If You Google Ron Paul
G. R. Boynton

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In February 2007 Ron Paul announced his candidacy for the nomination of the Republican party to run for the presidency in 2008.

It was not an impressive performance. He sat staring at the teleprompter while he read his six and one-half minute statement. It had none of the vitality that one expects from a contender for the nomination to the presidency.

The other candidates for the Republican nomination surely did not see this as a formidable threat to their efforts to win the nomination.

Between 2003, the last race for presidential nominations, and 2007 large changes in communication technology had occurred. Broadband internet connection had spread to more than half the population and the speed of data transmission had greatly increased. That produced Google, YouTube, Facebook, and a generation of young men and women who were confident they could change the world with this new communication technology. And they found Ron Paul.

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Ron Paul was not the only candidate to visit Google. Any candidate who sought an invitation was welcomed. However, Ron Paul's visit was, as far as I can determine, the only visit to be recorded on YouTube. This brief clip, taken from a 14 minute video, has many of the features that characterized the Ron Paul YouTube campaign. The visuals are accompanied by a song written for the occasion, and it becomes a music video experience. The cuts are extremely fast from one view of the candidate to the next. And it ends with the punch line: "I'm from Sioux City, Iowa" . . ."people our age who understand the technological issues are very connected with Ron Paul." Ron Paul's campaign became something that one would not have imagined based on viewing his announcement that he was going to run.

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And he became a convert. In this brief clip he gives his perspective on the internet as part of a campaign. "Our numbers go up each day" . . . due in no small part to the use of the internet in the campaign. And, as important, the spontaneous activity all over the country. We try to stay organized, but we cannot keep up with them, he said.

Ron Paul was not the only candidate to mount a YouTube campaign -- though it may have been more important for him than for any other candidate. They all jumped on YouTube with videos numbering between 100 and four or five hundred. The internet, specifically YouTube, became a core element of the communication between candidates and supporters.

There was electronic communication in the 2003 campaign; it was advertising on TV. All of the candidates in 2007 advertised on television, as well, but YouTube became an important supplement to the TV advertising. My research is on how the campaigns made opportunity from the changes in the communication technology. How did they take advantage of YouTube? I will examine eight of the campaigns, but in this analysis I look only at the Paul campaign [see also the earlier analysis of the Joe Biden YouTube campaign].

A fairly direct comparison between the electronic campaigns of 2003 and 2007 is possible. In 2003 there was no contest among Republicans. And the race for the Democratic nomination 'settled down' to five candidates: Dean, Edwards, Gephardt, Kerry and Kucinich. The campaign ads they used in the Iowa-New Hampshire campaigns are given in the table.

Dean had one 60 second ad and 18 were 30 seconds long. Edwards had one 60 second ad and the rest were 30 seconds. Gephardt had only 30 second ads. Kerry had one 60 second ad and 14 were 30 seconds. And Kucinich had three 30 second ads and two 15 second ads. The total is 36.5 minutes. Of course, the ads were run many times during the campaign, but 36.5 minutes was the upper limit on the information they could provide to potential supporters.

The Paul campaign had thirteen 30 second TV ads and six 60 second radio ads. In addition they had 87 videos accessed from YouTube. Apparently no one told them that people would not watch anything longer than 30 seconds because these videos ranged from one minute to 30 minutes in length; they averaged almost nine minutes apiece. Ron Paul had 775 minutes to tell potential supporters about himself. Just one of the 30 minute videos was almost as much as all of the candidates had in 2003. The other candidates in 2008 hued closer to the 30 second rule; their YouTube videos averaged just over two minutes.

Compared to the candidates in 2003 775 minutes was a lifetime. The question is: what did they do with all that time?

Time enough to let others speak for him

Ron Paul was a fringe candidate. He was not taken seriously by his opponents. He was not taken seriously by the party organizations. He was not taken seriously by the media. So organizers of the candidate debates did not think they needed to invite him to participate.

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The first time this happened was early in the campaign in Iowa. All of the Republicans were invited to participate in a presidential candidates forum -- except Ron Paul.

With Ron Paul's blessing his supporters organized a parallel meeting right next door. And they marched through the hall where the 'official' forum was being held. And it was recorded for YouTube so that everyone in the country could learn about the strength of support for Ron Paul. The video is 13 minutes long. The first segment was in the parking lot with signs, flags, and lots of people who eventually welcomed Paul to the meeting. Then two minutes of marching to the cadence of louder, louder with musical accompaniment for viewers of the video. Imagine watching two minutes of people marching to make the point that support for Ron Paul was wide and deep.

In Iowa his supporters spoke for him.

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Then he was excluded from a debate in New Hampshire in January of 2008 as the election neared. This time others stepped up to speak for him.

He was immediately invited to return to the Tonight Show where Jay Leno spoke for him. He had been on the Tonight show earlier -- the obligatory stop on the presidential nomination express. But this was a direct response to the actions of Fox news that had excluded Paul from the debate. Leno's verdict was "it seems like you should be kicking somebody's ass right now." And it was immediately on YouTube where anyone who had missed it could see it or you could watch it over and over if you were a fervent supporter.

