were coming through smartphone apps) intelligentsia.

When re-tweeting replaces reporting – whether because newsrooms are slashing their foreign bureaus or because a cabal of mullahs are restricting  media – structural biases are ignored. Mousavi’s supporters took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands yesterday; their voices deserve a medium that can penetrate the theocracy’s digital curtain. But how can we claim we’re witnessing the triumph of disintermediation when the only sound we hear is a chorus of tweets?

The holidays are when we’re reminded that we live in an age of plenty. And I’m not talking about food or shelter; we’re free from cultural want, the important stuff. I listen to most of my rear-end top ten lists (Slate’s, NPR’s, The New Yorker’s) as spoken word, podcasted. It’s the first new medium that is structurally, ontologically tailored to our new habits of consumption. Podcasting is designed for time shifting—I listen when I get around to it, when I have nothing better to do. I’m so flush with media, I have to squeeze it into the few remaining un-entertained cracks in my life.

Top ten lists, podcasted or otherwise, are a thriving genre. So much so, actually, that I could use a top ten list of top ten lists. And I don’t think it’s because the Internet is conditioning readers to consume more condensed, distilled, list-ified information. I think it’s because people are more able to curate their culture consumption. I like TV and I like music, so I have a lot of conversations with friends about what to consume. And recently, I’ve noticed myself saying “I’ve been meaning to check that out.” A lot. My procrastination habit, alarmingly, has migrated to my media consumption. Don’t as how long my Netflix queue is.

I don’t think I’m the only one telling my friends that I’ve been meaning to watch or listen to something. I think we’re all saying it a lot more and I think it’s a trend worth noticing. Whether by TiVo, Surf the Channel, Bit Torrent, or iTunes, everyone’s consuming media on their own time. And that’s a good thing for our culture. We’re experiencing a major contraction in broadcasting—with the networks cutting scripted content and replacing it with the cheap stuff, like Jay Leno and (appallingly) Mama’s Boys—because broadcasting is inefficient. It relies on passive consumers grazing aimlessly for content. Sometimes we would find something great and make a point of watching it next week, but why bemoan the loss of “appointment TV,” when all that’s changed is that we no longer have to make an appointment?

I can’t remember the last time I paddled out on my remote control for a good ol’ fashioned channel surf. I’m embarrassed that my preferred mode of procrastination used to be the act of looking for media. Now I have a surplus of media with which to procrastinate by actually watching or listening and it’s the discovery of more new, great content that I’m putting off. Ignoring, for argument’s sake, how the content is paid for, am I not better off? As a culture, we can stand to lose a little fat, so let’s stop grazing.

Have you seen this video? How ‘bout this one? Or this one? If you’re reading this, you’ve likely had dozens of these little nuggets of YouTrivia show up unannounced your inbox over the past 18 months. More often than not with a subject line like “you have to see this…” Well here’s one you probably haven’t seen. (That’s right, you’re hearing God Bless the U.S.A. by Lee Greenwood.) David Plotz, editor of Slate, mentioned it in a December podcast and I thought he deserved a shout-out for noticing what seems like a persuasive example of the limitations of social media as ideology-agnostic cultural Cuisinarts.

This was seen by more than 13 million people. 13 million, 20,000 of whom clicked the link on Rush Limbaugh’s site. And neither of us was one of them. Why not? I guess no one thought we’d be interested. Sarah Silverman’s hilariously vulgar plea for intergenerational political dialogue among the chosen people? Now that sounds like it would be more up our shared alley. I think about a dozen people sent me that one. Here’s the point: Sure, the social transmission of media is breaking down some cultural walls, but it’s reinforcing others.

About six months ago, my thesis supervisor, a confirmed liberal of the Daily Kos/Nation sort, told me she’d managed to get herself into a conservative email chain. Turns out her parents belong to that curious species of American who votes Republican no matter what buffoon is on the ticket. I read a few of the emails and I felt like I’d just stolen the enigma machine. Just as I suspected: they actually think he’s a Muslim!

