YouTalk campaigns

You know something’s ingrained in American culture when the government finally catches on to it.\nCNN sped up that process earlier this week by introducing the Democratic candidates to the cultural phenomenon that is YouTube.\nMonday evening, the cable news channel aired a debate among the candidates where, rather than being asked questions by a mediator in the traditional fashion, they answered questions ordinary Americans had posed to them in YouTube clips.\nI never watch presidential debates because they’re full of the candidates sidestepping issues and gearing topics toward whatever they want to babble about. But this one piqued my interest. Despite not being impressed by any of the candidates, I was impressed by the way the debates brought democracy to the forefront of American politics.\nAmerican politics are plagued by the problem of looking bureaucratic and seeming irrelevant to the everyman. Even if you feel close to the most prominent political issues because you are gay or plan on chucking your abstinence-only education by getting as many abortions as possible, it’s hard to feel like you have any swaying power on the American government’s course of action in Iraq or Darfur.\nPlenty of us discuss these topics with friends and on Internet message boards and blogs, but we rarely bother to communicate them to our government. We figure they will get lost in the stacks of probably better-written letters sitting in our representative’s office, or we think they might not listen at all if we do not represent a significant interest group or represent an idea they oppose. \nDiscussing our opinions with friends and Internet communities hardly gives us any more political power, and instead, politics ends up serving as a thought experiment.\nBut this debate attempted to bridge this impasse. It allowed the thought experiment to serve as communication with the government and therefore made the everyman relevant on a personal level in American politics.\nIt also showed which candidates were more in tune with the lives of the average American and who knew how to communicate in layman’s terms, as opposed to those wrapped up in Washington and so used to spinning issues that they no longer find the American people themselves important.\nI am not sure whether, in practice, the debates highlighted the relevancy of candidates who would not otherwise have received the support of the American people (Hillary Clinton clearly came out on top). However, it did bring to attention the relevancy of candidates being able to communicate clearly with the American people. \nOf course, not all presidential debates in the future should be formatted this way. As boring as they are, the traditional-style presidential debates show which candidates look better for the formal, bureaucratic tasks required of a president.\nBut Monday night’s debate was good for the conversation between the American people and their leaders, a conversation that is all too often nonexistent.