In response to yesterday's post

In thinking more about my rant against the political coverage of Campaign '08 thus far, I overlooked or failed to mention the biggest problem I have with it. It's great that everyone is looking toward the Internet as the best means of getting a hold of everyone and essentially they are doing what MTV tried years ago with its "Rock the Vote" campaign. And the internet provides massive exposure and publicity beyond all of the traditional modes.

What I see as irrelevant in all of this is the only question that really matters: Whether all of these young generation Iowan bloggers and internet wizards are actually going to go out in the Iowa primary (or any other youth going to their respective primaries, for either party) and actually make a difference. It's easy enough to court favor with CNN (apparently) and put a slick video on YouTube, but in the end, these elections aren't like the stupid online votes than can be manipulated fairly easy. Remember when New Kids on the Block became the best video on TRL? Can't do that in real life. One person, one vote.

So, will the generation traditionally the most apathetic actually come out in February and represent the so-called "MTV generation" and game the political system? Or will all of this internet hype turn out to be a lot of hot air and the generation traditionally controlling the vote (the so-called "retirees") simply go for the most conservative candidate from either party? The best example of this comes from the Simpsons episode "Wild Barts Can't Be Broken" where, at the end of the episode, the old people vote for a town curfew for anyone over 70. As Lisa states in the end, "I warned you guys that seniors vote in record numbers."

In searching around the internet, it appears that this sort of thought also came up in 2004, and obviously met with fairly apathetic results. See RatcliffeBlog-Mitch's Open Notebook: Meta-analysis of the Dean Campaign. Whether this phenomenon repeats itself in two or three months from now remains to be seen.