Wise voters will find Net a useful tool

I just finished watching a video editorial on another newspaper's Web site. It's a parody of the now famous "Obama Girl" video on YouTube.com, only this is an attack on a Midwestern senator.

It got me thinking. What would Abraham Lincoln or Stephen A. Douglas have done with the Internet? Would their famous debates of 1858 have turned out differently on YouTube? How would the stove-top-hatted rail-splitter have reacted to a scantily clad "Lincoln Girl" shaking her stuff to the world, completely independent of anything he had ordered or could control?

Actually, the question of whether the Internet is going to change campaigning is moot. It's as irrelevant as the same question about television would have been after the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates. The Internet is here, and it already has changed the way campaigns are conducted. The real question is, what are Americans going to do with it?

Are politics going to return to a more-or-less grassroots level, with even lesser-known candidates finally able to mount major campaigns on the strength of their ideas and a few inexpensive pieces of equipment? Or is it going to introduce anarchy, with negative and positive ads flying through the air like moths at an outdoor-lighting convention? Will it give rise to more substantive politics, or will it merely empower meaningless sound bites and powerful, but empty, video?

The co-founder of TechPresident.com, a site that tracks presidential candidates, was quoted as saying the Internet has "taken the conversations over the backyard fence, or around the water cooler, and put them on steroids."

Perhaps the most telling thing about that quote is that it came out of the New Zealand Herald. The Internet knows no boundaries. That means even foreign influences, if they ever get savvy enough, could try their hand at helping their favorites into the White House.

But only if we're gullible enough to let them.

Back in the '60s, the campaign of Lyndon Johnson took a lot of heat over a television ad that combined a little girl picking petals off a daisy with a nuclear explosion, implying that the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, would lead the nation into a nuclear holocaust. It was shown only once, and it generated a lot of discussion.