The tubes can connect people who think differently, but they may actually be better at connecting people who think alike.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appealed to the collective reason of colonial America. Reason was very much in vogue at the time, with uppity intellectuals across the pond like Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau fermenting discontent and promoting radical ideas. You know, sort of like community organizers. Paine’s famous revolutionary pamphlet detailed grievances with the British monarchy and policy prescriptions (like armed revolt). It was all about change; change that rational Americans should embrace. But Paine’s rhetorical gift wasn’t his ability to persuade his reader to agree with his argument; it was his ability to persuade them he was pissed off. Righteously, unambiguously, inconsolably pissed of. And that they should be pissed off too.

Paine went to the trouble of introducing himself to his reader with four short paragraphs. (He’d only been chased out of the U.K. a few months earlier, so it was probably a necessity.) And he did so not with an even-tempered assurance that he was a reasonable man. No, he assured Americans that he could be motivated by passion. The uniquely inspired rhetorical maneuver of his text was his assertion it was entirely natural for him to be angry. That the British violated American “natural” rights, he argued, was “the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling; of which class, regardless of party censure, is The Author.”

It would benefit Barack Obama enormously in these final weeks of the presidential campaign to learn the same trick. His even-tempered demeanor has served the Democratic candidate well as he introduced himself to the country, but it’s time he showed a little “power of feeling.” He has been so afraid to make himself vulnerable to Angry Black Man Jackson-Wright stereotyping he is abandoning the “natural” rhetorical advantage of change agents: righteous anger. The hardest hitting line of his very reasonable Democratic convention speech consisted of two syllables. “Enough.” Empathy is how great politicians win constituencies otherwise way out of their reach. (Bush had it and it looks like Palin has it.) And shared anger is a bountiful source of empathy.

So get pissed off, Senator. Your future constituents already are.

Waffles are delicious. That grid pattern? Sheer genius. Right up there with electricity and the printing press among the all time great inventions. If you distribute your syrup carefully, dribbling just a bit in every square, you can get precisely the right ratio of sweetness to doughyness in every single bite. Pancakes, with their consistent, unwavering smoothness, are fundamentally flawed: always either too much syrup per bite or too little. Pancakes know no moderation, no subtlety. A pancake is a unified, clearly defined thing and many consider its cohesiveness a virtue, but it is structurally predisposed against balance, against equilibrium.

If I could ask the two presidential candidates one question, I’d want to ask which they prefer, pancakes or waffles. Why? Because the one thing our politics needs more than anything else, more than campaign finance reform and de-sound-bite-ification combined, is a renewed appreciation for waffles, waffling, and wafflers. Now, I know a lot of people associate flipping and flopping with pancakes, but both are really properties of the waffle. And I’m pro flip-flop. JFK was a flip-flopper and a waffle man; that guy could not leggo his Eggo. His foreign policy was all over the map, not a hint of Goldwaterish “moral clarity.” And he did OK. How about Reagan? He flipped and flopped on a macro scale, yielding his campaign belligerence toward the USSR as he realized that he had a real negotiating partner in Gorbachev. Wafflers make great presidents. Unwavering consistency does not.

One of the great frustrations of this election for me is the anti-waffle media prejudice. The lessons producers and journalists seem to have learned from the 2004 election seem to be that the two great sins a democratic candidate can commit are a) windsurfing, or equivalent and b) waffling. Obama is constantly being lambasted for supposedly flipping and flopping on this or that issue. If you ask me, this is a symptom of newsrooms being hollowed out and replaced with a few interns who know how to do a Lexis Nexis search. It doesn’t take much to find a minor inconsistency when candidates are stumping three times a day for 18 months and the interwebs are cataloguing all of it. Cable news is a hungry beast. It needs to be fed.

Waffling, to me, means intellectual honesty. It means a willingness to understand opinions you don’t agree with. It means listening to people other than communications and media consultants. If Obama’s a flip-flopper, I say we’ll all benefit from a healthier politics and a tastier syrup distribution.

