Planting Liberally

Last weekend I posted about the idea of buzzing against McCain as a tactic to augment the McCain Googlebomb project start by Chris Bowers. The idea is to schedule regular "bursts" of anti-McCain memes throughout the social networking-o-sphere, in order to create negative "buzz" around John McCain. My diagnosis is that many people think they know McCain well, based on hazy impressions left by positive media coverage. The hops is that a steady stream of negative messages coming from friends and relatives will help clear up those hazy impressions, and encourage voters to deal with McCain as he is - a conservative politician who will be just as disastrous as George Bush was as president.

To make this idea a bit more concrete, what I'm suggesting is that at some regular interval (let's say twice a month, for argument's sake), progressives pick a day to "flood" the blogs and social networks with anti-McCain messages. The particular steps I'm thinking of include:

• Bloggers writing posts which spread the meme
• Social networkers digging, stumbling, Facebook-posting, and otherwise recommending those posts
• MySpace, Facebook, and other social network members posting notes, bulletins, or blog posts which reinforce the meme
• Facebook members creating and joining groups which reinforce the meme
• YouTube members posting and recommending videos which reinforce the meme; bloggers and others embedding those videos on their blogs or profiles

... and I'm open to other suggestions. There are more elaborate things we could try, too, such as designing an anti-McCain badge which displays the meme of the day in some kind of catchy way, or designing a contest website to choose the favorite anti-McCain video of the week, or something like that.

I'd also like to think up ideas for anti-McCain memes. There's plenty to go on here, but here are some initial ideas:

• McCain has a very conservative voting record
• McCain is breaking campaign finance laws
• McCain is a Bush lapdog
• McCain wants to stay in Iraq for 100 years
• McCain is a lapdog of the Religious Right
• McCain kissed up to Jerry Falwell to win the nomination
• McCain is rehashing forty-year-old ideas that don't work
• McCain is tied to lobbyists

And there are plenty more we could add to the list.  The important point is that each meme should be thoroughly documented and proven with relevant facts, articles, etc.  Those details can be dropped in the blog posts, YouTube videos, Facebook group overview text areas, etc.  That will take some effort, which means, first, that we'll need a fairly big crew to pull this off well, and second, that we'll need a bit of time between each burst - that's why I think two weeks is about right.

If you've got other ideas for buzzing against McCain, I'd love to hear them!  Fire away in the comments...

Yesterday Chris Bowers got the ball rolling with the Googlebomb John McCain project. I admire Chris's work a great deal, and in particular I think his innovative Google-bomb campaigns have been absolutely phenomneal. But I think beating John McCain will require a lot more than just a Google-bomb.

Google-bombs work best in a low information election. For background, the point of a Google bomb is to cause a negative but neutrally sourced news article about a candidate to appear high in Google search engine rankings when web users search for the candidate's name. So Chris's Google-bomb for 2006 House Republican candidates worked really well because voters quite often didn't know much about those candidates. In the weeks before the election, voters sought out information about those candidates by typing their names into Google, and came up with the negative stories that bloggers helped push high into the search engine results.

The problem with John McCain is that he's extremely well-known, in a shallow way, by a lot of voters. The general perception is that he's a maverick clean-ethics Republican, and is therefore more moderate than the rest of his party. There is also a quiet perception that he's very hard to beat, and that "most" voters like him. This meta-opinion about the election is perhaps just as damaging to our activists as the fuzzy notion of McCain as a whole, because it dampens the effect of our enthusiasm gap.

While I think Google-bombing will do some good, I think a really effective solution will have to go further. I think it will have to incorporate a grassroots messaging campaign which a) informs progressive activists that McCain isn't really a maverick, clean-ethics, moderate Republican, and b) informs progressive activists that beating McCain is not going to be difficult. This campaign has to be virally spread, pushed from friend-to-friend via blog posts, Facebook notes, YouTube embeds, and all sorts of other peer-to-peer venues.

My recommendation is that progressive bloggers establish a regular routine of "buzzing against McCain". Similar to Atrios and DailyKos's monthly Kerry fundraising days in 2004, these will be days when we exhort progressive activists to flood the social networks with some small, simple, anti-McCain meme, like "McCain is unelectable", "McCain is a lobbyist lap-dog", "McCain wants another 100 years in Iraq", and the like. Ideally, I'd also like to see some kind of distributed badge infrastructure which allows bloggers to display the meme of the week (or month, or whatever) prominently on there blogs, right alongside a photo of "the hug". OpenLeft has been doing some great spade work on establishing an anti-McCain narrative in recent weeks, and I think some of that work will come in very handy as we try to come up with anti-McCain memes to be spread virally. But we'll have to go beyond the Google-bomb to win this election.

(Full disclosure: my company did a bit of technical/design work for Chris and Open Left last year.)