In all seriousness, one thing I think you have to take into account is the affect that new media had in quickly disarming the usual Rovian scare tactics that helped Bush win twice. There is a middle-ground of independent and swing voters in America that I would assume is a little more web-savvy than the GOP grandma’s and grandpa’s you’ve described, that only 4 years ago wasn’t able to really go on-line and find out what was actually going on with Swiftboats or flip-flops, etc, using tools like YouTube or Digg or Twitter, tools they could now look to for more even-handed expositories this time around. Ariana Huffington pointed that out a few weeks ago at HuffPo. She thinks that played a part in defeating the strategies of Karl Rove, which it would appear the McCain camp turned to in trying to rally their base of old media consumers (choosing Palin was a big part of that). So, it’s not so much that Obama and co. utilized social media to attract and empower voters, it’s also that people in general were getting their information about the candidates from social media more and more this time, totally independent of either campaign, too. That’s how stuff like the silly accusations I listed above (…like the Ayers, Wright, Muslim, Socialist, etc things) could be deconstructed and the real facts could be spread around. I’m not saying that everything echoed on-line is fact, but when you can watch videos in context, read transcripts, see what people were actually saying, get further clarity, etc, that’s what I mean. Kerry didn’t have quite the same luxury, or so Ariana Huffington argues. I generally agree.

Social media is, in my opinion, a side note to this election. Barack Obama won because of enormous historical forces. He was the candidate best positioned to take advantage of whatever the emergent method of communication was, because he was the candidate whose message most clearly matched the mood of the country. And what determined the mood had more to do with long-term political cycles and short-term realities than the way the message was conveyed.

The historical forces that shaped Barack Obama as a candidate are the same historical forces that shaped the emergence of social media. They may be deeply intertwined, but they also could exist without each other. There’s nothing magical about it. If the emergent communication medium had been writing messages on paper airplanes, Obama’s campaign would have buried McCain’s campaign with 100:1 paper airplane ratio.

However, I studied McLuhan in my undergraduate days. How can I reconcile what I just said with the McLuhanist tenet that “the medium is the message”? It’s because those who understand the idea also understand that they can’t take a message intended for one medium and expect it to work in another. McLuhanists change what they say depending on where they say it.

Kennedy understood that, with TV, debates were no longer about speaking, but about one’s appearance while speaking, and that lesson served presidents for 40 years. But did Kennedy win because of TV? No. He won, in part, because he was accepted by the generation that elevated TV to a central place in their lives. If instead they had elevated the Etch-a-Sketch to that place, he still would have won, because he would have understood how to use the Etch-a-Sketch to convey his message to that generation.

I love digital media. It’s been a central focus of my life and my career for quite a while now, and I’m thrilled to be taking a more academic approach to it now. I even think it’s part of a communications revolution. And I’m certain that it’s an essential part of election campaigns moving forward. But I think we need to be very careful in overestimating its power and losing site of the bigger world within which we live.

Your post speaks to an identity crisis within the GOP, which was brought into clearer focus by Obama’s ability to generate a large and mostly unified online front, while McCain faltered and went in several directions at once. I’m not making a political aggression—it’s just a reflection of the composition of today’s Republican party, which, when it comes to technology and the internet, tends to diverge instead of self-organize. It’s no coincidence, either, that an overwhelming majority of the tech community supported Obama (http://www.techforobama.com/).

But, you’re not alone. Many Republicans are trying to figure out how to make online organizing work for their party. I think it’ll be part of a deeper soul-searching period partywide while Obama’s in office, but the gears are starting to turn. See http://www.rebuildtheparty.com—a manifesto about the GOP loss and the need for online grassroots organizing. It’ll be interesting to watch how it all takes shape.