Socially Wired

No one has ever owned a presidential candidate this agreeable… Obama’s appeal, according to mainstream news sources, is that he’s still a variable.

In fact, turns out he’s an “empty vessel” for his supporters to define.

Anti-war? Obama’s your man. Minority tired of that glass ceiling? Obama fits the bill. Smoker?… err, until a few days ago even Big Tobacco could claim Obama.

But the most versatile and fascinating group of Obama supporters are, well, his zealous band of MySpace and Facebook users . Mobilizing in numbers slowly outnumbering even Dean’s “Moveon.org” minions from the last election, they are in many ways an unaccounted for block.

Most shocking… a good number of the demo can’t even vote!

One only need to look online at Obama’s legion of 14-21 year old supporters. He has over 3,500 wall posts on his recently created Facebook profile. His MySpace Page boasts over 38,000 friends!

The only thing greater than Obama’s “everyman” appeal, is the indescribable urge to Poke Him! on his profile. (Couldn’t Facebook create some term more becoming for a presidential candidate? I don’t like the idea of 16 year girls digitally poking a potential President of the United States…)

Meanwhile at the time of this posting Hillary’s MySpace page is not even functioning. When it is up, her friend count usually boasts a respectable count of just over 22,000 friends.

There must be something “special” about Obama for him to be winning the contest of online eyeballs. Even the Digg crowd finds him sufficiently tech-cool, enough to post his mentions on their site to the exclusion of Hillary.

Maybe it’s charisma, or even his everyman appeal. Or then again it could be his mystery. More likely, it’s that in a medium all about conversation… he seems to be conversing very well with his audience.

Watching our candidates battle it out to “win” the online conversation war is, in one word, hilarity.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 11:59 pm and is filed under YouTubian Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.