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During Super Bowl broadcasts just days before the Super Tuesday primaries, Barack Obama appeared in a 30-second campaign ad that was unremarkable in its presentation save for three words and a number that appeared midway through the footage of the candidate surrounded by excited crowds. As Obama’s long arms reached out to grasp outstretched hands, viewers received an invitation: Text HOPE to 62262.

In an around-the-clock media environment fixated on all things political, Obama has experimented with new tools for communication in a media climate so diffuse that it’s difficult for any candidate to shape a message let alone hold it for a few hours. He and his team have exploited the elite media’s enthusiasms for the history-making features of his campaign, while also making adroit use of technology to push information to supporters using a network that some describe as “off-line.”

To Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor and veteran analyst of campaign communications at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, the Super Bowl ad was a genuine “ah-hah” moment, akin to witnessing the first ancient creatures emerging from the primordial shallows to breathe on land. By figuring out how to tweak the passive medium of television with an interactive link, Obama made his “we can” message work two ways. Viewers could hook up with him from their living rooms. And they could act.

“The Obama campaign has really refined e-mail and text messaging to get people connected,” Jamieson said, adding that young people in particular have embraced text exchanges as a vehicle for clubby social interaction. “He’s signaling, ‘I know who you are; you know who I am; we can trust each other,’ ” she added.

The people who sent text messages to the campaign that Sunday were greeted with a request to provide some information about themselves: “Welcome to Obama mobile news and updates. Reply with your ZIP code to get local Obama info.” And once inside the electronic tent, the curious texters (the campaign won’t say how many there were) received information tailored geographically to them, to encourage them to mobilize with their peers and, Obama hoped, with their votes.

This 2008 twist on political message delivery is one innovation likely to live beyond this election cycle, Jamieson suggested. It seized the power of two communications technologies at once: the ability of television to engage a broad audience using emotion, music, and moving images; and the capacity of text messaging to establish social links that can help transform citizen engagement into political support, one person at a time.

Its added virtues, from the Obama campaign’s perspective, included communicating outside a news media filter—as campaign advertisements aim to do—while encouraging repetition of the Obama message by the national news media because of the ad’s novelty. It also delivered a payload with speed and at relatively low cost. (The Obama campaign spent $250,000 to broadcast a pregame Super Bowl ad in select regional TV markets, instead of devoting $3 million for a national ad during the game itself.)

According to interviews with political scientists and political communicators from both parties, the Obama campaign has moved ahead of the pack by augmenting—thanks to its own targeted communications—a torrent of political coverage from the mainstream media, now known colloquially as “MSM.”

SIDEBAR: NEW MEDIAObama’s AuteurArun Chaudhary had to interrupt wedding plans, and take driving lessons, to become Barack Obama’s videographer.Aswini AnburajanVideographer Arun Chaudhary knew he had to pick up the pace for his candidate, Barack Obama, after listening last summer to a rapper named Jin the Emcee tell of his conversion to the Obama cause. Jin had just improvised a rap for a New York City audience that had gathered for the candidate’s first official volunteer meeting. The Chinese-American singer disclosed how he became an Obama fan after spending a night viewing all of the candidate’s campaign videos on his computer.
“That was a tragedy,” Chaudhary recalled. “I thought to myself, you should never be able to go through all the [more...]

The MSM used to be defined as network TV and radio, the news services, weekly magazines, and large-circulation daily newspapers. As news-consumption habits change and advertisers divert resources from broadcast and print media to the Internet, news outlets with heft now include hybrid print-electronic newcomers such as Politico, and cable news and talk radio, which favor personality journalism and opinion-saturated programming. Today’s Information Age presents real campaign challenges, not the least of which is the departure from fact-based information-sharing. As journalists, entertainers, and attention-seeking bloggers blend their takes on politics, “facts” become more subjective.

