aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Romney proves the point

For those of you who need more evidence, Time Magazine has a story on the Republican reluctance to engage in a YouTube debate:

Still, some Republicans worry that shying away from YouTube will make their candidates seem technophobic or out of touch. Patrick Ruffini, a G.O.P. online political strategist, wrote on his blog: “It’s stuff like this that will set the G.O.P. back an election cycle or more on the Internet.” Democratic consultants are rubbing their hands together at being able to portray their general election rivals as being - as one put it to me - “afraid of snowmen” or simply ignorant of techonologies that many Americans use on a daily basis. Indeed, Governor Romney today, in the context of evincing concern over Internet predators, supported that suspicion: “YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their web site. They had 29,000,” he said, mistaking the debate co-sponsor for the social network MySpace, which has recently done a purge of sex offenders from its rolls.

Via Kos:

Snowmen. They’re afraid of puppet snowmen. And convicted sex offenders on some random other site not having anything to do with YouTube. (MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, so I’m sure Romney will be boycotting the next Fox News debate as well...)

Of course, the GOP is still coming to terms with the fact that the internet is not a truck. So we can’t expect anything less than baby steps.