Then a person familiar to communication scholars. Bill Moyers invited Kathleen Hall Jamieson to talk about Fox excluding Ron Paul. Kathleen's language was a bit more gentile, but her conclusion was "I think it was an injustice."

He did not have to defend himself. Others spoke up for him.

Time enough to address questions about the campaign

What do you do when the 'knock' on your campaign is that it is just a niche campaign? There are not enough people interested in the campaign to take it very seriously.

One possible answer is the video above of supporters in Iowa marching in protest against Paul being excluded from the candidate forum. It straightforwardly makes the point that there are substantial numbers of supporters. In this case there were 600 in the candidate forum audience and 1200 outside marching.

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They made the same point in the video "The Ron Paul Fan Club" The strength of the campaign was the enthusiasm and the willingness to put in the effort on the part of his supporters. In this case the media, Fox News, made the point for them. When the anchor introduced his interview with Paul by commenting that he had never seen so many emails urging Fox to get a candidate on the air he was doing the work that needed to be done to address a principal question about the campaign. And then you put it on YouTube where people who did not watch the News Alert live can see it later.

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In this video, "Ron Paul Supporters are Everywhere," they address the question first with an explicit statement by a supporter. Ron Paul signs are everywhere, he said, and it is going to make a difference -- just wait and see.

Then they do it with a sight 'gag.' The meeting at which this video was made was early in the campaign. Tommy Thompson was still thought to be a viable candidate. The various campaigns had put up tents that became the centers for rallying their supporters. So they show you the empty tent of Tommy Thompson and flip over to the full tent of Ron Paul. It is a quick transition so some viewers may well have missed it. But the video makers surely thought it was a neat way to make the point that their candidate was more viable than some who the press were taking seriously. And they concluded with the enthusiastic supporters cheering their man.

How do you get people to watch more than 30 seconds [or two minutes] of politics?

Who is the audience? If you look at the audiences pictured in the videos they are not people who look like Ron Paul. It is a sea of young faces sprinkled with a few older ones. It seems particularly unlikely that this generation is going to sit still for long speeches. But music videos -- that is another matter. Constant movement -- that is another matter. And those are two principal characteristics of the YouTube campaign: music and visual movement. Two videos illustrate these points: Ronstock and Ron Paul on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

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Ronstock: the allusion is obvious. Ron Paul, however, does not seem the obvious candidate for resurrecting Woodstock -- except for the Ron Paul freedom train.

The video is seven minutes long. The first 3:07 minutes is a music video. The song is the Ron Paul freedom train, which seems to have been written for this occasion. The music is accompanied by rapidly shifting visuals: putting up a tent for the meeting; an interview with a campaign official; signs on towers "Ron Paul Revolution"; supporters talking and walking in the evening; Ron Paul talking to a radio audience; and finally Ron Paul walking to meet the supporters. There are 80 visual changes in 187 seconds; one change every 2.3 seconds.

The rest of the video slows down a bit. Ron Paul addresses his supporters, his wife says hello, then cheering and handshaking, and finally Paul leaving.

One has a hard time imagining Ron Paul as leading a return to Woodstock except for the final piece on this clip. He walks in to the cheers of the supporters and his second phrase is "we must have fun in our effort." One can imagine "fun" from Ron Paul, and we all have fun in our own ways. That could even reconstruct Woodstock -- fun and freedom as a musical event.

It is also a video that his supporters might relish -- even though seven minutes long.

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The Tonight Show is one of the stops on the presidential election trail. Even Ron Paul, though a niche candidate, got his ten minutes of fame at the hands of Jay Leno. The video was 15 minutes long; the first five devoted to his visit with the people outside waiting for tickets. That had a heavy music video feel to it; the music played as he greeted, autographed tee shirts, and did what politicians do -- pressed the flesh. However, it is the way they handled the 10 minute interview that makes it an unusual video; a video that supporters might enjoy watching.

The Tonight Show is not broadcast live. It is filmed in the afternoon to be shown that night. Ron Paul and a group of supporters gathered in the evening to watch the interview on television. Instead of simply replaying the Tonight Show video of the interview they created the Ron Paul version of the interview by interspersing visuals from the group watching. The audio of the interview runs through the entire 10 minutes, but the video flips back and forth between the Tonight Show film of the interview and the reaction of the supporters who were watching it with Ron Paul.

What was produced, then, was the reaction of Ron Paul supporters to the interview with Jay Leno. Any supporter watching the video could join the reaction of the supporters on the screen: laughing at the humor, cheering when he made a telling point, and nodding agreement at the serious moments. It becomes a conversation between the interview and the supporters watching the interview. The interview was 10 minutes long. The video flips back and forth 26 times; that is 52 changes of scene as the video moves from the Jay Leno show to the supporters watching and then back to the Tonight Show.

