We don’t espouse political philosophy here on Inside Facebook, though we are in favor of encouraging constructive political debate. That’s why we were surprised to hear at last night’s Startup2Startup event from Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s manager of political and social change initiatives, that despite her team’s best efforts during last year’s election season, the Republican Party generally wasn’t very enthusiastic about making Facebook a strategic part of its campaigns.

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The McCain-Palin campaign fire-sale dumped a bunch of orphaned BlackBerrys, including at least one loaded with confidential personal numbers of important people, and a ton of internal campaign email. These were the people who were planning on running an entire country.

“Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.

And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 BlackBerry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.”

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The tech advances of the last few years have turned the news and entertainment worlds on their ears, shifting the balance of power away from media poobahs dictating what is important and what is not, and toward consumers–and citizens–being empowered to choose and create.

Technology is poised to have the same game-changing effect on the political world–as well as on those assigned to cover the game.

Presidential campaigns are undergoing dramatic change–in both surface and subterranean ways. We all know they are becoming bigger operations–with ever-increasing staffs–and alarmingly expensive. At the same time, they are moving to the Internet at breakneck speed.

The 2008 campaign will be the first truly 21st-century presidential race. We have entered the era where candidates routinely announce their candidacy, try out and place campaign ads, and raise tens of millions of dollars online. And they are connecting to voters via increasingly interactive Web sites. Politics and technology are intersecting as never before.

And yet, a quick survey of the way the race is being covered in the mainstream media is like being stuck in a time warp. Sure, the New York Times now has a political blog and an interactive widget aggregating all its coverage of the top-tier candidates, but the follow-the-candidates’-planes-and-take-down-the-nuggets-of-spun-
wisdom-doled-out-by-campaign-spokesmen model is still very much in effect. In a time of YouTube politics, the MSM are still adjusting their rabbit ears. And in a campaign in which more than at any other time in recent history, life-and-death issues are on the table, far too many reporters are obsessing on the horse-race aspects of the campaign.

Last week we saw how musty and moth-eaten the old style of televised debates–choreographed Q&A sessions, really–are. Especially in the brave new world of instant interactivity.

The Huffington Post, partnering with Yahoo and Slate, is setting out to do something about that by hosting online-only presidential debates. This merging of new media technology and old-fashioned politics (and old-world moderating with Charlie Rose at the helm) will allow the debates to start long before the actual debate begins, with Facebook, MySpace, YouTube et al. partnering with us to solicit questions–including on video–from around the country. And they will continue long after the candidates have finished talking, with mashups, remixes and online discussions of what the candidates said.

The main advantage for the candidates will be that they don’t have to grind their campaigns to a halt so that they–and their entire senior teams–can move to a specified location for an hour-and-a-half of on-air jousting. Instead they can log in from wherever they are, brought together live via the Internet.

The main advantage for the democratic process is that we will be able to engage a whole new generation of young voters who spend so much of their time–and get so much of their information–online. It’s where they get their news; it’s where they share their views
(and their pictures, videos, favorite songs, diaries, etc). It’s how they stay connected to their friends–and how they can become connected to the candidates.

These young voters are part of a very interesting and complex demographic. They make fun of celebrity culture while indulging in it. They distrust most corporations, but are fanatically loyal to a few (such as Apple and Google). They have credit cards but dislike credit-card companies, have cellphones but dislike cellphone companies, have cable modems and cable TV at home but dislike cable companies. And, most intriguing, they are suspicious of politicians, but desperately long to be inspired by them. With campaigns shifting to the Internet, online debates are the inevitable next step.

Just as emerging technologies have caused campaigns to change, they will also force candidates to adapt themselves to the new reality–or face the kind of Future Shock Richard Nixon experienced in his 1960 debate with JFK. And the rabbit-ear-adjusting folks on the campaign bus will have to change, too, or risk becoming irrelevant.