And for all the talk about a Paris Hilton or Obama Girl YouTube video, the impact of such TV-quality productions is only felt after they are shown and discussed in newspapers or on TV and legacy media Web sites.
Nothing speaks to the primacy of TV over the Internet this year like the record $5 million and $6 million spent by the Obama and McCain campaigns, respectively, in advertising buys on the Olympics. Follow the money if you want to know what the candidates and their handlers really believe in - and it's TV, not the Internet, that comes first.
And for all the money that Obama's campaign team has raised online, Howard Dean and Ron Paul did it first in cyberspace. What ended the candidacy of both was TV - the cameras capturing Dean's strange yelp during a post-Iowa news conference in 2004, and simply focusing their unblinking gaze on Paul during his first televised debate in 2007. Dean and Paul had the cybergenic thing down cold; it was the telegenic part that killed them.