Campaigns understand that the quirky electronic new-media platforms can easily spark coverage or help candidates play defense against rivals. Online news aggregators collect establishment reporting but are willing to be guided by what’s popular. Many blogs mix opinion with reporting and analysis. And a handful of cliquish, minutia-obsessed political websites follow hour-by-hour developments in polling, horse race predictions, and he-said/she-said sparring among rival candidates. As an example of just one campaign adaptation, Obama’s team put a young New York City film-school instructor in charge of the candidate’s videos, knowing that visuals are grabbing voters of all ages, particularly as the use of computers and high-speed Internet access to view videos expands. (See related story, p. 47.)

Substance Before Speed

Analysts caution, however, that it’s much too early to determine whether there’s a link between Obama’s message-mastery using the Web and his current leads in pledged delegates and the popular vote among Democrats. But numerous academic studies and student theses are looking for correlations.

YouTube and the social-networking sites Facebook and MySpace did not exist as political forces four years ago, and it’s anyone’s guess how technology will have altered “news” dissemination and voter persuasion by 2012. It’s not ridiculous to imagine computer-generated, three-dimensional hologram “candidates” conversing interactively with individual voters in their living rooms.

Already evident are Obama’s Internet savvy and willingness to spend millions of dollars to forge fast new electronic connections with supporters. They have helped his campaign to set online fundraising records, and enriched his voter-turnout organizations in key primary states. “I think Obama is pretty suggestive of how things would have been very different in this election without the Internet,” said Arizona State University assistant professor Matthew Hindman, speaking of the Internet’s impact on fundraising and organizing. He has a book titled The Myth of Digital Democracy coming out in the fall.

“Hillary Clinton,” he added, “would have been the nominee but for the Internet, and she would have secured the nomination—as her campaign expected—by Super Tuesday.”

"A lot of people who are running Hillary Clinton’s campaign came of age during Bill Clinton’s campaign.… The Obama campaign culture was created in 2007, not in 1992." -- Dee Dee Myers

Ari Fleischer, a spokesman for candidate George W. Bush during the 2000 election and later his White House press secretary, said that it’s possible to get carried away in the midst of a tight, contested race. “The wonderful thing about all these changes is that you can communicate better and faster, but the enduring factor is that you have to have something to communicate,” he cautioned. “You have to connect with the voters on something the voters care about. Substance and character come first, and speed comes second.”

It’s not to say that Hillary Clinton and John McCain are mired in one-way media using retro persuasion techniques, but to some it has that feel. “The Obama campaign does the best job,” said Dee Dee Myers, who was candidate Bill Clinton’s spokeswoman in the 1992 race and subsequently his White House press secretary. “The McCain campaign has no clue, and Clinton is somewhere in the middle.”

Here’s some evidence: By late March, Obama’s visibility as measured by the percentage of campaign stories that featured him was the same—70 percent—as the percentage of the public who said they were hearing more about him than they were about Clinton or McCain. With Clinton, however, the gap was 15 points: The percentage of campaign stories that featured Clinton was 30 percent, while the percentage of people who said they were hearing more about her was only 15 percent. That’s according to weekly news surveys and content analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism together with the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Despite being the GOP nominee, McCain has had dismal visibility. He was the featured subject in 18 percent of campaign stories in late March, and only 3 percent of the public said they were hearing more about the veteran senator than they were about either of his potential opponents.

Myers, who writes a blog for Vanity Fair and appears as a Democratic political analyst on MSNBC, believes that Clinton’s approach to campaign communications reflects what a twice-successful team was familiar with light-years ago. In the 1990s, the media mix was easier to peg; there was a defined news “cycle” during a 24-hour day; and it was possible to pinpoint the power hitters who controlled political information that influenced voter choices.

“A lot of people who are running Hillary Clinton’s campaign came of age during Bill Clinton’s campaign, so I think a lot of the approaches that they use, the way they see campaigns and the way they see the world, were defined 16, 18, 20 years ago,” Myers said. “The Obama campaign culture was created in 2007, not in 1992.”

A Candidate’s Natural Audience

Obama has demonstrated his ease with traditional news outlets and electronic media, but he has also shown his willingness to use alternative outlets. For instance, he posted a written defense of his controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, on The Huffington Post a political website, before responding to the establishment press. Appearing on the Huffington site showed deference to his younger constituents, who do everything on the Web.

