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...