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"  He was the first blogger allowed to cover a White House press briefing, and now Washingtonian magazine editor-at-large Garrett M. Graff is the author of &amp;quot;The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House.&amp;quot; As primary season heats up, he spoke with PM to break down how technology and the Internet are changing the presidential game\u2014from the YouTube debates and smear campaigning to leadership in digital infrastructure and the future of online voting. \u2014Erin Scottberg We&amp;#039;re seeing a lot of the candidates talk about things like net neutrality, broadband deployment and other things that weren&amp;#039;t issues in 2004. How has technology made this campaign different from the last one? The theme of my book actually is that this is the first campaign of a new era of American politics\u2014that this the first campaign that we&amp;#039;ve seen focused on and conducted on the playing field of the 21st century. Candidates are making videos on YouTube, raising money online, going on social networking sites and playing in Second Life. And, at the same time, they&amp;#039;re talking at Google, talking in MySpace and doing CNN YouTube debates. They are really sort of interacting with this new world and playing with technology and talking about policy relating to technology on a broad spectrum of issues for the first time.  In 2000 and 2004, the previous &amp;quot;Internet campaigns,&amp;quot; there was one candidate that really harnessed the power of the Internet. In 2000, we had John McCain on the Republican side and Bill Bradley on the Democrat side. In 2004, we had Howard Dean, a campaign I worked on, which was very successful online. But this year\u2014and this is what I think is so transformative\u2014all of the candidates are campaigning online. Everyone wants to play in this space, and everyone wants to harness the power and the innovation and the energy that they see online. The YouTube debates were a first for this election: They reached a new generation of voters and got a lot of traditional media attention as well. Do you think they were just a ploy for CNN, or do you think they did their job well? Do you think they were effective?  It was definitely trying to reach a younger audience, and they did in fact reach them. The CNN/YouTube debate had tremendous ratings for cable news debates, particularly among younger viewers. But I think it was a big step forward for politics and technology, but not as far as it could have gone. I think they carried a weight and a gravitas that the traditional debate formats could have never matched.  But at the same time, you sort of have to ask whether in the YouTube era of unlimited video space and broadband Internet connections, the video debate is broken as a model. I don&amp;#039;t really understand why we are continuing to hem in candidates into a 30-second or 90-second response when they could take the time and record a four-minute response that could be posted online, that would allow them a little more time for thought and reflection, and also an opportunity to maybe even answer the question. What would you have wanted done different in the debates? The thing that CNN didn&amp;#039;t do this time that I think the next person who does this type of debate will have to incorporate is allowing the people who are submitting the videos [questions] to choose at least some of the videos [questions]. There&amp;#039;s no reason that you couldn&amp;#039;t have a community-moderated debate where people vote on which questions they want to get asked. And there are even groups like 10questions.com that are pushing this model further, that would allow people to vote on whether the candidate successfully answered the question or not, which I think would be a tremendous boon to the political process\u2014if candidates knew they were going to be called out for not answering the question that they&amp;#039;re being asked. Do you think they have a good grasp of the technology issues they should be discussing? No, I don&amp;#039;t think very many of the candidates have a particularly good grasp of the Internet and the policies and the investments that we really need to be asking in this environment. One hundred and fifty years ago, our government realized that what we needed to grow was to build the transcontinental railroad. And we were able to do that, just as 50 years ago, we were able to grow in the industrial age\u2014we built the interstate highway system, under a Republican administration actually.  And today, I really don&amp;#039;t see any of the leadership we need to build the national broadband network or the national wireless network or to lay the fiber and the cable and close the digital divide that we really need in order to be successful in the next decade or two. The United States does not have very high broadband penetration. A lot of third world and developing countries have a better cellular network than the United States has. As part of my book research, I was in India in February this year, looking at the high-tech industry there, and I was traveling through rural India in these little dirt shanty towns, and I could get text messages there on my cellphone. But if I go to New York City, I can&amp;#039;t make a cellphone call on the subway system, which is ridiculous. How do you think technology and the Internet are changing smear campaigning? I think it&amp;#039;s changing both for good and for bad. The upside is it&amp;#039;s much easier to combat a falsehood online by posting supporting documents or linking to corroborating evidence. The flip side, of course, is that the barrier of entry to smear is non-existent. I can sit at home here and post a smear on YouTube or on my blog or wherever and it has the potential at least to reach as many people as any article published online in The New York Times.  Have you seen someone combat smear effectively online? Yeah, it&amp;#039;s actually one of my favorite case studies so far in this campaign. There was video that surfaced early on of Mitt Romney making some very liberal comment about abortion earlier in his political career. The video surfaced online and was picked up by conservative blogs and conservative talk radio. The beauty of the Internet is that Romney couldn&amp;#039;t deny that he had said it because the video was right there and people could see the context in which he was saying it. But within eight hours of this video first being posted online, Romney recorded the video of himself calling into a conservative talk show to explain the situation and explain his comments and why his views have changed since then.  It was just a great example of how to effectively combat YouTube smears because, it happened really, really quickly\u2014eight hours is amazingly fast in terms of news cycles and campaign cycles. And it was video, so you absolutely knew it was Romney himself doing it, and you didn&amp;#039;t have to be concerned it was some flack trying to explain away something that Romney didn&amp;#039;t really want to get involved in. I really thought that that was a textbook case of the power of the Internet to smear, but then the power of the Internet also to allow a candidate to hit back effectively.  Online voting: After the 2004 election, how we count votes has become a huge debate. Do you think we&amp;#039;ll be voting on the Internet anytime soon? I do, and I have a couple of thoughts on online voting. First is that we have a generational divide here where the generation that&amp;#039;s currently in power and making the decisions about online voting trusts the paper ballots more than the computer. And I think that the generation that&amp;#039;s coming up trusts computers more than they trust paper. And I think we&amp;#039;ll see that switch begin to play out over the next couple of election cycles.  A lot of people talk about the security problems and the data problems with voting but the truth of the matter is that we know how to authenticate identities online. We know how to securely store, process and retrieve data. My bank can tell when I&amp;#039;m me, and can tell me private information. EBay, PayPal and lots of commercial vendors know when it&amp;#039;s me and not someone else and allow me to conduct secure transactions that individually verifiable. So I think that this is more of a software question and a societal question that it is anything else. We can do this, and we can make online voting work; it&amp;#039;s just a question of whether we sort of set that up as a challenge to take on.  GEEK THE VOTE &amp;#039;08: PM&amp;#039;s Science and Technology Guide to the ElectionPLUS: More PM Q&amp;amp;amp;As With Experts From Around the World "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a2428/4237621/>