Mike Gravel 2008 Presidential Election Campaign

If you haven't heard of long shot Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel, you will soon. Immediately following his participation in the first Democratic debate, Gravel's popularity shot up tremendously, thanks in large part to exposure online. If debate performance can be measured by the number of supporters won over post-debate, then Mike Gravel won the debate hands down. As I write this, the number one story on reddit is "Meet the Next President of the United States of America", which links to a video compilation of Gravel's best(and most provocative) statements in the debate. The same story is #1 on Digg, climbing to the top in record time. You only need to look as far as the thousands of votes Gravel received on reddit and Digg to see that he is popular, at least online.

The interesting thing is that Mike Gravel was dismissed by the mainstream media as a nobody with no support, and denied participation in the next debate. Ironically, it is this very rejection by the mainstream media as not popular enough/too controversial/too outspoken that has made Gravel so popular online.

The traffic to the Gravel campaign website has skyrocketed immediately after the debate, and has only continued to grow since. Blog mentions of "Mike Gravel" have also shown similarly impressive growth. And the video of Gravel's performance at the first debate has been viewed over 120,000 times in the past 2 days. And current frontrunner Hillary Clinton's most viewed Democratic debate video? Less than 2000 views. Now you tell me who has how much support.

It is not the place of this piece to delve too deeply into politics(except the politics of the blogosphere of course). But I continue to be amazed at the amazing ability of nontraditional media like blogs and social news to subvert traditional, mainstream media. There is no doubt that what is and isn't newsworthy can no longer be decided by news editors. Now, the wisdom of crowds reigns supreme. Social media, blogs, forums and comment threads now have as much, if not more power to generate publicity than an interview on CNN. In 2007 and beyond, the media can no longer afford to ignore what the masses deem important. Because if the media is seen as pushing a particular view,position,or candidate on the vast and untamed crowd of the Internet, the crowd fights back.

But the most interesting question that might come out of this whole thing remains: What happens when a fringe candidate who can afford to have controversial views suddenly becomes mainstream?