A New Candidate Who’s Nothing but Net

Fed up with President Clinton? Doubtful about Bob Dole? Meet Richard Stands, candidate for president in 1996.

Stands, 43, has considerable voter appeal. He is courageous, nonpartisan and free of political baggage. He possesses the telegenic warmth of JFK and the gritty gutsiness of Ike.

Best of all, he’s a tireless campaigner, a candidate who can be everywhere at once, any time of the day or night.

Stands is beset by just one pesky liability: He is not real. His campaign is a virtual one, conjured up in the online universe of the Internet.

Stands is the star of a new Internet program that pokes fun at the real presidential contenders while raising matters of concern to the computerized world. More important, the pseudo-candidate is but one example of how politics and politicians are colonizing cyberspace.

During the 1992 presidential election, there were a mere handful of political sites on the Internet; this year, there are thousands. Some are silly, such as one site that lets you vote on a hairdo for First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Others are created as campaign tools by candidates, offering sound bites, do-it-yourself poster-making kits and invitations to drop in for a “chat.” Dole startled some observers by using his closing comment in Sunday night’s debate with Clinton to invite listeners to visit his World Wide Web site, although he did get the address slightly wrong, leaving out a crucial period.

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Some scholars predict the Internet will revolutionize politics by vastly expanding civic participation. The proof is yet to come, but politicians are taking no chances, scampering to get their names out on the Net.

Among them, Stands is certainly the most colorful. Sure, he’s stuck on a cyber-soapbox, but he has an edge over his flesh-and-blood opponents in some departments: no jet lag, no cash-flow problem, no skeletons hiding on his hard drive.

A creation of America Online Inc., Stands was “nominated” to represent the fictional N.E.T. Party, for National Election Therapy, which lives by the slogan “uncommon sense.” The selection process involved online users.

Like the true-life candidates, Stands has a winning smile, a campaign message and an impressive, though fictional, resume. Users can schmooze with him in his chat room and, with the right software, hear his campaign ads or accompany him on a wild virtual bus tour around the Net.

Perhaps most provocative are his positions on the key issues of the day. To combat the high school dropout rate, Stands advocates giving each graduate $5,000. On immigration, he suggests allowing more new blood into the country while exporting America’s “dead weight” to a remote island called “Idiotopia.” Among those he would exile are people who still use 2400-speed modems, “bald guys who insist on comb-overs” and “anyone with more gun racks than books.”

As for the deficit, Stands unveils a new debt-slashing idea on his home page each week. Proposals include pay-per-view executions and selling ambassadorships to rich, power-hungry citizens with time on their hands--something that real candidates already do.

Unable to kiss babies or shake hands at pancake breakfasts, the computer candidate has been lagging far behind the big guys in the polls. So recently, Stands’ creators hired two real-world politicos to advise him. These experts write strategy memos that are posted on the N.E.T. Party home page, offering visitors a peek behind the scenes of a presidential campaign, albeit a fake one.

“Richard is the perfect candidate; he doesn’t talk back,” said Bob Beckel, who managed Democrat Walter F. Mondale’s ill-fated run for president in 1984 and joined the Stands’ team this week.

Dan Schnur, former spokesman for Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, is Stands’ other strategist, giving the campaign bipartisan advice. “At this point, I think we need to humanize Richard to make him more competitive in the race. We’re considering a ‘feel-the-pain’ brain chip.”

Visually, Stands is a composite of actual features borrowed from politicians. His eyes are President Eisenhower’s, his mouth that of President Kennedy. From Vice President Al Gore, Stands’ creators grabbed a nose, because, they said, the vice president has managed to keep his pretty clean, even while surrounded by controversy. The name comes from the old joke about children thinking the Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase “and to the republic, for Richard Stands.”

Other features that round out the cyber-candidate are Reform Party nominee Ross Perot’s wallet, “because it could fork over $60 million without a problem,” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s heart, said Wendy Marx, programming manager for GNN, a Berkeley-based service of America Online.

Marx leads a team of five people who, in “Wizard of Oz” fashion, make Stands tick. The group, most of them twentysomething, gathers weekly at a Berkeley coffeehouse to brainstorm and update the candidate’s shtick.

To keep things fresh, elements are added to the home page five days a week. The candidate’s unorthodox message is tailored to appeal to his online audience, which tends to be young, male, intelligent and with a philosophy tilting toward Libertarianism.

Able to travel anywhere in the world in seconds, Stands has roamed far and wide in his search for votes. In August, he dropped in at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where he made a “speech” asserting that flesh and blood were not essential presidential features.

In the coming weeks, the candidate will survive an assassination attempt and may travel to Iraq, where Schnur proposes that Stands be downloaded into Saddam Hussein’s missile defense system: “You shut his weapons down, Saddam’s defenseless, and we wipe him out,” Schnur said, adding that the votes would pour in. “Everybody loves a war hero.”

Marx said the N.E.T. Party project was launched partly in response to the Communications Decency Act, which was enacted in February but later invalidated in federal court. The law sought to regulate the Internet to prohibit the distribution of indecent material, causing an uproar among civil libertarians, especially those in the online world.

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“The politicians were taking shots at our Net,” Marx said, “so we decided it was time to strike back.”

Feedback from the cyber-world, she said, has been positive. The N.E.T. Party home page is viewed more than 40,000 times a week, and e-mail is pouring in.

But will spoofery and game-playing with a faux candidate translate into true political participation? The verdict is not yet in.

“It’s certainly a possibility,” said David Birdsell, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College in New York who is studying politics and the Web. “But there’s also a chance that poking fun at the process contributes to a sort of cynicism.”

Steven Livingston, a political scientist at George Washington University, has another concern:

“This undertaking may be amusing, but I think it . . . contributes to the insecurity people feel about obtaining information in cyberspace,” Livingston said. People are often not sure what’s authentic and what’s a joke, he said.

One plus of the N.E.T. Party page, scholars say, is that it encourages interaction. Visitors can create their own party platform, write letters protesting Stands’ exclusion from the presidential debates and take a test to determine if they are “a bonehead voter.” (Sample question: Whitewater is A: a scandal that could derail Clinton’s career or B: “that crappy Kevin Costner movie that cost a bazillion dollars to make.”)

N.E.T. partyers also can have a say on key aspects of their candidate’s campaign. In recent weeks, users were asked to choose an appropriate girlfriend for Stands (they picked Princess Diana) and speak out on who should be his running mate.

In the end, Stands decided he didn’t need a vice president. Why? Because he’s already got two floppy discs for backup.

N.E.T. Party headquarters can be found at https://netparty96.com.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

It’s a Party on the Web

President Clinton and Republican nominee Bob Dole have Web sites on the Internet: Richard Stands was created for the Internet. Here’s a look at this fictional candidate:

PARTY: National Election Therapy (N.E.T.)

CAMPAIGN SLOGAN: “Uncommon sense”

ADDRESS: https://netparty96.com

KEY ISSUES: “Immigration,” “naughty government,” “campaign finance reform” and “get out the vote.”

QUOTE: “Now that November is rolling around, we’re once again being subjected to the same old tired shouts for that ridiculous, simplistic, alleged panacea for all that is wrong with our public officials: term limits. Well, guess what folks, we already have term limits. They’re called ELECTIONS!!!”

Source: Global Network Navigator Inc.