From MySpace to the White House?

First it was YouTube. Now MySpace, the leading online social network, is getting into the candidate-quizzing game in partnership with MTV. The youth-oriented duo will host a series of talks with individual Democratic and Republican presidential wannabes, featuring questions submitted via instant message, e-mail or wireless text message.

The sessions may be the best indication yet of the Internet’s ascendancy as a medium for political communication. At least 11 of the candidates have agreed to sit down for a one-hour grilling, including the front-runners from both parties. They’re doing so even though the events won’t be televised live. Instead, they’ll be broadcast online, using websites run by MySpace and MTV. Yet despite the absence of live TV coverage, the potential audience is huge -- more than 40 million people visit MySpace each month.

It was clear from the 2004 election that the Internet changed the fundraising equation for candidates. As Democrat Howard Dean demonstrated, the Net’s broad reach enabled campaigns to raise mountains of money from small donations, without the backing of the party elite. What’s playing out now is the Net’s effect on the way candidates speak to masses of voters. YouTube confronted them with questions presented in an unusually powerful way, in videos made by voters in nonpolitical settings. And the MySpace format will not only pepper them with outside-the-Beltway inquiries, it will also provide instant feedback by polling the online audience after each answer.

These talks may not make much difference in the long run. Thanks to the Web, cable TV, e-mail and various grass-roots techniques, candidates are able to speak to voters through an array of outlets, many of them better targeted at likely voters than MySpace and MTV. (Although the Internet has helped boost the turnout of young voters, they’re still a comparatively small portion of those who cast primary ballots.) But no one knows yet which of these channels will be most effective, so candidates are game to experiment online -- if for no other reason than to not seem like Luddites. Besides, a good showing could drum up a few hundred more volunteers for a candidate’s campaign.

The benefit for voters, meanwhile, is that these new-media showcases shift control away from the Beltway insiders and pundits who populate the traditional media’s coverage of campaigns. Not many voters will be able to pose a question directly to a candidate through the My- Space events, which begin with Democrat John Edwards on Sept. 27. But judging by the YouTube debate, the ones who do will ask a lot of questions that don’t reflect the concerns and assumptions of the political establishment. Instead, they represent the hopes and fears of many in the emerging connected generation. With any luck, improving the questions will improve the answers too.