Dear John McCain,

Why hold back? The mood is right—the only thing Americans like better than a hero, is tearing one down. The only thing Americans like better than celebrity is manufactured infamy. He’s on top of his game: sinking three-pointers, striding around air force bases in hostile countries (too cool for body armor, looking quite fetching in sunglasses), and inspiring Europeans to wave the stars and stripes where for seven years they’ve been burning them. But the wings won’t melt by themselves. In fact, they don’t even seem to be made of wax. You’re going to have to shoot the SOB down. You know how to do that, don’t you?

No, I’m not talking about your Air Force service in Vietnam; I’m talking about your 2000 presidential campaign against a fresh-faced “compassionate conservative” named George W. Bush. (And his then-unknown sidekick, a gifted strategist named Karl Rove, who’d seemingly been bullied in middle school and taken to compensating by overeating and inventing sinister schemes for the undoing of his employer’s political rivals.) Didn’t you father an illegitimate black baby? I think I remember hearing that somewhere… Well, whatever, I’m getting sidetracked.  The point is that you’re running against a very unique candidate – never has there been a Democrat so difficult to slime publicly and so easy to slime covertly.  So turn ‘em loose; call Rush, Anne, Bill—I dunno—James Dobson? Is he on the list? Whatever; just ask W. what he does when he wants to convene the Justice League over a gay marriage amendment. There’s got to be some sort of secret signal.

The point is that you have to get everyone on board and up the ante a little. Here’s why: Obama is stagnant in the polls and failing to pull ahead despite your consistently pitiful performance and his surprising ability to hit nothing but net, even on issues outside of his extensive range of expertise (like Iraq) perpetually and with style. You’re making mistakes that would embarrass most fifth graders and closing in the polls.  Americans are telling pollsters that they just don’t know about this Muslim-y-sounding internationalist, but that you, the curmudgeony grey-haired white guy rambling through his old war stories to anyone who’ll listen, remind them of their good-natured (if ill-tempered) gran-pappy. You need to seize this moment.

Warmest regards,

Dave Godsall

P.S. Among the potential effects of this plan is a Barack Obama presidency. He’s stagnating in the polls because many Americans feel alienated by a strong campaign that looks, to the Fox viewer, like it’s being run for a coastal elite club to which they hold no membership. His numbers are weak because when these people see the coverage of Obama’s  worldwide #1 smash hit superstar week they’re predictably more inclined to read that chain email their crazy evangelical uncle sent them about how Obama’s going to start Koran instruction in public schools and appoint Louis Farrakhan Secretary of State. If you’re clumsy enough to expose too much of the slime and filth to the light of day you’ll show this Fox viewer something all Americans like: an underdog. Regardless of what Chris Matthews feels running up his leg, Obama is running against power more entrenched and more pervasive than the media’s.

The death of broadcasting is a big story. You may not have heard about it if you still get your news from radio and television broadcasts; Brian Williams and Katie Couric seem to be a little reticent about covering it, but it’s all over the inter-webs. There seems to be a little confusion as to who is to be credited with the scoop—Joe Trippi was an early poster with 2004’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and deserves points for first person empiricism—but media critics the world over have been writing obituaries for years now. The story goes something like this: Marconi and Edison and Telsa and the rest bequeathed unto the world the power to disseminate information everywhere. Instantly. And there were villains, like Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who used this Promethean gift for evil, and there were heroes, like NBC counter-propagandist Edward R. Murrow, who used it for good. But then came a series of tubes called the Interned and suddenly everything changed. Instantly.

I’m of the belief that nothing changes instantly, especially not anything as culturally and socially pervasive as broadcasting. Broadcasting is dead? Long live broadcasting. The sinister seduction of the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ has gotten the better of too many. Bloggers and scholars alike need to learn to resist the temptation to announce, from atop their stack of books about how Web 2.0 is changing everything, as if it were the first time anyone thought of it, that Web 2.0 is changing everything. I can write this with conviction because one thing about which we can be absolutely certain is that nothing changes everything. Broadcasting is a fitting example—most poignantly because now the most efficient way the procrastinate, sitting at a computer to write a blog post, is to watch streaming video of Meet the Press. More generally, though, just because to write it off is to fundamentally misunderstand its function.

