The US Presidential elections 2008 are historic in many ways – A black man had to beat a woman to claim the nomination of his party, the campaigns already spent more than a billion dollar to persuade voters, the final month of the election coincides with the collapse of the credit markets and the global economic system is threatened in its entirety.
Also, this election is increasingly fought out not on the TV screen or in newspaper editorials and op-eds, but on the Internet – which adds another historic element. German journalist Tobias Moorstedt has travelled the US to find out more about this development and the changes, challenges and criticisms digital campaigns evoke. He touches on all of these questions in his new book and in the following interview with tapmag (you can also read the interview in German on my private blog).
Liberal college-towns favorite filmmaker Michael Moore will make his newest movie “Slacker Uprising” available online for free. The documentary – it’s Michael Moore, what else would it be – follows him on a 62-city tour of the swing states during the 2004 Presidential election and showcases all the excitement and insanity a US Presidential election brings about.
Here are the words which John McCain and Barack Obama used most frequently in their acceptance speeches they delivered at their party’s conventions. Draw your own conclusions (but be so nice and tell us about them in the comments).
John McCain
Barack Obama
The wordclouds were created with the help of wordle.net.
At eleven forty the crowd slowly becomes bored and people start to entertain themselves. They rythmically shout, “Yes, we can! Yes, we can!” An interpreter for the hearing-impaired is still on stage, who raptly joins in. She clenches her right fist to nod with it, brings it to her chest with her index finger out, then clenches both fists and stems them toward the ground – Yes, we can! Back and forth, the crowd and the little woman in a summer dress are firing each other up; all just to lure him, the Democratic Presidential Nominee, savior and general hopeful on to the stage. To no avail. Barack Obama sets his own timetable.
Click here to find out who Barack Obama has chosen as his running mate, and here for some additional detail and background information. McCain is set to announce his running mate shortly, too.
For years, Muslims and Islam have been the center of some of the most heated and controversial debates in the Western world – about things as fickle as faith, democracy, and values. “Clash of Civilizations;” 9/11; the Cartoon Controversy; the veil (a symbol of oppression, or a symbol of unshakable faith); Palestine and Israel; Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran… Therefore, one could have expected Muslims to take center stage during the 2008 elections. But what happened?
To find out, www.tapmag.net (TM) asked Katrin Simon (KS) of the Free University of Berlin a few questions. Katrin Simon is a PhD student in Islamic Studies, specializing in African American Islam, who just returned from New York where she conducted fieldwork.
Paris Hilton, that is. Reportedly, Mrs. Hilton was not too pleased that John McCain used pictures of herself and Britney Spears in a political advertisement to bash Barack Obama. The campaign commercial attempted to compare Obama’s popularity to that of perceived dim-wits such as the two, with a voiceover weighing in that “he’s the biggest celebrity of the world – but is he ready to lead?”.
McCain’s use of Paris Hilton as an example of someone famous for, well, being famous, is especially slippy as her parents, Kathy and Rick Hilton, have donated $ 4,600 to McCain’s campaign. Talk about a bad choice of image.
Now, Paris Hilton herself has responded to the events, in a rather surprising way.
Before Barack Obama’s hugely successful tour through Europe and the Middle East, his critics assumed this was all about photo-ops, that Obama wasn’t coming for a dialogue, but for the pictures of him talking to important foreign leaders and delivering speeches in front of aroused masses of Europeans. That’s why Merkel and others denied his campaign to set up stage in front of Brandenburger Tor – it’s not a place for election talks.
And guess what, the critics were right about abusing European crowds for campaign purposes. However, it’s not Obama who is using the pictures of 200,000 Berliners on Straße des 17. Juni. Here’s the Republican National Committee’s attempt at trying to frame Obama as the King of the Eurotrash Dance Nation which apparently has its headquarters in Berlin.
Bring together 200,000 people and you will surely find a pill popping anarchist, a Paris Hilton clone, and some death metal goth heads who will gratefully deliver all the cliché-laden sound bites to use in an attack ad. Why bother and interview the 199,983 normal people from the audience?
The other way is to simply imply that giving a speech to a huge audience overseas is related to force Americans to buy foreign oil. What, you didn’t know that Germany is new on the board of OPEC? Didn’t you see the big oil pump Obama was standing in front of, that thing was huge!
To be fair, I have no idea how Americans are perceiving these ads. It’s just hard to believe that you can slap a negative message on such positive pictures. Then again, an American politician in front of clapping and cheering Europeans might still be an alienating sight to many American voters. All in all, McCain would probably be best of by finding a way to create these pictures himself.
The US Presidential elections are finally entering the homestretch after a seemingly endless qualify season. USA Today has laid out the last meters in great detail. They describe how the campaigns try to prepare in advance for the events they know about and how they react to all the unscripted surprises that might happen before it’s all over November 4th. Prime example are the Olympic Games, during which both candidates will find it hard to generate substantial press coverage of their campaigns.
Here’s what fills the calendars of both John McCain and Barack Obama.
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