The 2006 election has been dubbed by many in the media as the “YouTube election”. While amateur or user-generated content is a powerful emerging phenomenon, and with time can be designed to feed the needs of campaigns and organizations, professionally produced viral content still has an important role to play. High-end content is content in which the story is designed as part of a complex communications strategy, and the material is used in various distribution avenues reaching a wide audience. The best approach combines both amateur and professional styles to reach the full spectrum of audience subsets.
Others suggested McCain's party may have erected too many obstacles for him to overcome with Hispanics.
"To me, the decision for the Republicans to demonize immigrants has been one of the greatest strategic mistakes of a political party in modern times," said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist.
"It's putting the Republican Party on the wrong side of what is one of the defining demographic changes in 21st-century America."
Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Florida all have a significant number of Hispanic voters. President Bush narrowly won all four states in 2004, and they could all be hotly contested this year.
"When you look at the battleground states, at least four of them are very heavily Hispanic," said Simon Rosenberg, head of a think tank called NDN, formerly the New Democrat Network. "We will see more (campaign) media heaped on Hispanic voters than at any time in American history."...
"Just looking at the demographics, whichever party ends up winning the Latino vote will be the majority party in the 21st century," Rosenberg said.
Andres Ramirez has an extensive political background, and has worked on several local, state and national campaigns for the past 12 years. Andres established himself as an experienced political organizer... Read More
That does not sit well with Andres Ramirez, who is a strong Obama supporter.
“Today McCain failed me,” said Ramirez, the vice president of Hispanic programs at the New Democratic Network, which, he stated, worked with McCain and Kennedy on the immigration legislation.
“He has been talking about border enforcement first and comprehensive immigration, those are not the same thing. I was hoping he would clear that up. Today he mentioned both and he was not very clear.”
He added that Obama is receiving a lot of support from Hispanics because they are upset at Republicans over immigration and the state of the economy. But it is far from a slam-dunk for the Democrat.
“Obama can’t take that [support] for granted,” Ramirez said. “He has to be able to deliver and show Hispanics that he has earned his support.”
With Latinos appearing key to the respective general election strategies of both John McCain and Barack Obama, experts say spending on Spanish-language media is set to shatter the previous record of nearly $9 million, the overall number achieved by both parties and outside groups during the 2004 race between President Bush and John Kerry.
"The spending is going to be unprecedented," said Simon Rosenberg of NDN, a liberal group that itself spent over $2 million in Spanish-language ads in 2004.
SIMON ROSENBERG, PRESIDENT, NDN: It's too low, it should be higher, but politics tends to lag behind the commercial advertising trends.
GERSH: Control is a concern. No campaign wants to see the candidate's banner ad pop up next to something obscene. Even so, this campaign has proven the power of online social networks to raise voter interest and money.
ROSENBERG: It's exciting because what it's doing, more than anything else, is allowing average people to play a meaningful role in the life of their democracy. That's a healthy thing.
Silicon Valley is a bottom-up, "somewhat chaotic," decentralized network that thrives "on meritocracy," he continues. Twenty-somethings with an idea -- say, Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- think their way to the top.
But in reality, the two worlds can't operate separately. In response to a spate of lawsuits against tech firms in the mid-1990s, Valley CEOs formed TechNet, a bipartisan network that lobbies in Washington. And by the time the Microsoft antitrust case made headlines in the late '90s, it was clear that the Valley needed to beef up its presence in Washington.
Says Peter Leyden, the former editor of Wired magazine who heads the New Politics Institute, a think tank focusing on technology's impact on Washington: "There's an emerging sense that both worlds need each other. Think of it this way: The scale of the problems that the world faces -- globalization, global warming, global terrorism -- can't be solved without these two hubs cooperating with each other."
With nearly eight in ten Hispanic voters backing Democrats over Republicans in presidential primaries this year, the Latino vote could swing several key battleground states come November, said Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, formerly the New Democrat Network.
"This is a community that is much more Democratic than it was in 2004 and is going to be voting in much greater numbers," Rosenberg told reporters during the release of a report by the organization looking at the growing political heft of Hispanic voters. "It is a new day. Hispanics are poised to play a very major role in the 2008 elections." ...
"The immigration debate has fundamentally altered the desire for civic participation in the Hispanic community," said Rosenberg. "They are blaming the Republican Party for the anti-immigration sentiment, the anti-immigration rhetoric in America today."