The current era of blogging, according to media theorist Andrew Chadwick, was really ushered in by the 2004 presidential election. This, he argues, is when blogs hit the mainstream. He also argues that sites like the Drudge Report and Daily Kos, that hit the big time during that race, are now consumed more like traditional media. He even goes further, making the case that as the bandwith grows and big media institutions figure out this mysterious virtual world, we’ll all one day look around and discover that everything has changed, but nothing has changed. I’m partial to this version of the story, but only because Chadwick’s wet blanket style is refreshing in this world of wide-eyed ‘future of media’ speculation. There are, however, a few important details he fails to notice. Chief among these is the compelling counterpoint exemplified by this year’s Palo Alto social media ‘It Girl,’ a clever little micro-blogging utility called Twitter.

Twitter is a service that enables users to type (from a stationary computer) or, more importantly, SMS a message that is automatically delivered to everyone who subscribes to, or ‘follows,’ their Twitter feed. The critical detail about how this works is that each message, called a Tweet, must be fewer than 160 characters, shorter than an SMS. So Tweets are small, very small, and, if the trend persists, abundant. Twitterers Tweet often, and usually not to communicate important information—although one Egyptian man did Twitter his way out of political imprisonment. Tweets are for the minutia of daily life, they are trivial and inane, much like the blog format before The Huffington Post and the like started using it for actual news and aspiring writers started using it for self promotion. Like Facebook status updates, they’re supposed to be the answer to the question ‘what are you doing?’ If there was ever a question that could almost guarantee a trite, banal answer, it is this question. Hard to believe, then, that the answers 1,974,030 Twitterers are providing could be the force sustaining the Revolution, isn’t it?

Chadwick was not alone in predicting that the Empire would strike back against our flattening or opening or participating or user-generating heroes, but few predicted that a couple of nerds announcing the content of their breakfasts to the world would be piloting the Millennium Falcon. And they should have. Here’s why: The story of the death of broadcasting has been told as the victory of the small over the big. The story of the annexation of new media’s open, democratic, participatory cyberspace Shangri-La by major media institutions is also about big (and few) versus small (and many), but this time Big gets its revenge. These narratives make for real page turners, and they correctly cast big as perpetually opposed to small, but their conceit, like that of every thriller, is that the hero and villain need each other—they are, in fact, defined by each other. Neither can die, there’s always a sequel.

Broadcasting will survive—maybe on TiVos, maybe on iPhones, maybe just in a browser window—it doesn’t really matter where, but it will remain part of our media landscape. This assertion is based on an interpretation of the social and cultural function of broadcasting according to which it is defined as the Big. I define the broadcast media of our time as that which distributes content intended to be consumed by everybody and that which is consumed, likely by fewer than everybody, with the perception that it could, potentially, be consumed by everybody. Yes, there are a lot of text-based websites that fit in this category and, yes, I am aware that I am taking liberties with the word. Bear with me, though, because I am primarily concerned with that which is not broadcasting by this definition. I think the way broadcasting, undead, adapts to the online world is interesting because it casts a new light on the difference between big and small.

The old small, the small of 1998, was anything you could read online. Remember the phrase ‘global village’? That was how we used to think about the web; it was a community. Communities are small, they are groups of people who feel like their part of something shared. Communities still exist online, but now the Internet looks a lot like the real world: expansive, unfamiliar, with someone selling something around every corner. It gets too feel a lot less like a village after the fiftieth or sixtieth time someone offers to help enlarge your member. Now, just like in the real world, communities are isolated and membership is defined by specific commonalities. Media communities, closed cultural and intellectual ecosystems where everyone agrees The Wire is the best show on television and Anne Coulter is the antichrist (or 24 is the best show on television and Anne Coulter is kinda hot), are the small media, where everyone knows your name.