The public’s online reactions to the Wright videos were part of the blowback that convinced the Obama campaign that an important speech about race was necessary. And the candidate’s March address in Philadelphia got heavy replay of its own on YouTube and was “rebroadcast” as text and video on the mainstream media—seemingly enough exposure to blunt the intense news-industry dissection of Wright’s most objectionable video excerpts. After Obama’s damage-control speech, public opinion polls indicated that he held his ground with voters, with 10 primary contests left on the calendar.

Obama’s approach to media and message complements his personality, his “change” agenda, and his young, educated, and tech-savvy upper-income supporters. He happens to be a candidate who doesn’t have to contort his persona or his communications style to stay in step with the way political information circulates in 2008.

“The wonderful thing about all these changes is that you can communicate better and faster, but the enduring factor is that you have to have something to communicate.” --—Ari Fleischer

“Obama and Clinton have different audiences, and if Hillary Clinton were just as smart about using the new media, it wouldn’t do her as much good,” Jamieson suggested, “because it’s not her natural audience. It’s not as if the new media alone is able to persuade an audience and bring them in.”

If Internet prowess and the swooning of young people were what it took to get to the White House, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean or Rep. Ron Paul of Texas would have done better against their opponents. Even wealthy Mitt Romney, who tapped a documentary filmmaker, Michael Kolowich, to create a “Mitt TV” video channel for his campaign, could not overcome GOP reservations that he was inauthentic and squishy on core conservative issues.

In a blog post titled “Ten Lessons From Mitt TV,” written after the former Massachusetts governor withdrew from the race, Kolowich predicted, “What we’re learning from the use of tactical Web video in the 2008 presidential campaign will inform and inspire marketing and communications well beyond politics in 2008.” But how a campaign can win more votes with clever videos of a flawed candidate, he did not say.

Citizen Media

New forms of information-sharing for election purposes via the Internet, talk radio, and entertainment TV go back at least to the early 1990s, a period when the networks’ news programming had already shed millions of viewers and candidates were jostling to find alternatives. Bill Clinton famously appeared on MTV and on Arsenio Hall’s late-night talk show, while President George H.W. Bush, seeking a second term, resisted such exposure, believing that it was unpresidential.

Sixteen years later, presidential contenders know they need websites to present themselves. Some have turned to the Internet first to announce their candidacies. And in 2008, no leading presidential candidate would dream of rejecting an opportunity to appear before today’s voter-rich talk-show audiences. McCain didn’t fret about decorum when he lampooned CBS’s David Letterman this month with a joke about inflated swimming trunks and a hot tub. Hillary Clinton, hoping that humor might be an antidote to the fallout from her false claim that as first lady she dodged snipers in Bosnia, went on comedian Jay Leno’s show on NBC.

The latest research by political scientists is inconclusive about whether candidates’ use of new-media technologies and approaches can or will deliver new political outcomes. Did voters turn thumbs-down when some presidential candidates thought that it was silly to answer debate questions posed via citizen-created YouTube videos, one of which featured a talking snowman? Can candidates woo new voters with personalized e-mail? With e-mail carrying videos? Will voters’ opinions be shaped more by political attack ads on TV or passed around in cyberspace, or by the truth-squading of those same ads by media organizations?

“The big story of this campaign cycle is citizen-generated media,” said Diana Owen, a Georgetown University political scientist who specializes in communication, culture, and technology. Citizen-generated media is a broad category and includes anything created by nonjournalists and noncampaign folks (or retooled from existing material) and circulated by citizens. The communications can be blogs, video, text, recordings, photos, research, pass-around issue papers, Facebook propaganda, text-messaging—virtually anything. Examples this year include the Yes We Can music video that was done for Obama but not by his campaign, and “Obama Girl,” the cheeky, scantily clad young woman who appears on BarelyPolitical.com. Owen cautions, however, that these pass-around messages have not yet been transforming; mainly, they’ve been additives. “What does it take to move the agenda?” she asked. “At this stage, citizen-generated media still has to make it into the mainstream media.”

Are the Young Important?

