A new bargain: YouTube politics

Imagine a 21st-century campaign without paid TV ads. Before Google bought YouTube, politics without those golden handcuffs would have seemed like a pipe dream. Instead, in the home stretch of a dreary midterm election, an entirely new political system, driven by interactive digital media, not broadcast dollars, is just on the horizon.

According to Larry Makinson, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, "House races in the last full cycle cost over $1 million." Although Ben Franklin used his war chest to print flyers and broadsides to hand to Philadelphia's few thousand residents when the first Congress was convened, today, incumbents and challengers spend billions on TV ads blasting their opponents and boosting themselves. When I asked a state senate candidate what he needed to win, without missing a beat, he replied, "$500,000 for TV ads." Odd, I thought, doesn't he need anyone to vote for him?

It's an electoral mirage that broadcast media, with its high priced ads, still rules. In fact, it's like a supernova, whose glow we still see years after its death. The final nail in the broadcast coffin was the new century's most successful business, Google, investing more than $1 billion dollars in YouTube, an unprofitable startup.

The Google/YouTube partnership means the revolution won't be broadcast, but will be shown on Internet TV, which has replaced broadcast media for the get-what-we-want-when-we-want-it generation, and, at least for now, it's free. But what does watching Bob in Omaha's karaoke performance of an Eminem song have to do with the future of politics?

If posting Internet videos is free, if any candidate can create and share a 30-second ad or documentary at virtually no cost, this could well mark the end of broadcast media's rule and mean the end of egregious campaign spending, no laws necessary.