Small media communities are where the online world is flat, and open, and participatory. It is within these communities that users generate content—these spaces seemingly rest a hand on our shoulders and say ‘go ahead, share, post, you’re among friends.’ The smallest of the small media is Twitter. And the most tightly knit of communities are those composed of people who care about what one another had for breakfast. That’s why Twitter is an increasingly important feature of our new media world. Steven Baker advances a slightly different theory in a recent Business Week article titled “Why Twitter Matters;” he quotes Biz Stone, one of the service’s co-founders, claiming it could grow by a factor of 100 and become “something people use every day.” He makes a few good points, but never manages to put together an argument more sophisticated than a series of variations on the assertion that Twitter is important because individuals and organizations are using it. His most persuasive point? Barack Obama uses Twitter.

Indeed he does. He’s currently the third most followed Twitterer using the service, with 41,676 followers according to TwitDir. Of course, Obama doesn’t personally write his Tweets-stuff like “in Chicago, holding an economic discussion with the Democratic governors”-he just goes about his business while some enthusiastic Dartmouth grad periodically tells his adoring followers all about it in 160 characters or less, occasionally soliciting donations. It’s significant that there are 41,676 people engaged enough in his campaign to want to know what he’s doing all the time, but now that the national spotlight is shining in the Junior Senator from Illinois, Chris Matthews could probably tell them. The point is that these people are part of a special little (very large) club, and being part of the club means interacting with their candidate differently than the way the rest of the world does. He’s part of their community, he checks in every once in a while to make sure they know what he’s up to.

As Jerry Langton pointed out in the Toronto Star a couple of months back, the content of a Tweet is only important in the way it characterizes the relationship between Twitterers and followers. He provided a revealing quote from Jason Pontin, publisher of Technology Review: “the only people in the world who might be interested in my twittering—my family, my close friends—were precisely the ones who would be entertained and comforted by their triviality.” Twittering and following, like Facebook friending, are methods of structuring mediated relationships, largely through the symbolic exchange of drivel. Businesses, interest groups, and politicians—as they have on Facebook—are figuring out how to use the social norms formed in these spaces by early adopters (who actually know each other) to reconceive the ways they communicate with customers and constituents. The goal, as always, is to build communities.

Twitter was developed by a guy named Evan Williams, who happens to also be the guy who invented the software that became Blogger, now a Google product. Blogger was initially built as a way for people working on a project together to collaborate more efficiently (Shirky, 187). This it has in common with Twitter, which is now being used as a productivity tool by organizations ranging from CNN to H&R Block (Baker). The Obama campaign would like to consider their Twittering a mode of online collaboration, too, since they go to great lengths to encourage supporters feel like stakeholders, and even partners, in their White House bid. Twitter shouldn’t be credited with much of a contribution to this effort, but it’s worth noting that the McCain campaign only has a handful of unofficial feeds, the biggest of which followed by just over a thousand people. If nothing else, this indicates which campaign’s communication style is better suited to the culture of the medium, the culture of small.

Using a productivity tool as a communication tool has its advantages when it comes to politics. Clay Shirky points out, concluding his discussion of Twitter in Here Comes Everybody, that “any tool that improves shared awareness or group coordination can be pressed into service for political means, because the freedom to act in a group is inherently political.” I would take this observation a few steps further. Once a person perceives themselves to be part of a group—be it a class, ethnicity, union, industry lobby, or Wednesday evening bridge club—they become a politically relevant social unit. Individuals are only political as groups. Indeed, the formation and mobilization of groups is politics. But just signing people up is hardly enough; it’s about persuading people to perceive themselves as part of a group, weaving group identity through individual identity.

Twitter is an effective political communications tool because it lets an unlimited number of supporters feel like insiders. It’s infinitely scalable, but always retains its smallness. More importantly, it can be used for Rove-style coordinated point-diffusion messaging without corrupting the sense among (aptly named) “followers” that they’re participating in a shared project. Herein lies its genius: gather 41,676 avid supporters in a football arena and tell them, with charm, charisma, and oratorical flair, that a just universal health care system is the right of every American (or whatever) and some of them will become “Fired Up” and “Ready to Go”. Casually mention, in 160 terse characters, to the same number of people, dispersed across the country, that you’re in Baltimore attending a symposium on health care (or whatever), and your inner circle of devoted loyalists grows by 41,676 people.

