Gaining on the outside

ALL the fizz aside, new media have the capacity to create distinctions with a difference.

National politics is one of the places where that may be occurring, and that’s a possibility to which, in Mrs. Willy Loman’s unforgettable words, “attention must be paid,” especially by the country’s news media.

Consider the odd situation in which both the Republican and Democratic parties now find themselves as the presidential election cycle spins into formal earnest. Both parties have fields of aspiring chief executives so large that you need a program to sort them out.

Have you watched either party’s so-called debates? If that many people were crammed onto a Wilshire Boulevard bus at rush hour, the MTA would be looking at another federal lawsuit. There’s no way to account for the size of this presidential field without admitting that we’ve become a nation in which narcissistic grandiosity is epidemic.

And who are these people?

Does responsible citizenship now require that we actually figure out what Ron Paul thinks about serious things? Is everybody really supposed to forget that the first time Dennis J. Kucinich held executive office, Cleveland -- which had elected him mayor -- became the first municipality since the Great Depression to declare bankruptcy?

In the Kabuki theater of conventional national politics to which such questions belong, there are answers but no convincing explanations -- and that’s particularly so if you look to most conventional political journalism to help you find the way forward.

What’s really interesting about this particular moment in our nation’s electoral life is that neither the Republican nor the Democratic candidates currently generating much of the interest and enthusiasm have formally declared. Both, in fact, have made themselves forces to be reckoned with by standing outside the formalized political process and communicating with voters through new and alternative media rather than traditional political journalism.

We’re speaking, of course, of former Sen. Fred Thompson, a Tennessee Republican, and Oscar darling -- incidentally, ex-vice president of the United States -- Al Gore, a Democrat. Both have held themselves apart from the predictable give-and-take of national primary politics and yet both remain every bit a force in this season’s campaign. It’s true, of course, that the conventional front-runners -- Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama on the Democratic side and Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mitt Romney in the GOP column -- have substantial fundraising edges. Money counts, but a significant number of political pros think Thompson and Gore quickly could close the gap if they stepped into the race.

And both have done it by holding themselves apart from conventional campaign and journalistic expectations and speaking to potential voters through new and unconventional media channels.

Gore, for example, has created a virtual textbook example of a multimedia candidacy. His jeremiads on global warming began as a lecture hall slide show, became an Oscar-winning documentary and an intricate series of mutually supportive Internet links and is mutating into a globe-spanning series of rock concerts that will be watched by billions.

Not bad.

When you’ve got all that, who needs a newsmagazine cover, a conventional sit down with another newsprint pundit or a podium microphone alongside 10 other wannabes at some cable TV cattle call that leaves everybody participating a victim of diminution by association? (We used to refer to the president of the United States as “the leader of the free world.” Are we now really expected to select that person according to a show of hands on who believes in the theory of evolution?)

Thompson’s example is, if anything, even more intriguing.

Gore has availed himself of media byways that are, in the context of presidential politics, untrodden, if already well laid out. Thompson is breaking entirely new trails. For one thing, he’s generally avoiding conventional political interviews, speaking mainly to commentators and analysts who distribute their work online to ideologically sympathetic audiences. That’s an interesting but self-limiting strategy. The sometime-actor, sometime-senator’s foray into what might be called new media image advertising is something else entirely.

If you haven’t seen it and have access to a computer, it’s worth taking a look at the brief and readily available piece of image advertising Thompson produced as an ostensible reply to the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore.

MOORE, who recently has been officially harassed for going to Cuba to shoot part of his film about healthcare, took a poke at the “Law & Order” -- get it? -- senator turned actor turned senator turned actor for smoking Havana cigars, possibly a violation of the U.S. trade embargo, as if anybody really cared about such things. Thompson responded with an utterly brilliant brief video, which begins with him sitting at his desk, his back to the camera. He swivels in his chair, a good-sized cigar -- possibly a Churchill or Double Corona, for the male voters prone to notice such things. Thompson looks directly into the camera, and, in a few relatively good humored but pointed remarks, he eviscerates Moore, plants the cigar firmly back between his jaws and swivels back to the desk and, presumably, to work. That would be man’s work, as the size of the cigar suggests. (On the other hand, what was it Freud said about cigars? “Sometimes, a cigar is just a ....”)

In any event, the amusing little home movie has spread across the Internet in what the cyber cognoscenti call a “viral” fashion. So-called viral advertising is the current darling of commercial media -- little snippets of cute pets or embarrassing human moments that people reproduce and send to one another so that the images spread across the Web by the millions.

On the blue side of the political divide, an increasing number of politically involved filmmakers has begun spinning out issue-oriented viral video spots. It’s a new kind of political advertising that well may outrun all current regulatory constraints. So far, the conventional thinking has been that its potential is mainly as a negative form of political advertising.

Thompson is the first candidate to demonstrate that this potent new media format has the potential to create what’s conventionally called “image advertising” -- the sort that introduces a candidate to voters and helps shape the electorate’s impression of his or her personality.

What the obvious viability of Gore’s and Thompson’s candidacies suggests is that something novel is occurring in this year’s election cycle. Traditional media remain wedded to the comfortable and familiar notion of process -- choreographed media events masquerading as real events, regularly scheduled caucuses and political beauty contests. At the same time, a parallel force that might be called “politicized media” -- mainly reliant on new and unconventional channels of communication -- is emerging as a coequal force.

How, if at all, will the political press cope with this new presence?

It might start by asking itself this question: If you were advising Fred Thompson on his shadow campaign, would you tell him to spend this Memorial Day weekend prowling the cornfields of Iowa or heading back into the studio to shoot another of those videos?

timothy.rutten@latimes.com