techPresident – Le Internet campaign

April 12, 2007

techPresident – Le Internet campaign:

To sum up, while Sarko is impressive and glitzy, he clearly doesnt “get it,” Ségo is leaps and bounds ahead of him.

But one has to wonder: if the internet has such potential to change democracy, then how come Ségo has such an effective online operation — and her campaign is going so badly? Shouldnt her online buzz be enough to carry her all the way?

Well, your 14 year old cousin Kenny who can only play the first riffs of Stairway to Heaven, given a top of the line guitar, is still your 14 year old cousin Kenny. Since before her nomination, Ségo has piled gaffe after gaffe after gaffe, and that sort of incompetence can be fixed by no campaign operation, online or off.

But I think theres more to it than just Ségos ineptness. First of all, the internet is less widespread in France than in the U.S. When you campaign online, you are mostly reaching out to a subset of the population, likely to be more educated and more affluent than the average voter, so you have less of an impact. Secondly, I think its hard to overplay the part that money plays in U.S. campaigns. The internet is so powerful in the U.S. because if you play your cards right, you can raise tons of it. In France, that factor is mostly out of the picture.

So whats left of the internets role in the campaign is basically Lee Atwaters wet dream. Videos of candidates gaffes pop up online, and are replayed on TV. Meanwhile, candidates invest in the web, partly because its the thing to do, partly because the others are doing it and they dont want to be left behind, but not because they think it has the potential to change politics, or even make that much of a difference in the outcome of the election.

Whether or not theyre right, I think, is yet to be decided.

As a French citizen, this election is important to me and, having looked at both candidates, I’m afraid that it’s a question of who is the least bad of two evils. Because of his international view and his belief that things need to be shaken in France, Sarko will get my vote. However, it would be nice to see him adopt some of the outreach tools presented by Sego.

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