Macaca Moments Reconsidered… YouTube Effects or Netroots Effects? David Karpf PhD Candidate, University of Pennsylvania Political Science Department Fellow-in-Residence, Miller Center for Public Affairs
[email protected] Abstract This paper explores “Macaca moments” – high profile candidate gaffes that are captured on YouTube and receive a cascade of citizen viewing, leading to substantial political impacts. Such moments are widely taken as indicative of the way that YouTube is changing politics. Through a detailed comparative case analysis of the original “Macaca moment” – George Allen’s controversial statement in the 2006 Virginia Senate election – and the most often-cited such incident in the 2008 election – Michele Bachmann’s verbal misstep on Hardball with Chris Matthews – the paper discusses the varying impacts of YouTube itself versus the “netroots” political community. Though there is great similarity between how the 2006 and 2008 moments involved YouTube, the substantial differences between how the netroots engaged with the larger campaigns led to widely divergent outcomes. The paper seeks to bring political organizations back in to the study of online collective action, and is one of the first academic works to treat the robust political community at DailyKos.com as a topic worthy of examination in its own right. 1 1 The paper relies on data from archived DailyKos blog posts, which were coded into an Excel database. The database will be placed into the JITP dataverse for future public reference and analysis. Macaca Moments Reconsidered 1 “This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is… He’s following us around everywhere.