One recurring hypothesis is that the Internet’s capacity to shift agenda-setting roles away from traditional mass media will empower the populace. The Democratic Net-roots activists pine for that “revolution.” Powerful or not, some experts contend that interactive political persuasion has moved beyond fad to lasting trend.

If the diffusion of information and the individualization of political communication on the Internet enlarges participation in the political process, particularly among the 18-to-29-year-olds who year after year always seem to fall short of the turnout forecasts, that expansion could recast the types of candidates and public policies taking center stage.

Keep in mind that social networking on the Web is almost exclusively an interest of young people: 67 percent of those ages 18 to 29 have used the sites, and 27 percent said they used them to get campaign news, Pew has reported.

“Obama and Clinton have different audiences, and if Hillary Clinton were just as smart about using the new media, it wouldn’t do her as much good because it’s not her natural audience.” --—Kathleen Hall Jamieson

“It may change what we talk about and how we talk about it, and that’s potentially a seismic change that has nothing to do with the Obama candidacy,” Jamieson said. Separate and distinct from Obama’s idealistic appeals for “change” and hope, younger voters in this election may have been mobilizing around their own anxieties about an unpopular war and disappearing jobs. “This may be an audience in search of a candidacy,” the professor added. Under that scenario, a media era of electronic politics and interactive communications could slice through the establishments of both parties. “It may wipe an entire generation out of politics,” Jamieson suggested.

That bold notion drew a chuckle from pollster Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, who believes that in the near term the involvement of younger voters still will not match that of older voters, although “some leveling out” has occurred.

Yet he agrees that people overall are dissatisfied with the direction that the country is taking and consistently express more interest in Democratic candidates than in Republicans. In terms of engagement, “the big positive is that people are so unhappy!” Kohut said. “I’m serious. If you think that turnout increases as a consequence of civic spiritedness, the current gloom becomes compelling.” Translation: Happy voters don’t mobilize; unhappy ones do.

Internet More Than TV

While presidential campaigns in a changed media environment try to figure out what really works to woo voters, they at least have better ideas about where people go for political news. For all age groups, the Internet is a rising source. (See graphic, this page.)

Some 42 percent of adults 29 and younger cite the Internet as a regular source of campaign news for the’08 race. For voters 50 and older, the Internet figure is just 15 percent but even that has doubled since 2004. The people in between also made a big leap in tapping political news on the Internet—up from 16 percent in 2004 to 26 percent now. The older groups tend to cite local TV stations and cable TV as their top sources of campaign news. The youngest group’s members cite cable news as among their top sources but not as often as the Internet. Ten percent of the 18-to-29 crowd also listed late-night talk shows.

A quick look at recent Pew data describing who accesses campaign videos online helps explain why Obama and Romney hired their own professional filmmakers. Twenty-five percent of young people have watched campaign commercials on the Internet in this campaign, Pew found. That compares with just 4 percent of people 65 and older. Similarly, candidate speeches on video attracted 22 percent of young people but only 5 percent of those 65 and older.

Because the coverage surrounding the 2008 race has been especially event-sensitive, anyone using the Internet and operating outside the established news community conceivably can become a game-changer. “There’s the potential for one blogger, one person with a video camera to have a huge impact,” said Amy Mitchell, deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The “macaca” moment that damaged the re-election campaign of then-Sen. George Allen, R-Va., is an example. “It changes the way candidates think and act and respond, and it changes the way journalists cover the news,” she said.

One final thought for 2009: When one of these candidates is residing in the White House, how will he or she be tempted to take advantage of today’s communications complexities? Would a president use social-networking sites to gin up support for a bill in Congress? Would he or she stop begging reluctant TV networks to open their prime time to East Room speeches—and instead take every word to YouTube’s POTUS channel? Obama pledged in January that if he’s elected he will throw open the West Wing to C-SPAN to broadcast his negotiations with “all parties” to get health care legislation.

“We can easily put too much attention on the techniques of delivering a message, rather than focusing on the message itself,” warned Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University scholar who writes extensively about White House communications. In politics, the new media may have become a message. But in governing, the message is still the message.