Like so many academics and media critics these days, Clay Shirky, adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, has come up with a unified theory of all things Web 2.0. Unlike most of them, however, his idea actually explains more than he claims it should. The book is called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organisations Without Organisations and the concept is a familiar one: that because there’s some curious feature of the human condition that makes us need to create, bored layfolk are increasingly doing much of the work that, pre-web, had been the exclusive purview of pros and institutions. He summed his thesis up tidily in a recent CBC Radio interview: “intellectual production is going to be altered by groups of amateurs who are taking on problem[s] in very different ways than professionals have previously.”

The book is a thoughtful, detailed, and insightful account of the trends exemplified by services like Flikr subverting the market for stock imagery and Youtube partially displacing network TV. He doesn’t overreach, as many working in this genre do, but he does adopt the standard wide-eyed ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’ tone. The reason I think his argument is useful in explaining dynamics at play outside the realm of cultural commerce (the sphere that is his focus) is that we are witnessing the nascence of a parallel trend in politics. Barack Obama, as commentators have observed everywhere from Rolling Stone to The Wall Street Journal, is running the first Web 2.0 campaign. Typically, the depth of insight is limited to ‘hey look, Obama’s using Facebook,’ but sometimes they notice that there’s more to his online communications strategy than the deployment of a new tool. As Ellen McGirt pointed out in Fast Company, he’s running a constituent-generated campaign.

In the introduction to The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama writes “I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” This is now the salient feature of his Presidential campaign. To his detractors, his candidacy is characterized by a slate of attributes he does not possess, a secret reverence for the Prophet Muhammad being the most bafflingly persistent among them. To his supporters, his platform is whatever they believe in. Obama’s is a partially formed brand that Americans complete by blogging, Twittering, and Facebooking him. It’s not that he gives us incomplete information—his website features an impressively detailed platform—it’s that his platform isn’t what attracts supporters. It’s not what Obama thinks that determines what we think of Obama; it’s what we think Obama thinks. He’s the intellectual, but we’re doing the ‘intellectual production.’

Hillary Clinton was 21 when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, so it’s possible that when she said “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California,” she did actually remember the month in which that tragic event took place. But I don’t think she did remember. I think she was recently reminded. (And not, as she claims, by Ted Kennedy’s saddening recent diagnosis.) I think she was reminded of the date of RFK’s assassination by an aide or a consultant and I think the context of her recollection was a conversation about why, given the near impossibility of victory, she should stay in the race and continue to attack the presumptive nominee of her party.

Every analyst of substance acknowledges that she can’t win by any democratic means. The math by which she claims a majority of the popular vote assumes that the caucus states aren’t really part of the union (sorry Nevada, but you were kind of a black sheep anyway) and that Obama’s vote total in Michigan is zero. So all the scenarios in which she wins fair and square are impossible and the scenarios in which she wins Mugabe-style are exceeding unlikely. The one scenario, the unthinkable one, that could make her the Democratic nominee is, as history’s taught us, frighteningly possible. And she knows it. In her comment we have another glimpse into the Machiavellian mind of ‘Hillary the fighter.’

Her “hard working Americans, white Americans” comment, and others she’s made since Pennsylvania reveal both some unsavory elements of her character and the nature of her perspective on the race. Hillary the policy wonk has been absent from the campaign since the Hillary whose gran-pappy took her out behind the cabin when she was 12 to teach her to shoot and tip a little bourbon took the stage in April. This is the Hillary for whom politics is sport. A blood sport, but a sport nonetheless. As she demonstrated with her ludicrous gas tax holiday, policy is not longer what her campaign is about. People in Appalachia seem to like this happy warrior Hillary, but here’s the problem with confusing sport and politics: when you just take any chance you can get to score a point against your opponent, in politics, it means you don’t believe in anything.