John Edwards’s “candid” video the new reality for 2008 campaign?

January 10, 2007

In what may become the new-media norm in the 2008 run for the White House, Democratic contender John Edwards has posted what looks like a candid, YouTube-style video on his official Web site. The clip shows a casually dressed Edwards aboard his plane, looking not at the camera but at his fellow passengers as he appears to ridicule his highly paid political consultants.

As Howard Kurtz wrote in the Washington Post on Monday, the former senator seems unusually frank in the video clip — but is it just “carefully choreographed candor, packaged for the YouTube age?”

During the 2008 presidential campaign, “You’re going to see reality, and you’re going to see savvy manipulation under the guise of something that’s authentic and real,” Kurtz quoted political consultant Joe Trippi as saying.

Edwards announced his second bid for the White House shortly after Christmas, but the news was overshadowed by President Ford’s funeral and the hanging of Saddam Hussein. But Edwards managed to generate Internet buzz anyway, by hiring bloggers to write about him and giving them free travel — ethically unacceptable practices for mainstream journalists.

Says Mathew Gross, Edwards’s Internet strategist, “We live in a world in which everybody has the power to capture and then broadcast.”

—Compiled by Greg Beaubien for Tactics and The Strategist Online

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