Ron Paul: Internet Buzz is not enough

It's the Internet, stupid. That's what many said when the last Senate race was called for Jim Webb in detriment of his Republican opponent, George Allen. Allen (R-VA), who was expected to be a presidential candidate for 2008, succumbed to the impact of the infamous "macaca" video, posted on the Internet and immediately picked up by TV channels and watched by millions of people. The 2006 Congressional elections were called in some fora the first YouTube election.

Before that, Joe Trippi and the Howard Dean Campaign had waken everyone up to the transformative effect of the Internet in politics. Today, candidates pour money in fancy interactive web sites, and spend time taping and posting their videos to reach millions of viewers. They have profiles on YouTube, pages on MySpace, they court the blogsphere, and they try to take advantage of the infinite new possibilities for organizing events, mobilizing supporters, and raising funds through online contributions. Emails from Friends of Hillary or MoveOn.org are a daily occurrence. And MySpace, whose registered members outnumber the population of all but 10 countries in the world, will hold a presidential primary next January, before the actual primaries in any state. Barack Obama, who has far more MySpace friends than any other candidate, Republican or Democratic, is expected to win.

However, the great mistery is still how to use the Internet to persuade. The Dean Campaign failed and Karl Rove proved that Sunday church, FoxNews, and talk radio, were still more effective tools of mobilizing supporters and getting out the vote.

These days, Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), must be feeling a similar disappointment. He's one of the Republican candidates for President in 2008 and claims to be the most conservative of them -although paradoxically appeals to the Left on foreign policy due to his anti-war position. Over the last two months, supportive videos of his candidacy have been a constant feature in YouTube's most viewed and top rated videos, outranking even Barack Obama. He has more MySpace friends than Mitt Romney. In terms of Internet buzz, he's got plenty. Yet he has consistently stayed in the polls below 2 percent. More than a million people have watched his YouTube videos, but the country still doesn't know him. If they do, they know him as the candidate that provoked an angry reaction from Giuliani in one of the debates, with the result of a big bump in the polls for Rudy. Meanwhile, just a couple of weeks of rumors on TV about Fred Thompson's possible candidacy have been enough for the actor of Law and Order to jump to second place on the polls.

Maybe Rush Limbaugh is right and Paul's supporters are spamming. Maybe it's too early for the buzz to materialize in more widespread support, or at least in name recognition. So far, Ron Paul remains a celebrity on cyberspace and the unknown candidate in the real world.