Faster YouTube Super Democracy Kill! Kill!

First off, is it me, or does John Edwards bear a striking resemblance to that luckiest man in 70s sitcom history, Jack Tripper?



Just picture him falling over an ottoman or something and you've got it.


This morning as I skimmed Drudge Report for monologue fodder, I came across an small piece about how John Edwards spends $400 to get his hair cut. In the article there was a link to yet another YouTube video that had run its course without my knowledge.

The video shows John Edward and a stylist primping and pruning his hair into a glossy helmet, accompanied by the delicate strains of "I Feel Pretty." If my watching it ten times in a row has anything to do with it, the video is pretty amusing. It's also kind of soothing in an admittedly creepy watching-people-get-their-hair-played-with kind of way.

Attached to this video was another video titled "John Edwards: YouTube is Good for Democracy." As you might have guessed, the clip features John Edwards during a radio interview in which he is asked whether or not he thinks YouTube is good for democracy. Edwards answers, of course it is, it allows for instant and uncensored expression, allowing for both fans and detractors to post their thoughts, regardless of merit or point of view because who are we to decide and blah blah blah. It's a fair answer to a somewhat asinine question, but what's interesting is that neither interviewer nor interviewee seems to really grasp the full meaning of the question.

My feeling is that YouTube and the super-saturated media environment that birthed it, are actually, in a way, bad for democracy. Or at least democracy as far as it relates to presidential elections. Yes, people get to voice concerns and opinions, and video sharing sites do a fantastic job of sorting through all the information out there to the point where nobody misses anything. This is good. And often very funny.

But I'm curious, does all this media saturation make politicians safer? More self-aware? This is not to say that before YouTube political candidates were free-wheeling, but it'd be very interesting to compare how Abe Lincoln campaigned versus any of the 08 candidates. How's that for cool? We'd need weapons grade plutonium to pull this off, but I swear I know a guy.


But let's be clear, it's not YouTube, it's us. Which I'll get to in a second and which brings us back to our earlier point, about YouTube possibly being bad for democracy. Democracy only works if people are well-informed and vaguely educated. Where trouble starts is when you have people being swayed by a clip of, say, John Edwards combing his hair, or more pointedly, Howard Dean's now infamous yell thing. It'd be one thing if we could take random C-SPAN clips or out-of-context sound bytes on the nightly news with a grain of salt, but we can't. Instead we watch it and email it to our friends and post it on our websites and by the time the candidate steps up to the mic, he knows we've seen the clip of him tripping over a mic wire, and worse, he knows we know he knows.

And this is why candidates act safe, play to expectations, spend two minutes combing their hair, because like the nerd who somehow gets a date with the cheerleader for prom, they're too afraid to get their retainer stuck in the girl's mouth and so they end up buying the corsage, not dancing, and dropping her off before returning to their neatly made bed sheets. And because you won't hop into bed with John Edwards' mussy hair, or let Howard Dean chop down a tree with his bare hands, political candidates have prom night blue balls. And that's not good for anything. Now about that weapons grade plutonium...


"CAPTAIN WHITE, THAT TREE IS WHERE TOMORROW, APRIL 10TH 1861, PRESIDENT LINCOLN WILL GIVE AN ARBOR DAY SPEECH! WE DID IT! WE! DID! IT!"

KAKOW!!!