The new great truth in media and politics is that Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama will be America's "first cybergenic president" if he is elected in November.
The basic idea is that like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, who were the first to grasp the importance of radio and TV, respectively, Obama is the first to understand the many ways in which the Internet and other new media are transforming politics and American life.
It isn't really true, of course. In fact, if you want to be McLuhanesque about it, a more apt description of Obama should he get elected might be the "last TV president." But that hasn't stopped the cybergenic buzz from becoming conventional wisdom - and there is nothing the media cling to quite as tenaciously as newfound conventional wisdom.
Taking on such glib media truths is a dangerous game in today's nasty, instant-attack, online world. But this one carries the kind of political cargo that could seriously confuse rather than help voters make sense of this historic election. And so, it seems worth the risk of daring to go inside the sound bites to do some explaining as to where we are when it comes to the relationship among TV, the Web and presidential politics.
The seeds of the idea have been planted in a number of places in new and old media during the past six months, but they burst into full bloom in a June article by Silicon Valley technology forecaster Paul Sasso that ran on abcnews.com under the headline "Obama's 'Cybergenic' Edge." The notion reached critical mass last Sunday in a New York Times piece by Mark Leibovich headlined "McCain, the Analog Candidate."
The Times piece took two politically loaded subtexts embedded in Sasso's piece and ran with them.
First is the notion that just as Obama gets the world of new media, Republican candidate Sen. John McCain doesn't. As Leibovich put it: "The self-described 'Neanderthal' of the Grand Old Party (emphasis, old) has been catching flack for admitting he is no techno-geek. He not only did not invent the Internet, he can barely use it."
The other subtext involves linking Obama to such legendary presidents as Roosevelt and Kennedy. The Times went one better, extending the chain of transformative media leadership from Obama back to Abraham Lincoln. Tom Wheeler, described as an Obama fund raiser and author of Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War, was the expert used to connect the dots.
