Macaca Moments Reconsidered: Electoral Panopticon or Netroots Mobilization?

ABSTRACT

This article addresses popular misconceptions about so-called “Macaca moments”—high profile candidate gaffes that are captured on YouTube, receive a cascade of citizen views, and contribute to some substantial political impact. Since the 2006 Virginia Senate race, when Senator George Allen made the original “Macaca” gaffe and went on to be narrowly defeated by his challenger, the term has become synonymous with the transformative influence of YouTube. This article constructs a case study of that Senate race through the archived blog posts on DailyKos, the largest progressive blogging community in America. It compares this case study with a second high-profile candidate gaffe occurring in the 2008 election season—Michele Bachmann's verbal misstep on Hardball with Chris Matthews. The central argument of the article is that the impact of these high-profile moments, and of YouTube more generally, must be viewed in the context of the campaigns and organizations attempting to engage in partisan mobilization. YouTube provides additional tools for parties and political organizations, but its influence is often overstated when academics and commentators focus on the technology in the absence of the organizations that use it.

KEYWORDS:

• Blogging
• netroots
• politics
• youtubenetroots

The research presented here was conducted while he was serving as a Fellow-in-Residence at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Dave would like to thank Rogers Smith, Jack Nagel, and John Lapinski for their supervision and support throughout the writing period. Additionally, Lokman Tsui, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Daniel Kreiss, and Kevin Wallsten provided substantive feedback and early discussion around the underlying theme of the article, and the anonymous reviewers and active participants in the YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States conference tremendously improved the piece from an earlier draft.

Notes

1. This dataset of DailyKos archived blog posts will be placed into the JITP dataverse for future public reference and analysis.

2. Comments are used as a proxy for community activity since neither hyperlinks nor site traffic effectively distinguish between posts that are actually being read versus posts that are merely skimmed or skipped over. It stands to reason that, prior to posting a comment, a reader must be actually engaging with the material and considering it long enough to form an opinion worth posting. It further stands to reason that these motivated commenters are more likely to engage in other forms of community activity, such as donating money or taking political action.

3. Data for both of these figures come from the Blogosphere Authority Index dataset. See http://www.blogosphereauthorityindex.com or Karpf (2009) for further discussion.

4. Seehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 9G7gq7GQ71c for George Allen's Listening Tour and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJIQm_7YAUI for Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) At Her Very Best. Both of these videos were posted multiple times on YouTube, and therefore it is unclear what the exact total of unique views would be.

5. For those interested in either duplicating the data collection or conducting similar content analysis projects, I discovered one important bug in the DailyKos search system. The tagged search feature itself underreports blog and diary entries, yielding only 71 Bachmann-related posts, for instance. Clicking directly on the tag of interest reveals the much larger universe of tagged entries, in reverse-chronological order.

6. See www.actblue.com/page/netrootscandidates.

7. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= eJIQm_7YAUI.