David Cameron Hearts The Interwebs
Alex:
May 2nd, 2007
Not content with having the most popular MySpace profile, Barack Obama has launched his own social networking site at My.BarackObama.com. Here supporters and party activists can organise meetings, plan protests, contact the party directly and write it all up in blog posts. MySpace provides links to the profiles of all the major candidates so they can be easily perused.
As previously noted by my iblog colleague Lottie, the battle for all elections will be fought with an arsenal of Web 2.0 features and on the battleground of the blogs and the Youtubes. This is a phenomena not restricted to the States. The leader of the Conservatives, David “Toby Blair” Cameron has his Webcameron blog thingie. It’s a sickening affair of convivial voter chuminess, mixed with myriad depthless “policy” statements, which makes the more paternalistic videos of the gruesome twosome, to my mind, slightly more honest (this video, however, lurches from embarrassment to embarrassment). “We’ve cleared up” smiles Commander-Data-lookalike and village idiot David Blair, a man who likely never raised a finger in his life unless a photographer was present. As a website it proves two things: Tories will literally laugh at anything and cheer at anything too (“recognise that you are all human beings” gets a huge cheer, as if Tony Cameron said something radical). And that at the conclusion of this video, as every good Baptist preacher knows, you need to put a tinkling emotive sound track, Coldplay or Coldplay-lite, under your words to prove their status as “a message of hope and optimism” and hence their overwhelming sincerity. Worse still is Conservative Future, which just makes me want to smash my own head in with a wet flannel. Do they think this photo will convince anyone to join these geeks and sacrifice everything that is good and true about the human spirit for a T-shirt which has a Union Jack on and a hand scrawled with an infantile message of “hope and optimism”?
His party political broadcast says everything you need to know. Cameron wanders out of his house, coz, like, he’s just a normal guy and such-like and he just did normal things like-you-did, things like being related to royalty, going to Eton, studying at Oxford and being a member of an exclusive dining club well know for hiring a private dining room and then trashing it. Yes, our hero walks about talking to the public, and has a perfectly reasonable and salt of the earth answer to everything. The “straight answers” he gives and the atmosphere of his questions are carefully (even beautifully) stage managed, so that Cameron is magically provided with enough people of non-white ethnicity and non-Southern accent that he can, with his knee up on a pool table and shirt open, spew forth empty platitudes like “I believe in social responsibility” as if he was re-writing Burke. His talk to the potential BNP member reveals his worthlessness: completely failing to engage this soon-to-be racist on any real level, running roughshod over any of his concerns whether legitimate or (more likely) illegtimiate.
The ultimate logic of everything today, including elections, is the logic of the market and of marketing – the logic of creating a product and selling it to you. Webcameron is the perfect illustration of this – selling you back your tired Blairite cliches as if they were the freshest product around, re-packaging dull philosophical conservatism as a revolution in common-sensical radicalism, making a man who actively opposed reforms of the homosexuality laws a gay friendly pro-environmental everyman. The hyper-media blast of the site is a fog that obscures all real questions under a blanket of reasonableness and ensures the Conservatives never have to state an actual policy for as long as possible, but hide behind a pillar of “having a clear philosophy”. Webcameron deflects any real questions, coz Dave is just like, you know, one of us. The best solution is the most simple: stop believing in it and ruthlessly tear into it for the dishonesty it represents.