During the 1960 Presidential election, candidate John F. Kennedy used the power of the TV to broadcast his message to the American public. Although today it seems like an obvious way to run a campaign, back in 1960 it was seen as a revolutionary step and is highly credited as being the driving force to Kennedy eventual winning a close election against Richard Nixon. Just as the TV revolutionized the 1960 campaign, so did the Internet with the elections of 2004 and on. With the invention of the Internet, politicians have found a new way to reach a greater audience and at the same time be held more accountable to what they do and say with the introduction of Web 2.0.

Elections truly changed in the 2004 presidential campaign when Democratic primary candidate Howard Dean used the Internet his main basis. In response, he received record numbers of donations. The main reason for these donations came from the fact that the people who were donating were of a different generation than most voters. They felt that with Howard Dean using the Internet as a campaign tool he truly related to younger voters. But as much as the Internet helped Dean, it was also he downfall. During the Iowa caucuses, Howard Dean gave an energetic speech to his audience with many video cameras rolling. The speech showed Dean as rowdy and was almost instantly streamed on YouTube. The video became viral within hours with many bloggers thinking his actions during the speech were “unpresidential.” Dean went on to lose the Democratic Primaries, but his ability to use the Internet did not go unrecognized. After he dropped out of the race, he was elected to be head of the Democratic Party. However, this was not the last time a campaign was destroyed by the Internet.

The Internet has made it so politicians have to be more careful for what they say. The greatest incident of this came during the 2006 Senatorial campaign in Virginia. During a speech, incumbent senator George Allen repeadietly uttered the word “macaca,” a racial slur, to an Indian-American, who was filming for the opposition campaign. This video spread fast throughout the Internet and like Howard Dean, George Allen eventually lost the election for which he once had a strong lead. The Washington Post analyzed and speculated that if this election was before 2004, the simple word of “macaca” would not have made headlines and George Allen might have been a prominent candidate for the 2008 Republican Presidential Nomination.