The quality of these videos is not professional, but the sensibility is very professional. It is fast moving, creative use of multiple resources to make videos that the Ron Paul audience might want to watch. It is definitely not the standard political video -- a candidate standing in front of a carefully selected small audience speaking to a larger audience in front of him or her that is largely unseen. Talking and talking and talking and occasionally taking a question. The standard political video is what candidates do on the campaign trail, but it does not make a very interesting video experience. And that is surely why they average two minutes; only the most dedicated could bring themselves to watch longer.

Who is Ron Paul?

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This is a brief video clip, but it encapsulates important themes of the campaign.

It begins with the unassuming candidate. "I am glad you let me join you." He specifically rejected a candidate centered campaign. It must be a grass roots effort. Relatively few candidates are as explicit about being part of a movement -- a movement welling up from supporters. And, somehow, the claim seems more heartfelt here than for other candidates saying the same.

"Are we going to have fun today?" Fun is a constant in the Ron Paul campaign. The ordinary view is that campaigns are about winning and losing. It is 'fun' if you win. It is a great disappointment if you have put in all the effort and lose. But Ron Paul knows that the likelihood of winning is close to zero -- notwithstanding his claim on the Tonight Show that there is a risk that he might win. So he takes the campaign out of the realm of winning and losing and recreates it as a movement that is fun.

The third point to note is his joy in what is happening -- that there are people who are responding to his message. He had been at it for 30 years, and this is the first time he has been able to join people who are as enthusiastic about the ideas as he is. You see it in his facial expressions throughout the clip, but it seems especially present in "people are trying now to emulate us, and they have no idea what's going on." The ideas have 'arrived,' and he is having fun.

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The message was simple and remarkably consistent: freedom, prosperity and peace. And those are to be found by following the founding fathers in the procedures they placed in the constitution. No taxes; leaving money in the pockets of people. Money based on gold; no federal reserve. The end of social security as it has been set up. Civil liberties that are not sacrificed in a pointless effort to run the world. Bring the troops home from Iraq -- immediately! Whether it was Ron Paul standing in front of an audience, as in this Republican meeting in Iowa, or the songs of the music videos these were the campaign themes that were repeated again and again.

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His views are outside the mainstream, of course. This became a small cause celebre at one point in the campaign. In one of the candidate debates he said that 9/11 was blowback; they came over here because we were over there. Rudy Guiliani exploded. How can you possibly say that about the people who died on that horrible day, he asked. In addition to defending his ideas in the debate Ron Paul went to the National Press Club to give Rudy a reading assignment. This is a snippet from the video that recorded his press conference.

As a politician outside the mainstream he can speak truths that the mainstream candidates cannot speak. All of the Democratic candidates, for example, were opposed to the war. The only disagreement was about how to get out. However, none of them could say the words 'blowback' or 'empire.' Those words were a part of his standard vocabulary for discussing U.S. foreign policy and the unfortunate consequences that result from believing that it is our responsibility to meddle in the affairs of countries around the world.

Of course it was not only 'blowback' that he could say and others could not. He was the only candidate talking about the gold standard. He was the only candidate favoring a flat tax -- zero. He would understand those as truths, as well. And for the first time he was getting an enthusiastic response from his young supporters.

Time enough for ethos

What difference does 755 minutes versus 9 make? One answer is time enough for ethos. While human beings are extraordinarily good at putting tiny bits and pieces together to constitute character nine minutes is very few bits and pieces to work with. In a YouTube campaign, like that run by the Ron Paul campaign, there is more texture, more repetition of movement, of expression, of words and also more diversity seeing the candidate in different situations and with different people. The campaign can provide a fuller, richer experience of the candidate when there are 755 minutes than when there are only 9 minutes.

I looked at the Biden campaign -- apparently a good place to start. What I saw was a policy wonk with passion. I was not surprised by the policy wonk; that is his reputation. But he said at one point: it is not enough to understand their concerns, it is not enough to have good ideas, they must feel our passion. In his campaign on YouTube it was clear that he understood the concerns. And he had ideas that he articulated very clearly about how to deal with what was bringing about the concerns. And whether talking about the firemen who saved his life by getting him to a Washington D.C. hospital in the middle a snow storm, or the wounded soldiers in Iraq, or violence against women one felt the passion. It was there in his facial expressions, in the way he held himself, in the words he spoke -- it could not be missed. He spoke about the concerns and his passion about those concerns eloquently in the YouTube communication in a way that does not work in a 30 second TV ad. One saw many sides of Joe Biden in the YouTube campaign that were missed if all one had to work with was his TV ads. That was the ethos of Joe Biden.

Looking at the Ron Paul campaign I conclude that it was not simply the ethos of Ron Paul. It was the ethos of a campaign. It was a campaign that was shared between the candidate and his supporters. And the core was joy: their joy in what they were doing, his joy in them and their joy in him. They were out to change the world -- the Ron Paul revolution -- and they were having fun doing it. The enthusiasm of the campaign, both his and theirs, was palpable. It could not be missed. The message was Ron Paul; the creativity in expressing it was his supporters. Everywhere in this campaign there was "hope for America."